Roy Jones interview

There is no consensus 'determined level of excellence', there is 'textbook boxing' and different schools of thought in what constitutes a good technician.

According to your very narrow definition of 'boxing technique' every boxer should keep both hands up and do everything off a jab. Slipping punches, punch techique, balance and foot placement has nothing to do with technique? Ofcourse they are, they are all skills that learned, practised to perfection and mastered

There's a big difference between textbook boxing and technique

 

Yes, but Jones' punching was both balanced and accurate as well as very well leveraged. That's down to technique.

 

This really merits its own thread. I'm also sceptical to good technique becoming synomynous with textbook boxing.

 

I think they are skills based on technique, its about learning the distance, learning to look for movement and slipping efficiently while maintaining balance with good technique

As for balance, its part physical like everything but maintaining balance through movement and quickly exploding to sit on your punches, takes technique and skill

 

I'd definately agree there are weaknesses, the biggest was his style did relly heavily on speed/coordination/reactions/precision. Hand in hand with that is allot of the things he does are very energy sapping

 

It's funny, in football no one would question that someone with great ball control and the ability to get past his opponents has good technique. Messi uses different moves than Ronaldinho and C. Ronaldo to get past opponents, but they are all regarded as highly technical players. But when it comes to boxing, the move you perform seems often to be of more importance than how you perform it.

On the other hand, I think there are great wisdom behind the textbook moves and am personally sceptical against divergence from them. I'm a bit torn here.

 

The head trainer at my gym thinks that Hopkins has bad technique. Caught me a bit off guard.

 

Yeah, you do aquire these skills when you train specific tecniques. That's true.

Also true.

 

It was about how scrappy Hopkins can be, falling into opponents when punching etc.

When reading a discussion about Hopkins here, I saw that some posters suggested that this is something that has come with age, though. I haven't followed Hopkins closely enough to know if that's true, but I hardly saw him put a foot wrong against for example Tito while he looked very scrappy against Calzaghe and even a bit unbalanced at times against Tarver when leading with the right.

 

Of course. But that's the result of the move rather than the move itself.

 

To get back to the subject: very good interview! Thanks for posting it.