[GIF] Jess Willard defends Dempseys rush

It looks to me like Dempsey catches him a glancing blow to the top of the head then closes in on him.
Willard then gets in with some cuffing slaps, but what impresses me there is Dempsey's superior balance.

With Willard at 245 pounds, Dempsey at about 185, even a cuffing slap from the bigger man would have knocked the smaller man off balance or spun him a bit if Dempsey's stance had been weak.

 

Willard was a slapper....had no legs behind his punches. All arm punches.
That's what a lot of big guys do, especially in the school yard where they are
bigger than anyone else.

 

Seemed to me that Willard avoided the blunt of the blow but a more skilled big man may have capitalized on Dempsey's telegraphed hook (and the followup right that missed by a few feet) with sharper counterpunching instead of Willard's awkward arm punches.

 

Yeah, my point was that the counters looked pretty harmless; missed opportunities where a superior fighter might have made Dempsey pay more.

 

I think you're giving him too much credit. He looks uncomfortable and uncoordinated. The problem starts with his stance. He stands way too tall and leans in with his weight off balance with that weird left as Dempsey launches his attack, so once Dempsey goes after him it's impossible for him to get his weight under him. So he can't get any weight in his punches at all and he has a very hard time stopping the much, much smaller Dempsey from pushing forward. Not hard to see why he was such easy pickings for Dempsey and lost to some light heavyweight-sized guys.

 

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how good Willard looks on film.

He was a superheavyweight, who lost his title to a cruiserweight style heavyweight, effectively shattering the myth of the invincibility of superheavyweight boxers.

That is what some people can never forgive him for.

 

:huh

Wouldn't that myth have been shattered when Willard crawled out of the ring against the 2-3 Joe Cox 8 years before he fought Dempsey? Who in the world thought that Willard was "invincible" when he'd already lost to ordinary little guys? atsch

 

This seems to have been the norm whenever a super heavyweight meets with a fast skillful lighter guy. They no longer look like the incredible super athletes they're built up to be. A lot of people thought Willard was going to murder Dempsey.

 

But he'd already lost to several lesser, smaller fighters, right? How did any reasonable person think he was an incredible super athlete? Sincere questions-- what am I missing?