Holman and Hearns.... who was greater?

Yeah, definitely GP, no doubt in fact, but that plays into Burley's hands because of his speed and the explosiveness with which his punches come together. You can be as watchful as you like, but you're still going to get clocked if you aren't keeping him busy. It may have been his feinting skills as you say, but imagine trying to keep a guy like Burley in check for any length of time with a skill like feinting? It would be exhausting. Certainly Moore failed miserably at it.

 

Yeah, that's all true, if you want my best guess I would hazzard that it was a combination of feinting and stabbing back, standard stuff, but it is kind of a mystery to me how it would work. I mean Moore got thrashed. Of course Moore wasn't the fighter we see on film, but his feints are absolutley exceptional. I read in his autobiography about one of his fights (i forget i'm afraid) and Moore had had gall-bladder surgery (he was really ill with that). Moore made a show of protecting the site of his surgery and over-reacting to any shots there but in fact he had healed perfectly. At one point he opened up his defences and feinted to a punch and as his man attacked the now vulnerable body he countered over the top for a KD. So that's a counter thrown on a punch that the opponent didn't throw behind a feint designed to expose a wekaness that didn't exist which he had convinced his opponent did. It's just the absolute extremity or ring-craft, so even though I credit Burley with finishing Moore's education, and Moore was not the finished article at that time, i'm at a bit of a loss to explain Holman's success where Archie so thoroughly failed even though he was using many of the same tools.

 

Yeah, good post.

 

Thing is, I sometimes wonder if Burley was frightened of looking stupid in the ring. He had his pride and he was getting nowhere, I think it may have been quite important to him. When Elmar Ray tried to make Burley look dumb in sparring, he got KTFO. There are stories that something similar happened with Jersey Joe Walcott. I wonder if the reason he held back against Williams sometimes was that Williams was so cute that it just made Burley nervous about being made to look stupid. Nobody ever made him look stupid. But he made other guys look stupid. I'm basing this basically, upon nothing, which is why i didn't really want to say it, but **** it, apparently it needed to get out.

 

Burley took his sparring very seriously. The gym rats and the young guys seem to have loved him. I think he considered that a part of his due given that he wasn't getting what should have been coming to him.