‘I still don’t know what hit me’: a brief history of one-punch knockouts

One of the things that makes boxing so compelling is that at any moment – BOOM! – one punch can end a fight. For the winner, there’s elation. For the loser, despair. The roar of the crowd is deafening.

I’ve compiled a list of one-punch knockouts that are a treasured part of boxing lore. There are three criteria for inclusion:

1) The fight must have had historical significance.

2) The outcome must have been in doubt at the time the punch landed.

3) One punch ended matters with no more punches thrown afterward.

The most celebrated one-punch knockout in boxing history was a left hook to the jaw delivered by Sugar

Ray Robinson on 1 May 1957, in his second fight against Gene Fullmer. Four months earlier, Fullmer had won a unanimous decision over Robinson to claim the middleweight crown. Midway through round five of their rematch, everything was going the champion’s way, until Robinson’s blow.

“It wasn’t a tough fight,” Fullmer later recalled. “I was winning on everybody’s card. I was working on his body a lot and he was hurting. Never seen the punch coming. I still don’t know anything about the punch except I’ve watched it on movies a number of times. I didn’t know anything about being hit. I didn’t know anything about being down. The first thing I knew, I was standing up. Robinson was in the other corner. I thought he was in great condition, doing exercises between rounds. My manager crawled in the ring. I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘They counted 10.’ Up to then, I didn’t know.”

When his boxing days were over, Robinson called the blow “the most perfect punch of my career.”

Rocky Marciano’s one-punch knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott to seize the heavyweight throne on 23 September 1952 runs a close second to Robinson-Fullmer. Walcott was ahead on the judges’ scorecards. Marciano needed a knockout to win. Thirty seconds into round 13, Rocky backed Walcott into the ropes. Both men threw perfectly-leveraged right hands at the same time. Marciano’s landed.

The blow, AJ Liebling observed, “traveled at most 12 inches, straight across his chest to the champion’s jaw. It was about as hard as anybody ever hit anybody. Walcott flowed down like flour out of a chute. He didn’t seem to have a bone in his body.”

After the fight, Walcott said he “didn’t remember anything” about the punch. “I don’t know if it was a right or a left,” he said. “I wasn’t tired; I felt good; I was setting my own pace. Then, bang, it hit me. I still don’t know what hit me. I couldn’t even try to get up.”

Ironically, one year earlier, Walcott had won the championship with a onepunch knockout of his own over Ezzard Charles.

More recently, on 5 November 1994, George Foreman solidified his place in boxing history with a one-punch knockout of Michael Moorer. Moorer was undefeated and had won the heavyweight title by decision over Evander Holyfield earlier that year. Meanwhile, the 45-year-old Foreman’s quixotic comeback had stalled with losses to Holyfield and Tommy Morrison.

“Foreman was losing every round,” Joe Cortez, the referee that night, later recalled. “But he wasn’t taking a beating. Then, in round 10, he threw a left hook. Moorer went to his left and walked into one of Foreman’s right hands, so Foreman did it again and hit him with another straight right. It was a thunderous punch. Moorer went down flat on his back. I tried to get Foreman to a neutral corner but he seemed stunned by what he’d done, like he couldn’t move. I had to push him. It was like neither of us could believe what we were seeing.”

Jim Lampley, HBO’s blow-by-blow commentator that night, later reminisced: “As Moorer was being counted out, I asked myself why I wasn’t the