How Good is Ken Norton's Cross Arm Guard

I thought he utilized it very well along with his upper body movement. I used to use this same style of defense very frequently when I was a young man with very good results

 

Well, smart guys seemed to have issues with it, but big, strong, dumb guys punched right through it.

 

It seemed to work well against boxers. Sluggers will bang away at whatever they can hit, and whatever they hit starts hurting soon afterwards.

 

What do you think differentiated the efficiency of Archie Moore’s cross guard compared to other users?

 

Archie Moore was a little smarter than the average and understood subtleties that many did not. His experience was so vast, yet we saw a strong, not so subtle guy punch through his defense as well.

Another thing about Archie, we only see film of him at the peak of his boxing intellectualism. We will never see the fights where he learned the lessons.

 

Well said! With the left arm low across the body and right arm across the face, it's hard to throw punches and especially hard to put power behind the punches. Maybe that's why the big, strong guys punch right through it? When the opponent has his arms crossed that way the big, strong guy can set up their hard punches without worrying about hard punches coming back at them?

From the cross arm defense a fighter can "torque" his body to the right and get good leverage behind the right and to the left and maybe get good leverage behind a hook, but with the arm across the body it might be difficult. When I see somebody using the cross arm defense and doing well, I suspect that the person is doing well despite using the cross arm, not because they used it.

 

That's definitely one of the factors. The big punchers didn't have as much to worry about on the receiving end and could open up to land big shots in the gaps of the cross arm block. Ken couldn't just immediately return fire with both arms like that.

The other factor is Kenny couldn't fight backing up. Big guys like Foreman and Cooney stepping towards him would be like a cape buffalo trying to bang heads with an elephant. It ain't gonna end well.

And the big punchers he faced were all good at throwing looping powerful hooks and uppercuts that could slip through the guard and nail Kenny with stuff he didn't see coming with his stiff guard. As athletic as Kenny was, he had a habit of being fairly flat footed, literally even dragging his rear leg, and couldn't leap out of the way of danger like other cagey guys such as Ali or Holmes/Young.

Essentially, Norton's guard was great at picking off the straight linear punches of slicksters who are light on their feet and mostly throwing jabs and crosses without putting much weight on them or opponents who threw just 1 pedestrian punch at a time. Against heavy combination punching, it's harder to block and anticipate everything and adjust the cross guard. Especially if a guy is going upstairs and downstairs, from the left and right, all at once.

 

Right. Seems like a good defense when you are trying to catch jabs with your right glove or use your left elbow to hurt a guy's knuckles on his jabbing hand.

But it's a terrible defense when a guy is throwing left hooks or big right hands at your temples, or delivering uppercuts.

It worked great for Norton against Ali, Holmes, Young, etc. for that reason. It was terrible when he fought Foreman and Shavers - Quarry rocked him pretty hard, too. Also explains why Futch never wanted Norton to fight Frazier in an actual match.

The defense also proved miserable for Foreman when he fought Holyfield, and Evander started launching hooks and uppercuts at George's noggin.

 

From the looks of the way Norton applied that guard he would be ripe to solid lead hooks to the body . Gene Tunney tore Tommy Gibbons with lead hooks to the body when he deployed a similar styled guard . The problem is if you are defending with you arms crossed and not throwing that lead arm you are still giving away initiative. Packey Mcfarland deployed it well against Mike Gibbons for he punched with the rear arm in the guard position!

 

There's footage of him when he was younger

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In Ken Norton's style, you could see a lot of Archie Moore, when it should have been a young George Foreman, who was in his early days trained by Archie and D. Sadler. Norton was very susceptible to a mover with speed and stamina. Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Young, and Larry Holmes exploited that weakness, although those victories were very close, except for the first fight against Ali in March 1973, the Young victory was very close in Las Vegas on Nov 5 1977 for Ken. Another glaring weakness for Norton was his inability to take a punch from a heavy hitter, Jose Luis Garcia in 1970 George Foreman, Earnie Shavers and Gerry Cooney much later at the very end of his lengthy career.

 

Norton -Holmes was an epic fifteenth round, Kenny was a good fighter no question , I did not like the way he got his WBC STRAP, Heck make it at least a 4 man tourney! 42-7-1 (33 ko)-
is a pretty nice record considering the people he banged against, 5-5 vs top ten w 3 knockouts, nothing wrong with that.

 

I think Witherspoon used it better against Holmes than Norton did. Don’t really remember Witherspoon getting hit flush by Holmes as many times than Norton did.

 

I think that they figured that Jimmy Young took care of George Foreman and Ken Norton gave Muhammad Ali problems, therefore he was the no.1 challenger. Leon Spinks having defeated ( A Gone To The Pasture) Ali did not want to honor the obligation to defend against Norton. Besides everyone at that time was tired of seeing Ken fight for the title again and again.