The Art of Boxing By The OldTIMERS

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THE CORSCREW PUNCH.
In connection with “tricks of the trade” special consideration
is given to what is termed the famous corkscrew punch invented
by Kid McCoy, one of the trickiest as well as one of the most
marvelously expert fighters ever seen in the ring. The secret of
his success was due to his study of possibilities. While others
blocked, or went in slam-bang, McCoy studied how to get past a
lead and land with damaging effect. His foot-work was perfect.
His judgment of distance next to uncanny. The accuracy of his
short-arm work nothing if not marvelous. In boxing position he
looked solid on his feet and a slow hitter, but in action he was confusing
and deceptive. His movements were slow, deliberate and
strangely original. His two arms with the elbows out and the
gloves nearly together, swinging slowly to and fro across his body.
The feet make moves that further this impression, and the man
before him usually leads to nip matters in the bud. But the “Kid”
has only been feinting for that lead, and as it comes he slips past
and into close quarters.
Then McCoy demonstrates what is possible in such a position.
He is too close to do damage, it seems, but McCoy has figured this
and knows better. His arms are not in position to protect him,
but drawn back at the sides.
One suddenly blocks like a flash, the other revolves like a
corkscrew and rips into the man’s body. Then, with the speed of
lightning, it bangs into the face. The block is abandoned and the
other hand jolts the body and then the jaw.
The spectator gets a confusing glimpse of two arms working
like a runaway rock drill, and McCoy is again moving easily about
with his half-bent arms swinging before him. His opponent confused
and angry at this unexpected behavior, rushes at the “Kid”
like a mad bull. But the “Kid” is away like a shadow ; and the
angry opponent finds nothing in the place McCoy occupied. If
the man rushes again McCoy breaks ground or blocks. When he
has his man quiet he begins his work over. He does not take
chances. An angry man is liable to do awkward things, and a
clever boxer can be hurt by awkwardness more than by cleverness.

 

PIVOT BLOWS.
Regarding the pivot blow I want to say, first of all, that it is
a very dangerous blow, and should never be practiced when sparring
with a friend. If it is done properly there is a great advantage
in its use, but if one does not know how to do it right he had best
not attempt it at all, as he will only hurt himself and commit a bad
foul. This pivot blow is a comparatively new invention in boxing,
but as far as I can learn it was never known or used by the boxers
of the old school. Several well-known boxers claim to have invented
the blow. Often in a fight it can be used with very good
results, and it can be delivered in several different ways.
Perhaps the best way is to wait until your adversary leads
with his left, instantly stop it with your left, and as you are stopping
it turn or pivot with the right arm slightly bent and the palm
of the hand turned down and the hand closed. If you have
calculated right the right side of the right hand should land good
and hard on the right side of your adversary’s jaw or on his jugular.
A different way of delivering the blow is by trying to get your
opponent to run after you. Let him get as close as possible and
when within reach spin around as quickly as possible. This is the
way that Jack Dempsey was defeated by George La Blanche.
Still another way to get in the pivot is when you are forcing
the fighting, and have got your man so that his back is touching
the ropes. This will bother him some, as a matter of course, and
he will try to get away from the ropes or out of the corner, as the
case may be. Then is your time to feint at his stomach, and at the
second or third feint, turn as I have stated in the first method, but
the head must be bent forward in this case. The proper way to
pivot is to turn or spin around on the ball of the left foot, lifting
the right foot from the ground and swinging it around. This will
add force to your blow. If you should miss the pivot blow you
will find yourself in a splendid position to deliver the shift.

 

ART OF BOXING 59
CHAPTER XXV.
EXERCISES FOR THE NOVICE.
Left-hand body blow (get back).
Right-hand body blow ( get back).
Left-hand lead off at the head, guarding with the right (get back).
Right-hand. cross-counter (get back).
Lead off at the head with the left and duck to the right (get back).
Right-hand body blow (get back).
Lead off with the left at the head without guarding (get back).
Right-hand cross-counter (get back).
Left-hand body blow (get back).
Lead off with the left at the head and duck (get back).
Lead off with the left hand at the head without guarding (get
back).
Right-hand cross-counter (get back).
Left-hand lead off at the head and duck to the right (get back).
Left-hand body blow (get back).
Right-hand body blow (get back).
Lead off with left at body, then make a short step in and repeat
the blow on the face (get back). (This is the double lead off at
body and head).
Lead off with left and right at head (get back).
As your opponent retires, advance quickly then step in and deliver
the left on the face (get back).
Both men lead off with the left and guard (get back).
Lead off with the left hand at the head (get back).
Right-hand cross-counter, remain and commence infighting; de·
liver five or six blows and get back.

 

BOXING
BY
PHILADELPHIA JACK O’BRIEN
FORMER LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION BOXER OF THE WORLD
I N C O L L A B O R A T I O N W I T H
S. E. BILIK, M.D.
FORMER ATHLETIC TRAINER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
FROM MOVING-PICTURE FILMS. CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Boxing is almost an ideal form of physical
recreation. It offers the youth and mature man
a clever and fascinating athletic pastime. It is a
scientific sport combining a form of vigorous
exercise with a maximum of mental activity,
There is probably no competitive sport that requires
as much mental agility as boxing. You
have got to think while under machine-gun fire,
You have got to see, plan, and act instantaneously.
There is no chance for a second thought.
for “time out,” or “huddle.” Either you have
grasped the opportunity or it is gone.
In childhood and youth are laid the foundations
of character and health. Boxing aids in
the development of both. In itself an excellent
form of physical activity, it is rounded out by
the supplementary training. Since thorough
physical conditioning is an almost indispensable
prerequisite in the attainment of proficiency in
boxing, those who become interested in the
sport usually strive to build up their strength,
speed, and stamina. The vigorous health gainedthereby is invariably associated with an abundance
of “pep,” “drive,” “dare,” aggressiveness,
Boxing breeds confidence, gameness, selfdenial,
sportsmanship, mental alertness. It enables
you to stand a lot of knocking about, to
take misfortune with a grin, and good fortune
without getting a “swelled head.” It teaches
self-control under the most trying circumstances,
respect and consideration for your fellow
beings, tolerance, control of emotions and
facial expressions, ability to take and give as a
man. General opinion to the contrary, very few
boxers are mean or cruel. It is a game to them,
a game challenging their manhood, testing their
mettle, offering the joy of physical and mental
combat, and earning them the knowledge that
they have been tried in battle and have not been
found wanting. It is an exhaust for the superabundant.
energy of vigorous youth.

 

Because of its inestimable value as a health
and character builder, boxing should be taught
wherever the child and youth of to-day is being
moulded into the man of to-morrow. Colleges
have taken up this sport with a vim. Many
academies and high schools have followed their
lead, I hope to see the day when boxing will beconsidered as much an essential in the physical
education programme as is swimming.
Every man ought to learn boxing. For some
reason, no matter how active an athlete in his
youth, as soon as a man marries and buckles in
to “get somewhere” he suddenly finds no time
for physical recreation. He will go to the
movies, sit up most of the night playing bridge
or penny-ante, keep the radio going while he
snores loudly, but . . . “I sure would like to go
to gym again. Wish I had the time. . . .” The
years roll on, the erstwhile athlete begins to
“go to grass,” gets sloppily fat, slow, easily
“winded,” complains of “too much acid in the
stomach,” “rheumatics,” headaches—in short,
he is well on the way to chronic ill health. Every
intelligent man knows what it means to be in
good condition. He also knows when he is not in
good condition. Now, when a man is satisfied to
go along year after year in less than his best
condition he is clearly indulging a weakness.
Good health is absolutely impossible without
more or less regular physical recreation. That
daily half-hour for exercise is as indispensable
as the cleansing of the teeth or the taking of a
bath.To acquire the art of boxing is a difficult but
not an impossible task. How well you absorb
it will depend on how much time, application,
and thoroughness you put into the task. Hagen,
Tilden, Grange, Ruth, Hoppe, Weismuller,
Tunney are essentially not very different from
any of us, yet champions. Were they superendowed
by nature? Are they “born” athletes? No,
All forms of athletics are artificial arrangements
for the expression of our play instinct.
No one is born a football star, a miler, or a
champion boxer. An athlete is made, and from
the most unlikely material. Read the biographies
of our champions and see how many of them
showed that they were “born” to gain superiority
and renown. None, probably. You will find
that the explanation of their success lies in the
fact that they early chose, or had chosen for
them, a definite line of endeavor, had the advantage
of skilful training, and threw all their
energies, time, and thought into the task of
achieving excellency. Everything else being
equal, practice makes perfect, and the more practice
you get the better you are bound to be. So I
say: Go at boxing just as intensively as is necessary
to become as good a boxer as you want
to be.

 

True enough, your ultimate proficiency will
vary with your fitness for the sport. Every
phase of human activity has certain requisites—
we can’t all make doctors, lawyers, engineers,
or farmers. Those who fail to heed this are usually
the square pegs in the round holes. Fighters
are born, because pugnacity is an inherent
instinct; boxers are made, because the science
is an artificial product of centuries of evolution
from the crude and punishing methods of the
ancients. Some of us are gifted with certain natural
athletic tendencies of physical and mental
quickness and agility; others lack these
qualities entirely. Some take to boxing like
ducks to water; others remain “palookas” forever
and aye. Any one can learn boxing, but few
will be Corbetts, Leonards, Brittons, Driscolls.
The essential qualities for success in boxing
are:
Brains—“athletic brains” is what Bob
Zuppke calls it. It implies intelligence of the
quickly perceptive, quickly reacting type. An
individual may rank rather low in a general intelligence
test and yet, possessing that one quality
of mental agility, he may make a “natural”
athlete, This type will be successful in any formof athletic sports—all he needs is to grasp the
fundamentals and persevere in training in order
to develop the essential mentomuscular co-ordinations,
and through continuous repetition of
the same movements change the conscious action
into an habitual one; that is, one that comes
at the proper moment without thinking. We
frequently hear of “four-letter” men in colleges,
which means that they have won their
spurs in four different major sports. I have no
doubt that these men would have done equally
well in any other form of athletics.
Some may question my choice of “brains” as
the prime requisite for success in boxing. As
I run over the past thirty-five years I can recall
many a brawny bruiser making fierce splashes
in the fistic world for a short while. And then
along comes some dandy stylist, who dances all
around the slugger, stabs him with all of the
57 varieties of annoying blows, laughs at his
clumsy efforts, and carries off the decision and
whatever glory goes with it, A bruiser never
lasts long—a clever boxer always does. Think
of Jack Johnson, Carpentier, Wilde, Mike and
Tom Gibbons, Jack Britton—men who in their
thirties, nay even forties, made a laughing-stockof hurricane youngsters. Occasionally a slugger
may overwhelm even the cleverest of boxers,
but not very frequently nor for long, Berlenbach
left a thickly studded trail of knockouts,
but the dapper and clever Delaney stopped him.
The Terrible Terry McGovern, a terrific slugger
from bell to bell, couldn’t dent Young Corbett’s
protective armor nor avoid his lightninglike
counters. The fiercer they are the quicker
they burn out, and when they do they are
through for good; a slugger never comes back
—successfully. In conclusion, it is always possible
to develop strength, speed, and stamina,
but brains are either there or they just “ain’t”
Speed.—A boxer must be lightning-fast to
avoid an attack and grasp openings for counters.
He needs not the straightaway speed of a
sprinter, but rather the speed of change, of
shiftiness, of instantaneous reactions. Speed of
change is vitally interwoven with speed of
thinking. You move out of range of a blow or
into shooting distance no faster than you will
to. The ability to judge distance and properly
time blows is wholly a matter of your perceptive
and reactive speed, You see the opening, you
decide to take advantage of it, you act. Now,the less time it takes you to complete this cycle
of thought and action, the speedier are you.
This quickness of perception, reaction, and action
can he modified to an extent by persistent
repetition of the same movement, until, as
pointed out previously, it becomes habitual, “instinctive.”
That is why we train and practise,
and also that is why the more we train and the
more actual boxing experience we get the better
boxers we become, always within certain limitations,
since it is the brain that slows or speeds
a movement, and no amount of training can put
“brains” into a sluggard. Also, the bigger the
man the slower he moves, since though his mental
agility may be just as quick as the little fellow’s,
his large body must overcome greater
resistance (friction). However. the big man
may be relatively fast, since his speed is compared
with that of at man of his own weight and
not that of a bantam.

 

Grit—Backbone—or in Webster’s English,
Courage.—Most beginners in boxing are timid.
After all, few of us enjoy the anticipation of
being lambasted just for fun. In no time at all,
however, it becomes apparent that very few
blows carry any real “kick,” and that even thoseare either disregarded or quickly forgotten in
the excitement of a bout. Carpentier landed a
terrific right-hander on Dempsey’s jaw, shaking
him up pretty badly. When the fight was
over, Dempsey denied receiving this blow, and
the psychologist will tell you that he probably
never felt it. Thus the man who is “game” at
heart needs only a little experience to gain the
confidence necessary to overcome timidity. Of
course the inherently pugnacious type finds his
heart’s content within the boundaries of the
ring.
Real honest-to-goodness cowardice is rare.
Most men start life with plenty of “guts.” Environmental
influences are the big factors that
make or break a man. Professor Griffith says:*
“Yellowness is rarely inherited. A few men are
cowards by nature, but most men grow cow—
ardly or unaggressive because their youth has
furnished no opportunity for them to learn aggressiveness.
They become a part of a gang,
they have accidents and defeats which no one
helps them to combat, their parents beat initiative
out of them; and in early manhood they
*“The Psychology of Coaching,” By Coleman R. Griffith, Associate
Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Illinois.find that their habits of passively accepting objects
and events are fixed. They have learned
that it is easier to dodge difficult objects and
events than to meet them.” Bluntly, what Professor
Griffith means is that if a boy is cowardly
and unaggressive he has his parents to thank
for it. If in the course of years of unfavorable
training you have acquired an inferiority complex,
you’ll have to grit your teeth and fight that
little “yellow streak.” Finding that you are just
as good or perhaps better than your opponent,
you are apt to gain the confidence necessary to
crush fear and misgivings. Many a man taking
account of his weakness in this respect has
taken up boxing and gone at it viciously in
order to overcome “funk.”
Boxing, because it is a man-to-man combat,
appears to the spectator as the most dangerous,
but there are probably more injuries in one
brotherly football game than in fifteen of the
fiercest of prize-fights. Even in the days of
bare-knuckle fighting the injuries were rarely
of a permanent nature. There is no avoiding of
occasional injuries of varying severity in athletic
contests. Every sport takes its toll, chiefly
because here and there a poorly trained man
takes a chance. A well-trained, well-conditionedman is in little danger even under prize-fight
conditions. There are wild and woolly bruisers
whose idea of boxing is that one must absorb
all the punishment possible in order to get in
an occasional blow at your opponent. A skilful
boxer is the recipient of very few blows, and
even these are of the glancing type. Benny
Leonard’s gloss pompadour was rarely mussed
even in a championship battle.

 

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Temperament.—Individuals of nervous temperament
always make better athletes than the
“easy-go-lucky” phlegmatic type. The youth
who toes the mark in an athletic contest without
being mentally on edge will be an “alsoran.”
Every good man is a bundle of nerves for
hours preceding a contest. The times I felt
worst I fought best, and when I felt fine and at
peace with the world I knew I could not put
forth my best efforts. Most athletes learn to
control this nervous tension and find relief with
the snap of the starter’s bell or the bark of a
gun. Curious how one minute you are tied in
a knot, a sickly sensation of nothingness in your
stomach, unable to sit, talk, or think of anything
but the start, and the very next minute
the bell rings, the tension snaps, and you settle
down to the task with confidence and coolness.Some boxers, especially if successful, appear to
be overflowing with confidence, and approach a
contest without the doubts and misgivings that
harry the less optimistic ones. Blessed is he who
can rip into his opponent, dominated with confident
optimism, however exaggerated! It stands
to reason that the neurotic type of boxer, because
of his very nature, will tend to take the
aggressive at every opportunity, and will find
it difficult to remain on the defensive when reason
dictates. His natural inclination is to be
audacious and keep up a fast, persistent attack.
The phlegmatic type rarely gets anywhere in
boxing. The big, good-natured Willard was a
good instillation of a man who had many requisites
of a champion and yet, lacking the fighter’s
aggressiveness, failed. Everything else being
equal, the pugnacious type of figbter is bound to
make his mark in the game. Terry McGovern,
Wolgast, Papke, Ketchell, Dempsey were all
fighters at heart. Having the intelligence to
adopt an individualized style of boxing, they became
champions.
Strength—Speed—Stamina.—These are, of
course, essentials in the making of a good boxer,
but I put them last because they are acquiredwith comparative ease through diligent training.
The more conscientiously you train, the
closer you approach perfect physical condition.
Any man, in whatever condition, providing he
has no organic disease, can be “built up” or
“trained down” to fighting shape, which, of
course, implies a smoothly working, snappily responsive
neural and muscular system; a lung
and a heart progressively trained to respond to
the exacting demands of strenuous sport; and a
digestive system that does not balk at every
strange morsel.
From the above it is clear that a boxer will
be the sum of his essential qualities, and since
there is bound to be great variation in the relative
percentage of the latter, it can be seen why
no two boxers can he alike and why imitation
of a successful boxer’s methods usually fails.
Dempsey’s peculiar stance and weaving, Dave
Shade’s puzzling crouch, Johnny Dundee’s ropebouncing
stunts, Carpentier’s whiplike righthere
are some unorthodox methods which have
brought success to their originators. Many have
tried, no one has ever succeeded in imitating
these with the same results. The thing for an
aspiring boxer to do is to take stock of his qualifications and consider the best means of utilizing
his assets and nullifying his deficiencies
—but all that after he has learned the three
Rs of boxing. --------------------------

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