Well Richie, Ali is the heavyweight boxer best known for using his jab. This, however, is more impression than reality. For this discussion I will only use the one fight with Cleveland Williams available for viewing through the link below, as it is regarded as one of his best performances, and also sets him against a fighter without an effective jab.
First a list of heavyweight boxers with a better jab than Ali:
Larry Holmes who had the best jab in all of boxing and tried to humanly put Ali out of his misery
Jack Johnson who would have been a slight underdog against Ali
Sonny Liston , who he beat easily
Joe Louis who I think would have KO’d Ali
Orlin Norris who Ali would have beaten easily
Wladimir Klitschko, who would destroy Ali or any heavyweight from his era, because he has the most effective jab ever to be deployed by a heavyweight, and because he is a Nimitz Class carrier compared to Ali’s Enterprise Class carrier. Note that Wladimer is their evolved form who received far better nutrition and training.
To begin with Clay/Ali had two entirely separate careers, and I am only considering the first here, in which his performance against Williams was his model.
Cleveland Williams
Williams was a big muscular guy of a build that is not conducive to good boxing. He would have been better as a tight end, defensive end, or debt collector. Today he would be an MMA fighter. As big as he was he was smaller than Ali in every way, who was a towering long-armed monster for his day.
Williams had been brutally KO’d by Liston who Ali beat easily and had been nearly killed in a shooting. He was aging on top of that. Ali’s problem with Williams was one of showmanship; how to convince the guy to actually throw hands with him so he could look like the genius he was rather than just blitzing him as he could have. Ali could have walked up to Williams and just thrown until the other man went down.
Williams had basic bio-mechanical flaws, such as holding his hands farther back than his elbows, letting his weight carry too high, and most egregiously looking over his hands.
Psychologically Williams was doomed by his not being a mindless aggressor of the Marciano, Frazier, Tyson type. A fighter who must get set, and be in proper position to through a punch before he throws it, cannot compete with a man who is just as schooled and has greater hand-eye coordination, reaction time and intelligence.
This was like Floyd Money entering a spelling bee against a 10 year old Chinese girl—a hopeless slaughter. Ali’s only dilemma—as would be the Chinese girl’s only problem in a spelling bee against our current top boxer—is how to make it look like art.
Ali’s Psychology
As a biomechanical genius Ali is perfectly suited for the role of showman athlete, but ultimately unsuited for the role of exemplary boxing technician, as his ability to not only survive but thrive by breaking the rules of dangerous movement that bind us mortals was fated to retard his technical development and result in severe brain damage as he aged among a field of improving and enlarging heavyweights in the 1970s.
Ali was lazy, would not even help clean the gym when Archie Moore offered to train him, and therefore never learned some of the basics that would have given him something to fall back on as an older fighter. But in the meantime, when he was still young, he was able to fight like a lightweight of old; one of the small carnival boxers like George Dixon, who could stand in front of you and get rich taking a nickel for every punch you missed and giving you a quarter for every one you landed.
Clay/Ali Biomechanics
The key to Ali was his hips. Watch him dance around with his hands down. If he was going to get these small older fighters—many like Moore, Patterson and Foster in actual fact aging Light heavyweights—to open up and throw punches so that they could be gloriously KO’d as opposed to just beaten down, he had to keep his hands down and give them the dubious opportunity of opening their guard to throw the punch that would get them starched. Among heavyweights only Clay/Ali and Jackson ever had this ability.
His punch count is low, his jab count proportional but not high. His foot work is pure art and was copied from Ray Robinson and adapted to a more mobile less hard hitting style, which was ideal since he was bigger than any fighter in his class and did not need to develop the sick power of a Robinson who competed against physically bigger men. Clay/Ali was the biggest heavyweight of his era and would be big enough to win the title even today. We cannot forget that, nor forget what a tough situation men like Williams were in when they faced a bigger stronger man who was also faster, smarter and more coordinated. Ali’s basic athletic ability was something that is rarely seen in the heavyweight ranks and is more akin to what we see from the best NBA players and most versatile NFL quarter backs and receivers.
His body is a series of interlinked levers, with the fulcrum of the hips being the key power point. An MMA man with a Greco wrestling background like Randy Coutre would murder Ali, for his hips were his game. Control of those hips would bring victory. Notice how Clay dips at the waist while on his toes, loading his hips and placing his entire upper body outside of the opponent’s firing line. After a punch is dodged in this fashion the entire musculature of the hips and obliques go into the counter punch as the weight is shifted from one foot to the other and a subtle micro-pivot puts his considerable African American ass into the blow as well.
His long arms on his broad shoulders are providing further leverage. Ali had the most beautiful boxing shoulder of any fighter in any class. On top of that his uncanny timing ability has his fist clenching and turning slightly and sharply at the wrist at the same moment he is pivoting. If one reads the Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee one will see in the description of the straight blast punch a description of Ali’s three quarter fist rising jab, which was ideal for a martial artist who was training to fight Williams type plodding movie bad guy goons.
Clay/Ali Arsenal
1. The body jab with the elbow winged out pumped low is a worthless and poorly executed punch just done to draw a counterpunch. Top heavyweights of any era would KO him at this juncture, or brain damage him as they did in the 1970s. Trying to train people to jab who have seen Ali do this has accounted for many a boxing coach drinking too much after the gym closes, including this one.
2. The low hand jab that corkscrews up to a three-quarter—almost vertical—fist has all the power of calf and hip under it and is a vicious shot, exceeded in power only by George Foreman’s power jab and the jabs of such later day giants as Lewis and Klitschko. As used this jab gets you KO’d unless you are working in a different time zone than your plodding opponent, particularly since it involves moving into the opponent’s right hand [see Lewis getting KO’d by our boy from Baltimore in South Africa, link provided below] For a mortal man to use this jab he must mix it in behind a high blind jab to the eyes and cover with a high vertical jab, a clinch, or a wing block, the later two which Ali uses in this fight. As time wore on he became a clinch fighter and never did learn how to throw that covering jab. Ali’s jab was not his key. It was his motion that put him in position to use his two devastating weapons.
3. Ali’s head hook [the classic vertical fist Philly hook] sucked, and was just a slap. However, note his vicious full body shovel hook. Most fans and commentators never ever saw or credited this punch, and martial arts people looking today would probably assume it was a missed, or wasted, or aborted effort. Now, that punch is devastating and is the very punch that Wladamir Klitschko used to KO Pulev late in 2014. Where this punch became art in Ali’s hands was in paring it with his weapon par excellence, his undervalued right hand.
4. Ali was not that good at integrating punches, particularly in light of his extreme ability, which speaks to his laziness and poor handling. But, so long as he was not in front of a Joe Louis type combination puncher [a type that did not exist in the 1960 and 70s in the heavyweight class] his ‘jab right’, or ‘right shovel’ 2 punch combinations were devastating. Ali had the best right hand in all of boxing. If he had been trained by Jack Blackburn and religiously threw 3 to 5 punch combos he would have KO’d every opponent and had a longer career. You will see in this fight his right used as a lead, used to set up the shovel, used as a lead counter cross after dodging to his right, and used from the balls of both feet, sinking all of his weight down behind the blow. The best example of this right is in a still photo from his KO of Foreman in Zaire.
Clay/Ali as a Training Model
If you are a young fighter look to this man as the best right hand shovel hook artist in the heavyweight game, not the jabber that the crowd at ringside saw as he taunted his dangerous opponent. Ali was an emotional experience for people of his era, who either liked or disliked him and their focus was on his showmanship, of which his jabs were often an integral part. Few ever noticed the dangerous cobra like Ali that was actually before them as they were so wrapped up in hoping he would get hit for dropping his hands and running his mouth, or in the fact that he was their glorious good-looking light-skinned avatar, beating up more dangerous-looking dark-skinned black men.
The only heavyweights I picture beating Ali are listed in order of how easily they would have handled him below. If you want to study the gaps in Ali’s game then study videos of these boxers. Note that many top heavyweights from other eras would have rocked Ali, but he had the chin that denied one punch KOs, which basically takes all of the short or one dimensional punchers like Tyson, Frazier [who split with him] Norton [who split with him] and Marciano out of the running for men that would have beaten him up and KO’d him.
1. Wladimir Klitschko 4-1 [better jab, better shovel, equal right]
2. Vitali Klitschko 3-1 [too active, too tough, and too big]
3. Larry Holmes 3-2 [much better jab]
4. Joe Louis 1-1 [superior punch integration]
5. Jack Johnson 2-3 [better instincts and movement, and much smarter]
Enjoy the film, and for all the genius of it, realize it was a clunky knockoff of Ray Robinson.
Video Links
Rockman versus Lewis
Listen to Foreman’s commentary. If you look at this video of Lewis [albeit not at his best] and put him in Cleveland Williams’ shoes in the second video, the same thing happens. Ali would KO Lewis more often than not, because they both kept a low lead, but Ali had the better right, and most importantly the better lead and counter right. For a fighter who has to get set to beat Ali he has to be a highly disciplined monster like Wladimir Klitshko
Clay versus Williams
Klitschko Sorting Out the Boxing Genome
And for that ultimate boxing fantasy, especially if you don’t like Ali, imagine him fighting this guy, who, in the boxing trainer’s view is his ultimate evolution. Klitscko is smarter, faster, bigger, harder working, more disciplined, stronger, more technically sound. Even so Ali could have beaten the version before Emmanuel Steward retrained him; by which act the African American boxing guru from Detroit consigned his brothers to the ranks of professional bowling hopefuls. Also, even if you are not a boxing fan, but perhaps a white supremacist woman [Miss Martin] then here is your Nordic hero.
Further Reading
If you'd like to see where Ali stacks up among other greats then try this link, where some European bookseller seems to be purveying my literary wares.
link › bokrecension.se/150289565X
Awesome piece. I enjoy the breakdown and analysis. To some it would be sacrilege to opine how Ali might not be the best.
Glad you liked it David. And yes, it is sacrilege to Baby Boomer sports fans to opine that their generation did not produce the best boxer. Call me the high priest of the Jack Johnson apostasy. Interestingly enough the old guys like Mister Frank always favor Joe Louis for heavyweight best, which may be a generational bias also.
The shame of it all was that Ali was handled as a celebrity and a political lightning rod, not as an athlete. If, let's say Bruce Lee, would have been his trainer, Ali would have actually learned the mechanical language of his own intuitive genius and been able to build upon it. Even though Lee was just an amateur boxer he had the ability to break down body mechanics and provided—in his book and art—the only explanation for one of Ali's techniques that came out of that era. He did this largely based on the understanding of boxing he achieved through a close reading of Jack Dempsey's manual, along with texts on fencing and his own experimentation.
Everyone else, including Ali, just had this gee whiz view of his ability. If only he had not been too proud to sweep the floor in Archie Moore's gym he might have been so much better and be more than a palsied relic of a generation in love with itself.