Positioning and what it means to you - Pt. 2:

[Sinister]

Here is the second installment of the "Positioning Topic." As mentioned before I'm going to attempt to work this a little backwards. I wanted to first familiarize you with good positioning in Part 1. Now that you're aware of that, I'd like to look back at some recent fighters who would not have had bad things happen to them had they had some of their training time spent on how they are positioned. This is something I notice is starting to plague American Amateur boxing, which HEAVILY favors busy, aggressive fighters. So offensively they look the goods, but then it gets weird when the opponent doesn't go away. As I stated in apizur's thread on hips, you sacrifice a whole aspect of defense if you solely rely on legs and arms to protect you. Especially if you get to the point where you can't use those in a fight, you become a sitting duck. Check out this bout with highly-touted American prospect Mark Davis, and fairly unsung Michael Farenas. At times, Davis appears to have every significant advantage, and looks like an offensive dynamo, then things get very interesting when that proves to not be enough:



Davis also made the mistake of never establishing control of distance. In his methodology, he WANTS to get close enough to hit. Yet he doesn't appear to be concerned with being close enough to BE hit. In boxing, we need to find critical distance (where you can land punches, but it is difficult for your opponent to land) and remain there as much as possible. For Davis, the shorter-armed fighter, his critical distance would actually be middle-distance. Just inside the longer-armed fighter's reach where it would be awkward for him to throw, but comfortable for Davis. And yet Davis repeatedly attacks from too far, or gets too close to do his best work.

Establishing control of distance is often done with the jab. If you reach out and CAN touch the guy, there he is. If you can't, you're too far. If you can't even jab, you're a bit too close. But the same can be said for catching jabs. If you position your glove to catch, and when the opponent fired he touches that glove, there he is. But control of distance begins before that, it begins with beginning position. This photo of Joe Louis will demonstrate:

If Joe lowers that lead hand too far, the opponent sees it as a sign to walk in. Which is alright if that is the intention and Joe has set a trap. But (and this is for all the "hands up" folks), the OFFENSIVE THREAT is the reason to keep it at least chest level. The opponent needs to believe you WILL try to hurt them if they step forward. Not because you're mean-muggin' them, but because your hand is in position to and will do so easily. I like to say the lead hand is more like a gun or knife, if you point it at someone they'll feel threatened, tense, uncomfortable. If you point it away even slightly, they'll feel much better. Two guys with guns aimed AT each other:

If Art (left) lowers his right hand, I (right) go in knowing he has one weapon only at use, and if he misses with that, he's fucked. And out of the two of us, whomever is the most threatened and tries to fight AROUND the other's lead hand, that one is fucked. Now if you think back to the thread on center line I stressed the lead foot. If the hand isn't in place, the foot will help. But idealistically, it would be both, and with a stance solid enough in foundation that if a person touches you, they feel that solidity. This gives the first impression to a guy that they shouldn't want to fight you. It shouldn't need to be established just by flinging punches, by working hard. Something that is rewarded highly in the current U.S. Amateur system.

Here's another recent example of a young prospect, who is SUPPOSED to win his fight against a faded veteran. But due to not having any fall-back to being made to defend himself. things don't go as planned:



One thing about veteran fighters like Campillo, and Farenas above. They learn how to get out of the way of punches and be in SOMETHING of a position to hit you back.

But just to show this isn't ENTIRELY an American problem. Here's a Hungarian kid who was 14-0 with 13 KO's, and was supposed to win this fight:



Of course, the higher profile versions of this are the losses of Adrien Broner and recently J'Leon Love, who lost to far more rustic fighters. Broner of course trying to imitate Floyd, but not REALLY knowing the Crab style (same with Andre Berto). And side-note, Broner looked GREAT in that fight when he marched forward and threw punches, but many guys who come up like that simply can't maintain such a pace for an entire fight. Then there was Love getting systematically walked down by Medina and the second he planted his feet in a poor position, got his lights turned out. Medina did a lovely job of controlling both distance and utilizing better positioning despite being heralded as the inferior fighter technically:



Another fighter (not American) who has been historically plagued by lack of positioning and distance control is Billy Dib. But his lack of control is different. This is from the same show as the above fight of Mark Davis, but watch how Dib actually boxes fairly on the outside, yet cannot resist going to the inside, where everything doesn't go exactly as planned:



Every fight of Dib's I've seen recently has this same motif. He does decently outside, inevitably ends up on the inside and looks like a fighter who hasn't really trained to fight there. Sure Dib still won that bout, but did it need to be that difficult? He could have stayed outside and won that fight by a mile, maybe even stopped the guy, or he could have utilized better tactics on the inside and not taken so much damage there from a guy he was supposed to kick the shit out of.

Now, to reflect on all this just remember that cornering of Whitaker by Georgie Benton and him telling Whitaker to "stand there and let him swing." NONE of these guys appear as if they could handle that sort of thing.

 

[Sinister]

BTW, contrast the above guys who got hurt giving up distance control, and ended up in poor positions, to someone like Roman Gonzalez who is making quite the argument for being THE most effective fighter in Boxing right now. I want you guys to even look closely at when it LOOKS like his opponent is getting work done. Don't worry, this one doesn't last long:

 

[WillW]

Another Excellent Thread.

love how your go into detail to explain and give video/picture examples.

I personally like threads like this that spoon-feed it to you, so you understand fully.

Doesnt love train at MBC with SR, why mention him along with broner and berto?

Nothing better to get people to take notice than showing guys getting beat up and put down for the errors of their ways.

Also why did Blackburn stress Louis to keep this left hand up in the 2nd Max fight? He fought with the lead hand low a lot, but in the first fight Jack blamed the loss on not having that hand up.

 

[Sinister]

Love is trained by Eddie Mustafa Muhammad. And because they all got beat up for the same reason.

 

[WillW]

Love is trained by Eddie Mustafa Muhammad. And because they all got beat up for the same reason.

For sure, that was brutal.

I guess I had a weird assumption that everybody that trained at MBC or was on TMT worked with SR in some way.

And Roman is a beast.

 

[Sinister]

Roman is more than a beast. He's terrifying to fight, or at least he should be. He's NOT easy to hit, and if he hits you it's likely over. I've very rarely ever seen a fighter who is the protege of a great fighter, and they end up looking as good as or possibly better than that fighter, but Gonzalez has already matched Arguello in that he was the legit Champ of two divisions, and just won his 3rd by knockout.

All he has to do now is take out Segura or Viloria, or both, and he'll be a mega-star. I hope he can do that because he's the embodiment of what's great about the Sport. Technical skill, subtlety, and if you fuck up, he'll send you home early.

 

[WillW]

Well said, inspired to go watch some more Roman.

 

[a guy]

You can really see what you mean with using the legs too much in Farenas vs Davis. Davis stands very upright the entire time, but when he wants to move his head the movements are huge. As he gets tired, he ends up curling his back too. So with all this movement, he's never able to fire back once he's on the defensive. His body gets way out of position and he gets in trouble for it. At the end of the fifth, he immobilizes himself with those dramatic movements based in his legs, which lets Farenas step around and blast him from an angle.

Then as soon as he starts moving his feet, his head is stuck in the middle and again he doesn't shoot anything back. Plus when he does punch, you can see where an emphasis on volume has neutered him. his right is quick, straight and tight but has no weight or impact. His left hook is slappy and comes in wide arcs to compensate for the lack of lower body involvement. He makes a big show of punching, even yelling every time he does to make an impression, but there's no steak beneath all the sizzle.

Then the left that essentially ends the fight, he's standing upright directly in front of a guy who's been hurting him all night. Too close to really be effective, yet still right there to be clobbered by a punch he barely sees.

Here's another recent example of a young prospect, who is SUPPOSED to win his fight against a faded veteran. But due to not having any fall-back to being made to defend himself. things don't go as planned:



One thing about veteran fighters like Campillo, and Farenas above. They learn how to get out of the way of punches and be in SOMETHING of a position to hit you back.

What you're talking about with finding range using the jab and making the other guy have to fight around it is demonstrated really well in Campillo vs Williams. Williams gets speared by so many stiff jabs in the second round alone because his head is leaned forward and right in line with that lead hand of Campillo. When he has to defend it, he needs to make big movements (even turns his head away!), and often pulls back. That doesn't help when Campillo buts his left behind the jab, because Williams stays in the path of it and still gets hit. Meanwhile Campillo is able to see and catch jabs, making him harder to set up because it's harder to disrupt his position.

So by the third round, Campillo is the one walking forward and putting his hands together. Williams is moving back, looking for big shots but still the one being forced to react. He gets to the point where he's circling around, flinching at punches that aren't coming and being ineffective at firing back. He spends a lot more energy trying to perform all these defensive movements than Campillo does calmly outboxing him. You could really see Williams' discomfort in the third and fourth rounds. His inability to deal with that jab caused him to unravel, and I think it started a lot earlier than the commentators would have you believe.

But just to show this isn't ENTIRELY an American problem. Here's a Hungarian kid who was 14-0 with 13 KO's, and was supposed to win this fight:

The problems with Norbert's positioning begin appearing even as he's having unloading on Escalera. Early on he gets caught with a hook that knocks him back on his feels for a second, he consistently lets himself get too close and he has pretty bad posture. Then when he's being attacked, he's always leaning back or ducking while covering up. His positioning in close looks terrible. You can see the excess curvature of his spine and shoulders, his elbows in bad position so both the sides of his head and his ribs are open while his head is ducked in the path of uppercuts and he's blind to punches coming around his gloves.

When he gets knocked down in the third, you can see his mistake is not facing Escalera properly. He lets his head turn away as he tries to move, making it a flush target for the hook that puts him down, which he only saw out of the corner of his eye if at all. He made that same mistake throughout the fight, as well as refusing to change his positioning as he shelled up which let Escalera unload on him freely. Norbert also completely failed to control distance. He looked better in the fifth when he was able to get some respect with his jab then smother Escalera if he stepped forward too much, but even then he wasn't being effective, just minimizing the beating he was still taking.

Side note: I think Escalera would have finished him if he used cuban hooks to the temple. A lot of his hooks weren't connecting as flush as they could have if he changed the angle and impact point of them.

You're so right that as soon as Norbert failed to take Escalera out and needed to keep him off by doing something other than overwhelming him with punches, all sorts of things came apart. Some major holes were revealed, and he had no answer for what was being done to him. He was just trying to survive for 6 and a half rounds because he didn't understand positioning.

Man it really looked like Love had no idea about distance. Not even that he couldn't control it, he couldn't measure it or figure it out. He was swinging power punches from too far away, I guess expecting Medina to walk into them. But then Medina was just walking him down, landing those body shots and the occasional shot to the head. Then he gets Love trapped in the corner, comes in low and blasts the left hook. Meanwhile Love squares his feet and stands straight up on his hook, he's only in position to get knocked out.

I see what you mean about Gonzalez. He either catches jabs or makes small, compact movements at the hips that get his head subtly out of the way, which lets him fire back lightning fast. At the same time, his jab is crisp and constantly making contact. When the other guy tries to come forward, Gonzalez takes small steps to keep him at his preferred range without running away. When his opponent gets in close, he'll level change and catch punches on his elbows or forearms while reestablishing his range to fire back.

There's one really nice sequence where his opponent tries to come in low, so he sticks him in place with a body jab, pops his head back up with an uppercut, hits the body again then comes high with a jab from underneath. His defensive movements really are economical, he'll just barely duck a hook before countering with an uppercut, and any time his opponent is left out of position after an attack he can expect at the very least a jab coming back: there's almost no such thing as an answered punch thrown at Gonzalez.

Also love how he can throw so many punches in a row off his lead side effortlessly. His left uppercut and left hook are both right there whenever he needs them, and he picks his punches exceptionally well. It stands in stark contrast to the previous guys we were studying, who throw with great speed and volume but very poor accuracy and intelligence. The knockout is nuts and perfectly highlights all this about him. He comes in to attack but his opponent fires back, so he stops for a second to pick off the shots on his elbows then retakes the imitative with an uppercut, a straight and then another beautiful uppercut when he sees his man go to duck. He's always well balanced even after missing, always ready to fire back and never letting his opponent smother him or get away. That fight was a treat.

Thanks for another excellent thread.

 

[Sinister]

Well said, inspired to go watch some more Roman.

The fight he just had vs. Yaegashi is amazing.

 

[nottingham90]

Fantastic thread. But I feel as if this is all for the boxer or outside fighter. What if your plan is to get inside and make it a rough fight? Where does all this play in when you're the forward aggressor/inside fighter?

 

[Redtarget]

What happen to jlove???!! Wow I've been wanting to watch that and finally have. That is a perfect fight for this discussion. Why do you think he couldn't keep the guy off him? I mean it's not like love has fought a forward fighter before. Hate to say it but Was he not motivated for this fight? He looked off.

 

[shs101]

I'm not understanding where everything goes wrong especially in the Davis fight...he looked to be doing just fine. Did he get tired? Where in the fight did he lose control?

 

[Sinister]

Fantastic thread. But I feel as if this is all for the boxer or outside fighter. What if your plan is to get inside and make it a rough fight? Where does all this play in when you're the forward aggressor/inside fighter?

Part 1 addresses inside fighting with video examples. Also, if you look at my threads with my aggressive fighters (linked in Part 1) you'll see decent and improved positioning. Also, Roman Gonzalez is not a boxer/outside fighter.

Please look at everything.

What happen to jlove???!! Wow I've been wanting to watch that and finally have. That is a perfect fight for this discussion. Why do you think he couldn't keep the guy off him? I mean it's not like love has fought a forward fighter before. Hate to say it but Was he not motivated for this fight? He looked off.

Where his mentality went wrong is in the video interview. One of the first things he said was: "He's going to be there to be hit." I remember Roger Mayweather said something like that about Castillo before he fought Floyd. "If you throw a beer can into the ring, it'll hit him." Seems like they thought Porky would be stupid. But he wasn't, he didn't over-commit, he didn't give up defense for offense, nothing went rright for Love. But he's had this kind of trouble before, Rosado did the same thing to him.

I'm not understanding where everything goes wrong especially in the Davis fight...he looked to be doing just fine. Did he get tired? Where in the fight did he lose control?

Of course he got tired. Using excessive movement, having stiff hips, overworking with ineffective punches, and getting hit will make you tired. A guy gave an excellent description of what went wrong, you should check that out.

 

[crossFTW]

Thanks Sin. I've never even thought about distancing for offence. I can see that Davis is always throwing from too far or too close.
Would it be fair to say that Farenas forced Davis to do this by pressuring his centreline better? Or was this more of a technical deficiency on Davis' part?

 

[Sinister]

Bit of both. Farenas is no dummy, and if I remember correctly Gerry Penelosa was in his corner. That's when I realized that Davis was in trouble, not just because of the record like Atlas was saying. The Penelosa Brothers are usually in the corners of decent fighters, even if those decent fighters aren't elite.

Farenas has a solid Professional style and a big left hand. Davis has a lot of flash and is a tough kid, but spent too long slapping people in the Amateurs.

 

[crossFTW]

Ok thanks, I'll have to check out the other vids later, man I love it when wily vets beat the young prospect.

 

[a guy]

The fight he just had vs. Yaegashi is amazing.

Just watched that fight, it was fantastic.

I love how Gonzalez is always right there to hit you. He almost never retreats too much to fire back. Plus he has great balance, even when he misses. And as a result he almost never sacrifices his distance, he doesn't ever smother himself.

 

[Sinister]

Right, that's one of the reasons I've actually got him as #1 P4P after the Yaegashi win. There's no other Champ better than he is in the Sport currently, and there doesn't seem to be anyone on the landscape who can beat him. Estrada just made a huge statement in beating the shit out of Segura (who is an interesting fighter in that his style is ugly, but he's not out of position very often), but the problem with that is Gonzalez already beat Estrada.

He's also almost always in good positions to receive punches. Very similar to his predecessor in Arguello. Arguello was difficult to hurt and it didn't happen much until he moved up in weight and was just fighting naturally much bigger men. To beat guys like that you really either have to overwhelm and neutralize their technique, or be as good as they are and THEN fight perfectly.

 

[a guy]

Right, that's one of the reasons I've actually got him as #1 P4P after the Yaegashi win. There's no other Champ better than he is in the Sport currently, and there doesn't seem to be anyone on the landscape who can beat him. Estrada just made a huge statement in beating the shit out of Segura (who is an interesting fighter in that his style is ugly, but he's not out of position very often), but the problem with that is Gonzalez already beat Estrada.

He's also almost always in good positions to receive punches. Very similar to his predecessor in Arguello. Arguello was difficult to hurt and it didn't happen much until he moved up in weight and was just fighting naturally much bigger men. To beat guys like that you really either have to overwhelm and neutralize their technique, or be as good as they are and THEN fight perfectly.

Man you make a good argument. I don't follow boxing as closely as I follow MMA, so this is embarrassingly the first I've heard of "El Chocolatito". Gonna have to go back and find all his fights, he might turn into my new favorite modern boxer.

Yea and another thing I like about him is he's ready to defend himself after missing, then ready to fire back when he makes you miss. There was one moment against Yaegashi where he missed a right hand then paused on his left hip, rolled under Yaegashi's left hook once he saw it coming and pivoted outside it, ending up at a great angle and throwing a few unanswered punches. Such seamless transition between offense and defense, he fights like there's no difference between the two.

 

[Sinister]

Also why did Blackburn stress Louis to keep this left hand up in the 2nd Max fight? He fought with the lead hand low a lot, but in the first fight Jack blamed the loss on not having that hand up.

Sorry, I only JUST saw this question you added in, but it's very relevant to the topic. Schmeling maintained before the first bout that he "saw something" that gave him his confidence against Louis. In retrospect, I'm not sure what the one thing he claims to have seen was, but there's a couple notable things that led to the knockout. One is that Joe often did drop his hand to waist level, he did this a lot to throw his own right. To bait a person to try to defend the hook, and he'd shoot his right instead. He also had a habit of pumping that hand before punching, which would lower it. Now keep in-mind what I said about control of distance. Joe sometimes had a false sense of security about just how much control he actually had and this was one of those times.

The next thing is that Joe rarely shifted to the left hip to avoid the right. He'd pull from it instead, which is a response I don't like a whole lot because you can still be tagged albeit less hard. But look how many times Joe eats right hands just in round 12:



Compare that to his slight adjustment in the second fight. But the difference is profound, you can see Schmeling's concern of the left hand hanging in the air between them, just because it's in his face:



In the second fight Blackburn also instructed Joe not to wait, to close distance quickly himself. That's exactly what Bleu did to Loco in the video in my opening post.