The worlds HW champ for seven years.The great great jack johnson is being compared to Joe Calzaghe. Calzaghe is being considered the better fighter by a lot of posters.
I would take the fighters Calzaghe beat during his title reign over those Johnson beat during his reign... head to head.
True Joe Calzages speed would indeed be a factor and it was better than Stan's (who was not slow) but I just think Johnson may have been a strong solid heavyweight and that would catch Joe
Seeing people pick joe over johnson genuinely makes me cringe; surely it's blatant trolling? Even if you were to judge johnson solely by his draw with philly, does anyone seriously consider joe above philly? I'd hope not. This is an unfair matchup. Johnson beat greats such as burns, jeffries, fitz, hart, ketchel, jeannette, langford, mcvey, martin. You're literally talking a top ten of his era all sharing 1 thing in common; defeat to jack johnson.
There's a fine line. Sometimes, I don't even know. Head to head, I'll take Joe but there really is so little footage of him available. Calzaghe would beat Burns and Hart worse than Johnson did. He could take McVea over 10 rounds, probably nothing longer. Jeanette a bit more problematic, not so sure on that one. That wasted pig-iron who entered the ring in 1910 would be cut to ribbons. Langford would find him, though.
I would use say Lacy or Kessler fights as examples of a prime or near prime Calzaghe. Calzaghe was slower for Jones, and Hopkins. The Hopkins win however was a very good one considering Hopkins ended up as champion at 175 post Calzaghe.
He looked slower against those two. Kessler and Lacy, not two of the quickest guys imaginable. As for Hopkins', his foot positioning made Calzaghe think twice, hence why he was so sloppy. I was at the arena for the Kessler fight, Calzaghe adapted well, but to a straight up and fairly robotic European operator. As for 'primitiveness', Calzaghe used very, very primitive training techniques, a lot of hill running and cardio stuff. Only late did he implement much in the way of 'modern tehcnology', that useless slap machine.
Jack Johnson is no ordinary sheep Calzaghe is used to shagging. He's a black sheep, and he'd ruin his welsh face
true. calzaghe and his father were totally from the old school as far as training regimen. except joe didnt even jump rope. he just ran and boxed and a few basic exercise