Boxing news article about james j jeffries.

On the ten dominant champions

sorry, but I don't think Dempsey belongs. Wills was his equal on paper and he did not defend against him.

 

Jeffries had his last fight as champion at 29, retiring officially at 30 in 1905.
He was at the top of his game.
Ali was 36 when he retired for the first time.
He was demonstrably slipping.

Jeffries when he first retired had 22 fights with a total 200 rounds on his clock.
His challengers in his title defences averaged 185lbs.
Jeffries had an average weight advantage of 33.5lbs over his challengers
Their average weight was 185lbs

Ali had engaged in 59 fights when he came back for Holmes.
He had fought 548rds.
The average of Ali's challengers was 205.6lbs in his first reign & 212.29lbs in his second.
I've included the title winning efforts of both men.


Jeffries had 4 fights which you could say were really tough ones.
The two with Sharkey ,the second Fitzsimmons one, and the first Corbett.

Jeffries was badly marked up in the second Fitz fight, punished in the gruelling second Sharkey one, and behind on points when he pulled the fight out of the fire with a ko against Corbett in their first encounter.

Part of Jeffries facial damage can be put down to the smaller gloves, but he was not hard to hit and relied on his toughness and durability to weather punishment and eventually overcome his opponents.

Ali didn't take much punishment in his first reign, but when he came back ,he absorbed a hell of a lot of shots because his legs were no longer capable of carrying him out of danger for 15 rds,and his reflexes were a tad slower.
Three wars with Frazier ,3 with Norton,a body battering against Foreman,tough fights with Bonavena ,Lyle and Shavers, all contributed to his decline.


For the Sharkey fights Jeffries enjoyed a 29lbs weight advantage in the first,and 32lbs in the second.
In the second Fitz fight Jeffries was 47lbs the heavier man.
The first Corbett fight saw Jeffries with a 27lbs disparity in his favour.

Ali had hard fights with many opponents ,a lot of them because he was past prime,fighting younger men ,there were no really significant weight advantages either way in his title defences.imo
Doug Jones and Henry Cooper gave him difficult fights before his first reign.
Jones was 14.5lbs lighter than Ali , and Cooper 13.5lbs lighter

Hard to evaluate their respective physical deterioration when they came back.
Jeffries had been out 4 years longer than Ali but was 3 years younger , he had only 22 fights with 200 rounds on his clock.
Ali was patently past his best when he retired and had 37 fights more than Jeffries and 348 more rounds.
Jeffries liked a tipple of whisky and enjoyed his food in his retirement, against that he ran a working alfalfa farm which ,one would imagine is quite physical.
Ali had well documented health problems and took various medications to get his weight down some of which were misdiagnosed and apparently potentially lethal.
There is a deal of speculation abetted by Pacheco's own input that Ali was damaged goods before he fought Shavers
He also had hand problems needing injections of novocaine to reduce the inflammation.

It depends on whether you think Jeffries longer inactivity cancels out Ali's Ali's longer career,age, and health issues.

 

Nice breakdown Mcvey very thorough research. For me, it comes down to your last sentence and I'm of the opinion Jeffries inactivity over the longer haul hurts more. That's Parkinson's syndrome aside. If Ali was suffering from early stages of the disease obviously much of his motor skills would be impacted. I think on his speech alone all those close to Ali should be ashamed they allowed him to climb back into the ring for his final two contests. The article compares Ali's decline and Jeffries, so I will stay on topic but in general I think the longer the layoff for a fighter the more his ability leaves with him and the harder it is to regain his form as opposed to someone who becomes shopworn due to grueling wars but is not out of the ring for an excessively long period of time.
Who slid more of the two is a rather pointless exercise in this case because it can be readily summed up that both men were complete ghosts of their former glory.

 

Thanks for the kind words.
Corbett had implored Jeffries to spar more and with younger men but he was obdurate about it.

Even an old Choynski embarrassed him.
I think he knew in his heart he had bitten off more than he could chew but he was caught up in the hysteria and racist hype of the thing.
Jeffries tried his best and took a terrible hiding, but he kept plodding forward into the guns, there was no quit in him.

He certainly did not deserve the castigation and scorn he received from the dissapointed white public after the fight.

Ali was being methodically bashed up by a less than enthusiastic Holmes when Dundee mercifully called a halt.

Ali whispered thank you to him.
Dundee would have been better off dissuading him from coming back to start with.

Whatever they say about Pacheco he did walk away when it was apparent Ali was severely diminished,and he did send copies of Ali's negative medical reports to Ali ,Dundee, and Herbert Muhammad,all of whom are culplable for that sorry night.

I watched it on closed circuit at Leics Sq London, the most miserable night of my love affair with the sport .

Jeffries v Johnson prime for prime would have been a hell of a fight.

Jeffries retirement robbed us of that, but he really just followed precedent.
At the time there appears to have been an almost phobic fear of losing the heavyweight title to a black man.

Yes both were just relics of what they had been.

 

Or Dempsey on the Tunney fight?

 

That was more the limitation of Dempsey's skillset getting exposed than him growing old.

Jess was 37 1/2 years old and completely inactive when he took on Dempsey. Still, had he not absorbed quite the punishment that he did in the first, he might have won. I do think a younger Jess has a good chance of beating Dempsey. Willard actually did pretty well in rounds 2 and 3 but the damage had been done.

 

S ,I disagree that the Tunney fights showed the" limitations of Dempsey's skillset." Dempsey handled Gibbons, a skillful boxer, ok . The Hollywood life and his inactivity had robbed him of his legs and his ,"seek and destroy attitude".
A more active, but still past it Dempsey nearly turned the trick against Tunney second time around ,it wasnt lack of skill so much as lack of fights and ring rounds imo.
Prime Dempsey beats prime Tunney imo ,and I have a high regard for the tunnel focused Tunney

 

We have found the limits of your magnanimity here!

 

Right on Mc:good
How much hate some posters have for the entity that was Jack Dempsey.atsch...To say that a Dempsey,out of the ring for THREE years, without
ONE tuneup bout, without a longtime manager Jack Kearns, who Dempsey
was in litigation, charging Kearns for THEFT of money, with the recent
tragic suicide of Dempsey's close brother who MURDERED his wife, before
killing himself....to say these harsh FACTS were not the CAUSE of this 32 year old rusty version of Dempsey, was not much of a factor in his loss to Tunney, tells me that hatred by some posters knows no bounds...
Add this to the fact that a Chicago based referee Barry wasted precious seconds not starting the count on a dazed Tunney until an excited Dempsey walked to a neutral corner giving Tunney about 15- 17 seconds to clear his noggin, whilst in the last round Dempsey was dropped by Tunney with a right to the temple, and with Jack on the floor, and Tunney draped right over him, referee Barry did not tell Tunney to go to
a neutral corner but STARTED an immediate count over Dempsey...
So to spout nonsense against a great fighter saying that these circumstances had little to do with the 32 year old rusty Dempsey tells one that many facts were glossed over to justify the fact that Dempsey was
a palooka in his violent prime...Cheers Mc...

 

The unfair part on Jeffries is there is next to no ring film of him in his prime. 95% of boxing fans only see his comeback loss to Johnson.

As champion from 1899-1905, even poster McVey agrees that Jeffries would have beaten Johnson.

As for as avoiding Johnson, that is not the case. Jeffries offered Johnson private fight as champion. Johnson refused.

Jeffries talked about Johnson as a possible opponent post Munroe, and returned to defend his lineal title 5+ years out of the game when the money was there.

Had there been a Reno like purse for Jeffries to face Johnson in 1905, no one can say for sure he would have declined it. In prize fighting money has a way of shaping the conversation.

 

I love Dempsey. I have more books on my shelf about Dempsey than any other sporting star, musician or author.

I can only give my take on his career. Everything else you have stated is already known to me. Buster Douglas lost his mother before the best fight of his career... or just about any career. Some champions react differently under pressure.

 

There are rounds against Ruhlin a couple of which clips are reasonably watchable .I think Jeffries and Johnson 1905 is a toss-up.

Prior to that , Jeffries probably takes it .

At no time whilst he was champion did Jeffries have the slightest intention of defending against Johnson .Martin ,Mcvey,or any other BLACK CHALLENGER

Jeffries went into print many, many times reiterating he would NEVER defend against a black challenger,that he,

"would never take the chance of losing his title to a black man," and

"when there are no white challengers left to fight I will retire".

Anyone that tries and spin this any other way is not only being totally dishonest , totally out of touch with reality,but totally underestimating the intelligence of the rest of this forum.

JEFFRIES NEVER AT ANY TIME INTIMATED,INFERRED ,IMPLIED THAT HE WOULD ENTERTAIN DEFENDING AGAINST A BLACK CHALLENGER
" I dont care if Johnson licks the Japanese Army I will not fight him".

JEFFRIES WAS DEFENDING NOTHING , HE WAS AN EX-CHAMPION CHALLENGING THE REIGNING CHAMPION.
I won't ask you to provide a primary source to prove that Jeffries considered fighting Johnson post Munroe for two reasons.
1.You NEVER have provided a primary source, even when asked repeatedly to do so.
2.There is NO such evidence to be provided.
You Sir are a complete JOKE.

You need to enter the real world because the one you currently inhabit is a fantasy universe with a population of one.atsch

nb There's no film of Harry Greb , but he is an automatic choice as a p4p great and in many eyes the consensus no1.

 

Jeffries was a colossus in his own time. It is probably fair to say that he had the greatest aura of invincibility of any heavyweight champion during his prime, so what went wrong?

Interestingly it might not have been his ill fated comeback against Johnson that tarnished his legacy. You could probably have got a consensus for Jeffries being the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, even ten years after the Johnson fight.

What primarily caused the decline in his standing, as with many historical fighures, was the fact that the people who saw him at his best started dieing off. He paid the price for being the last heavyweight champion who did not leave a substantial legacy in terms of film, and of course the only footage of any quality that did survive, was the loss to Johnson.

 

Being knocked completely out of the ring ,landing on a writers table with the wind forced out of you,tearing muscles in your back, badly bruising your spine and rippiing open your rectum ,then climbing back in and kayoing your opponent,strikes me as reacting pretty well under pressure.
But what do I know?:think

 

Jeffries was highly regarded into the early 50's but in time those voting for him passed on.
Up until the early 60's Dempsey was revered as a mankiller but as his fans began to shuffle off their mortal coils his popularity dwindled slightly.
Ten years after the Johnson fight there had been only 10 champs, the reigning one, Dempsey was only a year into his tenure.

Many observers of the game still rank Dempsey and Johnson highly , how many rate Jeffries in the top ten?
Footage obviously has an input in this, but it must be remembered, that Jeffries was not only the first Champion to retire undefeated, he was also a comparative giant to nearly all his challengers.