You will find a very responsible defence in those books - look how small your fist is, all those blocks and stops will work well, some can’t anymore with the absence of the free thumb. Can you imagine putting the ear muffs on bare handed? All those gaps… in the below video at 1:14-1:16 variations of a guard left and right handed are shown in a few very old manuals, Daniel Mendoza is said to have done so also. Replicate it, for me… if you use the right hand all a straight punch has is your elbow and the top of the head to bite into… the left hook can be stopped by the tricep, roll with the hook don’t let it smash into your arm, you’ll get tired I imagine lol. it is however - lot more sturdy then your forearm IMO if you had to take it, the coverage is huge. if you use your left hand like Fullmer it feels more natural to me with how a typical stance is the spread of weight etc - coverage from a hook is less so but it stops people getting around a shoulder… you can still roll the left hook too, but again I’m not a coach, Fullmer or Daniel Mendoza these are quick guesses for discussion, I think it’d be the way to for bare handed blocking. You’ll note that an alternative of the shoulder roll some old books suggest is elbowing the fist. Sensible, but with the above remember in bare handed combat body shots are amplified and prioritised. This content is protected
He always struck me as a bit of an odd looking guy… I wonder how he looked before his nose was busted up? - maybe this is how it always looked?
I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the techniques displayed on this manual but outside of the weird looking duck in fig. 45 (which could very well be an illustration error), as well as leaving the left down when throwing a rear punch to the body and the occasional lean into the right hand to the body (which are still pretty common today sometimes and can be done effectively if you get out of there quickly and aren’t predictable), I think a lot of the techniques shown here are genuinely viable. The way that wrists, elbows and forearms are used for blocking seem more practical than the glove-dependent defense you’ll see from some fighters today. Weight distribution seems fine on the way they delivers punches, sure the hands are low in most of the pics but there is a heavy emphasis on slipping, ducking and side-stepping to make up for that. The way that Fullmer uses his lead hand to block reminds me of the Mike Donovan-Billy Edwards clip, as well as from other manuals at the time. Boxers from the 19th century seemed to have a very diverse set of guards, like an inverted cross guard with the left hand up instead of the right. That said, they showed they can still show effective defense with their rear hand in a sort-of shoulder roll. This content is protected
Charley Burley and Archie Moore both learnt from bare knuckle boxers… Blackburn didn’t invent the things he taught Louis - Brown taught Duran so much and who taught the men who taught Brown? I agree absolutely, glove heavy defence is a mistake but it’s easy to teach… but it borders on barbarism walking forward with your gloves up, turtling is just giving someone a chance to hit you again, it’s not hard to move or manipulate a high guard, really you could just punch through the bloody thing if they don’t know how to ride shots - hit the inside of an arm when they lean forward to open them up for a body shot; take the liver it’s there… use your left hand to pull the guard down the same way you throw a hook and hit’em with a straight right, jam the jab between the gloves and rip an uppercut in the gap, use your left to pull down the there left when they shell up for an easy right hook… you can’t see punches hiding, you can’t hit someone with your best when your fists are above the shoulder.
There’s always a lineage. Blackburn was largely inspired by Gans, who was largely inspired by Jack McAuliffe and Bob Fitzsimmons, who learned from arguable bare knuckle GOAT Larry Foley. Too many crafty technicians donate credit for their ability to bare knuckle boxers for me to think that they were all just primitive cavemen, and this manual largely proves this imo. Sure, it wasn’t a large talent pool like what was seen in the decades proceeding the bare knuckle era, but the talent pool was still there. I doubt there’s a significant difference in class between the elite gloved technicians and elite LPR technicians like Foley and Mace.
