Prime Foreman and Max Baer-technical comparisons

I agree with you....In my opinion Foreman was a heavyweight Sandy Saddler with those always moving hands, catching punches.....The pressure footwork was very similar too.....

But I agree with swarmer in many aspects, Baer is underrated sometimes...

 

A verry good analysis Swarmer.

Foreman was undoubtedly the greater fighter and had by far the better ring mentality.

In defense of Baer however, his destruction of Schmeling is the sort of systematic breakdown of a great technical boxer that Foreman never quite managed to show us. This is perhaps the one fight of his career that Foreman should have studied.

 

Watching Baer is a bit like watching Foreman fighting under water. It's not so much the technique as workrate and speed of pressure (at least in the early rounds) that differs between the two men. George's jab is clearly better, though.

 

Schemling is vastly overrated as a technical boxer by some here, though. He's not even close to being a Young, not even a Quarry. There are few of the better boxers of Foreman's day that I would hesitate to put clearly above Schmeling in terms of technique.

 

Interesting comparison. :think

Both, respectively, terminator seek & destroy type fighters in their divisions. Foreman with just a bit more power, and Saddler faster speed of pressure. Both could have utilized their jabs more often. At least in Foreman's case of not abandoning it.

 

I have to respectfuly disagre with you about Schmeling as a boxer. His style was unorthodox and briliant and I am not sure that anybody ever realy solved the puzzle.

I think that he would have spelled big trouble for both Young and Quarry. Schmeling was a fighter who fed off you following the boxing textbook. If you were unorthodox yourself then you could throw him a bit of a curve ball.

 

He could. I'm just commenting upon technical skill. But if that was all that mattered in a match-up, the notion of Calzaghe beating Hopkins wouldn't be far from bizarre. Not to mention Jones easily beating both him and Toney.

 

You won't find Max Schmeling's style in any book, but still it seems to work to a formula, as much as any orthodox technical fighter's style does.

I guess he took his style to the grave.

 

Throw out the ten round loss to 36 fight veteran Jack Taylor in 1924 (Max's second year of competition at age 19, which Schmeling reversed in 1927), and two decision losses to Neusel and Vogt in 1948 (for whom he was 42 and 43 respectively), and the only two defeats he sustained which went to the final bell were by controversial SD in the 1932 Sharkey rematch, and the 12 round upset by Hamas in Philly to start 1934. (Many of us have seen what Max did to retire Hamas in Hamburg a year later.)

I do agree that nobody ever really solved the puzzle. Going into round ten, Baer-Schmeling was anybody's fight with five rounds to go, despite the German not looking all that good, and Louis just tore into him before he could get a chance to get started in 1938, not wanting to get into any kind of chess match again. Stylistically, I'm not convinced that Joe had any other answer for that counter right, although I can't see Max beating that version of Joe at the age Schmeling was by then regardless. But I've always believed that peak Schmeling (circa Uzcudun I in 1929, or Stribling in 1931) could have taken the Louis of the Max Baer fight in a first time match, and that's the Louis which the German was prepared for in 1936. (Yes, that's a risky call, as Joe was obviously far greater, but head to head, Max had the perfect counter right for dealing with the Bomber in a protracted bout, and the intense focus on what he wanted to do, resulting in not being concerned about what Louis might inflict on him. Joe had a lot of opponents psyched out before they even stepped in the ring.)

 

Schmeling had a very odd style. For instance, his feet always seem to confuse me. He seems to have a lot of weight on his front foot, but actually he's working off his back foot to an unusual degree. He was a counterpuncher who did well going forward. He's sometimes said to have a European style, but I struggle to think of many Europeans from that period who were particularly similar. I like the positioning of his right hand a lot. Like a lot of boxers in the era when film was scarce, he liked to spend the first few rounds working out his opponent, in a way that Foreman and Frazier didn't have to do.