George Foreman and Earnie Shavers are hailed as some of the biggest punchers in boxing history, but the heavyweight duo returned the same answer when they revealed who hit them the hardest during their professional careers.
Foreman and Shavers boasted a combined 138 stoppages by the time they both hung up the gloves, with both men remembered as some of the heavyweight division’s most devastating knockout artists before their respective passings.
However, when discussing who returned the favour and hit him the hardest, Shavers named Ron Lyle, who knocked him out in 1975, as the hardest punching opponent of his career, in a clip that has been doing the rounds on social media.
“A guy by the name of Ron Lyle from Denver, Colorado. Lyle was a great puncher, yeah.”
Meanwhile, in an interview with Oxford Union, ‘Big George’ recalled his fabled five-round slugfest against Lyle, just four months on from the latter’s scrap with Shavers.
“Ron Lyle [hit me the hardest] and he hit me so hard that it didn’t even hurt. His distinction was that he was a convicted criminal, he had served in Colorado Penitentiary and boy was he muscular.
“When I got into the ring, no one, beyond Sonny Liston, ever stood up to me. Everybody would have to run, hide and cover-up. No one stood up to me, but Ron Lyle decided ‘I ain’t running!’.”
“He hit me so hard that it didn’t even hurt. There I was on the canvas, thinking ‘what excuse are you going have now?’. [When you lost to] Muhammad Ali you said the ropes were loose, someone drugged you, I had all of these excuses, so I was laying on the floor thinking ‘I can’t think of an excuse,’ I had to get up.
“When I got up, he knocked me down again, he knocked my teeth through my bottom lip.”
“He beat me so bad that he fainted and I won the fight.”
Lyle lost out to Muhammad Ali in the solitary world title challenge of his career, retiring with a record of 43-7-1 (31 KOs), following a brief four-fight comeback in 1995, which ended a 15-year run of inactivity.
