The honesty of John L Sullivan. Were other champions as honest?

Mendoza,ive seen the footage and all honesty not impressed at all,the guy hes sparring uses slap like punches,hands down and looks like a joke in what we would consider a real fighter today.Jefferies may have been good for his time with guys like this but it does little for me.


I like Lewis big over Ali,and agree with Kellerman but that's another topic.

 

The guy he is sparring with is his brother Jack, who had 4 fights and won 1 of them .So yes he is a joke, not only today ,he was then.

 

So based on that footage that what makes Jefferies the boogie man of hearsay of the only video footage of him?:roll:

 

That footage shows Jeffries to have underrated defensive skills. He has sound in-and-out and circling footwork, very springy for a 220+-pound man, and very nice head movement and sense of range. Through it all he is very calm and relaxed and not breathing hard at all. It is well known that he held back in his sparring sessions, not wanting to hurt his sparring partners, so we aren't really seeing his offense much here. But he's definitely not some slow plodding guy with slow hands - you can see there is speed and activity of hand, foot, and head.

 

It shows him to be quick on his feet and I never thought of him as slow.My reservation about the footage is that in the fight footage we have of him he does not utilise it.
Similarly Johnson in training can be seen skipping nimbly about shadow boxing with dumbells in his hands rapidly covering the ground, but he didn't fight like that and, from what we have read neither did Jeffries.

 

Actually Johnson did exhibit nimble footwork on occasion, but he was subtle, economic, and efficient with it, particularly in his championship years. He moved a lot more early in his career - as you know from Part I of my book.

You cannot know how much Jeff did or did not move in his fights from the very paltry amount of footage in existence. That is why we have to read and utilize the actual next-day newspaper reports, which I do in my Jeffries book.

 

I have more appreciation of Jeffries since buying your biography of him ,but from the accounts he is more a reactive fighter than a pro-active one ,that maybe because he was nursing an injury in the second Sharkey fight,as you describe, he seems to have been reasonably quick when stalking Ruhlin although it's bad quality film , but Ruhlin looks speedier .