Would jack johnson style work today

Good post! Corbett is commonly known as the Father of modern boxing, how many fights did he have?

 

You are insulting someone else but you are far from proven right. He could just as easily shoot that comment back at you.

It is widely accepted he was undefeated until facing Johnson despite fighting all the best guys around and winning.


Ranking of boxers during the 1900-1910 according to hwaction dot com

1890-1900

Frankly asking who considered Jeffries to be the best during that period is like asking who considered joe louis or muhammad ali or mike tyson the best during their period. You'd have to know virtually nothing about that period to even ask that kind of question. Until Jack Johnson he was considered th greatest heavyweight by virtuall every analyst. He fought the best and beat them all with no losses.

Frankly Jim Flynn looked just as embarassing if not more, he could hardly hit johnson and resorted to head bucking him and calling him racial epiteths. The sheriff stopepd that fight because he was on his last leg and didn't want more race riots.

 

Yes, I think I seen the photo, it looks like 5 of the recent white champions photo, jeffries, carnera, willard, dempsey and baer. It is clear from the photo that Willard is at least 2 inches taller than Carnera. And not only was he taller he was significantly broader/bigger in the chest area. Its no surprise at 40, that johnson couldn't knock him out, the real error was making the fight 45 rounds at such an old age, and of course johnson would have known he couldn't realisitically beat such a man at his age with the way he fought which lends credence to the he threw it theory. People don't cover their eyes when they are knocked out. I've seen alot of things, but that is not one of them. They get up and talk funny or walk funny or sleep on the mat, or stumble over or don't move at all. But covering your eyes is not something you do.`

 

I was insulting myself, dip****.

 

Which fully takes into fact that he took 5 years off away from the sport, relaxed in his Los Angeles saloon and on his alfalfa farm, took ZERO tune-ups, was so pathetic in sparring sessions that the press was restricted and then banned, was so pathetic in sparring sessions that none other than Stanley Ketchel wanted to KNOCK OUT Jeffries during ring introductions to save the pride of the white race, was so unmotivated because there is a very good chance he believed the fix was in for him up to the point the fight was moved to Nevada and Mr. Johnson informed him otherwise.

What the **** does Jim Flynn have to do with this? As was corrected earlier, the quotes to which I was referring were from Gunboat Smith.

 

Not really sure if his style would translate that well because of modern day officiating. That said, he'd still get his share of W's against top cruisers using his wits and strength alone...

 

I have used some Jack Johnson techniques myself in coaching my boxing pupils and believe me, they are still to this day very effective and can be very frustrating. But that work helped them improve. Just this year I had one boxer earn a bronze in the National Golden Gloves and one earn gold in the Masters Ringside Tournament. Trust me, that stuff is legit. Good is good. I wonder if years from now folks are going to say Beatles songs weren't all that good, that music has improved. To me, music of yesteryear is and was good, and is today - it is just different. But it still has value and can be effective. Classical music is beautiful, and so is rock. Just different ways of expressing it. Both effective in their own way. Good music is good music. It just doesn't all look or sound the same way.

 

The music analogy is spot on.

A certain Edward Kennedy Ellington once said ,"there are only two kinds of music."



Good and Bad.

Same with boxing, it either works and is effective, or it doesn't and it isn't.

There was a reason Jack Johnson finished his extended ring career practically unmarked, ,the fact that he possessed sound fistic fundamentals meant that he did not get hit a lot.

 

Exactly, and believe me, a lot of guys were trying to hit him very hard, wearing 5 ounce gloves, which is about the weight of what they wear in MMA fights nowadays, and they had a LOT of rounds to try to do it.

One other note. I don't think it fair to criticize Johnson's victory over Jeffries when Johnson had been willing to fight him for seven years or more but Jeff refused. That was Jeff's fault. Jack was more than willing to fight a prime Jeff. So Johnson had to fight him when Jeffries was willing to fight him. That isn't Johnson's fault.

 

Can you share details on what technique legal today still works that Jack Johnson used.

 

Yes and no. Athleticism, conditioning, power, speed, timing, reflexes: that would all transfer to today's game, but the actual styles... I'm not so sure about that. They'd work against laymen because any science is still better than no science, but they wouldn't work in today's game against top shelf competitors. They were too fine tuned to the rules of the boxing ring of their day. Take bare knuckle boxing styles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-pUc49fV4A

They'd still work in a street fight but with gloves on you fight differently. Who now rolls their fists in circles while they box? And while many blows are blocked by the glove now, before that would be impossible. Even the posture and mechanics of throwing a punch were somewhat different and had to be so that pugilists wouldn't break their hands. It's still effective as a martial art, but it's no longer a good style for the ring, and there should be a distinction.

Take the example of the martial arts that have sprung up in the modern era with color film. We start with Full Contact Karate in the 70s which in time develops into kickboxing. Dissatisfied with point fighting in tournaments, Karate enthusiasts seek a more universal and realistic form of martial art. They find out initially that their punches do not strike as hard as boxers, and their conditioning is not as good as boxers either, so they make some reforms. The first stars: Don Wilson, Joe Lewis, Benny Urquidez, and Dennis Alexio were all fine athletes but their early style would be dropped or improved by the 90s. That's because their rules didn't allow for elbows, leg kicks, or clinching and they would routinely get annihilated by Thai kickboxers from overseas. Their footwork, based on boxing, left their legs exposed and the Thai boxers would kick them until they couldn't stand, or if not they wouldn't know how to break a clinch and would get kneed into submission. Just by the 90s, styles had adapted and fighters like Ramon Dekkers and Ernesto Hoost were able to beat the Thai's at their own game. In the '00 era skills continued to improve or adapt, if you prefer, and we have the examples of Badr Hari, Andy Sower, Mike Zambidis, John Wayne Parr, and Masato, which look less and less like their noble predecessors.

In the case of mma, we start with things like Pancrase in the early 90s where you can't even punch with a closed fist. This evolves into Pride and the UFC which in their infancy were full of kickboxers, tough men, street fighters, and catch wrestlers. The Gracies bring Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and the tradition of Vale Tudo into the sport. Then ground and pound becomes popular, until the rubber guard is invented. Striking is still pretty sloppy 20 years on and it's only recently that world class athletes like Jon Jones have entered the sport. When the sport was young and growing the champions were guys like Bas Rutten, Ken Shamrock, Noguera, Fedor Emelianenko, Mark Coleman, Kevin Randleman, Tim Sylvia, Brock Lesnar the fake wrestler, and Tito Ortiz. They were good for their time, advanced for their era, but time and the sport has passed them by. Today, their skills are elementary and their athleticism would be second tier.

Is it too much to assume that modern gloved boxing from 1893 might have followed a similar progression as mma from 1993 or kickboxing from 1977? Perhaps, boxing only got all the kinks worked out by the late 20s early 30s, and it took around 30 years to develop the infrastructure and talent in America that allowed boxing to flourish? Indeed, people have always fought, but they didn't always fight with the modern styles, and you don't wield a rapier the same as a broadsword or a katana. The styles are unique to their age and their purpose. For sure, pre-1893 Americans fought, but did they have the same number or quality of boxing gyms, trainers, and professional athletes as they would by the 1920s-1950s. Surely, the shrinking number of boxing gyms in the last couple of decades has had a negative impact on the sport in America. Does anyone doubt that? So why would the same people think that boxing could flourish in a time without any infrastructure, money, or publicity, confined to a few illegal underground gambling dens? Or do they think that top level fighters just sprang up out of nowhere the moment boxing became legal?

Based on the old rules of the time modern boxers would probably have a hard time with all the clinching from around Johnson's era too, and they wouldn't know what to do when John L. Sullivan threw them cross buttock. In Daniel Mendoza's time you could grab a guy by the hair and pummel them until they lost consciousness. Rules change, styles change.

 

Nice post, but Lesnar and Randleman's athleticism is far from quaint.

 

Ovie, I like your approach and context, tho I dont entirely agree with the scale of its relevance to boxing.

On the nitpick front, I would not label Lesnar as a subpar athlete. He was a very accomplished college wrestler and such a specimen that he was invited to training camp for the Minnesota Vikings, despite little experience in US football.

Also, Fedor would be very good to great in any era.

 

You went out of turn, there is a queue.

 

Yes, Lesnar was a good college wrestler, but you need more than that to have a long successful career in mma at this point. His 5-3 record in mma bouts speaks to that. A lot of world class wrestlers can't take getting hit in the face and fail when they try to make the transition to mma where striking is nearly as important as grappling. The same holds for the high level strikers from kickboxing who do well except when they are matched against more experienced grapplers.

As for Fedor, while impressive, he was really just a fat light-heavyweight by boxing standards. He beat big guys with incomplete technique, strikers like Semmy Schilt, Tim Sylvia, or Hong Man Choi but he did it with grappling, because they had no defense for that. When he finally faced big men with a more complete set of skills in Fabricio Werdum and Antonio Silva, he got smashed because they were five inches taller than him and Fedor didn't belong in that weight class. Same thing happened to Bob Fitzsimmons when he ran into James J. Jeffries.

Also, Fedor didn't exactly look like Larry Holmes throwing those big looping punches of his. His sambo and judo were enough for him to thrive in his time, but I think the overall level has risen since he entered the sport in 2000. I'm not saying he never improved, but I believe that the game improved faster.