Jim Jeffries v Joe Frazier 15rds

I'm going to get a lot of Jeffies idolisers pissed at me over this but, if you saw Frazier-Chuvalo, then you get an idea of how I think this fight would unfold.

 

Apart from a small tremor i can remember Joe Ripping apart Big Manuel Ramos, when he was on the way up and still shy of his prime, in very impressive fashion, knocking the fight out of Big Manuel in less than two full rounds, of course not comparing Jeff to Manuel, but Joe had little difficulty in finding his targets on the bigger slower man, Jeff i suspect would be much more resilient in spirit, so would take come considerable Hacking down, and Joe was capable of some considerable and indeed consistant Hacking,

Jeff was not a Foreman type Predator, and Joe at his best was not quite the Easy Target with his bobbing weaving and Jinking that some Post FOTC contests may have suggested... I doubt if Jeff's Crouch would help him much against Joe, it may protect his body but may also put his head in the way of Joes Nasty little 'Jolt-Jab" and Left Hook, I thgink they operate on two different speed settings and as shown on March 8th 71, nothing wrong with Joe's fifteen round Stamina, Fraziers not a Sleight Ruby Robert or Back-tracking Gentleman Jim...he's a strong incessant Pressure-Hooker...Jefferies will know the difference pretty quickly, he's Strong and willing as they come
which means that after a certain point it might be a case of how long a ref is prepared to let it go....I like Smoking Joe, a Smoking Joe at the top of his game circa 9th ...it may be a case of a sympathetic Ref saving an battered but unbowed Jeff from himself...and Joe of course..

 

Frazier lands three to four punches to one of Big Jim's.

 

I find it hard to rate old timers because of the poor quality fight films that probably don't do them justice. Jeffries looks a beast of a man and by all accounts had bear like strength, so he could feasibly give Joe trouble, like Bonavena did. Other than that, I can't say because I can't analyse JJ's style like I can Joe's.

 

Depends how much Jeffries is allowed to wrestle on the inside. Boxers from the turn of the century were like octopi. They made late-70s Ali and John Ruiz look downright clean outside fighters.

 

Reasonable, in the absence of the official Jeffries-Sharkey II film. But Jeff was, "The fastest big man I ever saw," according to Sullivan. Nobody ever lauded the Canadian Gibraltar for his speed. Joe could utilize angles with movement and quick side steps when dealing with opponents who did not concede ground, as he did with Chuvalo, Stander, in Foreman II and Cummings.

Careful scrutiny of the degraded Jeffries-Ruhlin II footage, and the much better training film of his preparation for that 1901 rematch suggests that Jeff had much, much faster feet, and was considerably quicker closing in that any of them. [By Johnson in 1910, his feet had turned to lead. We can see the same difference in Dempsey by comparing how springy his legs look against Willard and Tommy Gibbons to how rooted they are when contrasted with those of an exuberantly youthful King Levinski in 1931. [At times, the Kingfish looks like he's bouncing on a trampoline. It's not good form. He doesn't box like that in other filmed performances. But he does covey the message to Jack, "Get out of the ring, old man! This is a sport for the young!"]

Jeffries-Sharkey II also suggests that Jim's right hand could be much more dangerous than George Chuvalo's.

Both Frazier and Jeffries won critical bouts with their left hooks rendered impotent by injuries.

Joe won Olympic Gold in a close 3-2 Final in Tokyo over Hans Huber with a fractured left thumb, which he broke during the second round of his semifinal win over 6'4" 230 pound Soviet representative Vadim Yelmelyanov. He kept this damage a secret from EVERYBODY, and with good cause. The only reason he was even in Tokyo to begin with was because amateur nemesis Buster Mathis was himself withheld from those Olympics due to a broken thumb of his own. Huge, reputation making win for Frazier, who fortunately didn't need his left to hurt Huber, just use it to outscore the German.

However, Jeff had a much more important victory with his left in very bad repair, and this handicap was published knowledge to EVERYBODY prior to what would become a legendary title defense. During training camp for his 25 round rematch with Tom Sharkey, he had his elbow dislocated by a medicine ball thrown from Ernst Roeber in a horrible mishap on October 12, 1899, causing that rematch to be postponed from the originally date of October 27th to November 3rd.

While Jeff did use his left in that contest [as the brief Vitagraph bootlag footage clearly shows], it is also reported that all the severe damage he inflicted was on the left side of Sailor Tom's face and body with his much less heralded right, including three [according to what Sharkey himself was quoted about] fractured ribs Jeff cracked on him during round three [again, as accounted in print by Tom, although witnesses of the bout indicated the right which caused one of Tom's ribs to break through his skin occurred in round 17, something a miracle resurfacing of all 37,000 feet of the 70 mm Mutagraph & Bioscope footage somehow in pristine condition might help settle], along with a split and swollen left ear. The knot in his left side from those broken ribs was visible to everybody for the rest of Sailor Tom's life. Jim re-injured his left in round two [by Jeff's own account] with a hook that managed to floor Sharkey, but Tom came up with a smile, and went right back to the attack.

Modern gloves might actually favor Jeff, who was known to hurt his hands with the minimal fist protection of his era. Frazier has no chance of outlasting Jeff, who was also much stronger physically. Joe didn't like taking on shorter opponents, and reiterated this after having a little difficulty in lowering his shots against the 6'1-1/2" Terry Daniels, who like the 5'11" Stander, and the 5'10' Zyglewicz, tended to stay somewhat upright. The 6' 1-1/2" Jeffries used a crouch.

Take away their hooks, and Jeff would have the advantage. Some reports give Sharkey the edge in their rematch after 15 over an impaired champion.

If this thing goes the championship distance, and hand speed, elusive head movement and work rate are the decisive factors, Joe could well have the advantage here.

Still thinking it through. Concentrating more on Jeffries because of the dearth of quality film with him. Frazier's the better puncher inside, but would Jeff, like Foreman, push him away from close quarters?

 

Jeffries would be turning in his grave right now!

 

This is tough because the styles are so different.

We have a really good idea of how modern-style boxers do against one another, since we've seen that type of boxing a lot. We know what types of problems a low left invites, how often you can get away with a shoulder roll against certain punches, and so on.

We don't have a comparable understanding of boxing styles at the turn of the century. It wasn't just "bad" modern boxing with tiny gloves. The expected defenses, angles, ranges, and interaction between punching and clinching were all different. If you look at the manuals from that period, it's a really weird system of fighting. Burns hops around with a wide base like a Shotokan tournament fighter (except with hooks). Fitzsimmons's style looks like the ******* child of Victorian boxing and karate. Corbett is "orthodox" by 1890s standards, which makes him as close to a fencer as a modern boxer. Johnson has a schizo blend of old-timey stuff and modern glove blocking. Jeffries, in some ways, was more "modern" than his opponents. At least he crouched. In any case, Jeffries came along at a time when fighters were adapting to gloved rules. He lifted the heavyweight title from the last champion to fight with bare knuckles (once).

For instance:

Take mcvey's comment above about Sharkey's bad defense. It's a fair point, but Sharkey wasn't defending against the same types of attacks.

Assuming a somewhat traditional 1890s stance (and that's a big assumption, since there was a lot of experimentation back then and the "cigar box" film is terrible) Sharkey would have blocked lead lefts with the ridge of his right arm, elbow out like a weird-angle karate block. Note that I said lead lefts. He wouldn't have dealt as much with jabs. Fighters committed more to the left. Think a weaker fencing lunge.

His defense against hooks -- "swings" -- would have been different as well. These weren't quite modern hooks. They looked a little like Russian "casting" punches from SAMBO, and could slip through the guard because the gloves were tiny. The angle was different, and they would be tricky for a modern fighter to figure out. Plus, those punches were good for closing range. You could enter the clinch with them, loop your arm around the neck, and hammer away a couple times.

Clinch fighting would have been VERY different. There's an entire book on infighting by Klaus that covers how at least one of these guys fought, and that's just one approach. People were mixing and matching wrestling and boxing techniques during Jeffries' era, and you saw a lot of variation.

So what does Jeffries not landing a lot on Sharkey's "bad" defense mean? Well, it's not clear. We know that Jeffries might have trouble with a crude fighter who had experience defending against oddball looping punches with tiny gloves, straight rights, fencing lunges, and really sophisticated infighting with elements of Greco-Roman wrestling. Whether that means Jeffries would have trouble nailing a relatively orthodox, bobbing, weaving, left-hook specialist is an open question.

We can make educated guesses about a hypothetical Jeffries-Frazier fight based upon what we've seen in modern boxing, but the game's changed enough that it's hard to tell what a modern-vs-old-time match would look like.

When you see techniques like that today, it's from novices who don't know what they're doing. It's sub-optimal for modern fighters under modern rules, so you don't see any better fighters practicing it. But the old-timers mastered this stuff, and they'd be a LOT better at using these "flawed" systems than any modern novices. Our experience doesn't give us perfect analogues.

 

Jeffries was carrying an arm injury going into the Sharkey fight, and he had not been at his prime to start with.

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Comparing a slow Chavalo who wasn't nearly as fast or athletic, to Jeffries is a real reach. In fact there is nothing Chavalo did that Jeffries could not do better.

Frazier lacked the chin, size, and versatility to win here.

Jeffries via KO inside 10 rounds.

 

No, it does not. Jeffries broke Sharkey's ribs with legal and clean punches.

Jeffries hurt his shoulder in training and damaged it when he floored Sharkey in round two with a left hook. For the majority of the fight, Jeffries only had one dangerous arm, and lost his best weapon ( Hook to the body or head ) for 23 rounds of the fight.

If Jeffries went into the fight 100%, he would have stopped Sharkey. The fight would have been stopped by many ref's post 1920 as Sharkey was out on his feet, and badly damaged.