Serious thoughts on this Harry Greb shadow boxing video?

We can't know what was in his head during filming, plus for all we know he could be plastered drunk or maybe he was swatting at flying insects, bees perhaps.

 

I'm curious how your views have evolved about this issue over the last 4 years or so. I ask in part because Greb and Carnera not knowing how to box would seem at least somewhat peculiar, in light of your relative approval of Dempsey and Tunney from the same era.

 

My position hasn't changed.

I still don't think that it tells us anything very much, one way or the other.

 

My own view after re-reading part of the thread is that @BitPlayerVesti got it right. They used a stupid style of shadowboxing back then. For some reason, they thought exaggeratedly moving differently from the way you fight was a good idea.

The same thing happens in many martial arts with kata/forms, and Fitzsimmons was telling his students to dance the hornpipe with some boxing mixed in in his book, IIRC. So I'm not surprised Greb is doing something weird. The premise of this thread -- that shadowboxing then = shadowboxing now -- is probably incorrect.

Incidentally, I also wonder whether the way Greb moves in those clips is related to exercises on the era's pulley machines. As some have mentioned, you see the same movement from other fighters of the era, and it looks similar to the pulley exercises.

 

You need to take up a new sport then.

 

Because I think that a picture of somebody shadow boxing, doesn't tell you a low about what they wee like as a fighter?

 

He looks shocking.

 

OK, but that doesn't tell you very much, given what he is doing.

Imagine a universe, where we had to grade the ATG's, on their shadow boxing technique.

How far would we get?

 

I guess he really su-ked and the three divisions he came to dominate over ten years aren't even worth mentioning ... people are just dense .. of course styles were different from the running holding the cane to the shorter , choppier shadowboxing but while the game has changed and the drugs are far far better the human body hasn't ... can we say Joe Louis holds up ? Well he was completely programmed by Jack Blackburn .. it goes on and on ..

 

When was the last time you saw an ATG shadow box and NOT look the goods?

Go and watch Floyd, Manny, Tyson etc shadow box, then come back to me.

 

Go watch the clip of Dempsey shadow boxing posted earlier in this thread.

It was clearly something different than modern shadow boxing. Judging it by that criteria is pointless. Maybe it's buried in a training manual, but otherwise no one alive eve knows what they were even trying to do with it.

 

I think a lot of it looks like it is for infighting, and probably atleast some of it is for grappling.

Without a decent idea of what they were going for and thinking with it, there's nothing to judge.

Imagine if in 100 years the speed ball has gone the way of Indian Clubs, and the only footage of Floyd Mayweather was his hitting the speedball. And then Imagine people going "LMAO that's how he punched? Awful punching mechanics"

That's pretty much what's going on

 

But there's so much footage of Floyd that nobody will come to that conclusion.

 

The hypothetical is in the future where that's the only footage of Mayweather.

Obviously we wouldn't, but the point is that the way Mayweather is being seen in that hypothetical could be what many have done in this thread

 

They all look a million times better than Greb.