[VIDEO] Jack Dempsey vs. Jess Willard [Crisp, Speed Corrected]

Willard's claim to fame is defeating Jack Johnson for the title, and that's it. He won the title from a washed-up fat Jack Johnson is a poor fight, imo. He outlasted a flabby smaller man, and it took 26 rounds to do so.
On top of that he has a 10-round 'newspaper win' over Frank Moran.

Even in his prime his credentials were weak.

 

Not really. Plenty of the guys who went multiple rounds with Willard would not have gone multiple rounds with Wilder. Dempsey was no Ali. Ali scored from distance and left before his opponents could touch him. That was not Dempsey's style. What makes sense is that Willard lost to several ordinary, small fighters. He was NOT a great heavyweight-- certainly not the monster that some of you guys are trying to make him out to be (for ideological reasons).

 

Wilder is also flawed and makes a lot of mistakes.
Technically he's often a mess.

But I'm very sure Wilder hits harder and is way faster than Willard.

 

It's silly for people to look at Willard and point out all the things he did wrong. His 'technical skills' and all that.
Boxing doesn't work like that. You can't just check-list his stance, his hand position, his punching and clinching techniques, etc. and hope to prove anything.

But it IS fair to watch him in his prime and study his record and then say he was not very good.
The fact that he's struggling to beat a fat, old, under-trained Jack Johnson, and the rest of his record is mediocre.

 

What I meant was that he won more then he lost against name guys of the era and had a winning record. I wasnt commenting on how good or bad he actually was. Simply he fought well for his time, that's all.

 

Sorry, that should have read "was NOT a great heavyweight"!! (drunken typo)

 

The main agenda that comes to mind is that of bolstering Dempsey's standing in terms of career greatness and head-to-head formidability. More broadly, building up guys like Willard (and by extension, Dempsey's destruction of him) lets nostalgic fans downplay the importance of the size disparities in matchups between smaller, older heavyweights and more modern heavyweights.

I should have worded that differently because I did not mean to insinuate that Willard's fans are being disingenuous. I just think these are deep motivations that implicitly shape how people evaluate Willard.

 

Willard was what he was. He had good hand speed, a good punch, good recovery abilities(not going down in the second or 3rd round of the Dempsey fight), and good foot speed. He lacked discipline and that was his fatal flaw. When he did get into shape he was a quality fighter.

Overall, he isn't the best of the shw's but he certainly isn't the worst of the shw's. He is simply a good comparison to measure how Dempsey would fare against modern super heavyweights.

 

Willard wasn't good but I don't think that should take away from the fact that Dempsey was very good.
I think LOADS of fighters in history could beat the 1919 Willard, but there's not that many who'd do it like Dempsey did it.