Ali as a composite puncher

If I remember correctly Ali had trouble with his hands which may have caused him to not put his all into his shots for fear of breaking a bone or two and jeapordizing his career. Even if that's not true Ali exemplified the old adage that there's more than one way to skin a cat. You don' tneed to be a big puncher to ko a man. Ali would punch a man silly for most of the fight, drag him into the later rounds and with a few well timed shots ko the exhaustated man ala Bonevena and Foreman and also Wepner. Speed and timing are just as effective as brute power if applied properly which is how Ali was able to ko tough guys like George and Oscar and Chuck. Ali was a boxer not a puncher though I think he hit a liitle harder than most people give him credit for. whether it's a speeding bullet or a slower moving sledgehammer to the skull the end results are pretty similar when you thinkabout it right?

 

:good And i'd add that all other things being equal, Speed is Power.

 

Ali never really wanted to drop patterson, he just wanted to punish him.

 

Ali himself was amazed at Patterson's ability to take his punches. He also brought up his inability to KO Patterson while knocking down many more durable men when discussing style match-ups.

 

This thread doesn't prove much to me. At least in terms of Ali's power. All of these were accumulations besides the Liston one. And wasn't Frazier III an RTD? And should we really credit Ali for KOing Frazier when it was really Eddie Futch that kept him out.

The thing I see is Ali was an alright puncher. I guess underrate only if people think he's a weak puncher. That one shot turned the entire Lyle fight around. However, most of the time he just TKO someone on cuts or too many consecutive shots.

The Foreman KO is misleading to Ali as a puncher. It was really just being dead tired that helped Foreman go down. We have to consider that too.

 

Ali had some pop when sitting down on his punches. Whatever might be said of Williams condition when they met, it's clear that there is power in those punches. But that was perhaps the only fight where Ali went out so deliberately for the KO early on (arguably he did so in FOTC as well).

But what separates Ali from most is not his power, but his poise and accuracy when finishing an opponent off. He could take the opportunity when it presented itself (Bonavena, Lyle), but he was at his most elegant when being the matador - waiting until the opponent was ripe and then going for the kill. And on these occassions he was deadly.

There are many fine examples (Moore, London, Quarry II, Blin etc), but the best one was of course against Foreman. The way he dummies Foreman - moves in a drawn out arc from his own position against the ropes to trap Foreman against them, all the while keeping balance and position to unload effectively and ending it with a perfect one-two. When you can execute a move like this, at the perfect moment, power becomes secondary. There sure was pop in that finishing right, though.

 

Of course. The Bonavena is arguably his most impressive KO.

 

It's strange to me that the KO's of Foreman and Bonavena are dismissed as being caused by exhaustion and/or accumulation. What then can be said of the KO's of Baer, Braddock, Walcott, Thomas etc? These guys weren't exactly fresh from the dressing room when they got taken out. It's very rare that fighters with sturdy chins suffer one punch KO's when still fresh. If Ali had managed that against both Bonavena and Foreman it had been close to a unique achievement. As it is, it's still pretty darn good.

 

I think this is a misunderstanding. Ali could throw both varietys of punches. When he was about to take his guy out of there, his hooks and uppercuts were sharp and solid. Watch the sixth round in the rematches with Patterson respectively Quarry for good examples. He used different types of punching for different puproses.

I think his liking for the flurrying kind of punches was because they are not energy sapping, but still do damage in that they can cause cuts (especially when thrown in a slashing manner) and a kind of sensory overload if you will. This seems for example have worked well against Moore, an old fighter with very depleted reflexes. I also think he believed they scored easy points with the judges.

He also used his wrists for leverage many times, in a kind of bolo punch fashion. But he not only used this technique for his uppercuts, but also for his hooks.

 

Great thread this.

 

You are able to find singular examples for every fighter - I used to do the same thing. Claim that Marvin Hagler could work the cross-arm defence when in reality, he only used it for a total of about thirty seconds in his whole filmed career. Yes, I'm sure (well, I know) there are a few examples of Ali throwing a decent uppercut, but it's consistency we're after, and the fact is that most of the time he did. The vast majority of the time, infact, his uppercuts were looping and used as a swat more than anything. Different usage - every time Louis threw an uppercut he thought he might be scoring the knockout. Ali used it to bring back up his opponent's head so he could continue bouncing the straight rights and lefts off of it.

 

This is roughly along the same lines that I argued. The point I made as well was that Ali could punch more solidly when he choose to. Since my examples weren't enough I'll have to use more I suppose. The left hooks he caught Williams with, the one he caught Bonavena with, the one he catches Lyle with when he already has him hurt and the one he caught Frazier with in the first round of FOTC. He also felled Bob Foster with left hooks in the 5:th round of their fight. Less powerful than the other ones, but sharp and precise enough. He rocked Frazier with a short left hook in the early rounds in Manilla, as well.

Of course, he didn't throw real hooks often, but when he plucked them out they did the business. He threw upppercuts even more seldom and when he did they were often looping. There are, as I said earlier, examples of throwing hard, solid uppercuts, but not too many. He did so against Ellis as well, though, in the last round. A very nice one.

Ali's punching could look sloppy many times, especially later in his career, but when he wanted to take an opponent out of there it was almost always sharp (pre Manilla anyway). It seemed he had that in his register as well and could pluck it out when it was needed.

 

A pretty cheesy but still apt metaphor of how Ali dispatched of opponents is the tired one of the matador. It works, though. While the arsenal of fighters such as Louis and Tyson was mainly about direct destruction, the main work of Ali was similar to that the matador does with the red cloth ("muleta" is the word right?). To confuse and tire the opponent.

Ali's red cloth are the jabs and the flurries, but when he deemed the time was right he also had the sharp sword, hidden in the muleta, to finish the job off with. And when he took out the sword his work with it was just about always sharp and efficient.

I'm kind of embarrassed about using a metaphor like that, but I think it's a pretty good way of distinguishing Ali's method.

As to why Ali was such a good finisher is more about him having the right mentality as well as technique, timing, balance, speed and footwork than it is about pure power. His hardest punches stack up reasonably well, though, I feel.