Watched this fight to-day and Jack handled Max like a baby. I know it was only for a few rounds but man, could Sharkey box. Made me wonder about some of his losses and his connections... Anyone?
The funny thing is that Sharkey was the better man in the first fight but lost and in the second fight it was the other way round. In life everything will get balanced out in the end.
Muldoon said that Sharkey was the best boxer in the world from the neck down and he was right. Sharkey was basicaly good at everything. He could box. He could punch. He had the ring smarts. Despite his inconsistency his record dose show some interesting statistics. He has one of the deepest records against ranked contenders of all heavyweights in history. If his head had been screwed on right the world would have shaken.
Sharkey at times was a bit like Andrew Golota, in the sense that although he showed talent/potential, he usually found a way to blow his big fights. He was also performing well in his fight with Dempsey, but got tired/careless and was KO'd. So two of his best performances came in fights he actually lost in the end. In the rematch, Schmeling used his jab (which was absent in their first fight) and put pressure on Sharkey throughout, and picked off most of his attempted counters. For his part, Sharkey looked like he wasn't quite the same fighter when they met the first time. It wasn't a stirring performance by either fighter, but it looked to me like Schmeling controlled most of it. As for Sharkey's "shady" fights, I always thought his loss to Carnera was suspicious, but I know a lot of people today will disagree about that. It also looked like he was holding back in his famous fight with Mickey Walker, and Sharkey himself says he was fighting not to knock him out, though he never said why.
