There are some things you all just need to know. Stiff jabs can stun or even drop you, and that doesn't mean you have a "glass jaw". A jab can range from 1 to 100. A right cross, in order to even be a punch and not a pantomime of it needs to be a 30 at minimum. Obviously a 100 RC (or even a 70) is always going to be magnitudinal orders harder than a 100 jab, but if you are fighting someone your own size and get caught the right way, even by a jab, especially if you don't see it coming and haven't "set yourself" - there's a solid chance you're taking a seat. Footwork is everything in boxing. Walk into any boxing club and unfold a lawn chair (with the owner's permission, lest you get your ass kicked & tossed on the curb a`la DJ Jazzy Jeff in the Fresh Prince) and just observe for an hour or two, a fly on the wall. You'll see heavy bag & speed bag drills. You'll see mitt work, probably a bit of sparring. If you're paying attention, though, you'll notice that an overwhelming majority of what coaches spend time on, especially with novices but even with seasoned pros - second perhaps only to conditioning (quite often with overlap between them within a single given exercise) - is footwork. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be fast. It has to be precise, and in fact precision with your feet is, on the whole, far more important than precision with your hands. That said..., Accuracy matters. It matters so much. Churning oxygen isn't worth jack in terms of scoring you points in a boxing match. There's no such thing as "making the fight". If you're coming forward rattling your sabers, okay, good for you, it'll get the crowd on your side - but a competent judge is giving you ZERO credit for anything that doesn't make contact with a legal scoring area on your opponent. Chin - a lot of it has to do with circumstance. Where are you hit, at what speed, and from what angle. Is your mouth shut tight or are your jaw muscles slack? Do you happen at that moment to be inhaling or exhaling? Are you standing inert or in mid-stride? How much did you hydrate today? How recently did you copulate? How vitamin deficient is your diet? How much did you struggle to make your division's weight limit? How much (and what) did you eat after the weigh-in? The variables are legion. Don't expect the past to be predictive of the future. A guy can be violently KTFO but otherwise prove to be sturdy for the rest of his career, and conversely you can have somebody with "proven" whiskers put on ***** Street by a relatively lighter hitter than past opponents. It happens. If you understand sports science it isn't really all that weird. Ring generalship exists. I often see people when listing the scoring criteria say there's effective aggression, clean punches, and..."yadda-yadda"; here things become as murky as stadium crowds unconvincingly lip-syncing the latter verses of the national anthem. "Defense" may charitably be included among the real, tangible criteria (except by the rabble who rail against its inclusion, saying that punches slipped or blocked shouldn't be creditable, and not seeing the forest for the trees) - but generalship is frequently dismissed with a wave of the hand by the sciolistic peasantry as some mystical bit of undefined poppycock. No. It exists. Look it up. If you Google it and still can't understand it - just accept that boxing is a little over your head. There's no such thing as "how a KO should look". Nothing frustrates me like seeing idiots claim that Ali's so-called "anchor punch" was fake and that Sonny Liston was somehow turning in an Oscar-worthy performance succumbing to it, or that, say, Likar Ramos took a dive against JMM, intentionally absorbing that massive right cross from Dinamita. "Pound for Pound" was created to give the devil that was SRR his due. It refers to prowess at fistic combat relative to size - the way you'd say that ants have greater proportionate strength than humans. Obviously humans are capable of crushing ants while the opposite is untrue - so there's no point in people commenting that "a good heavyweight beats a great welterweight" ...yeah, no shit, Sherlock. That isn't the point. Weight-climbing, therefore, isn't the critical component of "p4p" rankings that some make it out to be. Nor do losses to a much bigger opponent (ie natural flyweight Omar Narváez moving up in his career twilight and getting thrashed by the comparatively gigantic elites Donaire & Inoue at bantam and junior bantam, respectively). A loss to a smaller opponent, however, does and ought to give your cred at least a slight ding more than would losing to somebody your own size. I can't believe this still bears repeating almost a century and a half after the Queensberry Rules were ratified, but styles make fights. Triangle-theory by itself is of little to no use, and there are countless examples of its debunking. That said, even though every match-up is going to have a base stylistic advantage or disadvantage for each person at the core of its dynamic, another truism of boxing is that "class tells". A guy who executes a given style to its utmost but is simply not as talented might not get the same result versus a common opponent as somebody who more or less fits the same pattern, if less neatly, but is a good deal more athletically blessed.
There, class dismissed, for now. Feel welcome to let me know if you have any further questions, but you better have a nice shiny apple to put on my desk in tribute.
