James Toney dismisses Muhammad Ali as boxing’s greatest and crowns Sugar Ray Robinson instead

James Toney never edited himself for public approval, so this one lands exactly the way you’d expect. Asked by WiseNuts who the greatest fighter of all time is, the three-division champion didn’t bother with nostalgia, mythology or global consensus. He went straight at Muhammad Ali’s sacred status and kicked over the altar.

Ali is routinely treated as untouchable: a heavyweight who moved like a middleweight, won the title three times, dragged the division into a modern era, and beat a catalogue of dangerous men without relying on raw force. That résumé usually ends the debate before it starts.

Toney wasn’t having it.

Toney: Ali was great as Clay, “trash” as Ali

“Ali ain’t the greatest fighter of all time, when he was Cassius Clay he was great, Ali is trash,”
Toney said, refusing to sugar-coat a single syllable.

He pushed the argument that Ali reinvented himself later in his career not as a stylistic evolution but as a downgrade. The ironic bit? Toney claims he’s an Ali fan,  just not a believer in Ali as No. 1.

Why Sugar Ray Robinson tops his list

For Toney, the top spot is obvious:

“The greatest fighter of all time is Sugar Ray Robinson, that guy was beautiful, he fought beautiful.”

Robinson is the fighter most historians already call the pound-for-pound prototype: power, footwork, adaptability, cruelty, longevity, and a skill set that transferred across eras. Toney doubled down by saying Ali idolised Robinson and tried to imitate him, but couldn’t duplicate the style.

Toney didn’t stop there:

“It’s [Sugar] Ray Robinson and James Toney second, period. If you look at how we did, we did it the right way.”

That’s classic Toney , half reverence, half self-promotion, all conviction. He even tied the claim to shared geography, reminding the interviewer that Robinson was a Detroit product and implying there’s something in that city’s boxing DNA that the rest of the planet should bow to.

Toney’s top-five excludes Ali  but includes other heavyweights

 Toney has built an entire post-career persona around rejecting orthodox boxing history and positioning himself as a purist among impostors.

Ali’s cultural weight will always overshadow arguments like this, because fans grant him more than boxing value, they grant him social power, era-defining charisma and mythmaking. Toney doesn’t care about any of that. He’s talking ring craft, fighting aesthetics, and the way a man carried himself under fire. In that space, he sees Robinson as the finished article and himself as next in the queue.

Agree or not, the honesty is vintage Toney: disrespectful to tradition, loyal to his own standards, and delivered without apology.