I think he is overrated, but it is no knock on Rocky. The fact that he retired without losing leads a lot of people to overrate the guy IMO. I mean I've seen him on so many top 3 HW lists with the only reasoning being provided is that "he never lost" and he "hit hard". I think its a tremendous accomplishment to retire undefeated as champ. But I think most people look at the record to judge him instead of his fights. His biggest supporters have the problem that because they never seen him lose, they can't picture him losing. If you look at his fights, he was a great puncher and an extremly durable guy who was always in shape. He had premendous punching power. But he also showed that he was quite 1-dimensional and didn't have great boxing skills. A lot of guys gave him a lot of problems. His best wins were against guys well past their primes.

I also have to laugh at the notion of him being the #1 hardest hitter in history. I don't buy it. He had tremendous power for his size, but in the scheme of things I don't believe he could match the power punchers of the future, guys with 20-30lbs of GOOD weight on him. I mean just watch Marciano teeing off on 200lb punching bag Don Cockell (who in a newspaper interview interview after the fight claimed Marciano was a tremendously hard hitter but not the hardest puncher he faced). Do you believe that Cockell would have been able to take that many flush shots against guys like Foreman, Shavers, Liston or Tyson? I doubt it.