When did boxing ''stop'' evolving ?

may 8th, 1982

 

It clearly hasn't stopped.

 

Conn, Overlin, Steele were all fighters who did that three decades before Ali came along and Overlin was called the poor man's Greb in large part due to his style of footwork so presumably Greb was doing that since the mid-teens.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC9Q3fl5AWE[/ame]

 

edit - sorry triple post. site is shitty today

 

I don't see anything that remotely resembles Ali's footwork unless you think anyone bounding around a ring is what Ali was doing -- he's mostly off-balance whereas Ali could change direction and punch off either foot at any time.

Nifty move how he turned his back on his opponent there, though.

Conn was more of a shuffle-stepper who moved side to side and in and out. He didn't glide the way Ali did, although he was able to throw the jab off his left foot while moving to the left in much the same manner.

Ali often utilized something more akin to back-pedalling like a defensive back in football, turning his body sideways. He also would kind of lift his right leg with knee beng maybe 45 degrees and float it down in coordination with a right-hand punch.

I don't see these guys doing this. Ali's movement was an evolution of what they were doing, and what they were doing may have been revolutionary or at least out of the ordinary at the time.

I'll await the Greb film to make judgments on him.

 

::rofl:rofl:rofl:rofl That's good can i use it.

 

Almost every fighter has his own unique style, so I don't think styles can be said to 'evolve'.
It's impossible to observe them all anyway. The very first guy to do something some certain way probably does so in absolutely obscurity years before someone else does the same thing and gets it noticed.

As someone mentioned, different 'cultures', different regions, different 'schools' have their own style preferences, which may or may not come to the fore and get noticed at different times.

It's reasonable to assume that the era in which more fighters boxed more rounds and fought more fights in total, in their careers, that those men would have developed their own science more than men who box less. It's obvious. I'm not sure what era that was though, and how much later eras could benefit from that knowledge without doing the same amount of practical.

 

just posting this in response to the ali comparison posts...

archie moore was ali's (when he was a younger cassius clay) trainer for a while....and looking at this video, i think you can see a definite influence....well, to my eyes anyway....watch from 20 seconds in here...hands low, swaying back from pucnches, fluid, slick movement...

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ATaP2TyF9U[/ame]