Let's Talk about Bob Fitzsimmons

Is it simple, though?

The very basics may be simple (which the old timers are often claimed to "fail" at, so your argument still holds.) And it might be simple to *teach*. But I'm not so sure anymore that it's simple to *figure out.*

The breakthroughs you see in boxing footwork and punches don't just show up in boxing in the later 20th century. They also start to show up for the first time in Muay Thai and French savate. Two sports with very different rulesets. These sports probably adapted this stuff from boxing -- the MT guys who looked into this stuff seem to believe that MT, at least, adopted some of its techniques from boxing at mid century. Certainly old French savate and MT look different on film before this point.

So modern boxing technique works for these sports. And yet, these sports either -- take your pick -- didn't develop these techniques on their own at all (rather, they took them from boxing), or, alternatively, they took decades to develop them in-house. So either it took all three sports a long time to develop modern boxing technique, or, worse, only one of them invented it...after multiple decades. That isn't a sign of an easy subject to figure out.

Boxing technique may be simple to lay out in a DVD instructional, and its simplest bits (hands up, chin down) may be simple fullstop. But as a system, it may not be an obvious one to *develop.*

 

There is no such thing as a lucky punch in boxing. Street fighter maybe. The whole point to boxing is punch and not be punched. Moorer got punched.

 

Yes there is such a thing as a lucky punch. If Moorer wouldn't have been that dumb and had he avoided to go toe to toe in that last round, he would have easily won.
Take Wilder for example. Tremendous puncher, top 5 all time IMO, but average skilled at best. If he were to fight someone like Holmes, Lewis, Ali, Tyson, etc, the only way he could win was due to a lucky punch.

 

When do you think modern boxing techniques started to be used more frequently? I think this is very important question that could put us on the same page.

Of course I didn't mean that creating a good boxing style is a trival thing. I simply don't see any reason (other than different rules) to believe that it's so hard that it required hundreds of years to develop. Besides, if you believe that the modern boxing started in 1970s (which is usually the case among these people), then it really looks like magical formula that was invented out of nowhere.

 

Let's take someone like Benny Leonard. It's clear that his style is anything but modern, but would you call him incappable of competing today?

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How about someone like Canzoneri?

 

Are there lucky home runs? Lucky free throws? Lucky touchdown throws? No. There’s nice plays. These people train their whole lives for these matches. They put in the work. Luck isn’t involved.

 

Of course they are.

 

Even under the premises I'm throwing out there, I don't think you can name a specific time when boxing became modern.

It's like asking, "When did that man get bald?" It didn't happen all at once. For all we know, it's still happening. There are probably one or two tiny refinements that are still being worked on right now that will eventually become commonplace.

Certainly, most of them looked modern enough in the 60s and probably 50s. Some looked modern earlier. At least among the guys we have film of, who were at the top of the game.

 

In one sense, no. A random hobo off the street wasn't going to knock out Michael Moorer that night.

In another sense, possibly. White Bomber might argue that if you gave Foreman hundreds of rounds to knock out Moorer again, he couldn't replicate his feat. He got "lucky" in the sense that a knockout was an unlikely outcome, even though it relied upon his skill to pull off.

But really, I'm not sure I find that plausible. The only fight we have is the one we saw. If they'd rematched, it might have showed that Foreman's knockout was a fluke. But as somebody pointed out above, maybe it instead shows that Foreman's *missed* punches had been flukes. Maybe Foreman knocks Moorer out sooner in the rematch. It doesn't make much sense to give Moorer credit for a fight that never happened, and rob Big George of credit for the one that did.

 

I don't think you can either, but it's frequently done on this forum. Plenty of people say that "the modern boxing started in __ (pick a decade when he started watching boxing)". Or people say thing like "no fighter from 1930s could compete today". It means that some people can name a specific time.

Remember, 1950s is the time when Rocky Marciano was undisputed HW champion of the world and nobody would call his style "modern". It's not only about his size (which doesn't matter here), but plenty of critics say that Marciano has no clue how to box. Some people think the same about his competition.

It also gives us problems with fighters like Moore or Walcott. They certainly weren't modern fighters (they started their careers in the 1930s and their styles were oldschool) and they were successful even way past their primes. If modern style was so much better, then why were they successful? You can try to explain that with their talent or experience, but it can be said about Fitzsimmons, Langford and other old boxers as well.

I think that 1960s might be a decent start, but it still gives us problems. Ali certainly wasn't a modern boxer by his style and you can't find more successful fighter than him in this decade. I think that boxing as a sport is old enough and simple enough that the style differences are more related to individual approach and equipment, rather than figuring out some kind of magical style after hundreds of years,

I think it's incredibly hard to talk about the progression of boxing. Discussion about the evolution is fun, but it doesn't mean progression in every sense. Of course I also disagree with the regression hypothesis.

 

I think you can go too far in picking outliers though. You can pause the film of history (so to speak) and pinpoint modernish looking technique in 1950, or 1930, or maybe even 1910. But if you step back and roll history at proper speed, you see that boxers on average look different in 1910 than in 1970. I think that's just a matter of historical fact.

Otherwise, you're stuck in the kind of denialism where people talk about Jack Johnson as if he fought like James Toney. It's necessary to come to terms with "evolution" to even do boxing history. Assuming that they fought the same way that we do is anachronistic. It will obscure what's actually happening in the ring if you insist that they're just modern boxers with funny thongs.

 

Of course, I don't deny that they fought differently. In this case though, we'd need far more footage to conclude how average fighter looked like in 1890, in 1910 and in 1930. We can get a decent look at 1950 or 1960 average figher and by then, the differences are subtle.

People often decide that all fighters in 1890s fought like Corbett and Fitzsimmons, but they fail to understand that they were seen as outliers even by contemporaries. We don't know how 1890s fighters looked like in the ring. We do have some limited footage of Jeffries and Sharkey and they looked far different than Corbett. Sharkey almost looks "modernish" with his stance and relatively high guard.

Who is a closer resemblance of average fighter of his era: Corbett or Sharkey? We just don't know.

 

I would mostly disagree. It would be very peculiar if all the early champions happened to fight like a group transitioning away from the bareknuckle style, but normal boxers fought like Floyd Mayweather or Alexander Povetkin. We've also got manuals from the whole period under discussion, and it looks like the same kind of stuff they're doing in the ring.

Finally, we have occasional glimpses of the average boxer in some of these periods. Peter Courtney or the Leonard/Cushing pair in Edison's early films were probably closer to the "average" level of skill back then. They share a lot of the traits that the champions of their era did; they're just really bad on top of that.

That said, if you want to change my use of the word "average" to denote an average *contender* back then, that's fine. It won't really change much in the argument.

 

Oh come on, you know that's not what I'm talking about. Of course there are similarities between the fighers in that era and on average, a 1890s fighter would be closer to Corbett than Floyd in style.

My point is - who looks closer to average - Sharkey, Jeffries, or Corbett? All three look much different on the tape.

I'm not sure if Courtney was really average, though I could be wrong. Besides, this "fight" wasn't even a real fight.

 

It's true that they all looked different, yes. You could add Johnson and Fitzsimmons to that list as well. I think part of that was a symptom of rapid experimentation to figure out Queensberry boxing, if I had to guess. Plus regional variation.

But for my point to hold, I only need to show that they all look far off from what a modern fighter would look like. Which they do.

It was real enough for Courtney.