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But both guys took some solid leather to the chin. What was so awful about it iyo? Baer's queer style? :: Must admit, both guys have zero defense, but Braddock is definitely the more efficient boxer.
The fact that he barely tried. Compare this fight against a small, career Light Heavyweight with Baer's demolition of Max Schmeling. In one fight, he goofed around, pranced and preened, tried goofy little tricks, in the other he was deadly serious and committed to total annihilation of a better opponent than Jim Braddock... just worked him over with bombs the whole fight Had he given a shit, he would have crushed Braddock. He treated it as a laugher, an easy win, trained little, gave a shit effort and lost to an inferior Heavyweight who took the whole thing as serious as cancer, trained like a madman for it and fought as hard and as smart as he could. Braddock did his best, Baer barely gave an effort.
Yeah, Baer pretty much dicked around for this fight. Fucked around with starlets and spouted a bunch of useless trash talk.
To contrast... Baer putting some real heat on shots, focused <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qs1VaA0SvZM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Yup. He figured he'd land one and it'd be over. And when in it turned out to be more difficult than that, he wasn't prepared enough to turn the tide and worse, seemed not to care terribly much
I note two things: 1) Baer took an awful beating and one of the reasons for it was his tendency to use a jab only for pawing, not as a punch... everything was predicated on landing the overhand right, so he would attempt to set it up by sticking that left in his opponent's face as little more than a distraction. Sometimes it worked, but it clearly didn't against Louis. Also, Louis's left hook was far too quick for Baer to defense. 2) You can see clearly what Max Schmeling saw in this clip. Louis had a tendency as a general rule to carry his hands a bit low, around abdomen level which, for his variety of punches and his solid parrying skills, wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He's certainly not the first or last fighter to do that. But you can clearly see that when he jabs, he does in fact often drop the hand even lower than that before bringing it back to about the lower rib level, which of course means he's not in his comfort zone to parry it. Baer even manages, in round 2 toward the end, to score with a right hand under that same circumstance. Compare this fight with Baer with Louis (Post-Schmeling) battling Arturo Godoy below. Note, the hands are still carried in that same lower guard, but when he jabs, he snaps the hand right back into that guard without dropping it. A good indication of what he had learned the hard way. <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/C7SK_N7NBIg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
With regard to the above, what I am getting at is that we often correctly think of Louis as being somewhat mechanical; a machine and not an inventive ring technician/strategist. It's true. What gets overlooked sometimes and what he deserves considerable credit for is his ability to be, for lack of a more sympathetic description, "re-programmed". Subtle little tinkering in his game by his trainer didn't result in any confusion or awkwardness, he made the adjustments seamlessly, as if his previous memories and tendencies had been simply erased. This is one of the reasons he had such a noted tendency toward remarkable improvements in rematches. Godoy was no exception. The first time around, he had been surprised and made uncomfortable by Godoy's crowding tactics. His jab suddenly no longer an automatic, largely ineffective. His mind still thinking "distance, space". For the rematch, apparently, Blackburn tinkered with Louis's approach and advised him to use Godoy's strength against him by eschewing, for the most part, counterpunching and long-range offense in favor of willingly accepting the close-quarters and taking advantage by throwing short, hard uppercuts and hooks. There's nothing more to be sad, really, than that it worked out really well. Godoy was pounded into a bloody mess and stopped.
