Does anyone seriously believe Corrie Sanders and Lamon Brewster would have knocked out Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Liston, Foreman or Ali?
Every time I hear their voices, chanting together in monotonous unison, telling me that Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko are not just great heavyweights but two of the greatest ever, the words of the old T.S. Eliot poem ring through my mind: We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw.
If you tell yourself something so many times, however outrageous that something might be, you will come to believe it. We hear terrible tales of the persecuted being brainwashed, but many people are highly adept at brainwashing themselves. It is known as mind over matter.
How dreadfully accustomed we have all become to mediocrity in our once fabulous sport of boxing and indeed in life itself. The spin doctors have skillfully whipped us into a frenzy of constant and almost orgasmic excitement by simply feeding us cheap burgers and fries when once we demanded steak and champagne.
When artist David Hockney returned home to England from Los Angeles some years ago, people were shocked. English David, it seemed, had become the quintessential California Man who would forever linger in the Golden State. When asked to explain his move, Hockney said, ?Everyone seems to be medicated now.?
His implication was that the urgency and quality had gone, replaced by a contented lethargy. The average and the mundane had become the new benchmarks of excellence. That is certainly the case in professional boxing today, most particularly in the erstwhile flagship division of the heavyweights. It staggers me that so many are hoodwinked by the third-rate, slow-motion drivel that is being served up.
Wladimir Klitschko is a good and competent heavyweight fighter. He is nothing more and it is now unlikely that he ever will be. Nor will Vitali. We are told that the bar has been raised and that we are now in the era of the truly super-sized, super powerful heavyweights who would have knocked seven bells out of their predecessors. That one little myth alone is among the most ridiculous ever perpetrated.
Wlad Klitschko thrives very nicely in the most pathetically shallow and unimaginative heavyweight division in boxing history. The quality is simply awful and any old lump with cartoon muscles and a bucket of bullshit can get into the top ten. No wonder Wlad looks like Superman. He is the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Good for Wlad. It?s certainly not his fault. He has improved his technique, learned how to protect his fragile chin, grown even bigger than he was before and just keeps slamming that left jab and right hand into the faces of the robotic blobs who huff and puff in mildly aggressive pursuit of him.
But hey, isn?t it great? Don?t you think it?s absolutely fantastic? Get with the program, appreciate what you?re seeing and thank the good Lord that he didn?t set you down at birth in the era of Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Frazier or Ali. Perish the thought. You would be watching genuine athletes of real talent instead of genuine giants of real whatever.
How can anyone with their eyes open, their brain engaged and their judgment unimpaired by the morphine of indoctrination be at all impressed by the inoffensive heavyweight waltzes of this most depressing era? How can they possibly believe that they are watching greatness?
Super
The new era of super heavyweights? No, quite the contrary. We have gone back to the era of the cavemen in terms of skill and technique. The lack of imagination and flair among today?s contenders, the lack of a Plan A (never mind a Plan B) and the almost complete lack of any meaningful movement has become chronic. That is why Wladimir Klitschko is the all conquering Tyrannosaurus Rex of his time. And why would you want a Ferrari or a Porsche when you can have a carthorse and still be happy? Welcome to the age of low expectation, welcome to the land of the bland and the obedient, where no unkind words should be uttered about the crap that?s on the menu.
A short time ago, I discussed this subject with referee and boxing historian Ron Lipton, who said: ?The Ukrainian/Russian/European devotional program of strength training, functional body building combined with a boxing regimen as depicted in Dolph?s training in Rocky is going to result in a superior physical specimen any way you cut the cake. When you add to it gargantuan height and weight you do not exactly produce a stiff KO victim who cannot move well nor have what I call the skeletal mechanics like other tall heavy boxers e.g. Anders Eklund via Tim Witherspoon, who was a sitting target for that overhand right.?
Ron stressed that his opinions of the Klitschko brothers? boxing skills were very similar, but chose to focus on Vitali. ?This is a superior intellect in a Goliath body who can apply himself to any endeavor of study and excel. Turn this Avatar loose in a barren wasteland of heavyweight talent with corpulent midriffs like Peters, Arreola, and or mustard seed heart performances like Haye, and then you have the epitome of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind.
?This is a very strong man blessed with genetic gifts who hung in there with Lennox Lewis, who was a true destroyer with both hands. Quite honestly I do not see great boxing skills here, but I do see an extremely tall and heavy boxer, who knows what it is like to be in that ring as far as range, radar, defense and how to use his limited skills against the mediocre opposition that boxing provides in that limited division.
?Joe Louis would annihilate him like Buddy Baer and Carnera. Tyson would break him in half and Foreman and Liston would chase him out of the ring.
?Vitali would paw, slap and lean back successfully against the rest of the crop where his size alone would allow him to survive his way to his usual decision win of sticking his long arms out, leaning back, pushing right hands into his opponent?s face and arm punching with pawing long and short hooks combined with awkward uppercuts thrown into the potpourri as usual.
?As soon as he got hit dead in the middle of his face, he would freak out like Mayweather does and grab and hold all night long, stinking out the joint like an unwashed rhino cage in the Bronx Zoo.
?He has skills, but so did Goliath. It is just there are no Davids on planet earth in boxing, they are all in the MMA where some of them would break him in half. Yet, I like him, for his dedication to training, his sportsmanship, as I do his brother. Both are gentleman and represent the sport well outside the ring and certainly are light years from being the usual thugs we hate that talk juvenile smack to their opponents.
?I respect Vitali and Wlad but do not think they have great skill, only great height, weight and reach. I respect with all my heart that they come into the ring in shape and earn their pay by at least looking the part and attempting although somewhat without any verve, to walk the walk.?
Of Wlad Klitschko, fellow writer Clarence George says: ?Big and strong? Yes, that?s true. But skilled? Sure, if you consider moving with all the grace of The Tin Man in desperate need of oiling a skill.
?It?s bad enough when a garden-variety fan hip hip hoorays over this big frog lording it over the tadpoles in the small and scummy pond that is today?s heavyweight division, but when a boxing analyst does it?…
?Mind you, I don?t disagree with those who call him the best of the current crop. He is that. But I bristle whenever he?s favorably compared to true all-time greats, such as Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano.
?The argument is that the heavyweight champs of yore would be considered cruiserweights today ? just too small to take on the massive Ukrainian. But there?s more to boxing, even at the heavyweight division, than poundage. No? Then how did Louis manage to stop Abe Simon (?The Ape?) not once but twice? Joe weighed a little over 200 pounds in their encounters, while Abe tipped the scales (hell, knocked them over) at around 255 ? about 13 pounds more than Wlad weighed during his recent draping-himself-over Alexander Povetkin.
?In terms of skill, toughness, experience, and savviness, Louis was pure magic, while Klitschko has only mastered ?Pick a palooka, any palooka.??
Debate
If we?re going to have a fair and honest debate about the heavyweights of today and yesteryear, then let?s have it on a fair and honest playing field. The modernists tell me that a 190-pound Jack Dempsey wouldn?t even get near a 250-pound Klitschko. That laughable statement in itself betrays their total ignorance of Dempsey?s speed, skill, explosive power and cunning boxing mind. Jack at his original weight would have butchered Wlad and Vitali and I will explain why in a little while. What amuses me is the arrogant (or conveniently intentional) assumption that Dempsey would still be coming into the ring at 190 pounds in 2013. How can that be?
Jack once said that he would have loved to have weighed 220 pounds. He regarded that weight as the perfect medium for a heavyweight boxer. He was right. Jim Jeffries, in his prime, scaled around 220 pounds. So did the young killer that was George Foreman. At that weight, a big puncher has all the power he requires without sacrificing the essential ingredients of athleticism and suppleness. Dempsey would certainly weigh around 220 pounds today with all the modern benefits of better food and nutrition. Like Marciano, he would also steer well clear (I hope) of wrecking his athleticism by lifting weights and messing around with ?supplements?. The old-timers were sworn off all that nonsense by their trainers.
Dempsey, Marciano, Louis, Liston, Foreman, Frazier and Tyson were natural fighters. Wladimir Klitschko isn?t and never will be. Nor will Vitali. That?s why the Klitschko brothers would have lost to all the aforementioned. Any kind of physical advantage goes straight out of the window when a boxer doesn?t really care for the business of boxing and has to keep a memorized version of the textbook locked into his brain. The champions I have named here were instinctive fighters.
They had the killer instinct in their souls and they knew how to cut the ring off on their opponents. They knew how to negate an opponent?s superior reach and get inside. They didn?t have to be told when to pull the trigger. Dempsey and Louis threw fast and varied combinations of punches as naturally as they breathed. They didn?t have to say, ?One, two, three? before they let rip. The Klitschkos, to me, look like men who do exactly that. They get away with it because their opponents are similarly programmed and mechanized but with less talent.
Wlad Klitschko improved greatly under the shrewd guidance of Manny Steward. But Manny, for all his duty-bound praise of Wlad, must have known that the improvement could only be finite. Steward was taping up a fragile package and making it as sound as he could. But he knew he didn?t have a fluid, natural talent in the mold of a heavyweight Thomas Hearns. In Wlad, Steward made a one-two-three fighter a better one-two-three fighter, teaching him as much movement as was possible and how better to protect the chin that had been shattered by Corrie Sanders and Lamon Brewster. Mark those two names. Does anyone seriously believe that they would have knocked out Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Liston, Foreman or Ali?
Wlad, even against the terrible opposition of his time, always looks like a man who expects the roof to fall in on him at any given moment if his memory should suddenly blank out and forget that ?two? comes after ?one?. He is not a confident, dominant fighter who grabs the bull by the horns.
If a man is scared of a spider, it is the man who will be backing off and I don?t care how tall he is, how much he weighs or how much he can bench press. Wlad would be backing off against every champion I have named here and would either be knocked out quickly or brutally chopped up. He would become even more hesitant and he certainly wouldn?t have the natural instinct to bluff and hustle his way out of the crisis. One can see the same hesitancy and fear in brother Vitali, generally regarded as the technically superior of the two.
Would Wlad?s big punch save him? What big punch? This is another fallacy I hear all the time from the hopelessly hypnotized. ?Wlad is a terrific puncher.? No he isn?t. He is a hard puncher but he is primarily a competent bludgeoner who is permitted to thump away pretty much as he pleases by a conveyor belt of clueless challengers who almost seem to invite the punishment. Carlos Monzon was a bludgeoner, but of a far higher class than Klitschko.
Stumbling
Against the incredibly talented Dempsey, the Klitschko brothers would be back-pedaling and stumbling around the ring in much the same way as Jess Willard. Here I must digress a little and explain the importance of proper and thorough research. If you?re going to shout from the rooftops that Jack Dempsey was a bum, that?s fine with me as long as you can prove that you have done your homework. Don?t just watch a couple of YouTube films. Don?t just read a few prosaic reports from the time.
Watch a lot of films, especially the old 16mm classics. Zoom in, break them down, correct the speed and see what you are looking at. Read a lot of newspaper clippings. Read a lot of books. If you truly care, then take the trouble, even though it can be absolutely laborious work. Some of my critics assure me they do all this, but it is quite apparent from their standard issue appraisal of old fighters that they don?t. They cobble together a few old stories they?ve read ? usually inaccurate stories ? and present them as a personal opinion.
With experience, if you are willing to persevere, your instinct will come to tell you what is probably true and what is probably false. It is a great pity that Dempsey?s all round greatness has been either forgotten or sarcastically dismissed by the smug and the lazy. What did Jack have? He had all the attributes of the perfect fighter. He was an excellent boxer, a tremendous puncher, fast of hand and foot and blessed with tremendous powers of recuperation. Along with Joe Louis, Dempsey was the greatest of the short range punchers, able to wreak terrible havoc with blows that traveled no more than nine inches. He dislocated Jack Sharkey?s shoulder with a misfired shot that had lost its steam by the time it landed.
Gene Tunney said of Dempsey: ?Jack was no wild slugger. He was an extremely clever fusion of fighter and boxer. He fought out of a peculiar weave and bob and was very difficult to hit with a solid punch. In the 20 rounds I fought him ? 10 at Philadelphia in 1926 and 10 at Chicago the following year ? I never did get a clean shot at his jaw. He was always weaving and bobbing away from the direct line of fire.
?Dempsey was criticized for not being able to knock out Tommy Gibbons ? one of the all-time great boxers. Actually, that fight was one of Jack?s most impressive performances. Unable to reach his clever opponent with a knockout punch, he was still a fine enough combination of fighter and boxer to outscore Tommy all the way.
?The most remarkable thing about Dempsey?s fighting make-up was the shortness of his punching. His blows seldom traveled more than six inches to a foot. He had a trick of hooking his left to the body and then to the head in practically the same movement.
?In his fight with Luis Firpo, Jack floored the huge Argentinian seven times in the first round and twice in the second before knocking him out. Yet, of all the punches he threw, only the last ? a right to the jaw ? was a long one.
?All the others were short, murderous jolts and digs to the heart and the kidney and the jaw. This ability of Dempsey to generate such punishing power over a few inches of swing, without seeming leverage, traced from a quick power inherent in his unusual shoulder conformation, with its high and bulging deltoid muscles.?
Do the Klitschko brothers possess even a scintilla of Dempsey?s talent? Do they get anywhere near the skills of Joe Louis or the truly exceptional punching power of Rocky Marciano? How can any sane and knowledgeable boxing mind even float the subject for debate?
I go back to my earlier point about research. It amazes me how many fail to appreciate Marciano?s punching power and just how hard he could hit. I am told by some that Earnie Shavers hit much harder than Marciano. I am told by others that George Chuvalo ? for goodness sake ? hit harder than Rocky. What utter rot.
Marciano was one of the true elite. Rocky didn?t possess the clever and versatile punching technique of Jack Dempsey and wasn?t Jack?s equal as a short range puncher. Jack still leads the heavyweight field in that department when one measures the actual distance of the punches. Nor did Marciano have the skill, economy and stunning accuracy of Joe Louis.
What made Rocky special was that he was a genuine, two-fisted knockout puncher who could damage an opponent with equal effect to both head and body. Marciano?s outstanding endurance enabled him to keep firing and he would fire at any available target. As Dempsey and Louis correctly noted, Rocky could knock a man out with a single shot or break his body and his heart over the long haul with a battery of powerful blows. Roland LaStarza suffered broken blood vessels in his arms in trying to fend off Marciano.
The punch of a knockout fighter carries a huge amount of energy. Scientists will tell you that an uppercut which lifts a man off his feet requires the energy of ?mgh?, where ?m? is the mass of the opponent, ?g? the acceleration due to gravity and ?h? the height to which the opponent is lifted. On average, it is reckoned that 700 foot-pounds of energy is required to manage this feat.
Around 1955, Rocky Marciano had his punch measured at a USA military installation, where it is believed that the test was conducted on a ballistic pendulum. Rocky achieved a score of 925 foot-pounds whilst wearing a 12-ounce boxing glove. Those who witnessed the test could hardly believe what they had seen.
Power punching, for all its surface brutality and apparently meaningless violence to the eye of the layman, is a wonderful science. The precious few who genuinely possess it must marry a formidable range of components and make them flow in harmony.
Louis
Joe Louis was another genuine two-fisted knockout puncher who married his terrific hitting power to grace, balance and exceptional boxing skill.
New York Sun columnist Bob Davis said of Louis: ?When he hits, something just has to go.? Davis noted the slight sway and lift of Joe?s legs as he moved into an opponent and started to punch. ?Louis has everything ? power, weight, marvelous co-ordination and the slash of a rapier in either fist. I watched him fight and watched him train. The kick in his blow is something terrific, for he gets everything in his legs and body into it, all swinging in perfect rhythm as he drives the fist for a vulnerable point.?
New Jersey sports editor Al DelGreco said: ?Louis batted out rivals with such swiftness that writers at the ringside couldn?t pick out the finishing blow and by which hand it had been delivered. He had a defensive weakness, true, but when he was in his prime he overcame it with his offensive ferocity.?
Louis was a great thinker and an accomplished planner who could always vary his strategy when required. Joe was as much of a boxer as he was a puncher, something that cannot be said of too many heavyweight champions.
Trainer Jack Blackburn had a key word in his early coaching of Louis. That word was ?balance?. Get your balance right, he told the Bomber, and all the other pieces of the jigsaw will click into place. ?Chappie had drilled me so much on hitting and balance,? Joe once said, ?that they were the main things I thought about. I wasn?t worried so much about the hitting. But getting my balance right was my main problem. As Blackburn said, ?When you?re hitting right, you?re never off balance.??
Blackburn instilled much of his own feinting and general boxing ability into Louis during the endless hours they labored in the gym. Jack regarded the Old Master, Joe Gans, as the perfect template, teaching Louis how to advance intelligently on an opponent and never allow the other man to set the pace. The objective was to make the opponent feel anxious, keep him ever guessing and never allow him respite.
By the time all the seeds bore fruit, Joe Louis was as near a perfect fighting machine as there could be, prompting Nat Fleischer to describe him as ??a pugilistic symphony with a tempo geared to bring him across the ring with all the grace of a gazelle and the cold fury of an enraged mountain lion. He combined excellent harmony of movement with crushing power stored in each hand.?
In short, here was a very special heavyweight who could knock out any man of any size ? and did.
Scale Louis up to today?s ?super heavyweight? size ? if indeed you really feel the need to ? and how can anyone seriously give Wlad or Vitali Klitschko an earthly chance?
Sanitized
Wlad and Vitali are the perfect products of the new mechanical age, the chief owners of a once beautiful diamond that is now irreparably flawed. Just as society has become clinical and sanitized, so has the once prized heavyweight championship of the world. Once the biggest and juiciest steak in sports, it is now sliced into manageable cutlets with alphabet soup letters to denote what each cutlet stands for.
It has been medicated, managed and manipulated. The quality has been sucked right out of it and the marketing people have cleverly numbed us into believing that a budget package is a five-star product. It is almost family entertainment in its blandness, a good movie that we forget as soon as we have seen it, and it is aptly reigned over by two clockwork kings of no distinction. No passion, please. No drama. Somebody might be offended. Some of those Berlin crowds at the Klitschko fights look as if they?re dressed for the opera. It?s all so awfully nice. Clean. Respectable. But it?s not exciting, it?s not technical brilliance and it?s not greatness in our time.
Take that morphine drip from your arm, tell the thought police you?re not a number but a man and then treat yourself to a fresh look at Wladimir Klitschko. Why? Because you will see a modified and computerized version of Fred Fulton with a few value-for-money extras added on. Take a look at Vitali Klitschko and you will see near enough the same thing.
But let me not keep the hollow men from leaning together and continuing to chant. All together now?.
