Which boxer pioneered boxing techniques as we know them today

[automaton89]

Jack Dempsey is a natural suggestion but his heavy bag work looks nothing like modern boxing. So I kinda doubt it.

[JAB5239]

Jack Dempsey is a natural suggestion but his heavy bag work looks nothing like modern boxing. So I kinda doubt it.

Benny Leonard is a good shout.

[them_apples]

Jack Dempsey is a natural suggestion but his heavy bag work looks nothing like modern boxing. So I kinda doubt it.

Dempsey hits the bag for a workout. He does it to develop his muscles. Just watch him fight to see how he punches and understand the frame rate is very low quality. We saw a glimpse of an upscaled Dempsey vs Tunney and hes Dempsey could KO a horse. I think overall Dempsey is overated, but his power is actually underated.

[automaton89]

Isn't Corbett the traditional answer?

Dempsey gets credit for the bob & weave and fighting off the front foot for power.

Ray Arcel (maybe Fleischer) once quipped 'for awhile everybody in the gym wanted to look like Dempsey.'

Maybe three epochs:

Corbett to Willard

Dempsey to Ali

Ali (Clay) to . . .

Dempseys head movement is outdated. Nobody does it. so it would be misleading to call him a founder.

[automaton89]

Isn't Corbett the traditional answer?
. .

Which One? There are three corbett

[QueensburyRules]

- - It’s a collective of history.

K recently perfected Big Man boxing…

[billeau2]

[QUOTE=QueensburyRules;n32253389]- - It’s a collective of history.

K recently perfected Big Man boxing…[/QUOTE

Indeed!

[billeau2]

Usually something has to happen in the heavyweight division to be recognized as game changing in boxing. This does not mean the heavyweights came up with the ideas. But when we see the heavyweights perform it puts the rest of the world on blast about developments.

I divide box into 3 epoches, you have pre Dempsey, where the focus was more on positioning, comprehensive skill sets, grappling among them, and footwork.

In many ways you see some sort of a glorification of all these aspects when you watch Tunney, The consumate representative of this style.

Dempsey change the focus to the punch. Through Dempsey we learned about the punches and the focus and emphasis on how to make them stronger.

You see the glorification of this technique in the next epoche, that of Joe Louis, who brought the consciousness of hitting technique to an ultimate point. Most people would agree, Ted williams and Joe Louis are Apollonian, physical archetypes for perfection of technical craft. Williams was perhaps the first noted technical hitter in baseball, and changed many perceptions of the game through his hitting, much as Louis did so in punching.


One can look at baseball and boxing and seat parallels here. The 1920s started the superstar era, you have Ruth and you had Dempsey, in the 1940s he saw the culmination of something started by Ted Williams and Joe Louis, baseball and boxing had both left any trace of the sandlot behind.

Anyway, the final period where we are today, probably started in the '70s. Again, all these things as a dialectic started earlier, but we saw them in the heavyweight division and in this case, Muhammad Ali.

Ali became the first fighter to truly take the idea of moral courage, natural ability, and entertaining value to create the epitome of the technically relaxed boxer puncher. Fighters like Ray Robinson had been doing it, you saw the perfection of it in Ali.

I think the queen bee said it best though in his post when he said it's a collaborative effort. It's a dialectic and it shows itself at a certain time historically.

[billeau2]

One might well ask where we are today. Well, post baby boomer generation, he came the first generation of America to statistically underperform there parents. If you look at boxing presently in a way it has gone backwards.

There are exceptions to this. But what you see is a lot of amateur trained fighters who started late, did not really get seasoned, and who do not really prepare physically as boxers have in the past.

And if you're going to judge any sport, you have to look at the general level performance, not the best, and not the worst. You want the statistical average what falls in the bell curve not the extremes of it.

If you watch a typical heavyweight fighter from this era, and compare them to a previous such statistical point, you will notice the difference in skills. Yes you will sometimes also notice the difference in size. I don't know if this correlates and how important it is we won't know for a few years yet imo.

[BKM-]

Jack Dempsey is a natural suggestion but his heavy bag work looks nothing like modern boxing. So I kinda doubt it.

I would rather pick his rival Gene Tunney. The footwork, the active movement, upperbody and head movement, the jab and counter punching off the back foot.

Muhammad Ali once did a show where he looked at a bunch of old time fighters. When he watched Tunney he seemed very impressed and noted that his style would easily fit into his era of boxing(70s boxing is modern enough).