Anthony Joshua has not sat on the fence in picking a winner of a fantasy fight between Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, tipping Iron Mike to claim the victory over The Greatest.
With the coronavirus wiping out boxing schedules across the world, attention has turned to fantasy match-ups for boxing fans, and they scarcely come any bigger than a heavyweight showdown between Ali and Tyson.
Many class Ali as the greatest heavyweight ever to lace up boxing gloves, but Joshua believes the skills, power, size and boxing knowledge of Iron Mike would have been too much for the Louisville Lip.
‘It’s quite interesting because in the era of Ali’s heavyweight reign, the heavyweights were ranked as cruiserweights,’ Joshua told JD Sports Instagram Live.
‘So in the Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Lennox Lewis era; they started getting bigger.
‘Hence why, in the amateurs, they then created a super heavyweight division.
‘So the current heavyweight division in the amateurs is what we class as the cruiserweight division [in the pros], so Ali went from lightweight and worked his way up.
‘He wouldn’t have been a fully fledged heavyweight. Let’s say we bulked Ali up and added size and strength to him, I truly believe Mike Tyson would have won.
‘Reason being, when you watch the fight between Joe Frazier and Ali you see a certain Tyson-esque style in Frazier.
‘Tyson used to study Frazier: moving, moving, hooks, hooks. He managed to put Ali down, it was a very tough fight for him.
‘I just believe Tyson was better schooled because times have evolved, he was more developed with more science, more information. So Tyson would have won – in my humble opinion.’
Tyson himself disagrees and has said in the past that no heavyweight would beat a prime Ali.
‘There’s no man like him,’ Tyson told This is 50, back in 2012. ‘Everything we have, he supersedes it.
‘Nobody beats Ali, it’s not about the muscle memory it’s not about concentration it’s just about him doing it.
‘I can’t beat that man, hell no f**k this.’
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