Nearly extinct punches

If you can punch the neck GREAT but if your opponent tooks their chin and has his shoulders high the neck is inpentruble

Plenty of fighters punch to the heart/solar plexus -Mayweather jabs to it for 1.

1 you don't see too often is a right hook to the LIVER - yes RIGHT hook to the LIVER. Mayweather punnished Gatti for bending over throwing a right hook over his back to the liver. Not sure of the illegality of that 1

While were on dirty fighting, not too much behind the back of the head Rabit Punching, Brits seem to do this best with Nigel Benn ruining McCellan, Lennox Lewis and Bruno made it a stable of their rough house tactics

The uppercut as a whole isn't thrown too much but missing an uppercut leaves you very open. It is a bit of a lost art

 

in adam pollacks excellent book on john l. sullivan, the two major targets for sullivan (who usually wore 6oz gloves or less) was the neck and temple area. it took pinpoint accuracy but imagine being hit in the neck by someone trained to punch with tiny ufc style gloves, hell the ufc guys routinely drop and seriously hurt guys with punches and they're nowhere near world class in boxing, a trained boxer doing work with small gloves makes me shudder, really makes you understand how tough the early gloved fighters were to fight with those tools.

 

They haven't.

Floyd rocked Corley back with a southpaw right hook to the chest/heart.

Guys punch the neck all the time.

 

Good that we still have guys like Cotto.

 

Back in '70 or '71 Jose Napoles ko'd Ernie Lopez with a really freaky hybrid right hand punch that was a mix of uppercut and a cross. It landed on Lopez's left eye and nearly dislodged the eye from the socket. Napoles was at the very top of his game then, with a very impressive tko scored over top contender and much feared badass Adolph Pruitt during that same year.

 

I failed to mention that the same punch put Lopez on the deck for the count. Jose "Mantequilla" Napoles was, in my opinion, one of the very best welters, as well as one of the very best fighters of all time. He had a rather short tenure of greatness, but during that tenure, he had it all at once. He was prone to cuts around his eye, which led to that title losing tko to Billy Backus in 1970. That loss, a fluke if there ver was one, was avenged in '71 in a brutally efficient manner.

 

A lot of less celebrated fringe contenders from the 80's had tools that are rarely seen in todays game.. I remember Scott Ledoux , he moved slowly never punched that hard but rarely got caught flush, he knew how to move laterally better than anyone around today and if you missed him he always countered with something even if it wasn't murderous, Ole school really knew ****, some of todays cats could learn loads from them.. One of the sneakiest shots that Larry Holmes used was a shot to the side of the hip just on the line of the cup.. It would strike a nerve , and he would slyly repeat the move over and over until your legs went very weak..Courage Tshabalala sparred a lot of rounds with him and he told me that it was something he was shown by Larry years ago.. real insider ****.. Crafty old *******..

but we have to love the petulant sod..

 

Trainers not emphasizing it during training.