Quote Originally Posted by brocktonblockbust View Post
Jack Dempsey and Jack Johnson can NEVER be ranked below the K Brothers.
Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali can NEVER be ranked below the K Brothers.
Lennox Lewis and Larry Holmes can NEVER be ranked below the K Brothers.
Mike Tyson and George Foreman can never EVER be ranked below the K Brothers.

So right there at the very BEST they could be ranked they are at #9 and #10. BUT...

A very VERY strong case can be easily made that:

Evander Holyfield, Rocky Marciano, Gene Tunney, Sam Langford, and Audley Harrison are ALL ranked ahead of the K Brothers.

Therefore the K Brothers cannot reasonably be ranked any higher than #12 and #13 on the All-Time Great Heavyweights. And I reckon a prime Jersey Joe Walcott' prime Sonny Liston, or even a prime Ingemaar Johanssen would've given them a Night of Hell and probably won.
Other than Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, I agree with your assessment. Mike Tyson never really beat a prime top dog. What was his best win? Holmes at 38? To me, he's in a pretty similar situation to the Klitschko's, but what they have over him is longetivity.

With regard to Lewis, I have no problem ranking Vitali near Lewis, but I agree with you it shouldn't be ahead of him. Any way you cut it, Lewis struggled mightily with Vitali. When the fight ended, Vitali was winning. Lewis won though fair enough. but there is no argument that there was some big difference in class between Lewis and Vitali. In my opinion, the K-Bros should be ranked somewhere near Lewis, within five steps behind him. So, if you put Lewis outside the top ten, the K-Bros should be between 15-20, or something like that. Then again, that might be overestimating all three's ranking. It's a tough list to draft.