James J. Corbett & Gene Tunney Sparring

It would be interesting to see how someone like say Wlad or vitali Klitchsko (or in the past Tyson, Foreman or even Ali) would go using that style. Would they still win fights or would they be blasted out of the ring by guys like chisora and others who are not in their class currently or would they still be forces albeit presumably not as great as they currently are.

 

LMAO @ "Corbett telegraphed everything" as a serious critique of his style as a fighter.

He's a 58-year-old man engaging in a friendly staged demonstration with a 27-year-old active fighter, for the cameras, in 1924.

Of course everything is obvious, telegraphed, exaggerated and deliberate.

 

Heightened my appreciation for Corbett. Seems like he has great physical gifts. Coordination, speed, reflexes. Hard to extrapolate to a young age, though, he could have been a health nut that always stayed in shape.

I mean, Chuvalo moves better now than many of his peers in his day, and he was not the fleetest of foot back then.

 

We are looking at an old man here, so of course his technique is going to be off.


Techniques evolve as the game progress, and in some cases de-evolves as the rules change.


If Corbett was born 50 years later, he would fight differently and likely look very modern. This is why I try to rate the man, not the era he fought in.

Corbett was a trail blazer for technique, and put the sugar in the sweet science. There was no one for him to copy. To an extent he created a new style that was not seen before.

 

This is a great film - thanks for posting it!

It is hard to believe that Corbett is nearing 60 when this exhibition was filmed. His moves are remarkable and give a good sense of what he must have been like when in his prime. Corbett was a keen student of the science of boxing and would have been an innovator in any era. In Peter Heller's "In this Corner" Tommy Loughran tells of Corbett telling him that he enjoys watching Loughran fight - doing things that he only used to dream of. When Loughran asked what he meant, Corbett replied that he only had 39 fights (Loughran had well over 100 by that time) and practiced moves in the gym that he never got to do in real fights. Corbett could see and appreciate what Loughran was doing moreso than others watching.

 

Indeed - very few of Chuvalo's top opponents are still living, and many of those, with a notable exception of George Foreman, are in poor health.

 

Here is what amazes me about the footage ... Corbett is in real life, up close and personal, against a physically prime Tunney, himself an outstanding physical specimen ... we see Corbett is taller, somewhere between 6'1 and 6'2" .. we see just how fast he must have been since he moved extremely fast with hands and foot at sixty ... we see when he clinched and clutched with Tunney and rough housed that he was a physical specimen , tough and from a rough era ....

MY thoughts when comparing fighters from different eras is not so much whiich is better because it is obvious the sport evolved , mostly in the first third of the 20th Century, but which fighters, given an equal playing field, could have dominated .... some could evolve while others could not ... Corbett clearly could ... might have even been far more dominant ...