The heavyweight division's most dangerous fighters in history

A few weeks from now, DAZN will broadcast live the match between Fabio Wardley and Justis Huni from the Portman Road stadium in Ipswich.

Of the pair of them, it seems that Wardley carries the heavier load in his hands. The local man, 18-0-1 (17), has seen only two of his fights go the distance: his debut, a points decision over four rounds against Jakub Wojcik in 2017, and his draw last year against Frazer Clarke.

And while Wardley never rematched against Wojcik, everyone knows the damage that he did to Clarke’s face in the rematch, ending the fight in the first round.

Wardley has, so far, walked through most of the opponents in his career, with knockout victories against notable fighters Dennis Lewandowski (who took Marco Huck the distance in 2020), Richard Lartey, Eric Molina, Nathan Gorman, and David Adeleye.

Huni, 12-0 (7), appears to be less of a puncher. The most-notable names on his record are Andrew Tabiti and Kevin Lerena, both of whom he outpointed a couple of years ago, although Huni’s three most-recent fights have been consecutive stoppages.

Some fighters, while never great boxers, carry such power in their hands that they become feared in the division, especially amongst the heavyweights .

Here are three that caused terror amongst their division.

Earnie Shavers

Shavers, who passed away in 2022, came from Alabama but was locally famous in Liverpool for being the head doorman at the city’s Yates’s Wine Lodge during the early 2000s (it was a crazy time). He was long retired from the ring, then, but in his heyday, he had been feared by the heavyweights of the 1970s and 1980s.

The bald-headed Shavers, 76-14-1 (70), is best known in 2025 for his losing efforts to Muhammad Ali (1977) and Larry Holmes (1978, 1979), but he terrified the division during his prime. He stopped both Ken Norton and Jimmy Ellis in one round, gave Larry Holmes the biggest professional scare of his career, stopped Joe Bugner in two rounds, and was avoided by both George Foreman and Mike Tyson.

Shavers lost to the best, too, being stopped in one round by Jerry Quarry, along with other short losses to Larry Holmes, Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb, and Ron Lyle.

In his book, Shavers describes how Ali refused to fight him until Shavers had gone through Roy ‘Tiger’ Williams, 30-6 (22), another feared heavyweight of the era.

So Shavers did. And Ali reluctantly signed to fight him at Madison Square Garden in 1977. Shavers knocked Ali down early in the fight, but the referee mistakenly called it a slip. After fifteen rounds, Ali said Shavers had hurt him more than any other fighter. In fact, the damage to Ali was so acute from that fight that his once-close team of seconds began to fracture and split rather than watch him take any more punishment.

Bob Satterfield

A name pretty much forgotten in 2025, but Satterfield was possibly the most-avoided heavyweight of the 1950s.

Satterfield, 50-25-4 (35), beat a lot of good fighters but came up short against those who were a level higher than that. The one thing he never got to do was fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

But he still fought a lot. While he beat Lee Oma, Harold Johnson, and Marty Marshall, Satterfield struggled in bouts against Archie Moore, Cleveland Williams, and Jake LaMotta.

Eventually, Satterfield had his last bout in 1957, after which he went on to train fighters in his hometown of Chicago.

But there was one last strange twist to Satterfield’s story. The writer JR Moehringer tracked Satterfield down in 1997 to write his story. What he found, eventually, was not a man called Bob Satterfield, but an imposter who had been living under the fighter’s name for decades. It was a true story so strange that it eventually became the movie Resurrecting the Champ .

Bert Cooper

To some, he was ‘Smokin’’ Bert Cooper. To his promoter Rick Parker, Cooper was known as ’50-Dollar Bert’, because that was how much money per day Parker could give safely without Cooper drinking it away.

Cooper, 38-25 (31), did not finish his career with a distinguished set of numbers, but he fought them all: Evander Holyfield, Henry Tillman, Carl Williams, George Foreman, Orlin Norris, Ray Mercer, Riddick Bowe, Joe Hipp, Michael Moorer, Corrie Sanders, Chris Byrd, Fres Oquendo, Joe Mesi, and Luis Ortiz.

The problem was that most of them beat him.

The closest Cooper ever came to greatness was early in his fight with Evander Holyfield when Cooper dazed his opponent. One or two punches away from greatness, Cooper gassed and Holyfield came back into the fight to stop him in seven rounds.

Cooper would die in 2019, aged 53. But he had been a horror in the heavyweight division for years. Still, the most-interesting part of his story was the part he played in another – that of Tim ‘Doc’ Anderson, another peripheral heavyweight fighter who would go on to murder Rick Parker in 1995. That story is the premise for the excellent book The Years of the Locust by Jon Hotten.