This one's mainly for you @70sFan865. It's kind of a progress report. I have 5 Sharkey fights down, and 8 to go. So I would say I've gotten a good taste of Sharkey again, but I'm still not half there, especially since I've largely not seen Sharkey at his peak (this time around). This is the first time I've seen his 20s fights before though, so it has been fresh. Of the 5 fights of his I've seen so far (all 20s fights), he won four (McTigue, Maloney, Heeney, and Loughran), and lost one (Dempsey). I can honestly say, impartially, and at this point, that I'm mostly not impressed w/ Sharkey. He failed to impress in four of the five fights here, w/ Maloney IV proving the exception. In that fight he showed tremendous head movement and crushing power. I really enjoyed him there. But in the case of his fights w/ McTigue, I thought he was far behind and was fortunate the fight was stopped. In the case of Heeney, I thought Heeney was badly jobbed. The Loughran knockout was so-so. The loss to Dempsey was not impressive to me either, as you probably know well by now. I thought the fight was pretty even going into the KO round and thought it was unimpressive of Sharkey that he couldn't do better than fight on even terms w/ Dempsey at this stage. Although I intend to re-review that fight once more, that's my opinion of Sharkey right now. However, my two biggest objections about Sharkey are is helplessness in the clinches, even against much smaller guys, like McTigue for Pete's sake! And secondly, as one poster observed yesterday, I think it was, Sharkey seems easily baffled by something so elementary as a jab. And most of the jabs he's been receiving from the fights I've been watching have not been anything special. I wouldn't call any of the 5 opponents I've seen Sharkey against strong jabbers.
