Joe Louis vs. Harry Greb

It's kind of grating answering your questions, because you don't learn. You are here for two reasons, still: run down the heavyweights you hate and boost the ones you love. You don't appear able to absorb information where it contradicts either of these positions. Therefore, talking to you is one long string of "what's the point?"

Still, I will once again reject your useless binary question, which like so many others is designed to box fighters based upon your allegance. I will however address the chat about the Joe Louis defence - but not for your benefit. None of this will go in. I think it's worth doing though, and that's the reason i'll do it.

Nat Fleischer called Joe "a master on defence". This was a direct quote. Grantland Rice disagreed - he wrote that "“…[O]n the defensive side there is still a lapse between mind and muscle. A break in an important coordination.” Even in his own era, his defensive capabilities were a matter of some debate and it was one that was never really resolved. In essence, neither of these men are right and as usual the truth is somewhere in between.

Louis is at heart an offensive machine. This is something of a cliché, but where certain high end boxers are concerned—Dempsey, Louis, Tyson—it is absolutely applicable. Offensive machines are limited in defense, traditionally, a situation which is entirely natural. Getting the punches across becomes the most important thing for these men and in turn that determination makes the opponent nervous about punching—this is the first line of defense for any great hitter and Louis was no different. It was a brave man who planted his feet when sharing the ring with him. Nevertheless even the most aggressive of boxers must have solid defensive technique to become successful at the highest level.

Joe laid some of the nuts and bolts of these techniques bare in How to Box, the manual released in his name after his triumphant return bout with Jersey Joe Walcott, but it is Mendoza's favourite fight film in all of history that I'm going to look through to examine Joe's defenses, the worst perfomrnace of his career pre-comeback, the highlighst of Walcott I.

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Speaking in 1941 of the then absolutely primed version of Joe Louis, Billy Conn’s trainer Johnny Ray said before Louis-Conn I:

“You guys have got it all wrong. You don’t box Joe Louis. You can put all the boxers you like in front of him and he’ll find them. No, you need to fight Joe Louis. You need to fight Louis every minute of every round, you need someone who can take his punches and give him some back. That’s how you beat him.”

The great Conn came within touching distance of doing just that before succumbing to the inevitable. Now Walcott set out to find a combination of the two strategies described in Ray’s informed outburst that would be the past-prime Champion’s undoing. His mission statement was nothing less than the literal perfection of boxing’s defining mission statement, one that will be repeated a thousand times in gyms all across the world this very day in one form or another: hit and don’t be hit. Walcott spent fleeting, desperate moments in the pocket always looking for the exit just before Louis hit his stride, exchanged with him at distance but always trying to force Louis to lead in unfavorable moments, then vanishing in a series of sudden, unpredictable moves that left a fuming Louis resetting his stance over and over again. Louis does not land a single straight right hand of real import in the twenty-six rounds spent in Walcott’s company.

In the opening moments of that fight’s first round, Louis demonstrates his most crucial defensive skill, the slip. In his manual, How to Box (HTB) this is described as a technique “used against straight leads and counters. As your opponent leads with his left, shift your body about five or six inches to the right of the blow, making it fall harmlessly over your shoulder…sometimes it is only necessary to move your head to slip a punch.” This is a key skill for Louis and one that allowed him to consistently out-jab opponents over the course of his career, even those who out-reached him.

After being caught with two clipping Walcott jabs early, Louis slipped the third in this manner. What is crucial to note about the Louis defense is that it is built specifically to facilitate offense. After the punch is slipped, How to Box tells us that we should find ourselves in position “for a blow to his unprotected left side.” This is the theory, in practice Louis comes out of the slip to throw a punch at Walcott’s right side before following it up with a short straight right. It is Louis’ early warning that the angles Walcott will be showing will not be of the type he has been shown in the gym.

It’s also an early lesson in the way that Louis wove his complete offense together with his less astonishing defense to create a pattern of deterrent that affected almost every opponent he ever met. This is important. Throwing punches at Louis is a terrifying experience that some people - Paycheck, Baer, Burman - described in those exact terms, terms of physical fear of attacking.

Anyway, moments later, Walcott tried his first serious left hook and Louis demonstrated the duck. “Bend forwards at the waist, ducking his blow. As soon as you have ducked his blow, straighten up and at the same time counter with a blow to your opponent.”

Louis pulls this counter off beautifully, following a left uppercut to the body with a clubbing right hand around the back of Walcott’s head as Jersey Joe, already rocking a little, tries for his own duck. He doesn’t quite make it and backs up before unveiling the two-step that would cause Louis trouble all night, going away and coming back with a punch (usually a right), one big horrible feint that Louis will fail to unpick in either fight. Later, swarming Walcott back to his own corner, Louis comes square and continues to throw blows even as Walcott blocks them on his gloves. Here we see the elemental weakness in the Louis defense—it is all but abandoned when he is in the full flow of an attack. Most offensive machines share this weakness. It is born of the absolute surety that exists in this extremely rare breed of fighter that they can outpunch any opponent, and that exchanges are therefore to be sought.

After going back to his boxing in the second, Louis shows a nice parry in the third. The champion’s curious habit of occasionally keeping his gloves tightly knitted at his chest is not entirely a matter of preparing his offense; it also allows him to move the “unit” the two gloves create up or down to catch straight blows that do not leave the opponent available for a counter. Nor does How to Box stress counterpunching after blocking blows. On occasions where the guard is made mobile to block opposition punches, the priority seems to move over to defense, perhaps the reason Louis did not use this strategy often. He can be seen primarily as a slipper and ducker of punches rather than a parrying or blocking fighter due to the lack of natural countering opportunities these earlier methods provide when compared to the latter, although such opportunities can of course be engineered. Early in the ninth Louis did exactly that. As Walcott moved forward and fired two-handed, Louis showed good flexibility, lifting his forearms which worked as an additional guard as Louis performed the block as described in How to Box:

“As your opponent leads, turn your body…If your opponent leads with a blow to the chin, use your shoulder to block it.”

Louis turns with this two-handed attack, tucking in his chin and lifting the relevant shoulder on each turn and when to his own surprise, Walcott “pops up” behind these shots right in Joe’s kill zone he improvises a beautiful pivoted hook which catches Jersey Joe on the mouth, helping him win the round.

In the fourteenth he can be seen parrying a Walcott jab and then firing off his own, not quite generating a counter but using his defense to neutralize a rare Jersey Joe lead before taking advantage and landing his own punch.

The fifteenth round of Louis-Walcott I may not be a round that in particular brings to mind matters of defense as Walcott ran and Louis chased him, but actually it is one of Joe’s better defensive rounds. He parries a Walcott jab in his very first action and slips two more before throwing his first punch, a left hook which glances off Walcott’s head. Louis is trying to box noticeably closer to Walcott now and his defense is paramount. Walcott spent most of the final round retreating and flashing up unpredictable punches when cornered or desperate, but Louis deals with most of these before firing back. Mobile and hard to hit, Louis demonstrates the truth of Johnny Ray’s statement of 1941 and his own immortal line before the Louis-Conn rematch: if they run, they can’t hide, not from him.


How someone can spend 15 years on this forum or many fewer spending time watching actual fights and still think Louis has "no defence" is beyond me. And it is actually a real shame.

 

Here is something that I think is worth saying: i've raised about 40 detailed points in a deep analysis of Joe Louis's defensive technique, the subject of your ire. And you've engaged with none of it. You have ignored literally all of it. Instead, you are harping on a question I partly answer in the course of this post, in your last post. You are not better than that.

It's also striking that you are incapable of seeing the irony in pulling me up for avoiding one of your questions

I've already answered your question regarding his defence in as much detail as I can muster.

As to his chin, Louis had a good one. He was flashed often, like a Juan Manuel Marquez, but like Marquez, he was very very hard to stop with punches. Two men pulled it - one of the greatest offensive machines ever below 200, Marciano, who battered a washed up Louis; and Schmeling, who beat the pre-prime version with as hellacious a protracted beating as exists on film. In short, he avoids the type of dull, binary definition you are so determined to impose upon him. I call it "tide-turning chin" whereby the fighter can be flashed, even momentarily hurt, but has the punch resistance to stay in the fight and potentially turn the tide.

 

thanks

 

I mean, the guy did well against Tunney and Dempsey (in sparring) and beat up some decent heavies...Louis is better than Dempsey by most eyes, but I'm not sure there is a world in it and they are both cruiserweights. I would give Greb a very good chance of upsetting Dempsey over ten. So my wild guess is that Greb, as perhaps the greatst fighter in history, would have set some serious problems for Joe Louis over ten. He did struggle for 12 rounds with the world's greatest light-heavyweight in his own time,so he might have struggled with the world's greatest light-heavyweight from the generation before.

I suspect that nobody would be putting money down on Greb though, unless the odds got crazy from all the money going down on Louis.

 

Well Greb didn't beat Dempsey, because they didn't fight.

But Dempsey was very serious with his sparring partners and was known for it - and Greb got the better of those spars. But they're still just spars.

Greb was certainly more than a swarmer.