Jack Johnson vs. Kovalev and Tua

He would probably outpoint them both pretty convincingly.

 

I'll bite. Very interesting matchups. Neither considered to be as "great" as Johnson but both bring offensive repertoires and abilities that he would not have been forced to deal with in his day (with the possible exception of Jeffries, who was apparently a cross between Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, & Rid**** Bowe...).

I'd pick Tua by stoppage. Johnson doesn't have the continuous footwork or work rate to keep Tua at bay and I think he eats some of Tua's big hooks pretty early.

Kovalev's a tougher call. Johnson presumably wins if he finds a way to get inside & stay inside but I like Kovalev's chances if he can control the distance and get extension on his punches.

 

Depends if he can prep for it.

Johnson's just as out of touch with modern boxing technique as Corbett was (maybe moreso, since his style includes several "roads not taken" -- techniques that emerged from early gloved experimentation, but didn't survive). On the other hand, Johsnon dominated a somewhat larger talent pool and was a better champion than Corbett, so his chances are a little better.

If he has a year prep time like the other thread, he does better than Corbett would, but probably not massively so.

No prep, and he probably gets his head knocked off by Tua, honestly.

 

Johnson easily outboxes Tua. Tua has nothing aside from a lucky punch to bother Johnson. Johnson had a wonderful jab which he would pepper Tua at length. Inside Tua would be smothered and raked with the great Johnson uppercut. Fight probably goes the distance with Johnson winning every round. Tua looks like he was hit by a hammer by fights end. Johnson unmarked.

Kovalev is an untested LT hwt. Johnson an ATG hwt champion. Let's see if Kovalev can win in a tough fight against another LT hwt before throwing him in with a beast like Johnson at hwt.

 

Honestly, there is a reason why Tua kept losing when he fought somebody ranked int eh top ten.

He wasn’t that good in his own era, and the idea that he could produce something that a technician from another era couldn’t comprehend, is frankly laughable.

 

Two things:

1) Top 10 rankings matter if the talent pools are comparable. They arguably aren't. Tua came from a larger talent pool with more numerous heavyweights.

2) Even though you say "technician", you're referring to completely different techniques. Johnson did not fight like a modern technician. He fought in a way that's not optimal for modern boxing.

 

Even if I agreed with this:

What technique in Tua’s ****nal, do you think to be so sophisticated, that Corbett would have no answer for it?

What could Tua do, that you couldn’t learn from any boxing manual, in Corbetts era?

 

You've created a bit of a strawman. I never said that Johnson couldn't comprehend Tua's style. I said he's out of touch with modern boxing technique, which is true. Tua's style was adapted for modern boxing. Johnson's wasn't. Tua fought and sparred regularly to face modern contenders under modern rules. Johnson didn't. And since you fight like you train, Johnson would be at a large disadvantage if he was forced to adapt to all of it in the ring, on the fly.



Now, as to differences?

Tua does a lot of little things differently enough to Corbett and Johnson that he'd have an advantage over somebody who didn't adapt to the rules. A few include:

* Different range. This is huge. Johnson and Corbett stood at very long ranges compared to modern boxers.

* Combination punching. Yes, fighters used combinations in Johnson and Corbett's era. No, they didn't use them nearly as much, or as smoothly, as modern fighters.

* A real jab. Neither Corbett nor Johnson jabbed like modern fighters. They had several types of left-lead straight punches, but none of them were exactly like modern jabs.

* Crouching, bobbing, and weaving. Not fully developed by Johnson's era. Certainly not fully developed during Corbett's. This was still considered an "American style" innovation that hadn't fully caught on, even though Jeffries fought out of a primitive version. This is partly because it was less necessary with the smaller gloves, since the margin of error for slipping was better.

* Night and day differences in clinching rules. Clinching has become less aggressive today, which means that a lot of the stuff that Corbett and Johnson dedicated their time to learning has become much less useful (and some of it would get them DQ'd, like the holding and hitting that you can see in their films).

* Narrowed down, standardized selection of punches. This is a refinement more than anything else. Fighters in Johnson's era punched in all sorts of ways, many of them very strange. An individual fighter's selection of "blows" was much more idiosyncratic during Johnson's day because they were still working out the bugs and seeing what worked best. That's why Fitzsimmons's punches look so different from Johnson's, which in turn look different from Corbett's or Jeffries's. Sure, you can find a left hook in a manual back then if you look hard enough. But you'll wade through a lot of backfists, corkscrew punches, "swings", and other weirdness before you get there. This is not the case today. Modern fighters are much more stylistically uniform. Today, stance, footwork, etc. are built around a standardized group of punches that have been found to work better as a base than any other group.

* The left hook. Tua's hook is better than the standard early 20th century left-swing (including Jeffries's) with modern gloves.

* Standardized footwork, stances, etc. See punch selection above. The whole thing fits together. To give just one (of many!) examples, quite a few turn of the century fighters were still learning not to cross their feet, a habit they'd picked up in the 19th century when the stances had started to narrow. You can see Johnson on film trying all sorts of bizarre footwork and stances that haven't survived until today.

So yeah, Johnson or Corbett might have seen individual techniques that looked like Tua's over the course of their careers, but they wouldn't have encountered the entire package.



The bigger problem, though, isn't that Tua would be "incomprehensible". It's that Corbett or Johnson would have holes in their own technique.

Sure, they can get by with their weird blocks, weird footwork, and the rest of it, but this stuff is poorly designed for modern rules. Modern technique just works better. Tua, whatever his shortcomings, consistently moves, blocks, slips, and punches like a modern fighter with his style is supposed to. Corbett and Johnson do not. And expecting Corbett or Johnson to adapt on the fly to a modern contender with zero practice is, frankly, rather unfair to them.

It's like training judo to prepare for a wrestling match. Are they similar? Yeah. Could you do it? Yeah, technically. But each works better for its own rules and conditions.

 

Johnson had a great inside game. He could box at distance or control his opponent in close while at the same time wearing them down with his own punches. Johnson jab was marvelous. Not generally a light flicking punch ala Ali or Holmes but a strong jolting blow which he threw singularly as well as in bunches.

When I see Tua I see a relatively limited hwt. Low skill set, one dimensional. The type fighter Johnson, a fighter who came from an era where only the very toughest survive...especially in terms of black hwts, feasted upon.

Unless a lucky blow is struck prime Johnson easily takes this one. 12-0 shutout.

 

https://streamable.com/brj8

I know Johnson throws it from a low guard, but would anyone really not consider this a real jab?

 

Good find.

It's close. IMO, it still shows some signs of the fencing style lunge-left that it evolved from, but I guess it's near to a jab as I've seen from Johnson. Notice that he still positions himself so that his torso is wound up for it -- more than a modern fighter would. (Fitzsimmons did this too.) He also threw something like modern jabs with Flynn. Ketchel and Flynn were shorter, outclassed guys who just sort of stood there in range, which meant that he could extemporize.

Problem with Johnson is that he didn't use this punch like a modern fighter. It's not consistent. It's just one of a number of left-lead punches he picked up over the years -- he really liked the ugly skip-lunge that you see in his early career, which gets him tangled up from time to time.

I will say this much: Johnson is interesting because over the course of his career, you can see the beginning of truly jab-like punches. They're not integrated with everything else yet, they don't really perform the same function that Louis's jab did a generation later, and they only occur in isolated spots, but they're getting there.

Johnson has a much better claim to being a transitional champion than Corbett.

 

A very important distinction. Modern heavies with Johnson's size advantage, fighting against an outclassed little man with a loose guard might have pumped 3 times as many jabs.

Here's a clip of the less great Maskaev jabbing like a modern heavyweight against Tua, who was more dangerous and more defensively skilled than Ketchel:

https://streamable.com/lttl

 

Yeah.

Still, I'll concede that the Ketchel footage is jablike enough that a modern fighter might throw it.

EDIT: The stance Johnson throws his lead left from is one difference from Maskaev, which goes to my point about integrating everything together.