How to Box by Joe Louis

The Foundation of Skill

It’s still in print. You can log on to Amazon right now and buy one for yourself, renamed, repackaged, all shiny
and new. But I like that mine is old. It comes straight out of Joe’s own era, has followed its own crooked path
through these past sixty-four years to find itself in my hands. It was printed late in 1948 in those perfect months
that followed Joe’s eventual destruction of Jersey Joe Walcott in the rematch of their first controversial meeting,
after his twenty-fifth straight title defense but before his ill-fated comeback. A legend, a hero, there had never
been one quite like him, there arguably never would be again.

Heavily ghosted by Edward J. Mallory, How to Box was not exclusively in Louis’ own words, but it was his
essence, distilled. Of course nobody, not Louis, not Mallory, certainly not I myself can take something as
perfectly formed and improbable as the boxer born Joseph Louis Barrow and expect to produce a story fully told
with mere words. That poet has never been born. Homer himself, splendid though his account of the boxing
match between Epeus and Eurylas may have been, could not have conveyed the splendor of Joe Louis in full
flow, so for me, the task is impossible.

But then, nor can I describe the feat of engineering that is The Ambassador Bridge. The nuts, though. The bolts.
Hand me them one at a time and I can describe them to you. If we work at it long enough and hard enough,
maybe we can begin to understand the process that brought it together, the building of the bridge that allows us
to cross the water and visit the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

So it is with Joe.

The nuts and bolts of Louis’ brilliant engineering are here in this book. If we could put this instruction manual to
work for us and study the construction for ourselves, what might we find out? It’s an intriguing idea and one
that wouldn’t leave me alone. The results is this close look at Joe Louis, based primarily upon How to Box but
with conclusions drawn only from the fight films that travelled the same crooked path as the manual, all the way
from the thirties and forties into our possession. No doubt there will be blind alleys and false leads. I don’t
apologize for them. Joe walked those roads too, striving for the perfection.

Legend has it that before beginning the fighter-trainer relationship that would help define him, Louis worked
with one Holman Williams, then a promising professional from Detroit who boxed mainly out of Michigan.
Williams, soon to be one of the greatest fighters ever to have lived, would never scale the championship heights
as did Louis but nevertheless is credited by some with supplying Louis with perhaps the most precious gift he
ever received—his jab. But Williams is also said to have taught Louis the rudiments of the defense and was
supposedly the first man to encourage Louis to punch in combination. “Don’t throw one punch at a time and
wait for the guy to fall,” Holman is said to have urged Louis. “Hit him again!” Passed down to us by the victim
and those lucky enough to be in attendance comes the description of his first knockout combination, thrown by
Louis at amateur Joe Thomas at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1932. A double jab was followed by a right hand to
the body before the teenaged Joe Louis closed the blinds on the now immortal Thomas with another right hand
to the temple.

But his trainer for his move into the professional ranks, Jack Blackburn, would still have his work cut out for him.
If Holman Williams was to be an unlucky fighter, Blackburn had written the book on it. One of the most brilliant
boxers of his generation he had shared the ring with both Joe Gans and Sam Langford several times, getting the
better of each at least once. But the fight game had not been good to him. In between matching the greats and
the giants he faced in his time boxing mainly as a lightweight, Blackburn found time to find the bottle and find
trouble, lots of it. He was bad, a dangerous man with a dangerous heart.

When he first set eyes upon Louis, he famously sent him away saying, “a colored boxer who can fight and won’t
lie down can’t get any fights. I’m better off with white boys who aren’t as good.” He changed his mind when he
saw this African-American boy punch.

“He was likely to trip over his own feet but he could kill you with that left jab. I figured, man, if he can hit you
that hard with a jab, wonder what he can do with his right?”

What Louis needed to learn from Blackburn, more than anything, was how to move. How to get balanced, how
to move, how to box, how to fight. He knew how to punch, but he didn’t yet know how to fight, not really.

“Boxing is built upon punching and footwork,” says How to Box. “If the stance is too narrow for balance, move
the right foot a few inches to the right to widen the stance; if too wide, glide the right foot forwards a few
inches. Don’t lock the left leg but keep it straight.”

Freddie Roach described Joe Louis as the “best textbook fighter of all time.” Here we see the first great
foundation of that inch-perfect style. Louis hardly ever made small adjustments with his left foot. Watching him,
I sometimes get the impression he would prefer not to move it at all. His left jab is always perched over that lead
foot, ready to be thrown. Many of Joe’s critics accuse him of being robotic, stiff, of lacking dynamism in his
footwork. This is not a criticism without basis, but nor is it the whole story. He sacrifices dynamism upon the
altar of destruction; he trades footspeed for handspeed; he swaps naturally being in range for naturally being in
position to punch—always.

The description of footwork in How to Box is so simple but to see it in action is to understand why simplicity is so
often more akin to genius than complexity. Louis does as he describes, leading with his left foot, “a few inches at
a time, with the right foot following, always maintaining a proper stance.” Louis almost never abandoned the
stance Blackburn drilled into him: The right arm crooked, elbow protecting the ribs, “both arms relaxed, ready to
attack or defend…chin down.”

His left hand would famously float; Louis would have that error corrected for him, mainly by Max Schmeling but
with more than a little help from James J. Braddock and Tommy Farr. But that stance was, for the most part,
developed early and adhered to throughout a career that encountered more styles and types than any other
fighter at the weight.

It was visible as early as February 21st ,1925 for Joe’s rematch with Lee Ramage. The first fight had seen Louis
drop the boom with Ramage ahead on points. In the rematch, Louis would demonstrate the fundamentals that
would take him to the title and then beyond. The ring is not Disney—there are no fairytales, none. Every
dramatic narrative is built upon the twin pillars of will and skill.

Ramage fought on the backfoot, having previously been hit many times by Louis and finding he did not care for
it. As discussed, his footwork lacked dynamism, so Louis never tried to get that step ahead of the opponent. He
tended not to pre-cut the ring, and avoided getting ahead of his man as he was circled. Rather, he kept his front
toe perpendicular to his man’s backfoot, keeping the psychological and physical pressure firmly upon him,
moving with him, the definitive stalker forcing the mistake, stressing balance both in the ring and in print.

“You must be able to move the body easily at all time so that balance will not be disturbed.”
On film, Louis dips as he moves onto Ramage, jabbing and even when he flashes forwards driving his opponent
to the ropes for the first time, Louis is not compromised. He facilitates brutal blows with his studied mobility and
is within hitting distance again only seconds later. The second time Ramage comes crashing off the ropes, Louis
rotates his torso as he punches, the foundations are so solid that he is able to utilize a plane of movement not
seen again in the heavyweight division until Mike Tyson, at least not by a killing puncher. Tiny adjustments with
the backfoot are enough to transfer his weight around his body to wherever it needs to be for the punches he is
using to douse Ramage’s enthusiasm.

Ramage actually boxes well for much of the second half of the second round. He moves away, jabbing, he looks
reasonably skilled, quite graceful. But Louis is so fundamentally correct that even were he not Ramage’s superior
in every single way he would still be the master. He is so well balanced that he can call upon almost any punch
from almost any position, whether he is dipping in and slipping a jab or moving back throwing clipping uppercuts
as Ramage tries in vain to crowd him. He can commit to punches other fighters would be unable to utilize in
similar positions having compromised themselves. Joe almost never compromised his fundamentals. This near
perfection proved too much for Ramage after only two rounds as first a right hand and then a left hook laid him
low.

Of course, there were limitations, and these were exposed by nobody so completely during the Brown Bomber’s
prime as they were by Billy Conn. Conn recognized early that he would be trouble with Louis telling his trainer
and partner in pugilism John “Moonie” Ray to “get me in with this guy! He wouldn’t be able to hit me with a
handful of rice!” years before his first outing at heavyweight. Conn was right. Louis did struggle to hit Conn, for a
variety of reasons. Most of these are related to Conn’s brilliance, but that’s a story for another day. Here we are
interested in the great heavyweight champion.

Firstly, Billy’s footwork was every bit as disciplined as Joe’s. Going backwards he tended to use the same small
moves as Louis did coming in, meaning that he minimized dramatic errors and dented Joe’s momentum. Louis
forced his opponents to make the angles. He punished mistakes. He did not, as a habit, make these angles with
his footwork, rather he made them with the virtual threat of his fists. He forced the opponent to make the
angle. In and of itself, this is one of the hardest skills in boxing to master, but it does not pay to rely too heavily
upon even the deftest of skills against a fighter like Conn.

When Conn did abandon his small moves in favor of big ones, they tended to be brilliantly judged and perfectly
executed. Joe’s lack of dynamic footwork was exposed.

Conn was also very careful to punch Louis whenever the opportunity presented itself whilst he was going away.
Grossly underrated as a puncher at heavyweight (fighting men weighing over 175 lbs. fifteen times Conn
registered eight stoppages including one over Bob Pastor), Conn’s work prohibited Louis rushes.

On the inside, he set up a brick-wall defense and cuffed the champion, but his brilliance was not so prosaic. Over
and over again, Conn walked Louis in clinches, he tilted him, he pushed him to the side, he tugged upon his
arms, he pushed his head into Joe’s face and chest. In short, he did anything and everything he could to interfere
with Joe’s balance. He knew the importance of disrupting Joe’s foundation. Bereft of his most exquisite attribute
Louis could not turn over his punches in the special way he had learned and get his power across. Conn survived
those cuffing punches both on the inside and the outside where Conn’s perfect footwork and granite chin
combined to make him the most elusive of targets for the killing blow. If this sounds like an easy fix, take note of
the following—every fighter that tried it got knocked unconscious or something like it, including Billy Conn.

From How to Box:

“…when Billy missed me with a zipping left hook, I quickly crossed a right to his jaw and followed it by several
straight rights that sent him crashing to the canvas. I had to wait for Billy to miss.”

I think Louis hits the nail on the head here. He is indeed reduced from forcing the mistake as he did in so many
of his twenty-five successful title defenses, to waiting for a mistake. But with Louis you could make only one.

“Clever footwork does not mean hoping and jumping around,” we learn from How to Box. “This will put you off
balance and the slightest blow will upset you. The purpose of clever footwork is to give your opponent false
leads…it also carries you out of danger when hurt.”

This is Louis in a nutshell: economy. Every movement has a purpose, there is no such thing as show. He is often
derided for this and is sometimes compared negatively with the only other heavyweight to inhabit that
stratosphere reserved for the true greats, Muhammad Ali. I don’t want to get into that too heavily here (we will
later—I promise) but as a final word I want to say that in my opinion, Joe’s footwork is every bit as impressive, in
its own way, as is Muhammad’s. Even if Louis had been technically capable of producing Ali’s own brand of
genius, Blackburn would not have allowed it. Indeed, amongst the many other services he rendered, Blackburn
took Louis down off his toes. The reasoning was simple—to perfect his balance and thereby maximize the kill on
his delivery. This is what Blackburn means when he says that Joe Louis is a “manufactured killer, not a natural
one.”

Louis, by moving conservatively, kept his powder dry for the late rounds allowing him to post four knockouts in
the later rounds—KO11 Bob Pastor, TKO13 Abe Simon, KO13 Billy Conn, KO11 Joe Walcott—versus only three
visits to the judges’ scorecards—UD15 Tommy Farr, SD 15 Arturo Godoy, SD15 Joe Walcott—in title matches, in
addition to keeping him almost permanently in position to punch with the most devastating of results.

No fighter—in my opinion, literally no fighter, ever—had better footwork than Joe Louis given his individual
style. But having said that…it’s not why you watch Joe Louis fight. You don’t watch Joe fight for his footwork—
Muhammad Ali, yes; Joe Louis, no.

You watch Joe Louis for a different reason. To quote Jack Blackburn: “Your fists, Chappie. Let your fists be your
judge.”

In the build-up to Rocky Marciano’s first confrontation with Ezzard Charles, The Miami Herald cast an eye back
to The Rock’s heartbreaking 1951 destruction of Joe Louis. In an article entitled “Louis Jab Hurt Rock, Boxing
Bothers Him,” the newspaper recalled the testimony of Arthur Donovan, who refereed some twenty Joe Louis
fights in his storied career. Donovan talked “half fearfully” of the Joe Louis jab and his concern that the Bomber
would one day catch someone moving in, chin up and that the Champ would “break his neck.”

Everyone knows that Joe Louis is one of the greatest punchers of all time, that the unparalleled mixture of
speed, power and accuracy combined to create one of the most devastating offensive machines in history, but
his jab is now somewhat forgotten. Whilst YouTube and similar sights bless us with hours of boxing footage and
allow a new generation to discover the ruination Louis wrought upon his opposition, these highlight packages
often stress power punches and knockouts at the expensive of the techniques that buy these scintillating
moments—not least the jab.

Well, Louis did hurt Rocky Marciano with the jab. He hurt everyone he ever fought with the jab. Although, at 76
inches, Joe’s reach is two inches shorter than perennial peer Muhammad Ali and three inches shorter than a
modern giant like Vitali Klitschko, I think it rests comfortably amongst some of the best jabs in heavyweight
history. This was certainly not in question in his own time, the press labeling it “a piston of a punch,” “a brutal
blow,” “Joe’s best punch” and according to the same Miami Herald article that recalled the discomfort it
aroused in the era’s most preeminent referee (not to mention Rocky Marciano), “a punch that could rock a man
back on his heels.”

And his left hook wasn’t bad either.

The Jab

“The left jab is seldom if ever knockout blow,” says the 1948 British edition of How to Box by Joe Louis, “but
many bouts are won by the skillful use of it. It is used to keep your opponent off balance and create opening for
your more powerful blows.”

Anyone who has read the first part of this series, The Foundation of Skill, won’t be surprised to read that Joe
Louis stressed disrupting the opponent’s balance as much as he stressed maximizing his own and it is indeed one
of the major benefits of a busy, correct jab. Joe’s was absolutely correct and in the early phase of his career this
is demonstrated beautifully in his desolation of Max Baer. Arguably his most frightening display of concentrated
punching power the fight is facilitated by Baer’s granite chin, which allows Louis to continue delivering crushing
punches long after most men would have been under the care of the ringside doctor. But the jab is the punch
that defines the fight.

It is also the only punch Joe throws for the first minute, underlining his technical maturity and reliance upon the
punch Holman Williams drilled into him several years before. Film makes these punches appear extended or
glancing, but these are the same punches that James J. Braddock described as a series of “light bulbs exploding
in your face.” Louis has Baer under control from the first minute, and when Max finally throws his first punch, a
leaping right hand that misses by more than a foot, Louis had already landed four jabs and a winging uppercut to
the body (one count would have Louis missing just two punches the entire fight).

Moving away from the wild Baer but now sitting down even harder on the jab, Louis is clearly taking the advice
in his manual to “jab through the mark, not at it, this will give you a follow-through effect.” He threw thirty-six
assorted jabs in that first round and he threw them with wonderful variety mixing body blows with shots aimed
at Baer’s mouth and higher on his head. He varies the speed of the jab beautifully, a skill all but lost today, he
varies the power judiciously and in keeping with a wider tactical theme, for example throwing rangefinders as he
begins to circle before sitting down on the snapping punches as he makes the angle on Baer‘s own jab, landing
the shots that left Baer looking “like an Apache wearing war-paint” according to one writer.

Thirty-six jabs, and only a handful of other punches, but by the end of the round, Baer is all but beaten.

It is deeply ironic that what was the night upon which Joe’s jab matured to such devastating effect, he also
happened to put on his first immortal power punching display. The jab is the punch that puts the “box” in “box-
puncher” but Louis, as always, eclipsed his own skill with a display of violence so terrifying that it prompted Paul
Gallico to write in The Daily News, “I wonder if his new bride’s heart beat a little with fear that this terrible thing
was hers.”

The jab’s excellence is built primarily upon skill. It is not a punch that requires great speed to land quickly or
great power to jolt the opponent. It can be the shortest punch, often travelling the shortest distance, from the
lead hand to the head of the opponent boring in or from the shoulder of the fleet-footed matador trying to
place the bull-rushing pressure-fighter under control. But like all punches, natural gifts help to cover
shortcomings or cracks in technique. For Louis, proof of the perfection of his jab comes not on the night he met
Baer, when the beginnings of his greatness were beginning to be understood, but many years later.
In August of 1951, broke and fighting only for the money, his speed and power having deserted him, a few
pounds heavier than he had been in his prime, balding, trying to come back from his own failed comeback
having already lost to Ezzard Charles more than a year earlier, Louis was embracing every single cliché that exists
for a washed up pug when he re-matched Cesar Brion.

At the opening bell that night, Brion bought with a brush of his shoulder what other men had paid for in blood
and concussion in the previous two decades, bulling Louis back to the ropes as if he were nothing. But upon
extracting himself, Louis goes directly to the jab and just like he did against Baer all those years before he almost
immediately has his opponent under control. His jab has evolved, just slightly, and he often snaps it up slightly,
driving Brion’s head back a little more than the straight jab would, a heavy, thudding punch. Almost every time
he lands it flush, Brion takes a step back, blinks, thinks about the punch sportswriter Bill Corum called “the
stiffest and surest jab the ring has ever seen.”

Brion tried to solve this punch by dipping deep and coming up with his own punches or showing head
movement. Louis, by then a canny general, just hit him when he came up or when he stopped moving, now
shooting the jab straight down the middle, his unerring accuracy and technique yet to desert him. The punch
means Brion is reduced, on the outside, to throwing single shots, and even then reluctantly as Louis tends to hit
him with a jab either side of it. In the final round, Louis landed his first real burst of punches but he also threw
twenty-six left jabs. This is more than either Juan Manuel Marquez or Manny Pacquiao managed in the tenth
round of their most recent confrontation. Joe Louis had a great jab, one of the best ever at his weight. It was so
good he could beat ranked fighters with that punch alone, control ranked fighters with that punch alone.
Perhaps it should not rank alongside the very, very best in the division and it seems likely that he could have
been out-jabbed by the great technical giants, men like Sonny Liston and Larry Holmes, but I believe these may
be the only two fighters who I would rank clearly above him in this department. For various reasons of
technique, accuracy, persistence, incredible variety and most of all the openings he would carve and the traps
he would set with it, Louis can be ranked alongside the other jabbing behemoths in the open class, men like
Wladimir Klitschko, Muhammad Ali and Lennox Lewis.

Louis, like these men, was a fighter who could win a fight “on the jab alone.”

The Left Hook

“The shorter this blow,” says How to Box, “the better the effect.”

This is a summary of the Louis offense spoken specifically about the left hook. Joe’s hook was at his absolute
best when the threw it downstairs and we are going to look at body work in detail in Part Four, but when he
went upstairs it was his shortest power punch. In his second title defense in 1938 against Nathan Mann, he
proved it an unusually flexible punch, too, and it would remain the most varied and improvised finishing blow in
his arsenal long after the press had begun criticizing him, in some cases justifiably, for being a “robotic fighter.”
Louis fought along strictly disciplined lines, operating almost exclusively in a given kill-zone working to bring that
kill-zone to the opponent or the opponent to that kill-zone but usually in pre-determined technically proficient
ways. Against Mann though, as the broad-shouldered challenger rushed him for the first time, Louis propelled
himself sharply back and away. His left foot no longer in touch with the canvas, up on the toes of his right, Louis
corkscrewed a whip-cord of a hook from his loosely hanging left hand. This punch illustrates two things
concerning the Louis hook. Firstly, the positioning of his jab-hand and the frequency with which he throws that
damaging punch makes it a blow he can disguise, a natural counter. Secondly, it underlines the strangest fact of
all concerning the Louis left hook: he drove it with his right leg.
In Box Like the Pros, his own, more detailed manual on boxing, Joe Frazier is very clear on how the left foot
should be used when throwing the punch that made him famous. It is to be kept firmly planted; it is to drive the
punch; when you bring your left hip around to follow through keep the left foot planted; “adjust your balance as
you follow through with the punch, move a little if you have to”; but keep the left foot planted.

Similarly, Bernard Hopkins stresses this left foot drive:

“I dip a little to the left and rotate slightly to the left, by body weight shifts from both legs to mostly the left
one…as I bring the punch up I’m driving with the left leg and at the same time bringing my hips around…”

In How to Box by Joe Louis, the transfer of weight is through the right leg.

“From the proper stance…turn your body to the right, shifting your weight to the right leg, throw the left arm in
an arc to the opponent’s head. Make sure to hit through the mark and not at it.”

This is not unheard of. I have been told that Ray Leonard threw and even taught the left hook right-legged, or
rather he was not a slave to the left leg and preferred to gain the leverage where he could. That sounds like
Leonard, but it doesn’t really sound like Joe. More recently Wladimir Klitschko can be seen throwing a left hook
propelled almost entirely by the rear foot, most impressively for the knockout of Eddie Chambers. Still, it isn’t in
keeping with Joe’s reputation for technical exactitude and this right foot pivot interested me.

Later in the second round against Mann we see Louis push through with the right foot for the hook once again.
As Mann is finally baited forwards upon seeing Joe with his back to the ropes, the Champion throws out a
lightning fast softener, comes the other way with a clubbing punch to the side of Mann’s head before striking
out with the punch the trap was set for, a left hook that combines the best attributes of the other two punches.
Once more, Louis is turning through his right foot. Mann is stunned and almost goes to his haunches, his face an
open question mark, his steps a trickling stream. It is a double blow for the men surprised by Louis, they come
forwards as the aggressor into his kill-zone having landed some token punch (in this case a hard right hand) to
which Joe gives ground before nearly taking the opponent’s head off with punches. And what punches. Louis still
has his elbow crooked in the defensive position when he throws the first left hook, he’s throwing it across that
famous and oft-quoted distance, mere-inches, perfectly disguised, impossible to see coming, the power
generated in a fashion so brilliant and dynamic that they are almost beyond technically correct; that is, nobody
would ever try to teach a fighter to punch in this fashion because it just doesn’t occur to most trainers that the
person standing in front of them hitting the pads is the fistic equivalent of a primo ballerina. But it is perfect It is
literal perfection. The second punch was more fully born but it is still a mere forearm’s length in flight, punching
all the way through the target.

Two more perfect left hooks scored the first knockdown of the fight just seconds later. Mann flapped after he
felt the first one, arching back and to the side, but Louis looked like he was hitting a static heavy bag as he
delivered and calmly made his way to the neutral corner. When the action resumed, Louis walked up to Mann
and hit him with two more, one up, one down as the gutsy Connecticut man sagged on the ropes. The bell saved
him and he wandered off to a neutral corner of his own, confused by the absence of a stool. The inevitable
occurred at 1:56 in the third.

I’d nominate Mann as Joe’s best hooking performance, but it did not contain the most devastating hook he ever
threw. Louis saved this dubious honor for a fighter who infuriated him personally more perhaps than even Max
Schmeling, “Two Ton” Tony Galento. Employing the unfortunate language he has remained famous for, Galento
managed to find his way under Louis’ skin, before adding injury to insult by dropping him with a left of his own
in the third. In the fourth, Louis sent over what may have been the punch of his career, a left hook which Joe
says “started his mouth, nose and right eye bleeding.” There is a beautiful series of photographs in How to Box
showing Louis cock and wing in that punch. We see him adjust it in flight so the knuckle part of the glove
connects with the point of the chin before Louis follows all the way through, his left hand resting calmly in front
of his right, Zen-like. As Galento is falling, he too is Zen-like, but for different reasons.

Also of interest: we see Louis pivoting through his right foot. Why? Perhaps it was just the way he threw them
and when Blackburn saw how well they worked he refused to adjust them. Perhaps Louis had a strange
ambidextrousness where his left hook was concerned and like Ray Leonard he was able to generate torque with
either one of his legs dependent upon circumstances; there do seem to be times when he is driving through his
left.

Or just maybe, Joe Louis didn’t like the adjustment Joe Frazier describes at the end of his procedure for throwing
the perfect left hook: “Adjust your balance as you follow through, move a little if you have to.” Maybe he found
a better way to stay balanced. A more correct way, for him, to throw the punch. Stop—rewind that. There is no
“better way” than Frazier’s way when a fighter is throwing a left hook, right?

Right?

If this question makes you uncomfortable, keep an eye out for Part Three. We’re going to talk about the right
hand. We don’t have to worry about any peers butting in for that one.

None exist.

The Afro American was in Johnny Paycheck’s dressing room only minutes after his devastating knockout loss to
Joe Louis in the second round of their March 1940 heavyweight title fight. Louis had been champion for three
years and Johnny was his ninth successful defense. No press ever had access to a Louis knockout victim so soon
after the offending punch and the sight made quite an impression.

His legs “still quivering” as his brain continued to try to absorb the catastrophic messages of disaster Louis had
inflicted upon it, “still fear-stricken, in a state of wonderment” Paycheck spoke with Art Carter, The Afro’s sports
editor, “slowly and softly.”

“God, how that man can hit. I don’t remember anything after the first knockdown.”

The Afro American did not go easy on Paycheck in thanks for this easy access. Under a banner headline naming
him “A Pathetic Figure” they went on to describe him as “a pathetic loser.” If Paycheck was pathetic he was no
more or less so than the Titanic right after it was ripped in two by the iceberg. There are forces of nature that
neither man nor steamship can survive. Paycheck reacted courageously in my opinion, campaigning briefly and
redundantly for a rematch.

Perhaps he believed lightning couldn’t strike in the same place twice.

For it was indeed thunder and lightning that laid him low in the shape of two of the most devastatingly effective
punches in boxing history, two blows tipped by the same spear; the Joe Louis right hand.

The Straight Right

The straight right hand that won Joe Louis the heavyweight title of the world drove Jim Braddock’s gumshield
through his top lip and opened a wound that would require twenty-three stitches. A crimson stain “a foot in
diameter” spread across the canvas as the referee tolled off the ten. Louis had thrown a perfect punch by the
highest of standards—his own.
“The straight right is one of the most dangerous blows in boxing,” says the Joe Louis manual How to Box. “It is
always preceded by the left lead and carries lots of force.”

Louis had indeed preceded this murderous straight right with a left hand and it is an interesting one. Written up
in the press almost exclusively as a “left to the ribs,” this is how the punch is generally described even in modern
books on both Braddock and Louis, when in fact Joe throws a left hook at Braddock’s left bicep. At the beginning
of the action, the champion is guarding against the murderous right hand with his left hand held high running
interference through Joe’s arch of attack. Whilst Louis probably could have pecked a right hand across that left
he couldn’t have thrown the punch exactly as it is described in How to Box without compromising his
positioning. The hook Louis threw was far more devastating than the reported shot to the ribs and I do not
believe for even one moment that this was a happy accident. Louis positions himself for the left hook—readers
of Part 2 of this series will note that the punch is channeled primarily through Joe’s right leg—and then throws it
within the parameters of his kill-zone, defined by the limits of his balance, which will be familiar to readers of
Part 1. Braddock has taken no evasive action. The punch to the biceps does not seem to alarm him.

But it should have. It allowed Louis to commit to the mechanics of the straight right hand with impunity.

“Shift your weight to the left leg and wing the right side of your body forwards, driving your right fist straight
out.”

A note must be made here of how easily Louis is able to transfer the weight to his left leg from his right behind a
left hook. As Louis comes forward behind his left he transfers from right to left with complete naturalism. There
is no moment for adjustment between the left leg taking the weight of the hook then the straight right, as
described by Joe Frazier (see Part 2). Louis’ straight right is a fire that burns the oxygen the left hook produces
rather than a punch that hinders it with minor reorganizations. It is the most natural pairing imaginable and no
other heavyweight in history, to my knowledge, throws these two punches in this manner.

“Try to drive through your aim, and not just at it.”

After leading with the left, Louis would often cock his right hand in a salute to his intended victim, his elbow still
holding position at his ribs whilst the right pointed straight to the heavens before launching it forwards at the
exact moment he transfers his weight. This creates a wind-up that deals almost exclusively with straight lines.
The title-winning right hand was such a punch, but Louis never made do with impact. This perfect punch ripped
through Braddock’s face, scarring him for life, continued through the target and down, terminating finally at his
hips, perpendicular to his thigh. His head remained poised though, maintaining a rigid balance through his lead
leg and torso—he looks briefly like a pool player about to attempt a particularly tricky shot—and then Braddock
is falling piteously to the canvas, seemingly in four separate pieces, wet and lifeless but curiously unruffled, a
child counting out the 100 for hide-and-go-seek. Whether you believe Braddock when he said he could have
gotten up but “saw no point” or the newspapermen at ringside who deemed him insensible, it is hard to doubt
that Braddock wouldn’t have risen even if the referee had counted to such a number himself. All agreed that the
punch was amongst the loudest ever heard at ringside, the audio and visual combining to make The Cinderella
Man seem the victim of a gunshot.

Such punches are rare for most fighters, but not for Louis. Returning to March of 1940 and the Louis destruction
of Paycheck, the first knockdown is the result of a similar blow. Only seconds into the first, Louis had bundled,
jabbed and battered a clearly intimidated Paycheck back to the short rope. Then, the right. As a punch it is not
quite the equal of the one that ended Braddock for several reasons. Firstly, the leading jab missed the mark,
reaching the point of Paycheck’s chin but failing to get over as the challenger pulled his head back and to his left
in the moment that Louis pushed forwards onto his left foot, launching his right. Having failed to get his man
under control with the jab, Louis found himself fully extended with the right resulting in a lack of the follow-
through seen on the title-winning punch. Instead of driving his whole forearm though a rebounding opponent
who has just been jabbed, he got the point of Paycheck’s chin and another inch whilst his positioning is clearly
slightly off as the challenger has managed to edge his way outside of the straight-armed portion of the
champion’s kill-zone. The vibration jolted the fallen fighter all the way to his ankles. This, a less perfect version
of the Louis straight right, is the punch that separated Paycheck from his memory. Likely a blessing, he never
would be able to recall the moments between his bravely regaining his feet and the painful journey to the
dressing room where he was able to express his wonderment to The Afro American.

Up at nine, Paycheck is driven to a neutral corner, but has the wherewithal to block the next lightning Louis right
hand. Recognizing his man is ready to be taken, Louis tries to set up a second right hand with a left jab. The
straight right is often the finishing punch of choice for the Brown Bomber, although the left hook he tags on
behind it for an effortless three-punch combination is a nice insurance policy. Paycheck avoids being stopped
here by jabbing his left into the air creating a break with his own forearm which he’s able to apply to the Louis
right as it zips past—this transforms the punch from a scalpel to a club and Johnny is able to survive.

Somehow he found his legs for the second round but his footwork was skittish. Gliding, clever footwork is
arguably a part of the recipe for success against Louis but static small moves and feints do not impress him. Any
boxer moving his feet but remaining in the kill-zone is playing right into Joe’s hands. He is a fighter that is
programmed to destroy what is in front of him and the details are not particularly relevant. This mistake had
cost a Paycheck a nightmare start and that pattern was set to continue. Remaining disciplined, Louis jabbed his
opponent back keeping himself firmly in range but throwing only a probing left hand for the first few seconds,
working on his timing before firing, at thirty-one seconds, the punch he had been brewing since the bell for
round two.

It was all the more shocking for the fact that he had been “shufflin’ Joe” only seconds before, moving forwards
in those small, measured steps, looking like the fighter some casual fans have come to misunderstand, especially
post-Tyson. These gradual moves, these narrow approaches, these “shuffles” are the equivalent of Tyson’s
menacing bull-rushes. They are bought with less energy but are layered with just as much menace and require
nothing like the admittedly impressive physical acrobatics Tyson is forced to perform to close the distance.

As a punch, it may be even more perfect than the one that pole-axed Braddock. Just as he did then, Louis gets all
his weight onto his front foot; just as he did then, Louis follows through all the way, his forearm running
horizontal to the black strip on his trunks before it comes to rest as Paycheck is rocked all the way back on his
heels before collapsing at Joe’s feet, flat on his back. Louis engineered the punch so as Paycheck was circling into
it as it landed, making it even more calamitous to the victim’s senses, a veritable iceberg of a punch, un-
survivable for even the unsinkable.

I say engineered and I mean it. There is a final adjustment of the feet as Louis lands the jab that unlocked the
final gate keeping him at distance. Coming that little bit closer allowed Louis to get outside Paycheck and drive
his right through his victim’s left jaw and on as the recipient moves to his left. Throwing the punch without the
adjustment would have seen him land straight-down-the-pipe on an opponent who is going away, still possibly
lethal for a man as hurt as Paycheck but perhaps not the ultimate in killing punches, which is what it became as
Louis made that move inside. It seems a small thing, but it is hard to teach and hard to learn and it requires both
a cool head and sublime technique to execute. It is the difference between being a good puncher and good
technician and a great puncher and great technician.

But in a roundabout way it reveals a weakness in the punch—and in Louis.

The killing field for Joe’s straight right is extremely narrow. As stated above, finding comparable punching
technicians is not easy but as an out-fighter, the great strawweight champion Ricardo Lopez is perhaps on a par.
Nothing like Joe’s equal as an infighter or short arm puncher, at distance the little man executes in combination
as well as anyone and although he lacks the killing power of Joe’s straight right I would consider him more
flexible. He found ways to reach with the punch, to stab with it. He can be seen using it as a reverse jab. Most of
all the width across which he is willing to throw it is much wider, his targeting for the punch is less impacted by
tunnel vision. Louis has to bring his opponent into a very specific kill-zone to activate the trigger for that punch.
He is arguably too much the perfectionist. He lets opponents get away—he let Conn get away—because Conn
could read and stay out of the narrow cone where the Louis straight gets lit up in.

For the knockout of Johnny Paycheck Louis used a covering jab and footwork to engineer an opening two inches
across and then landed a technically flawless punch on that opening thereby creating a finisher which almost no
fighter in any era would have survived. That is wonderful skill and it must not be forgotten or minimized. But if
there was a flaw in the punch it was the same flaw that would dog Louis for his entire career and beyond—that
he was too specific, almost robotic. Whilst the beautiful improvisation of a left hook to Braddock’s biceps in
order to facilitate a clear path for the narrow trench the straight right needed can dispel notions of stiffness in
his boxing to a degree, Louis still needed a dirty counterpart to this precision punch.

The rolling thunder.

The Right Cross

What How to Box calls the right cross would most likely be referred to today as the overhand right. But it’s as
the great man once said: “What’s in a name?” Some things never change. How to Box:

“In order for the right cross to have the proper effect it should be remembered that its success depends upon
the speed with which it is carried out.”

By any other name we recognize this as truth. The overhand right, the right cross, whatever it is named the
slower version is an open invitation to a counter. Of all the punches it is the most difficult to neaten up due
simply due to the natural arc. Whilst every other punch tends to work in terms of the distance between point A
and point B where A is the fist and B is the target area, the right cross travels a longer path as a consequence of
form.

“Assuming the proper stance,” Joe Louis and ghostwriter Edward Mallory continue, “bend your body slightly
forward from the waist, then throwing your body power into it, bring your right arm up, over and across (making
almost a complete semi-circle).”

In 1937, Bob Pastor had boxed ten rounds with Joe, making the scheduled distance. Although he was soundly
beaten, gaining one round on the two judges’ cards and the referee giving him nothing, Pastor celebrated like he
had won the fight and the image seemed to resonate with the public. Pastor gathered himself for a shot at Joe’s
world title in late 1939. Louis had been frustrated if not befuddled by Pastor’s tactics in the first fight and was
determined to stamp his authority on the fight early. The right cross was to be his weapon of choice.

Pastor’s tactics are interesting because they are a more realistic version of Paycheck’s later tactics, and, I would
argue, part of a double foundation for Billy Conn’s strategy against Louis (along with some of the tougher
lessons Fritzie Zivic taught him). Showing genuine mobility rather than Paycheck‘s queer half-feints and a sharp
offense when Louis steps into range is a very reasonable strategy on paper. Unfortunately, Louis had already
measured his man in that first fight and Joe and Chappie Blackburn had their tactics in place. Louis prods with his
jab, an almost feint, the blinder as the old-timers called it, before slashing with his right cross. Louis doesn’t fight
for position or use the left as a covering measure to reposition or to swat defensive ramparts out of the way, he
uses it as a distraction, a killdeer bird, a lie, a message that the attack is weak.

The right hand he throws behind it is a punch far less fussy than the straight. It doesn’t need to be nursed into
position and is the dirtiest punch in the Louis arsenal from the technical perspective. He lands it less than a
minute into the fight against Pastor in 1939 behind the flapping pretty-birdy left. Pastor took it high on the head
which likely saved him from an immediate count. Sagging into the ropes with his back to the camera, Bob’s
expression is not revealed but he does seem to pause for a moment in consideration of the hardest punch Louis
had landed on him up until that point—not even the punches Joe managed to get across in the first fight had
prepared him for that one.

Pastor comes back at Louis and they maul momentarily before Joe, without taking a step back or to the side,
makes space for another cross. It’s a reactive punch, thrown in answer to the tiny amount of room Pastor
provides as he fights for his own balance. Louis follows all the way through on this punch, just as he does on the
straight, his hips turned eighty degrees, Pastor turns with him under the force of the blow and as the punch
finally comes to rest the two are looking away from their own fight, each of them looking out across the ring and
into the 33,000 strong crowd before Louis snaps back into position and Pastor crumbles to his knees. How to Box
insists that you throw the punch “with all the energy and strength you possess” and Joe commits to that tenant
with enthusiasm but what is displayed here is his continued control of total balance even whilst following
through on such a punch. On the rare occasions his balance is compromised it is generally this punch that has
caused the blip. But for the most part he arcs the punch as he describes, rockets through the opponent (or even
misses) but remains welded to the canvas, his torso returning smoothly to front and center after the follow-
through. Watching the great heavyweights throw this punch one comes to understand how rare a talent this is.
Even men like Dempsey and Tyson, compact power-hitters who also trade of balance and speed, can struggle
behind this one.

But for all this, Pastor is up at one, Louis closes quickly and treats him to a straight right—behind a jab,
naturally—which doesn’t quite make the cut as a Louis punch, appearing to hit at rather than through his man.
This time Pastor gets up at nine and although he looks in control of his faculties as he hobbles back to ring
center streaked in resin, he looks very much the new boy at school, unsure just how far his new playmate is
willing to go in this dangerous game. Louis gives as brief an answer as possible throwing two rare lead right
hands to drop Pastor for the third count, but Pastor is running from these punches now and Louis is not catching
him clean. This is where Louis really relies upon the cross. It’s a barrage punch he can throw at a retreating
target, one that can’t be baited into contesting space or trying to punch back. If he was to rely upon the straight
right hand in these situations, his right hand would become a non-factor against a hurt or fleet-footed
opponent.

At the beginning of the second Louis tries both the straight right, to no avail, and a clipping hook which gets
home without the desired result. After that he goes back to his money punch when up against a runner, rolling
in the thunder. These aren’t broadsides, it’s not like Joe’s dirty punch is anything other than compressed,
succinct, but it’s targeted in a less computerized fashion, there’s no self-enforced flight-path or perfection
bought with multiple preliminary moves. He just lashes them out there, catching Pastor high on the head with
the first one, sending the smaller man on the run for nearly a full minute during which barely a punch is landed.
Louis stalks him patiently and when Pastor finally tries a serious punch, a jab, he parries then shows the
challenger that birdy, that half-formed jab again and all of a sudden Pastor is on the ground again looking up.
Louis still requires patience to land, but it is telling that in a round where his fleet-footed opponent spent almost
the entire three minutes on the run Louis threw more crosses than he did power punches of any other kind.

Pastor survived the second and spent most of the rest of the fight on the run, aside from the eighth, where he
mounted his only offense, arguably winning that round. Louis had limited success but did well enough that he
was able to go back to his corner at the end of the tenth and tell Blackburn, “The next round is the one, I’m
going to get him.”

Pastor had indeed tired and he made his fatal mistake within seconds of the restart, trying to jab and then move
across Louis to his own left. Louis threw a covering left and then brought the right hand over as Pastor moved. In
the end it was almost too easy. Pastor collapsed backwards like his ass suddenly weighed two metric tons and
Louis had fulfilled his prediction.

“I didn’t even see the punch coming,” remarked the beaten challenger post-fight. “The next thing I knew the
referee was counting nine.”

They belong together these two punches. If Louis had just been armed with the laser-guided straight right he
would have spent much of his career being out-maneuvered. Had he been armed with just the cross he would
have visited with the judges more often, likely to his detriment. But they intertwine to create a right hand
offense that I’d consider unparalleled. If Louis has a tiny handful of betters where his jab is concerned and if
there is a serious argument to be had regarding the status of his hook, there are no peers to his right hand
offense at his weight. For all that fighters like Foreman and Lewis who came after him were bigger and stronger,
nobody has ever put together the fundamentals of great right handed punching like Louis—and we haven’t even
come to what made him really special yet, the way he wove these different punches together.

We’re getting there, I promise. The series is now at the halfway point. Next up for us, inside. Getting close and
personal is the last thing you wanted to do if you were actually in the ring with Louis, but it should be safe for us.
And we just might learn something.

There is a certain type of Joe Louis opponent. He is not defined by the style with which he boxes, his size or his
temperament. What binds these men together is that gained the attention of Joe Louis as adversaries. Think of
men like Jersey Joe Walcott (more of whom in Part Five), Max Schmeling and Billy Conn. At a given moment it
dawned upon each of these men for the first time that Joe Louis had really noticed him. That he had registered.
So many fighters who had the bravery to take to the ring with him were interchangeable. Paycheck, Dorazio,
McCoy, Roper, Lewis, these men did not stir in Louis even the merest suggestion that he was doing anything
other than what came naturally; he was a shark that had come to feed and not to fight.

For each of those that troubled him long enough for him to notice them in a more fundamental way, a way that
called for studied consideration, the moment of realization came at different times. Walcott learned last, as he
took to his heels and ran from Joe in the final round of their first fight. Schmeling likely realized in the moment
his back was broken by a Louis punch in their rematch. Conn recognized his predicament as he came to from an
inexplicable reverie in his dressing room before his own second fight with Louis long enough to mutter, “this will
be the worst fight ever” before trudging to the ring with the same expectation of a positive outcome as a man
heading to the gallows.

And what of Arturo Godoy, the Chilean jack-in-the-box bruiser who extended Joe Louis fifteen rounds in
February of 1940, when did he realize he had drawn the special attention of a champion who always wrought
terrible havoc on the fighters that caught his eye? History doesn’t record the exact moment but if I were
guessing I would speculate that it was whenever he learned that Louis was working in training specifically to
nullify the Godoy style. According to The San Jose Evening News, Louis had been working with sparring partners
who were told to recreate the “croquet-wicket stance” of the Chilean contender whilst Louis worked upon
tactics to nullify the awkwardness of an opponent who had split the decision in that first fight.

It seemed Godoy had caught the attention of Jack Blackburn, too.

After the debacle that was the first Schmeling fight, Blackburn tended to satisfy himself with a solid training
camp that saw Louis turn up and do what he was told. Blackburn was hired in part because he was tough
enough to handle a man with Joe’s astonishing gifts but by the time the German had been set up for them, a
problem that even canny manager John Roxborough could not have foreseen emerged—Blackburn had gone
soft. This embittered, giant-killing, murdering alcoholic had fallen so completely for Joe Louis that he couldn’t
bring him to heel without the fighter’s own cooperation. Blackburn complained bitterly to the Norfolk Journal
and Guide about Joe’s new relaxed attitude to training.

“You newspaper men have made him think he can just walk out and punch anyone over and that Schmeling’s
the easiest pushover of the lot. Well Joe’s likely to get hit on the chin by one of them Schmeling rights…”

The trainer’s total prescience in predicting not just Joe’s downfall but the specific mode of that downfall is
arguably the best thing that ever happened to Louis. Little Chappie had no more problems getting Big Chappie to
listen to what he was told thereafter. Louis worked in training, only pausing long enough to let Blackburn taste
the sweat on his shoulder when, after weighing the salt content, he would indicate whether Joe should continue
or hit the shower.

Whilst they talked about the specific strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, Blackburn did not have a
modern day trainer’s access to film or internet and Godoy had not boxed in the United States since 1937. In
early 1940, Blackburn and Louis had been caught by surprise and had been run close. They would not repeat
that mistake four months later.

“I don’t like other fella to make me look bad,” said Joe. “They usually find out I don’t like it.”

Another Joe Louis punch was about to come of age.

The Uppercut

“Perhaps the shortest of all blows is the uppercut.”

This is the first word on the uppercut in the Joe Louis boxing manual I hope readers are by now familiar with,
How to Box. Joe did indeed throw uppercuts shorter even than the narrowest of his hooks, but it was not a
punch that he used to bombard and overwhelm opponents until the second fight with Godoy. The uppercut in
volume solved both of the problems Godoy had set for him in the first fight, discouraging the headbutts Joe felt
the Chilean had reigned down upon him and punishing every reckless step in his swarming attack. The punches
themselves are dizzying. Louis begins with a right uppercut inside, “bending to the right and slightly forwards” as
How to Box advises on throwing the right uppercut, before stepping back as Godoy tries to crowd him and
landing a left uppercut/overhand right twice in quick succession, “dropping your right arm a few inches and
making sure the fingers of your fist are facing your own body, bring your right arm up in an underhand arc to
your opponents chin.”

A missed or even a landed uppercut can be an invitation to the wildest of counters because, as per the above
description, it commits the bodyweight to the same side as the punch that is being thrown. You transfer the
weight to your left hand side as you throw your left. Joe’s problem with the commitment he shows to this punch
is that it makes him vulnerable to exactly the type of rushes that Godoy excels in. This, then, is why Louis is so
careful to throw another punch behind it, generally his wildest, least technically fussy punch. His preternatural
balance allows him to commit to this sort of plan. Imagine for a moment the practical difficulties in maintaining
balance, never mind punching position, whilst being leaned upon and butted by a 200 lb. man and steering your
weight right and throwing the uppercut—now add the technical detail of the second punch (see Part 3—The
Right Hand). My guess is that there has been no fighter around his weight capable of making this fight plan work
with the possible exception of Evander Holyfield, who was never able to generate anything like the speed and
power Louis had on these punches.

Godoy would say afterwards that these were the blows that dissuaded him from his highly publicized pre-fight
strategy of slugging it out with Louis. He had lasted perhaps thirty seconds.

Going now to the fight-plan that had caused Louis so much frustration in the first fight, Godoy tried to swarm his
way in from the crouch, Louis greeted him with the right uppercut to the body. The punches that come right
after this blow are the ones that had made so little impression on the challenger in the first fight, but Louis has
his single welcomer down pat already—the uppercut is working.

Just how much he needs that uppercut becomes apparent as the rest of the round plays itself out. Louis spoke
after the first fight of his concern for his hands. Beating a tattoo upon Godoy’s bowed head, he claims to have
never risked the wrath of his full-blooded straight punches in that fight—there is indeed a noted difference in
the Louis jab, which Blackburn has convinced him he needs to throw with impunity in the second meeting—but
the straight right stays in the holster. The other punches skit and whistle off Godoy as he burrows in, the angles
are all wrong as he gets inside the arc of the left hook and even that messier cross. Whenever a near-to-flush
punch finds him, he dips even lower to ditch whatever comes behind it. Through the second, third, fourth and
fifth Louis peppered uppercuts into what may have seemed at the time a repeat of the first fight, but that punch
was telling. Sometimes he just lifted them into the face or body of the oncoming Chilean as he mauled forwards,
low-risk, low-reward punches that did a cumulative damage to his opponent. But every now and again he would
turn the style on and throw the punch as it’s described in How to Box, giving it “the slight twist of the hip” that
will often “send your opponent tumbling to the canvas.”

At the end of the fifth, Louis told Blackburn that his stubborn opponent was “getting soft” and was “ready to
go.” Blackburn hesitated then told Louis to keep boxing for one more round. The frustration in Joe’s work in
those three minutes is there to see; it is, I believe, his worst round of the fight. He’s a shark that came to fight
but is now ready to feed. Blackburn saw the redundancy of holding him back any longer, and in the seventh,
Louis came to kill. The weapon of choice, of course, was the uppercut.

By the beginning of that seventh, Joe had already inflicted upon Godoy the wounds, predominantly to his left
eye and his lips, that would lead The Afro American to describe him as “the worst battered piece of meat ever to
walk from the Yankee Stadium,” easy to write off as hyperbole were it not for The Calgary Herald describing him
one week later as “still looking like he had been hit with a meat-clever.”

Louis landed more than a dozen flush uppercuts of the perfected variety in that seventh round and to appreciate
their power is to watch Godoy lose touch with his own boxing as the round ticks down. No longer fighting to
contain his man he now makes half steps, turning Godoy as he goes, opening doors for one or other of those
cleaving punches that cost him so little in terms of balance. The knockdown, which comes right at the end of the
round, is a sight to see, as Godoy bobs twice below waist height, a bemused Louis looking on, missing with his
first punch, but then straightening Godoy to almost his full height against his will on the end of first a left-
handed, and then a right-handed uppercut. This is the Louis solution to the Godoy crouch in a nutshell: punch
him underneath his chin until he stands up straight.

The eighth is a master class in the uppercut. Louis recognizes immediately that Godoy no longer has the balance
or strength to swarm and that he is now only following. He immediately transfers his offense to the backfoot,
fighting laterally and backwards making room by turns for each hand. Godoy is a rampart crumbling before
something every bit as inevitable as time.

The straight right hand is finally uncorked to dispatch the gutsy Chilean, but the uppercut is the punch that
solved the puzzle, won the fight, and opened Godoy’s face like a can of blood-frothed beer. The “dozens” of
stitches he needed in his eyebrows post-fight likely contributed to the end of his prime—Louis had broken
another one, Godoy won only four of his next twelve fights.

But he was spared the expected body punching, outside of the occasional uppercut. The press had been almost
unanimous pre-fight in predicting that Louis would go to the body in an effort to “straighten Godoy up.” Joe
didn’t stress body punching, however—not that this stopped the body punching stressing the opponent.

Bodywork

When Joe Louis stopped Red Burman with a body punch in January of 1941, the most telling reaction was
surprise. Louis just didn’t knock guys out with body shots.

“For the first time in his three year reign as king of the fistic world,” wrote The Lewiston Morning Tribune,
“[Louis] knocked out a rival with a punch to the body.”

The punch itself was a straight right hand, the most precise and deadly of the Louis finishers as outlined in Part
Three, this time driven to the heart.

“So unexpected was it,” the newspaper continued, “that the crowd in Madison Square Garden let out an audible
gasp as the Brown Bomber revealed this new way of arriving at the old result. Up to tonight he flattened 10 of
the 12 battlers who had challenged the reign he began when he finished old Jim Braddock…the head punches
were the crushers.”

Burman had surprised up until that point, doing well and arguably winning the third on a hard left hand that
“half turned” the champion, but in the fifth he was brought to heel, cut and bloodied by the champion before
being trapped upon the ropes and very nearly broken in two.

“A funny look spread over [Burman’s] face,” said the Tribune of the challenger’s reaction to the final punch.
“Then he toppled. He fell with his head and neck across the bottom strand of the ropes and stayed that way,
moving only slightly.”

“That was just about the hardest punch I ever threw,” Louis offered post-fight.

The above remark is worthy of your consideration. Louis still had some incredible punches ahead of him
including, amongst others, the destruction of Buddy Baer (more of which in Part Six) but his more famous single
punches— the left hook against Galento that brought blood from the face of “the little man” in rivers, the
cannonball right that left Braddock in repost on the canvas, the shot that brought the famous scream from
Schmeling—were behind him. But Joe’s pick—or “just about”—was the body shot he threw at Burman, twelve
defenses into his extraordinary title run. What this tells us is that Louis is as capable of hurting a man to the
body as he is to the head. The reason that he doesn’t have more stoppages via body punches is that he was
every bit as much a headhunter as the other One, Muhammad Ali. But Louis was far too drilled, far too much the
perfect technician to neglect body punching in the same way. He used it as a tool to facilitate his headhunting,
and so great a fighter was he that he sharpened this tool not upon journeymen as is customary, but upon two
former heavyweight champions of the world.

A little under a year after turning professional with a record standing at just 19-0, Joe Louis matched not just a
former world champion but a man who outweighed him by more than sixty pounds in the shape of Italian giant
Primo Carnera. In the first, Louis ripped punches into Carnera’s head and Carnera did his best to grab his
tormentor, closing down avenues for Joe’s more exact punches upstairs but opening up the body. In the second
Louis attacked that body two-handed as Carnera’s eyes were filled by what the Lewiston Daily Sun ringside
reporter described as “a look of horror.” By adding bodywork, Louis had transformed himself into a lit stick of
dynamite, still possible to smother, but only to one’s detriment. He continued to mix his punches in this fashion
until the fourth, during which he rested a little only to open up in earnest in the fifth.

As always, Louis is looking to land his jab, but here he goes to the body. Carnera has a serious size advantage
and whilst Louis hasn’t struggled to reach him the jab is his way in. When he throws this punch to the body it is
not quite as perfect or snapping as is the respective punch to the head. Louis “pumps” his left when he throws it
downstairs, often taking a step to his left or straight back as he does so, a nod to his temporary vulnerability as,
for just a second, his bodyweight goes over that front foot. Adding a stout jab to the chest, his offense is in
motion without his having to overreach himself in any meaningful way. Carnera is understandably but
ineffectually trying to maintain distance with his own jab but Louis has a dramatic advantage in handspeed
which allows him to close that gap. When the Italian manages to move off the ropes having suffered a handful of
Joe’s Sunday punches, Louis again returns to the jab to the body, lowering Carnera’s guard and setting him up
beautifully for the feint Louis launches at around 1:50 of the round, a step inside as though he were about to jab
the body followed by a shift and a clattering hook upstairs. Carnera’s bewilderment is now complete. He is
guarding against a jab to the body, a jab to the chest, flashing punches upstairs and a feint off the low jab. With
just two different jabs downstairs, Louis has bought himself total tactical superiority over a much larger former
champion of the world.

In the sixth, a scything left hook is added to the wheelhouse right Louis dropped at the end of the fifth. This
punch causes Carnera notable discomfort as it is delivered in the same fashion as the left hook to the head,
short, fast and powered through the right leg (see Part Two—The Jab & Left Hook). As a rule Louis displays no
equivalent to the straight right hand to the body (though he seems to have made an exception for the
unfortunate Burman) but he throws his other power punches in near identical fashion to the ones he throws
upstairs. For all that, they are rarer and generally abandoned when it is time for Louis to finish, although he does
feint a left to the body as he prepares the giant’s coup-de-grace.

Only weeks later, bodywork played less crucial role against another former heavyweight champion, Jack
Sharkey.

Sharkey was there for Joe’s punches more than Carnera had been by virtue of his lesser size but Louis utilized a
great uppercut to the body in that fight, straight through the middle as Sharkey went into his crouch,
foreshadowing his eventual solution to the Godoy problem. Sharkey’s lack of dynamism and abandonment of his
offense also left him vulnerable to a newfound fluidity in Louis as he went round the houses on Jack, landing a
left to the head then a right to the body then a left to the body and a right to the head. But these body blows
are not the eye-catching punches, and nor should they be. How to Box offers little, a single paragraph which
notes dryly how body punches are liable to “weaken the opponent,” but as we’ve seen they were much more.
The body punch that laid Red Burman low led him to label Louis “the killer-driller,” a nickname that may have
stuck were it not for the fact that Louis had been “The Brown Bomber” for many defenses by that stage. The real
function of Joe’s bodywork was not to “kill” however, rather it was designed as a second front, a secondary
wave of attack to confuse and stretch the opponent’s defense. Louis, like all great destroyers, understood to
take the opponent’s defenses to pieces. Furthermore, like all great fighters he has a defense of his very own. It is
not the deeply flawed defense of legend, either. It is layered, for the most part technically sound, designed to
facilitate the punches that made Joe Louis famous and the subject of Part Five.

“He was a master on defense.”—Nat Fleischer

The judgement of the founder of The Ring magazine is not to be ignored but nor can it be allowed to go
unremarked that many of his most prestigious contemporaries disagreed with him, some quite vehemently. The
great newspaperman Grantland Rice was amongst them:

“…[O]n the defensive side there is still a lapse between mind and muscle. A break in an important co-
ordination.”

I have sympathy with both points of view. Louis is at heart an offensive machine. This is something of a cliché,
but where certain high end boxers are concerned—Dempsey, Louis, Tyson—it is absolutely applicable. Offensive
machines are limited in defense, traditionally, a situation which is entirely natural. Getting the punches across
becomes the most important thing for these men and in turn that determination makes the opponent nervous
about punching—this is the first line of defense for any great hitter and Louis was no different. It was a brave
man who planted his feet when sharing the ring with him. Nevertheless even the most aggressive of boxers
must have solid defensive technique to become successful at the highest level. As described in Part One—The
Foundation of Skill, Joe laid some of the nuts and bolts of these techniques bare in How to Box, the manual
released in his name after his triumphant return bout with Jersey Joe Walcott. Through Parts Two, Three and
Four we’ve taken a close look at Joe Louis on offense using Joe’s ghost-written instructions in tandem with a
detailed look at Louis on film and putting defense under the microscope is going to be no different. In the other
corner for this most difficult subject is one of Joe’s most difficult opponents—Jersey Joe Walcott.

Speaking in 1941 of the then absolutely primed version of Joe Louis, Billy Conn’s trainer Johnny Ray said before
Louis-Conn I:

“You guys have got it all wrong. You don’t box Joe Louis. You can put all the boxers you like in front of him and
he’ll find them. No, you need to fight Joe Louis. You need to fight Louis every minute of every round, you need
someone who can take his punches and give him some back. That’s how you beat him.”

The great Conn came within touching distance of doing just that before succumbing to the inevitable. Now
Walcott set out to find a combination of the two strategies described in Ray’s informed outburst that would be
the past-prime Champion’s undoing. His mission statement was nothing less than the literal perfection of
boxing’s defining mission statement, one that will be repeated a thousand times in gyms all across the world this
very day in one form or another: hit and don’t be hit. Walcott spent fleeting, desperate moments in the pocket
always looking for the exit just before Louis hit his stride, exchanged with him at distance but always trying to
force Louis to lead in unfavorable moments, then vanishing in a series of sudden, unpredictable moves that left
a fuming Louis resetting his stance over and over again. Louis does not land a single straight right hand of real
import in the twenty-six rounds spent in Walcott’s company. Readers of Part Three—The Right Hand will
understand the significance of this.

Jersey Joe stretched Louis to the absolute limit on offense but also on defense and in all likelihood it is amongst
his worst performances in this regard, but this is a fight I wanted to take a closer look at before this series was
concluded —and we’re perilously close to the end now. So I’m breaking one of my own rules and examining a
fight of which apparently only highlights have survived—Louis-Walcott I.

In the opening moments of that fight’s first round, Louis demonstrates his most crucial defensive skill, the slip. In
How to Box this is described as a technique “used against straight leads and counters. As your opponent leads
with his left, shift your body about five or six inches to the right of the blow, making it fall harmlessly over your
shoulder…sometimes it is only necessary to move your head to slip a punch.”

This is a key skill for Louis and one that allowed him to consistently out-jab opponents over the course of his
career, even those who out-reached him.

After being caught with two clipping Walcott jabs early, Louis slipped the third in this manner. What is crucial to
note about the Louis defense is that it is built specifically to facilitate offense. After the punch is slipped, How to
Box tells us that we should find ourselves in position “for a blow to his unprotected left side.” This is the theory,
in practice Louis comes out of the slip to throw a punch at Walcott’s right side before following it up with a short
straight right. It is Louis’ early warning that the angles Walcott will be showing will not be of the type he has
been shown in the gym.

It’s also an early lesson in the way that Louis wove his complete offense together with his less astonishing
defense to create a pattern of deterrent that affected almost every opponent he ever met.

Moments later, Walcott tried his first serious left hook and Louis demonstrated the duck. “Bend forwards at the
waist, ducking his blow. As soon as you have ducked his blow, straighten up and at the same time counter with a
blow to your opponent.”

Louis pulls this counter off beautifully, following a left uppercut to the body with a clubbing right hand around
the back of Walcott’s head as Jersey Joe, already rocking a little, tries for his own duck. He doesn’t quite make it
and backs up before unveiling the two-step that would cause Louis trouble all night, going away and coming
back with a punch (usually a right), one big horrible feint that Louis will fail to unpick in either fight. Later,
swarming Walcott back to his own corner, Louis comes square and continues to throw blows even as Walcott
blocks them on his gloves. Here we see the elemental weakness in the Louis defense—it is all but abandoned
when he is in the full flow of an attack. Most offensive machines share this weakness. It is born of the absolute
surety that exists in this extremely rare breed of fighter that they can outpunch any opponent, and that
exchanges are therefore to be sought.

After going back to his boxing in the second, Louis shows a nice parry in the third. The champion’s curious habit
of occasionally keeping his gloves tightly knitted at his chest is not entirely a matter of preparing his offense; it
also allows him to move the “unit” the two gloves create up or down to catch straight blows that do not leave
the opponent available for a counter. Nor does How to Box stress counterpunching after blocking blows. On
occasions where the guard is made mobile to block opposition punches, the priority seems to move over to
defense, perhaps the reason Louis did not use this strategy often. He can be seen primarily as a slipper and
ducker of punches rather than a parrying or blocking fighter due to the lack of natural countering opportunities
these earlier methods provide when compared to the latter, although such opportunities can of course be
engineered. Early in the ninth Louis did exactly that. As Walcott moved forward and fired two-handed, Louis
showed good flexibility, lifting his forearms which worked as an additional guard as Louis performed the block as
described in How to Box:

“As your opponent leads, turn your body…If your opponent leads with a blow to the chin, use your shoulder to
block it.”
Louis turns with this two-handed attack, tucking in his chin and lifting the relevant shoulder on each turn and
when to his own surprise, Walcott “pops up” behind these shots right in Joe’s kill zone he improvises a beautiful
pivoted hook which catches Jersey Joe on the mouth, helping him win the round.

In the fourteenth he can be seen parrying a Walcott jab and then firing off his own, not quite generating a
counter but using his defense to neutralize a rare Jersey Joe lead before taking advantage and landing his own
punch.

The fifteenth round of Louis-Walcott I may not be a round that in particular brings to mind matters of defense as
Walcott ran and Louis chased him, but actually it is one of Joe’s better defensive rounds. He parries a Walcott
jab in his very first action and slips two more before throwing his first punch, a left hook which glances off
Walcott’s head. Louis is trying to box noticeably closer to Walcott now and his defense is paramount. Walcott
spent most of the final round retreating and flashing up unpredictable punches when cornered or desperate, but
Louis deals with most of these before firing back. Mobile and hard to hit, Louis demonstrates the truth of Johnny
Ray’s statement of 1941 and his own immortal line before the Louis-Conn rematch: if they run, they can’t hide,
not from him.

The decision for this fight was by far and away the most controversial of The Bomber’s career and to this day the
word used to describe it is “robbery.” For as long as we are discussing the fight, I have decided to take a brief
look of my own at this now seemingly established fact.

The recent Manny Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley fight will be, for many, the benchmark robbery of their youth. This
is a result so seemingly without explanation that of the one-hundred and twenty-five media sources I have seen
produce a scorecard (including several from the guys at boxing.com) we have one-hundred and twenty-one
scoring in favor of Pacquiao, three scoring in favor of Bradley, and one scoring the fight a draw. That is a ratio of
around about 1:30 against those seeing the fight any other way than a win for Pacquiao.

The Pittsburgh Press conducted a ringside poll of writers at the venue the night Louis decisioned Walcott and
whilst the majority, twenty-four, had Jersey Joe the winner, some sixteen had it for Louis. This is a ratio of 2:3
against.

One media source reports a Bradley win for every thirty polled.

Two media sources report a Louis win for every five polled.

The point is not that Pacquiao was robbed and so Louis was not, the point is that Thomas Hauser, Brian Kenny
and the other forlorn souls who did not see a win for Pacquiao can be dismissed as statistical anomalies—they
either made mistakes or sat in a corner of the stadium that would always give birth to such a strange score. In
the case of Louis, he is backed by sixteen boxing men who know the fight game. If we include the judges
amongst those polled, the difference between those who see it for Louis and those who see it for Walcott starts
to look more negligible.

The widest media scorecard I have been able to source for Louis-Walcott was the AP card which had it 9-5-1 for
Walcott. I was unable to source more than one ringside card that had Walcott winning any more than eight
rounds. Those who stood in judgment over Louis in a surprisingly rabid press that following week typically did so
based on a scorecard provided for them by a ringside reporter that had Walcott winning only six, seven or eight
rounds. This is exactly what almost every single ringsider has Louis scoring.

But most interesting to me were the reports made by the two sources which, rightly or wrongly, hold the most
weight in my mind when it comes to deducing the reality where close, un-filmed fights are concerned. The New
York Times described Louis as having been “out-thought” and “generally made to look foolish,” but the
newspaper also scored the fight for the champion because he had “made all the fighting, did most of the leading
and, his two knockdowns notwithstanding, landed a greater number of blows.”

Nat Flesicher, scoring for The Ring, also saw it for Louis.

Louis, unquestionably the puncher in the fight, landed more punches according to the Times. Whilst the
newspaper men ringside tended to believe that Walcott had won, there were many who felt that the exact
opposite was the case, including the men who mattered. Referee Ruby Goldstein scored it 7-6-2 for Walcott,
judge Marty Monroe had it 9-6 to Louis and judge Frank Forbes had it 8-6-1 for the champion.

The highlights we have available to us seem inconclusive with neither fighter really emerging as clearly the
superior of the other. In the rounds I have used to describe the Joe Louis defense, one, two and four can be
scored for Walcott and three, nine, fourteen and fifteen for Louis.

But even if we had the entire fight, all we would have is a modern eye trying to interpret a fight set in 1947 with
their respect for the title, their heightened appreciation of aggression and accented disdain for the retreat.

Louis was the aggressor, the puncher, the champion, and according to at least one reputable source the busier
man. More than that, there were no ringside scorecards that mimicked the degree of outrage expressed by the
press.

Over the years I’ve come to suspect—just to suspect—that the decision was a good one.

I feel with certainty that this was no robbery. Walcott may have deserved the nod, he may not have but either
way it was close. Why, then, the controversy? It is a fact that the crowd booed Louis from the ring. This has lent
credence to what has become a truth by repetition. Perhaps, like Louis himself, they were disgusted with the
champion’s performance (disgust, according to Joe, that caused him to attempt to leave the ring before the
verdict was even read). More likely, they had seen Louis bamboozled by an opponent that had seemed one step
ahead of him at all times. But fights are not and were not scored upon aesthetics. If Louis was out-landing
Walcott and enough of those punches carried enough vim to impress two of the three judges, Joe’s job was
done.

Finally, the fight continued to garner attention in the press because the method for scoring boxing itself was on
trial. Whilst Walcott had been awarded points for his two knockdowns in rounds one and four on the
supplementary system, they had in reality only gained him two rounds on the cards and whilst judge Forbes
actually awarded Louis more rounds he awarded Walcott more points. When there seemed even a hint of a
chance that the decision could be overturned on a technicality (it was claimed that Forbes should have reversed
his decision based upon general impressions, permitted in a case where a judge awards more points but fewer
rounds to a given fighter) the controversy continued to burn.

And it would burn until Louis doused it with an eleventh round knockout of Walcott some six months later. But I
think he deserved his win of December 1947, too, or at least I don’t consider that he was firmly beaten as the
legend says. It was a close fight—so close that perhaps even a handful of punches could have turned it.

For Louis, then, his defense would at least once prove to be as important as his offense. Had Walcott landed
even one more punch in the right round, perhaps Louis would have been a two-time champion of the world
instead of the most dominant world champion in history, as he remains.

“You got to be a killer, otherwise I’m getting too old to waste time on you.”—Jack Blackburn
Much has been said concerning the Joe Louis duels with Max Schmeling. It was proof that Louis was vulnerable
to right hands. It was proof that Louis wasn’t vulnerable to right hands. It was a victory for America over the
Nazis. But Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi. It was boxing’s biggest fight. But it wasn’t about boxing. It was what made
Louis a hero. But he was already a hero.

One of Abraham Lincoln’s most successful biographers, Roy Basler, wrote that “to know the truth of history is to
realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.” Is there a more telling example of this truth in sports than
Louis-Schmeling II? Sometimes the tale can obscure the truth. To put it another way: when was the last time you
just wondered at it? Wondered at what Joe Louis did to Max Schmeling on a night when, admittedly, the world
was on the brink of war and the African American was on the road to reclaiming himself from the white power
structure in the USA? When, yes, the black and white citizens of that wounded country called out with one
single voice for perhaps the first time and the man they were calling to was a fighter. When was the last time
you ignored all those very important things and just marveled at that fight, the recording of which reporter
Henry McLemore called “the most faithful recording ever made of human savagery”? I’m going to invite you
here, please, to wonder at it again. First, we have to take a look at Joe’s best performance.

Buddy Baer

The bigger, less celebrated of the Baer brothers had his own rematch with Joe Louis at the beginning of 1942.
The first fight had ended in the controversy of a DQ win for Louis and, as he always did when there was the
merest hint of a question mark after a title fight, Joe arranged to meet the Giant Californian once again.

A huge man in any era, Buddy tipped the scales at 250 and scraped the ceiling at a little more than 6’6. As noted
by The St.Petersburg Times, “a fellow of Baer’s size in good condition, and equipped with the usual quota of
arms, legs and eyes must be conceded a chance in any bout, particularly if he has courage and a punch.”

Buddy had both in abundance, but he was not a natural fighter. “We have the feeling he would rather be out
picking violets,” is how The Times chose to illustrate the point. Whilst this is a little extreme we all understand
the point. Louis, who would famously be fighting for free that night in support of the Navy Relief Fund, was a
natural gladiator. Buddy Baer was not.

If Max Schmeling is clearly the tougher of the two opponents and Louis wreaked similar havoc on each of them,
what is it that makes this Joe’s greatest performance? Baer’s size? Might it be suggested that herein lies the key
to arguing Louis the master of all modern super-heavies as he completely destroys one in this encounter? It’s a
reasonable point, but no, it is not that. It was my own favorite line from How to Box by Joe Louis that brought
me to this conclusion.

“There are two basic methods of attack,” the1948 manual tells us, “either by force or by skill. The attack by force
is used only by the slugger who depends only upon hitting power. The attack by skill is used by the boxer who
relies upon his cleverness in feinting, correct leading, drawing and in-fighting.”

This is a division at once elegant and incomplete of the boxer’s physical abilities versus his technical ability, his
gifts as an athlete as weighed against his skill as a boxer. Whilst Joe’s destruction of Schmeling is his most
devastating display he relies often in that short fight upon his natural gifts, his speed, his power. Joe fights ugly
for short devastating stretches against Baer, too, but not before he has demonstrated for us the height of his
art.

Louis and his ghostwriter, Edward J. Mallory, describe the various feints Louis employed in his championship
years and most interesting among them is the left jab to the body, the lie, and then the right uppercut to the
head, the truth. It is a difficult move from a technical perspective, calling upon the weight to be transferred from
the left foot to the right and for the fighter to move from long distance to the inside, downstairs to up, all
without getting caught. Louis pulls this move off against a fresh Baer, twenty-five seconds into the fight.

Baer came out aggressively and Louis was momentarily crowded out of the fight, driven and harried back to his
own corner first by Baer’s length, then his size. Buddy’s physical advantages overcame Joe’s technical
superiority, for just a moment. They circle, and Louis takes a short step back, employing the draw, before
throwing a nothing left hook. Louis notices that the challenger’s tactic upon being jabbed are to dip, then make
a grab and try to tie the champion up on the inside, allowing him to use his size and weight to bare down on
him. A fine plan for a big man, but in fact the fight is now lost.

A few seconds later Louis is shuffling back and away from Baer once more and as Baer moves forwards Louis
throws another jab. Again Baer dips and tries to crowd but Louis has no intention of landing the jab. Instead, he
holsters his left, takes a step to the outside with his left foot and even as Baer draws himself into his shell and
prepares his grab, Louis uncorks his right uppercut, slipping his weight across his body as a part of the natural
movement of the punch, the absolute perfection of this skill. The punch is not a finisher, but note Baer’s
reaction when Louis jabs at him once more, moments later. Instead of trying to menace the champion with his
size or a counter-blow, he backs up directly; shy of the uppercut that the jab disguised last time around. This is
the ultimate realisation of the feint—to imbue in the jab, a hammer blow at the best of times the virtual
attributes of the uppercut. Baer has now to abandon his pre-fight plan for Joe’s most important punch, that jab.

Skill has determined that his superior size is now worthless.

Paraffin to the wound seconds later as Louis pulls the trick off once more, this time after following through on
the jab. A right-handed uppercut to the jaw—the hardest punch to land from a technical perspective—turns the
trick again and now Baer is hurt. Louis plants a left hook behind the glove just above the ear and then he is ready
to unleash the combinations that made him famous upon the now hapless giant.

People say Joe Louis has slow feet. There is something to this, although hopefully it has been explained in the
proper context in Part 1—The Foundation of Skill. Even then, however, we discuss his speed relative to those
opponents who run. Well footwork is not merely a byword for a foot race. I defy anyone who takes the time to
pay close enough attention to the speed at which Louis adjusts his feet now as Baer retreats across the ring.

Out of position for a left hook as Baer is going away slightly outside his right foot, Louis shimmies—there is no
other word for it—a quick step forwards, channeling all his power through his left leg and hips. This allows him
to land that deadly, rare, straight and behind it, despite the fact that he each time has to shimmy and hop
forwards, he lands a left hook and then that rolling right cross. With each punch he is covering ground and with
each punch he touches down long enough to get the torque through his hips and crack home hard punches,
knockout punches. Perhaps the most startling thing about this sequence is that if you press pause on your DVD
or online video at the moment these blows are landing they look as though Louis were punching from a
stationary position. His balance is perfect, his rushing attack is in no way affecting the value of his punches yet
he takes literally no time to get set. He is a cobra packing a shotgun.

“Use the weight of the body in every punch,” (my italics) advises How to Box and it is a tenant Louis is married
to. My expectation upon placing it under the microscope was that I would have to issue a warning similar to the
one I described when analyzing Joe’s straight right hand—that it bore sweet fruit when it worked but that it was
to detail-specific to be really viable in the ring, and that counter-measures must be employed. To my
astonishment I found that Louis threw power punches (if not always his jab) in this fashion without
compromising his balance on offense. It is my suspicion that this is a unique skillset above 175 lbs. and that you
would have to work to find fighters who can fight like this in even the smallest divisions.

Though the fight is only a minute old, referee Frank Fullam takes his first close look at Baer as he wobbles back
to Joe’s short rope behind a left-right combination to the jaw and a right to the body that Louis lands after
ducking into a clinch as Baer tried to throw his first punches in some seconds. Louis is made to miss in turn as
Baer bores him back and away from the ropes, missing first with the right uppercut and then the left hook.
These are the most difficult punches to remain composed behind, but Louis does so, remaining in punching
position.

Head-to-head in a maul, Louis appears the loser as he slowly gives ground during an exchange of meaningless
punches but a split second later he has moved out of the maul that Baer remains bowed solemnly into, and
Louis begins the assault again. A bobbing top caught in two opposing tides—his, and the punches Joe is driving
home—his size is now nothing less than a handicap in the face of the genius of Joe’s box-punching.

For the first knockdown Louis slips the nonexistent jab he expects when he is on his way in, jabs to the stomach
and bombs a right cross over his defense. Watch carefully and you will see Baer’s high guard rappelled right and
down by the famous Louis follow-through before snapping back into place as Baer collapses in an enormous
heap on the canvas, forty-pound weight advantage and all, the first time he has looked really big since that first
uppercut landed.

It’s hard to admire a man shooting fish in a barrel but take a moment to appreciate the blinds being drawn and
the man Leroy Simerly (Herald-Journal) called “strictly a sixteen-inch gunner” in full flow.

Baer was magnanimous in defeat clutching Joe’s head in his oversized paws, almost comically huge next to the
man labeled in numerous newspapers the following morning as “the most destructive puncher the fight game
has ever seen.” Baer figured Louis to be champion for some time to come. “Maybe my next child will be a son
and I can raise him up to do the job.”

Three days later, Louis would pass his army physical. He would never reach the heights of the Buddy Baer fight
again. It is a frightening thought but it is possible that the boxing never saw the very best of its greatest
champion.

Max Schmeling

“Ain’t no sense foolin’ around like I did last time.”

Louis said more than once in the run up to the fight that he would end Max Schmeling in a single round. For the
most part this was dismissed as hyperbole by a press which did not break ranks to predict anything earlier than a
third round knockout. Hyperbole was the furthest thing from the minds of Louis and Blackburn, however. This
was a plan with its foundation built firmly upon the scientific reasoning that Schmeling had become so famous
for.

When Joe Louis attended the welterweight title fight between Henry Armstrong and Barney Ross, it was not as a
fan, although he was one, but as a disciple. It is possible that Armstrong was the only man in the history of the
fight game capable of teaching Louis about controlled destructive violence in the ring, but the story goes that he
did—and that along with handler Eddie Mead, he convinced Louis and Blackburn that a direct, rushing assault
was the best strategy.
And the story had more than just a hint of truth to it. First Joe was seen at Henry’s training camp and then Henry
was seen at Joe’s. Louis did not speak of it directly but Blackburn was less equivocal:

“Last time Chappie fought just the way Schmeling wanted him to. This time it’ll be different. Chappie’s going to
learn from Armstrong. He’s going to set a fast pace right from the start.”

Max Machon, trainer to Schmeling, did not see the danger, encouraging Louis to do just that: “He would be as
awkward as a school girl on her first pair of ice skates!” Schmeling, meanwhile, wasn’t paying attention or had
seen a bluff where there was none: “I think in the first round we will just feel each other out.”

According to the World Telegram, “Schmeling will make no mistake in strategy. Louis doesn’t know what the
word means.” This was the purveying attitude at the time, but in fact a reversal of this equation was happening
right under the noses of the dismissive newspapermen. Even those that sniffed out a possible tactical dimension
to the Louis battle plan were disdainful of it. Perhaps they were right to do so and perhaps Blackburn and Mead
were the masterminds behind the directness of the violence about to erupt in Yankee Stadium. But the fact is
that Louis had been obsessively watching the first Schmeling fight, originally with a journalist (who could not
believe that Blackburn had never shown it to the champion and had in fact discouraged him from seeing it), then
with his trainer and finally alone.

“I know how to fight Max now.”

Louis was to fight Schmeling in the opposite style, as far as How to Box is concerned, to the one he would use to
destroy Buddy Baer. There, he fought by skill, here it was to be by force—speed, power.

Louis doesn’t stalk or attempt to draw a lead from Schmeling at the first bell, he is after him straight away and
when Schmeling tries to move, Joe moves with him, still in the small steps and still behind that ramrod jab but
with more urgency than is normal. The hard jab and a closet left hook are landed before Max moves out of
range, but the leaping left hook he uses to drive Max before him is a new flavor of Louis, especially against an
unharmed world-class opponent. Louis had reportedly shadowboxed for forty to fifty minutes before emerging
from his dressing room wearing two gowns to keep his body warm. Now he was making both Schmeling and
Machon foolish in their pre-fight predictions. Not only was Louis wasting absolutely no time in feeling Schmeling
out, he also bore very little resemblance to a school girl on ice skates. He looked more like coiled galvanized
steel brought miraculously and terrifyingly to life.

Referee Arthur Donovan would later claim that this left hook caused Max’s face to swell and changed his pallor
to a “faint bluish green.”

The hook also carried him inside, but rather than moving for space Louis dug his heels in and pushed against
Schmeling, denying him room, landing three hard uppercuts, pulling out and then stabbing back in with the one-
two. When Schmeling puts his left glove over Joe’s right, cupping his own body protectively with his free arm,
Louis reverted to his old habits, making room for himself as he punched, adjusting tactically to Schmeling’s
increasingly desperate defensive manoeuvres.

After the German lands his only significant punch of the fight—a right hand as the champion moved away—
Louis stalked a rattled Schmeling to the far rope and drew the inevitable pressure lead, before going to work
with both hands to the midsection and switching upstairs. When Schmeling tries to hide up close after another
one-two, Louis pushes him back and away, giving himself room for his aggressive rushes. Here, then, was the
culmination of the tactical switch as he drove Schmeling back with the uppercut then invoked the most famous
fistic assault between Dempsey and Tyson, hammering Schmeling back with both fists, the German catapulting
away but seemingly caught in the Bomber’s horrifying gravity as he catches the rope for support with his right
gloves and catapults himself right back into the kill zone. Louis is swarming all over him and Schmeling, now half
turned away, is nothing more than a slab of meat and one that the champion goes to work upon in earnest, a
butcher wielding two cleavers, finally landing perhaps his most famous punch, a right hand just above the kidney
that fractured the transverse process of the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, tearing the muscles surrounding
it in the process. The scream that erupted from Schmeling was “half animal, half human” and according to David
Margolick author of Beyond Glory: Max Schmeling and Joe Louis was so bloodcurdling that many patrons on that
side of the ring reached for their hats as though compelled to retreat. If it occurred, this was a primal reaction
but Louis, for me, was not giving the primal showing of legend.

“He is a jungle man,” wrote journalist Henry McLenmore. “As completely primitive as any savage out to destroy
the thing he hates. He fought instinctively and not by any man-made pattern.”

This is not true. Louis had re-armed himself with some new tools for this fight and had shown a strategic surety
the German came nowhere near matching—Schmeling was outthought for all that he was also slaughtered.
When necessary Louis switched between pure aggression and his drawing, counterpunching style with seamless
ease and although he used his physical rather than his technical brilliance to master Schmeling, I would argue
that “the hand of man” is more apparent in this performance than any other one of his fights.

“I thought in my mind, “How’s that Mr. Super-race? I was glad he was hurt,” said Louis in response to questions
about his thoughts on the punch that had broken Schmeling’s back. Now he did cut loose, battering Max like he
was a heavy bag and indeed from this point on the challenger put up about as much resistance. The final punch,
when it came, had the same affect upon Schmeling’s face as a baseball bat would an apple, according to the
Herald Tribune. The fight ended in confusion and uproar as first the towel, then Max Machon himself stormed
the ring but Schmeling was as knocked out as any fighter had ever been. Louis had wiped the floor with him.

His reward, outside of the $400,000 he had just banked, was to be compared in the next few days in the press to
every dangerous animal that walked the earth. Lions, tigers, bears, snakes, hawks and most of all panthers were
what the champion was like and the racial climate in which he fought makes us look back and shake our heads at
the casual racism. It is a fact, however, that some of the pressmen that talked about Louis in these terms were
black.

It can be argued that the African American of the time had not yet found himself and this is a position with
weight. Louis himself, by virtue of his skill in the ring would take a hand in steering his race toward calmer
waters and Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John F Kennedy were all in America’s glittering future. But I do
not think it was a matter of race—or not only of race. It’s us. We all look at Louis and see something primal
because there is something primal within all of us. He speaks to it.

And that’s fine. Boxing needs its violence every bit as much as it needs its heroes. If this series of articles was
about anything it was about stripping away that projection, that stardust, that lie and looking at the fighter
underneath, because that is a beautiful thing that all too often is overlooked. Louis had one of the best jabs, one
of the best skillsets, was one of the best counterpunchers, one of the best boxers at any weight, ever—and I
hope I have shown that his supposed tactical rigidity and strategic naivety is something we have projected onto
this “animal” this “killer” this “bomber,” too, for all that these were not his greatest strengths. He had help and
Blackburn was an important part of arguably the greatest story our sport has ever known but as Joe Louis said,
“Once that bell rings, you are on your own.

“It’s just you and the other guy.” And I sure as shit wouldn’t want to be the other guy.