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| [original cartoon pending] |
CITATION
Rasheed, Muhammad. "The Corrosion of Quality Boxing." Cartoon. The Official Website of Cartoonist M. Rasheed 00 Date 20XX. Pen & ink w/Adobe Photoshop color.
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Q: Why doesn't Deontay Wilder take boxing lessons? He has been boxing fairly seriously for a while now and seems fairly athletic, and yet his skills are universally criticized as very deficient. Is there a reason he doesn't fix that?
Muhammad Rasheed - There are three components to becoming a boxer:
1.) Physical Fitness.
Boxing is a very physically demanding activity, and to pull it off and hope to win against game opponents you must have your body conditioned to high levels of strength, speed, stamina/endurance and well-tuned reflexes.
2.) Skill in Techniques.
Mastery of the weapons of boxing — how and why to be on your guard, how and why to be in the correct and proper stance and maintain it while moving in any direction, how to punch correctly, how to correctly throw the different kinds of punches and why they are thrown— is critical to enabling you to inflict effective offense while protecting your body from damage in return.
3.) Battle Strategy.
The ability to penetrate the opponent’s defense by using tried & true game play, forcing openings with clever combinations and thinking-on-your-feet weakness exploitation, maximizing personal strengths to dominate exploited weakness, skillful usage of ring generalship to corner the opponent and set traps, are all the difference between mere competence versus true mastery of ‘The Sweet Science.’
Boxing trainers no longer teach all three of these to the fighters (I doubt the new generation of trainers even know them) because the sport of boxing doesn’t cater towards the knowledgeable true fans of the discipline. Instead they accommodate the ignorance of the ‘casual fan’ who doesn’t appreciate the high-level chess match of two superbly skilled technicians trying to solve the other’s puzzle; all they want to see is the crude slug-fest brawl such as can be found in a drunken bar fight. Consequently, boxers have grown less and less skilled in the actual ‘Sweet Science’ of the discipline with each passing era, until today we find a dominant heavyweight champion in the form of Deontay Wilder [this post was written 6-years ago].
Bursting with extreme natural talent, a ferocious fighting heart, focused passion and commitment to hard work in the gym to throw ALL of his eggs into the first boxing component of physical fitness, Wilder has demonstrated that this alone is enough to plow through a division of fighters who really don’t know what they are doing when squaring off against another game fighter. Yet the big men aren’t the only ones deficient in the basic powers of a professional boxer. The celebrated 50–0 record of Floyd “Money” Mayweather, Jr. and his seemingly uncanny ability to make the vast majority of his wins against quality opponents look easy, owes a great deal of that to the fact that he is uniquely superbly trained in the above listed three components of boxing by his very old school father and uncle. His opponents couldn’t beat him because they really didn’t know how to fight!
For example, in the Mayweather vs. Robert Guerrero fight, although the challenger was very fit, he never tried to use any actual boxing techniques/strategy to neutralize Mayweather’s effectiveness—he just spent the entire fight doing the literal exact same thing and getting more and more flustered. By contrast, after spending a few rounds feeling Guerrero’s style out, Floyd drew upon his large repertoire of tools and used what was most effective against the opponent in front of him, with zero adjusted counter response from Guerrero.
Watching Deontay Wilder fight Tyson Fury was frustrating because I was rooting for the champion to win, but it was clear that if Wilder really knew how to fight correctly, he would have penetrated Fury’s sloppy, rudimentary guard earlier to put him away. His raw talent and superior endurance alone were enough to carry him through until he was finally able to catch Fury for the controversial draw, but for the sequel, I would very much like to see Wilder get his boxing skills up so we don’t have to see these two unnecessarily wade out into the deep waters of the later rounds again. Based on how the boxing entertainment industry flows, however, I’m not holding my breath for such a miracle.
See Also:
To Socially Engineer a Plastic Great White Hope by M. Rasheed
The Art of Greed by M. Rasheed
