Jersey Joe Walcott – the King of Contradictions

I've never really made my peace with Walcott, he's an odd fighter. The last time I watched him was when the reconstituted footage of his knockout win over Charles came out on YT, this was about six months ago, go see it if you haven't. Anyway, it's wild. He'll spend two minutes boxing like a technician then he'll lead with a left hook to the body out of nowhere. And step in with the hook. Against Charles. During that two minutes as a technician he'll throw a pushy jab that makes my balls want to go back up in my body but also a rat-a-tat-tat from a half slipped crouch that looks like it could open a hole in a barn door. People talk about his style being baffling and his footwork. The thing is, is, i've done that for years and years. One of my most liked posts on here was a throwaway remark that Walcott fought like a man who had been "poured not born" and I get while people like it, but it was cowardly. It's the same thing people always do with Walcott, his footwork is this, his style is that and I think it's related to some of what the OP identifies. Walcott's technical tourette's (a litlte strong but i'm on the right line IMO), I don't think it was voluntary.

Frazier made this work for him in head-movement, he sort of turned it into an involuntary tic that made hitting him very clean particularly difficult, but Walcott feels to me like this might the case for his whole boxing technique, right down to his punches. A lot of this is muscle-memory trained, sure it is, his condition was magnificent and everyone agrees he was busy between fights but the riffs that he comes up with, tossing lead right hands and left hooks to Ezzard's body, a lot of times, these punches don't make any sense, he shouldn't have thrown them, it was the wrong thing to do, but because he was as likely to them as lean forwards and take a half-step back - absurd - he might get away with it. But I don't feel as strongly watching him as I do watching Canzoneri. Canzoneri is genuinely a technical backwater, a developed style that couldn't be copied, a vapour of leans and feints by design, an attempt to re-write the playbook everyone had the good sense to ignore (interesting that everyone tried to be Ali but was cured by the time Roy Jones got finished). Canzoneri feels alien in a way Walcott really does not. Walcott is as beautifully balanced as any meat/potatoes fighter you might meet and if you click the Charles KO on at a random moment you might see him circle left to stay out of that right hand, feint with a jab, dip the head and engage in a clinch having felt something he doesn't like. It looks like chief support on a big card from Saturday night. The he'll land a long right hand followed by a short right hand, but he hasn't done anything to close the distance. He will land a long right hand to the head, sort of change the shape of his body and land another right hand, that is short, a shortarm punch with the elbow pointing down. How did he do that?

His geometry feels a little different and i've never really done the work to understand what he's up to. I was wracking my brains to think about guys who remind me of him in other sports (because there are NO BOXERS LIKE JJW) and the nearest I could come was Steve Smith in cricket and Vasily Ivanchuk in chess These are brilliant sportsmen who are simultaneously limited by and exalted by their strangeness in execution. So Midget Wolgast, Tony Canzoneri, those men were their styles to a degree, but Ivanchuk and Smith feel like they could have been GOAT types if they could be cured of certain aspects.

I digress. Returning to boxing, Walcott maybe has the best jab to the body of any heavyweight and he is absolutely not in the discussion for best jabs to the head, you could name two dozen guys with better traditional jabs. Wtf even is that? There is loads of stuff like that about JJW and nobody has really done the work IMO. Must do better!

EDIT: @Fergy i been fiddling with this post for ages and didn't see you writing about JJW's footwork before I did this post, not meant as a dig or anything at all.