Guys school me on James J. Jeffries...

Unfortunately you can't simply come onto this forum and ask this question.

Bless you, ya don't realise what you've done here but all will become clear soon.

 

damn good athlete..could run 100 yards in 10 seconds....could also high jump 6 ft...that is using the old method of high jumping...which was harder than what they do today.

 

One of the greatest hwts ever to live.

 

He wasnt anything special

 

Theres already a thread on this in the General section.

 

The man's a **** he can't even pronounce the names properly, 20 seconds into the interview tells me all I need to know about his credentials as a boxing expert.

 

Anyone with dental work like this has no right to call anyone a bum.

 

He should see a dentist.....

 

you can dislike Ali and everything but to say the guy was a bum is just outright stupid...

 

Jeffries was the 4th recognised Heavyweight champion of the MOQ era. He took the title from Bob Fitzsimmons & beat him in a rematch. I have read that Fitz was ahead in both bouts before coming unstuck He also beat James J Corbett twice & came from behind in 1 bout. He also beat Sailor Tom Sharkey but this decision has been disputed.

Unfortunately his legacy is tarnished somewhat by not fighting the leading black contenders & gave up the title when the leading white contenders offered little competition. Jack Johnson obviously beat him after Jeff came out of retirement in 1910 but his skills had diminished by then.

Regarding Tony Triem, I read an article where he was slating many other historians including Bert Sugar, he seems a bit contrary from what I have come across.

While Ali is no bum, I do think his legend is a bit overblown at times. He did get some disputed decisions even in his earlier days but you cannot dispute that he is one if not the best heavyweight up to this day.

 

I don't dispute that Jeffries was a good fighter & agree with your statement about holding back, I don't think it happened that way but we will never truly know either way.

I'm not knocking Ali in that he's a bad fighter but agree with the guy when he says his legend is overblown, although I tend to think ever so slightly, whereas Triem obviously thinks it majorly.

I don't go for P4P debates nowadays but like you say it's difficult to see anyone else going ahead of him on his record.

 

Guys check out this interview with this character. Check out his top ten picks at heavy. Who is that at number 5? Isn't that a bum? In essence, this dude is not only pretentious with bad teeth, he's a pretentious hypocrite with bad teeth.

http://www.doghouseboxing.com/DHB/Tyler021512.htm

 

Not necisarily.

Jeffries did make that claim, and even Fitzsimmons said that Jeffries usualy carried his opponents for a few rounds before he finished them off.

 

Jim Jeffries was born Michael St. Lucia-Galloway Tapia Villa Lobos Ramirez in Santa Cruz, New Mexico in the summer of 1771. At the age of fifteen he married his eleven-year-old cousin, Virginia Poe (acceptable at the time), who'd matured early, thanks to the new development at the time of hormone-induced extra milk production in bovines. Soon thereafter he would begin boxing in the service, during WWI and win the Pacific Territory Golden Gloves tournament as an amateur.


By 1914, Jeffries was fast on the rise as a hot welterweight prospect only to be derailed by scandalous injury whereby his then-ex-wife and lesbian golfer Tonya Harding plotted to attack his knee with a black jack. Some say he never moved the same way in the ring again. Forced to abandon his fleet-footed, "cute" style, described as "The Figure Skating Ballerina Man" he was then forced to slug it out with opponents, and found he had quite a punch when he stopped "skating about", as the press at the time had called it.

He won the light heavyweight title at the age of forty and said he felt more American than New Zealandian (there was a large New Zealish population in New Mexico, his birthplace) and chose to wear the American flag on his trunks, alongside the Jewish Star of David, to protest the Nazis. He then took on Germany's Max Schmeling after winning the title from Italy's own Primo Carnera in a bizarre Knockdownfest that had both the Ringling brothers aching to recruit him. And he won. Both against Carnera and Schmeling. The Nazis would never bother him or his family ever again.

That is, until the Korean Conflict, when neo-Nazis publicly denounced him as a "filthy Samoan" and he took on Korea's biggest neo-Nazi symbol Kyung-Duk Ahn. Ahn was no match for Jeffries who destroyed him with body shots and ended it in the third round on the undercard of Tyson/Stewart. Though Tyson destroyed Stewart and Jeffries destroyed Ahn, that fight was never to be made. Jeffries drew the colour line for the first time since the Viet Nam war in 1897 and was never mentioned on ESPN again, post-retirement. But history will still remember him as the 22nd greatest heavyweight and 34th-56th greatest welterweight of all times.