Where would you rank John L. Sullivan?

I confess Corbett was a bit of an easy out for the purpose of making a more refined point.

In all honesty I simply disagree with the idea the gloved LPR fighters are the first modern champions. This thread being about LPR and QB makes it a relative but distinctly more focused conversation and I did try to stay with in those confines ... a little bit.

That said, you touched on a historical truth I can not deny:

Start at the beginning of the sparring masters itself is a nuanced topic. I would contend testing is not sparring and the mufflers of the BK practitioners were for testing men in exhibitions not for practicing nor fighting. That begins with Daniel Mendoza but isn't popularized until Molyneaux vs Cribb

Sparring then becomes a distinct sport separate from prize fighting. About exhibitions. This is lead by William Fuller, a pro fighter himself who would train elites self defense, and Aaron Molyneaux Hewlitt, an early black practitioner and teacher of sparring to those less affluent than mister Fuller's clientele. If memory serves this is about the 1820s

Fuller's success would grow the promotional end of sparring as a sport while Aaron would tour his wares around America. I should have noted Bill had moved to the US. Making sparring somewhat an American practice despite the difference in defense in America and England at that time in LPR.

My point being descriptions and eyes are not deceived; Jim Corbett has MUCH more in common with Mace, King, and Allen than he does Usyk, Lennox, and Holyfield. this is traceable. It came from Aaron and Bill. I mean the entire sparring booth phenomenon came from those dudes.



That said I would contend those currently categorized as early modern are in fact transitional and the modern period begins, at HW, with Joe Louis.

I would concede Dempsey at best, but the color line prevents an otherwise inarguable chronology.

IMO Figg-Paddock is accurate. They are all similar, fighting similar version of boxing under similar conditions.

Sayers - Willard is also accurate in terms of styles, rules, etc. Willard's time has a lot more QB and a lot less LPR in it than Sayer's but still more LPR than Usyk's. Willard knows all about hovering and nothing about neutral corners.

And then Dempsey-Usyk as the actually modern block. In all things except political.

But if we're going to have a singular barrier for categorization, I still disagree with Sullivan being on the QB side of that line.



Lastly, on eyes, you do not need to see a man to read his descriptions and relate them to others. No one ever saw Hercules or Thor but if I draw parallels between them the fact they are similar won't be denied simply because you never saw these known similarities yourself. You know exactly what I mean when I say Sullivan fought like Burke and nothing like Usyk; their descriptions are similar and Usyk's are not.

 

You bring up a good point: mythology, which is totally different to ATG or H2H ranking.

The mythological Heaviies are Sullivan, Johnson, Dempsey, Louis and Ali. Expand the weight class and you get Greb, Langford, Ketchel, SRR. Armstrong.

 

GASP....he'd even beat...FLOYD PATTERSON?

 

He'd even beat Riddick Bowe, the greatest of all time I am told.

 

We do have descriptions of how Sullivan fought and most praise him. They've been posted many, many times on this forum (example here). He fought out of a crouch and was noted for his explosive straight punching. Many of the best technical boxers of the time compliment his straight punching technique and were shocked at how quick he was for his size.

IMO Corbett was not a 'technical' boxer for the time at all. Corbett being a master technician is one of the biggest myths in Boxing history. He almost entirely relied on his speed of hand and reaction, alongside other contextual factors which usually favoured him. The Sullivan of the Corbett bout was also one of the most shot fighters ever seen in a ring - not a good win whatsoever. Corbett is one of the most overrated mythologised fighters ever for my money, whereas Sullivan actually became underrated.

'Learn to strike straight and clean, swinging blows nearly always leave you open for your opponent. It is well to do your leading with the left reserving the right for any good openings. Wherever you hit your man with one hand let the other fist land in the same spot if possible.'

John L Sullivan.

 

I think I'd distinguish between the title lineage and the style used. Sullivan, Corbett, etc. fought a lot like the fist-fencing stuff you see from bareknucklers, but under QB rules, and without (most of the) LPR grappling. I don't see what Sullivan is doing as just LPR with gloves, since the rules are enforced enough that the gloved fights are a different animal, although it's definitely QB done badly. Closest analogy would be early American kickboxing, where the first practitioners are the previous generation's most successful point karate guys.

On styles: I personally think Cribb and Mendoza fought significantly differently from Sullivan and the sparring teachers, but I also suspect that there's more going on that's not picked up in the manual tradition. There's a bloc from about 1860 to Corbett that all looks different from earlier material, and seems pretty uniform within itself. But then, every so often, you get weird stuff like Fitzsimmons or the way Sullivan moves on film that makes you suspect that no, there are other traditions and approaches that aren't reaching the genteel pages of instructional manuals.

I honestly don't think people can learn that much from written descriptions about a fighter's style. People around here have argued, based on written descriptions, that Sullivan fought like everyone from the sparring manuals (plausible, IMO) to Tyson (ridiculous, IMO). Just for myself, I once wrote a description of a Klitschko fight in Fancy Eganese, like Boxiana. Sounded similar. But Klitschko fought very differently from anybody in Regency Britain.

 

I'm not real sure what to say to "gloves makes it a different animal", John L is not the first to wear gloves in an LPR match. I do, obviously, like challenging convention though ... Let me restate that. I didn't invent the term or criteria for "LPR with gloves" I just applied it, that said I might challenge that criteria myself if I had noticed my complacency prior to you pointing it out. Regardless of if you meant it that way for not.

To that I have to say it may be so but as it stands convention for LPR with gloves should be applied to Sullivan as much as any other champion. He either fits or he doesn't. My argument is he does. Anything stressing the parameters of what is taken for granted is beyond the scope of it, though relative.

I am curious to know how you marry the second and third paragraphs. It seems to me the second it utterly defeated by the third. I do not know how I can defend my categorization by description when I do not understand why your own categorization by description is acceptable. You can see Corbett but not King so ... I'm a bit lost.


I've written heaps on the ancients. Somehow no one ever mistook any of those posts to be about bare knuckle or queensberry fighters. I like to think that's in the descriptions.

 

LPR and QB get fuzzy boundaries in practice when you're talking about the 1880s. In practice, it might be more like a spectrum. On one end, you've got gentlemanly sparring. The kinds of skills you need to win that would be pretty close to modern boxing. On the other end, you've got a bareknuckle prize ring fight, with throws and hockey punching. And you've got a mess in the middle.

I don't think there's a single thing that distinguishes something on one end of the spectrum from the other. It's not a question of airtight logical criteria. But I think you've got indicators. Bare fists are one. Apparently changes how you punch, etc. Throws are a second. Chanceries, holding and hitting, and the other percussive aspects of the old timey clinch are another. The round structure, prioritizing a very specific type of endurance, and emphasizing general infliction of damage over a 10 second concussion (like Burmese boxing) is yet another.

To me, most of what Sullivan was doing (when he wasn't cheating) looks to be on the QB end of the spectrum. It doesn't tend to have the round structure, the bare fists, or the grappling that made LPR a different game. So I count him more as QB, along with being one of the last great LPR'ers as well for his work against Kilrain, Mitchell, Ryan.

Now, I don't think people had figured out the optimum way to fight under QB yet. Their technique was still based partly on the assumption that they'd be fighting under LPR. But the rules and incentive structure made even the primitive QB stuff a different enough game -- albeit one that the early guys played badly -- that I think it should go firmly on the QB side of the line.

There's absolutely tension; let's see if I can explain where I'm coming from. My perspective usually starts from looking at the manual tradition. It's generally clearer than the film for the time period we're looking at, and simplified for instructional purposes.

There are two manuals I know of that purport to teach Mendoza's style. (One has a single illustration; the other has more.) Unlike press reports, or somebody like Egan, the text is written specifically to explain the techniques. One of those manuals also claims to teach Humphreys's approach, IIRC. It's been a while. And then you've got yet another one from Cribb's era with some neat grappling and a surprisingly modern looking stance and guard.

None of this material looks like the Victorian and Edwardian stuff. The styles we have preserved for the comparatively small community (by modern standards) around London & etc. don't look like Edwards, Donovan, or that lot. The occasional contemporary art bears this out, although one ought to be careful interpreting the latter.

So when I say that I don't think Mendoza or Cribb looked like Sullivan, I'm not saying that I know exactly how they would've looked on film. I'm saying that the evidence shows a different enough boxing tradition (or traditions) that I don't think they would have resembled Sullivan.

Imagine for a moment that we lost all of the film of Evander Holyfield. But we have a boxing manual written by one of his students. Do we know enough about Holyfield from that manual to accurately envision him fighting? No. But we may know enough about the broad principles he was taught and fought from to say that he's unlikely to have fought like R.G. Allanson-Winn's gloved boxing at the turn of the century. (For which the manual also survived.)

 

There is no footage of him, (for obvious reasons), so it's impossible to rank him or put him in fantasy matchups.

 

Add Tyson to that.

 

That is the crux of the challenge. Who does he share most in common with and if the separation between Sullivan and Usyk is greater than the differences between Figg and Sully.


I agree to an extent, and I'm pretty sure most of my post are reflective of a three part categorization. It is unfair to Sully to call him Figg. I contend it is unfair to Usyk to call him Sully.


Firstly, no one is calling sparring LPR with gloves. Sparring was just how Corbett got his style and why styles, equipment, and rules, were influenced in the 1860s. It's because the 1820s sparring boom.

LPR with gloves is not a matter of opinion. It either is or is not LPR with gloves. The other fighter either did or did not ask for LPR to be used. Whether you read a round by round that features grappling or doesn't makes no difference to the rules used.

To that end, Broughton rules is the first era I can find you gloves in a fight. I wouldn't call it LPR with gloves because it is BR with gloves. I damn sure am not calling it QB.

Likewise, Wlad vs Pov was the HW title fight with the most grappling of all time, including eras when grappling was legal. Would not call that Br or LPR with gloves, it is a QB fight. With the most hugs in any HW title fight.

Doesn't matter how many logical fallacies I can make up from the acts of the fighters. They fought under the rules they fought.

Excerpt: Sullivan, at an out-of-shape 230 pounds, outweighed his opponent by sixty pounds. He used his size against Burke in the first two rounds, using wrestling, throwing, and rabbit-punching tactics that were technically against modern Marquess of Queensberry rules.

I am not calling this one LPR with gloves because it was a QB fight. Regardless of if Sully LPR'd it up like Wlad later, it was a QB fight.


That said, I'd win the comparative contest too. If you want to keep going that route and the challenge is prove Sullivan fought like a BK guy ... bro, you see that sash? There's your clue. Yes he did. How would you like me to go about proving? Listing the LPR with gloves or listing all the LPR **** Sullivan did?

Because going by acts, you just moved an LPR fight I otherwise would have categorized as QB over to LPR for me.

 

Sullivan is a pioneer. A legend of the sport who deserves to be remembered. An ATG under gloved boxing rules? Of course not. But he is great nonetheless.

 

So I think I might also be missing something about the standpoint you're coming from. What makes Sullivan an LPR guy and also not a QB guy?

I ask because I'm not connecting the individual historical pieces you're citing into a coherent picture. So again, I think I'm missing something.

Let me go through the bits and pieces, so you can see how I'm thinking about them, and tell me what I'm missing on how you're coming at the problem:

If you're going by the de jure rules, then Sullivan contested most of his bouts under QB, as you know.

If you're going by the way the fights were actually fought and officiated in practice, again, most of his bouts looked much more QB than LPR. Except for Mitchell, Ryan, and Kilrain, obviously, and the QB ones where Sullivan cheated and the refs didn't care. I have no problem with there being LPR bouts contested with gloves -- I don't recall offhand whether bare fists are specified by the rules themselves -- although I don't think these were the majority of LPR bouts, which were bareknuckled.

If you're going by the institutional support (Does a champion have to defend the belt? Sanctioning bodies? Etc.), you're right that most of that doesn't come around until later. But the old concept beginning with Sullivan of a QB lineage, where the champion can refuse to defend through the sanctioning bodies and still somehow be regarded as champion, never really died out in boxing. Usyk recently won the "lineal" title from a guy who took time off on a bender, endless rematches with Chisora, etc. That said, if you're a very strong institutionalist, as your comments on the alphabet titles suggest, then I can see why you'd want to start with Louis.

If we're talking the Color Line as the major issue, or globalization, then Tommy Burns might be your guy. Or Louis. Or Klitschko, for that matter, if it's more a globalization issue than a Color Line one. Although I don't see any conflict in theory between LPR and globalization (or not being racist.)

If you're talking the pageantry like sashes, etc., that's an interesting point; I've always found the way that Sullivan's QB reign appropriated old forms to an emerging new model to be one of the more whimsical things about that period.

If you're talking his boxing style, then as far as we can tell (which isn't that much, IMO; see above), he fought more like a Victorian LPR guy who wasn't allowed to throw you in his QB matches. This is why I brought in the analogy to the early American kickboxing guys. Their first matches looked a lot like point karate with gloves, but it was still American kickboxing, because those were the rules. Just badly fought American kickboxing. And, like Sullivan's era, not always officiated strictly by the refs. As to whether Sullivan fought more like Figg than Usyk, I'm not aware of any illustrated manuals going back much before Mendoza/Humphreys, and the latter don't look like Sullivan-era boxing, so I don't think there's enough evidence to say how close Sullivan's style is to Figg's vis a vis Usyk. Not because Sullivan looked like Usyk -- IMO he clearly didn't, from the evidence we have -- but because I don't know what Figg looked like when he fought.

If it's a combination of all of this stuff, then the weights you assign to each could lead in all kinds of directions.

EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, there's also the question of what period of boxing we're considering normative for the lineage. When you ask, "How similar is Usyk to Sullivan?" it sounds like you're implying that the end of the chain/tradition gets to define what counts before them. So if Sullivan differs from Usyk on too many points, he's out. But things might change if we're letting a different period's preferences define what the lineage should be. People from Louis's time, or Charles's, seem to have considered what they were doing to be a continuation of what Sullivan had done. (Or at least what Corbett had done, if we watch Gentleman Jim too many times before asking the question.) If the end of the chain defines the norms for who counts in the lineage, it has some side effects as boxing continues to evolve. Louis might eventually get kicked out as well.

 

Just doing a color code because it's easiest.

To the final paragraph. That's exactly what happened. Like even just calling Figg a boxer is post dated. That IS what our history is. We, as time goes on, draw lines between the now and then. I'm calling for new ones. It wouldn't be the first time. We do not now separate BR for LPR. They did. We do not separate regional champions in BK, English/American, from "World" champions of BK today. They did.

**** man, you only have to look to the second generation of boxers to find the first generation of champions claiming they had evolved beyond the barbarian times. Am I alluding to Taylor, or Corbett? Exactly, if the shoe fits and repeats then it fits twice.

Lastly, and unrelated to the last, I was unable to work it in this time but you did ask in what I'm quoting and I had stated prior:

There is nothing wrong with categorizing the clearly transitional period of boxing when BK fighters were becoming QB fighters OR the old ways were giving way to the new, as just that. They do not need to be in the same category as Figg or Usyk, but if you're lumping John into one it's been about a century since a boxing match looked anything like his.

 

That wasn't the contemporary opinion but they were used to seeing a different brand of combat.