Oleksandr Usyk vs Sam Langford, fight held under a 20 round contest with glove size and grappling rules typical of the teens.
Usyk very quickly, boxing technique evolved and new ways to set up punches were discovered, not to mention that there were hardly any southpaws in Langford’s day, who have their own ways of setting up punches, Usyk would easily force the errors out of Langford, because of the primitive technique combined with the lack of experience against southpaws Langford would’ve had.
Not particularly, if you look at official bareknuckle fights these days, they’re not fighting like guys in the late 1800s-early 1900s, they’re using modern boxing techniques. The reason I draw the comparison between bareknuckle is because the ruleset makes it the closest to boxing in the early 1900s-late 1800s.
They probably shouldn’t be using as many modern boxing techniques as they currently do in BKFC. There are not many schools that currently teach bare knuckle boxing arts due to how ostracized it’s been. These bare knuckle arts still exist in different forms throughout the world like in Africa or Ireland for example, and their styles of punching look very different to the cans in BKFC who fight as if they have 10 ounce gloves on. There’s a good reason why washed up MMA grapplers are dominating that sport. Boxers who cross-trained bare knuckle and gloved back in the day noted that there was a stylistic difference in how they approached the two. As BKFC evolves, I can see it come to look somewhat similar to older manuals.
We’ll see, the longer bareknuckle goes on, if they revert back to using old boxing techniques, but I can see why they wouldn’t from a tactical perspective, 1 jab, then put the hand on the opponent’s head with right hand down (specifically referring to how Jack Johnson fought here) then clinch, a simple jab the the body to level change and come over with a right would land on Johnson, or a feint low as if you’re going to the body and come through with left hook would land and he’d duck right into it since that’s the way he came in as he clinched, not to mention the right hand down. Johnson had some skill for those days, but it was very primitive skill in absolute terms, he had a basic understanding of how to use and manipulate range. Also, I seen a clip of Langford himself have his left hand on the opponents head or in his face for about 5 full seconds before throwing (and landing) the backhand uppercut, you wouldn’t get away with that in the modern game.
If you are patient enough to look then you can find fundamental mistakes on film being done by the top level in any era. Fury did some reckless stuff on Saturday at times for example, but it doesn’t reflect how he performs consistently throughout his career nor how he performed throughout the majority of that fight. The same thing applies to Johnson and Langford here, I don’t think we can judge boxers’ abilities off of occasional recklessness like that. I’ve seen Johnson use safe cautious methods to enter a clinch far more often than is seen him do it recklessly. From what I’ve seen of Jack at his best, he did seem to enjoy jabbing his way in but from what I see he usually keeps his right glove open to control the opponent’s lead. I’ve seen a few opponents try countering Johnson’s jab into the inside with a right but Jack had good reflexes and would roll away on time which would usually happen when his opponents tried countering his sometimes reckless leads. He seemed well aware of the risk. He also enjoys doing a 1-2 before latching on, hooking off the jab into a clinch, or trying to control the opponents hands and wrist from long range like Foreman does. In fact, the most often I’ve seen Langford and Johnson fight recklessly were against fighters far out of their class like against Burns, Ketchel, Flynn, in the case of Langford; Lang and Flynn. They could afford to get away with making mistakes against fighters so out of their own class, but it’s noticeable how much more cautious Johnson is against Jeffries, or how much more technical Langford is against Jeannette. I think that most significant evolution bare knuckle boxing has will be tactical, as it’s a different game from 10 ounce gloved boxing. They will start targeting areas old timers used to target more like the neck, chest, solar plexus, the heart and sensitive areas around the heart. Defense will probably be centred around a low guard with arms protecting the body, with head movement being the main method of defending your head while appearing open. The arms will likely be used more to outwardly block/frame punches like they were more commonly used to in the bare knuckle/early gloved period. Due to smaller gloves.
