Rocky Marciano Film Study

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Do we have to?

 

That’s really cool. Man Beshore, Vingo, Reynolds, and Muscat’s looked like they suffered brutal knockouts

 

This is why I believe Sonny Liston and many bigger champions would find Rocky far too awkward. Joe Louis was a great short puncher yet technically he was mauled out of commission inside. His leverage and foot position was taken away. And joe was still a guy who was beating world rated fighters like Savold, Bivins and Brion as well as having knocked out nino Valdes, Elmer Ray and Pat Valentino in unofficial fights.

To beat Rocky a fighter needs to be faster and slick enough to meet him with punches before getting away. To be able to think a move ahead. Fighters could hit Rocky but not many could get away, predict or avoid the returning blows. That was always the problem. Rocky was able to reach a guy as soon as they hit him. He closed the gap while under fire. And he came in too low.

The guy was not invincible. Rocky just didn’t get the kind of opponent that had all the elements to beat him. For most fighters He was extremely unorthodox and far too dangerous.

 

I can really see guys like Foreman and Tyson (and Liston for that matter) needing to get away from him. They'd be dust otherwise.

 

They would obviously be on their bikes from start to finish!

 

Only way for them to win.

 

Fighting against Rocky you need to make room to unload. The footage here demonstrates how very difficult it was to find room when he came in so low like that. Using his head and putting it under a guys chin up against the throat.

Sure you can make a case for a much bigger man rag dolling Rocky inside, pushing him off and clouting away at him with harder blows than he ever received before. That’s a legitimate argument. Nothing wrong with that view.

No more so than having the view that Rocky would be as hard to throw off and batter on the way in as Joe Louis found him.

 

Joe Louis was way past his awesome finest.

Joe Frazier used to get in pretty close too.

 

True. Louis was past his awesome finest but it’s just as true that Louis was still effective against elite men of the day. It would be a different matter if Louis was already losing fights to guys who could not lace his boots before. And this was not the case.

True also that Frazier used to get in pretty close too. We did not see anybody overcome what Frazier could do until after the hospitalisation and health scare post Ali.

Certainly any great fighter is harder to beat at his best, and if a great fighter retires before he declines we can never truly know.

Marciano benefited from retiring and so too could have Frazier. If a great fighter retires at the top he cheats the experts of ever really knowing don’t they?

 

The fact of the matter is Louis was massively declined regardless of beating a couple of contenders of this particular era. Peak Louis would have been a totally different proposition. It's not even up for debate.

Yeah Foreman would have been lucky to have lasted 3 rounds with the Frazier of 3 fights earlier. No doubt Joe would have been totally wrong for Foreman stylistically at that point of time.

Imagine if Foreman faced the guy that actually came out the loser of that grueling epic. He may well have killed poor Ali.

 

I wrote a breakdown of Rocky vs Moore, hope yall like it. https://imgur.com/gallery/xn2lt

 

The fact of the matter is George Foreman was not beating guys better than Savold, Agramante, Bivins, Brion, Valentino, Elmer Ray and Nino Valdes before he fought Joe Frazier. Of course it did not stop George beating Joe Frazier, but until he fought Frazier there was none of this faith you have in Foreman always beating Joe Frazier was there? We can never know can we?

At that point Frazier was cleaning out a division. Ali, Bonavena, Quarry, Ellis, Chuvalo, Machen, Jones, Ramos. There wasn’t anybody left to fight.

you are proving your own point here. Your trying to sound funny but the truth was Foreman did lose to Ali didn’t he? Frazier took more punishment winning than Ali did losing. So much so there were doubts about Frazier even continuing with his career. I’m not saying 2 plus 2 equals 5 or suggesting anything definitive one way or the other. Let’s just say why rule anything out? You can’t prove it can you?

 

Great read!