Boxers who didn't like bags, speed bags...

Loads of guys with hand problems probably - I've been told JCC did the minimum just sparring at one point.
Lots of videos you see of fighters hitting the bag very well could just be for the cameras, photo shoots etc.
I think at a certain point the old timers likely follow the Toney/JCC route, stay sharp enough for the next bout don’t kill yourself you’ll be fighting very soon - LaMotta said he never ran.

 

According to some notes I have - LaMotta did indeed only try to spar.

 

I've read that Tunney and Marciano eschewed the speed bag, as Ali allegedly did not use a medicine ball. (Muhammad spent the first 45 minutes of each workout performing stretching exercises, a fact well known during the midst of his second reign. Torso flexibility is an overlooked element of soft tissue body punch resistance.)

In 1977's Biography of a First Son, Everett M. Skehan wrote that Rocky thought is was of no use to a HW. Instead, he shadowboxed underwater for speed. Certainly he could use a speed bag. We have the footage of that. But Skehan drew on information from a lot of people who knew Marciano intimately and shared the ring with him. (His mother was very much alive and well, his brother Pete, and most of his opponents with the notable exception of Charles.) Skehan's biography of the Rock can never be matched. I also have the book on Boxing and Body Building written by Marciano and Goldman (although the collegiate manuals by Haislet, John J. Walsh and Championship Fighting by Dempsey are the true definitive manuals).

 

This is an exercise Joe Louis specifically mentioned Jack Blackburn rigorously drilling him in. We may never know everything they did when he was tutoring the Bomber in private, but Ali also did a tremendous amount of work which wasn't available for public viewing. (We do know that if a sparring partner took excessive liberties with him that he'd beat the living daylights out of the poor dude in private.)

Ali was said by Angelo Dundee to be the one guy to punch the heavy bag with his bare hands.

 

What blew my mind is that hitting focus mitts and pads is apparently a recent phenomena in boxing. In the Ali era they only hit the bag.

I think that adoption came about from Muay Thai which has always prioritized hitting/kicking pads.

 

Best boxers in history were prepared to hit elusive targets. Jack Johnson was renowned for many things, including his ability to redirect a punch in mid execution to a moving target. His punches were heat seekers. (You see this from the beginning of Griffith -Archer II, where Joey keeps streaming out accurate jabs on a weaving, ducking, dodging, leaning and bobbing Emile, as the crowd's cheers for Archer reach a crescendo. Griffith-Archer I & II have previously been on YouTube in their entirety.)

 

Pads are a trash look-at-me “exercise” that teaches people to watch the hands, it makes sense it only came around in the camera/social media era as it is for nothing but show

 

For Ali, it helped to grow up with a buddy like Jimmy Ellis to spar with and compete against. At the Fifth Street Gym, when they weren't fooling around and playing pranks, it also didn't hurt Ali to have a top ten HW veteran like Willie Pastrano to work with. For Kinshasa, he was working with Larry Holmes. His sparring partners where a Who's-Who of HW boxing. (On YouTube, a grossly out of shape and badly winded Ali utterly clowns 19 year old speedster Michael Dokes, I believe before the Young fiasco.)

 

Interesting, but you don't see any benefits to their use? There has to be something about using them beyond just looking pretty for the cameras right? otherwise I doubt they'd be so prioritized today by trainers.

 

0 benefit and a lot of negatives, anything that a pad could teach you could be better picked up with a good sparring partner. if you watch someones hands in a fight you wont make it a round, it is not only ineffective but destructive

 

Yeah, for this to be any good, the hands which are holding the pads need to be moved evasively, making it hard for the puncher to hit them. Maybe it makes for a good trendy fitness regimen, but it's not something I'd have used to prepare for competition.