Having begun his career at middleweight before campaigning across four additional divisions up to heavyweight, James Toney faced more than his share of big punchers.<\/p>\n
Toney moved freely between super-middleweight, light-heavyweight, cruiserweight and eventually heavyweight.<\/a> Across those divisions he exchanged blows with renowned hitters such as Roy Jones Jr, Iran Barkley, Vassiliy Jirov<\/a> and Hasim Rahman.<\/p>\n Yet it was back at 160lbs, early in his career, where Toney believes he faced the hardest puncher, pound-for-pound. Speaking to The Ring for their \u201cBest I Faced\u201d series, Toney identified the 25th opponent of his career \u2013 a 1991 meeting in Atlantic City.<\/p>\n \u201cSam Peter is the hardest puncher I\u2019ve fought, but pound-for-pound it\u2019s Sosa because he hurt me the most. I\u2019ll never forget that fight, we fought on an ESPN show in Atlantic City on a Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cI went at him like I did everyone back then and that mother f***** hit me so hard in the third round I was seeing triple for the next three rounds. He knew how to hit and he was so awkward that I couldn\u2019t time him and he caught me high on the head.\u201d<\/p>\n Toney dropped Sosa in the third round and ultimately edged him on a split decision. Later that same year, \u2018Lights Out\u2019 captured his first world title, stopping Michael Nunn in the 11th round to claim the IBF middleweight belt.<\/p>\n Sosa fought 45 times in his career which spanned from 1987 to 2000, winning 34 of those fights. 27 of them came by knockout, displaying the power that Toney discussed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having begun his career at middleweight before campaigning across four additional divisions up to heavyweight, James Toney faced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-347490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}