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Originally posted by Boxing_12
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“At first, he didn’t look like much of a fighter,” Gainford said of the man who would later become the greatest fighter of all time. “All he did was hit and run. But he had one thing; he wanted to learn. He was the first kid in the gym and the last one to leave. He’d say to me, ‘Suppose I do this; what do the other guy do?’ I’d tell him, and then he’d say, ‘And suppose I do this and this. Then what happens?’”
“When Ray went to the gym,” says Don Turner, “he wasn’t there to party. He didn’t play to the crowd. All he cared about was getting ready for the fight. There was no radio, no entourage. If someone was talking loud, Ray threw him out. He shadow-boxed like there was a guy in front of him. When he punched the heavy bag, it was five-punch combinations. Every punch meant something and it sounded like he was shooting guns. No fighter worked harder, and everyone else in the gym worked harder because he was there.”
http://www.secondsout.com/columns/th...ited--part-one
“Sugar Ray Robinson was a great admirer of Kid Chocolate,” said Fausto Miranda, a former Cuban journalist who covered many of Chocolate's fights. Sugar Ray Robinson, went on record saying that he had never seen anyone box like Kid Chocolate before. Robinson studied the Chocolate style and incorporated much of his slick movement and graceful flair into his boxing style. Robinson in many ways was a combination of his boxing idols Joe Louis and Kid Chocolate. He mixed the concentration, masterful combinations and power punching of Louis with the stylish movement and balance of Chocolate.
http://coxscorner.tripod.com/chocolate.html
The greatest fighter of his time and one of the greatest of all time is Ray Robinson, the middleweight champion of the world. It is probable that in him, more than in any other fighter of today, are combined more of the qualities that go into the making of a great fighter.
Among the fighters of the present there is, for example, no more avid student of the sport. Robinson has been thus since the days when he started to box. As a four-round preliminary boy he made it a practice to sit at ringside in his ring clothes, before and after his own fights in order to study the others on the card.
One day we were talking in the Uptown Gym in Harlem. He was explaining how he had learned to fight by watching others and fighting others, and I asked him from whom, among those he had fought, he had learned the most.
“Fritzie Zivic taught me a lot,” he said, speaking of the former welterweight champion. “He was about the smartest I ever fought. Why, he showed me how you can make a man butt open his own eye.”
“How?” I said.
“He’d slip my lead, like this,” Robin¬son said, demonstrating. “Then he’d put his hand behind my neck and he’d bring my eye down on his head. Fritzie was smart.”
We were sitting one day in Robinson’s office on Seventh Avenue, just south of 124th Street. He had fought Kid Gavilan twice. The first time they had fought Gavi¬lan had given him trouble. The second time, for the welterweight title in Phila¬delphia on July 11, 1949, he had handled the Cuban with ease, and I wanted him to tell me at least one of the things he had learned about Gavilan in their first fight.
“Well, I noticed one thing.” Robinson said. “I noticed that when he throws his hook he’s not in position, so he shifts his right shoulder forward maybe an inch or two. When he does that you know the right hand is dead, and you how the hook is coming.”
I was not amazed by this, because I had ex¬pected some such revelation. I was merely im¬pressed that of the many who have fought Gavilan and of the many more who have watched him closely, this is the only one to find this weakness.
I was not amazed, moreover, when Robin¬son told me that he knows fear. I have never known a really good creative artist, whether he be a writer, painter, or boxer, who has not confessed that he often doubts himself, experiences nervous¬ness when the big project is at hand.
“Accidents happen in a ring,” Robinson said. “You can never tell when you’re liable to be hit with a good punch.”
He remembered the night he fought Artie Levine in Cleveland in November of 1946. Levine had a dozen pounds on him and so Robinson was fighting it the way you should fight it, moving and throwing no more than combinations and piling up the points.
“In the ninth round,” he said, “he started a right hand and I reached over to catch it. When I opened my glove it wasn’t there and I heard the referee say: ‘Four.’ I thought to myself, Man, he’s startin’ awful high.”
Robinson got up at nine, and in the next round he knocked Levine out. He has never forgotten this, however, but the fear that Robinson knows is the limited fear that inspires a degree of caution and out of this gives birth to inspired performance.
http://www.ringtv.com/blog/685/class..._good_fighter/
Ivich
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