'Converted' fighters

Which I think is a shame. It has these guys almost ignoring a proper jab as a legitimate weapon in their arsenal. I don't remember so many top amateurs ignoring the jab back in the 90's, or looking back to the 80's. Or am I mistaken?

Look at the kazakhstan boxer - he dominated people with an active jab and style predicated on throwing lots of jabs to set up combos (i thought so at least) and even tho his actual jabs weren't scoring much it seemed to set everything up and deservedly got him the most outstanding boxer award for the whole competition.

 

Agreed, he jabbed and combo'd the shit out of that fucking AWFUL Evans guy. What a scrub Evans is.

 

Yeah but the guy was dominant for his entire run all the way to gold, more dominant scoring margins than Lomachenko, he looked legitimately good to me, unless it was just an incredibly weak weight class this year

 

I'm not familiar with am boxing prior to the 90's other than the same shit everyone has seen with Americans and Cubans kicking ass no matter how your scoring system works.

In the 90's, the two ways of dealing with the scoring system were the Cuban athletic way with flashy shots and movement. I think those guys were still using the jab, but understood that it wasn't really for scoring, just setting yourself up to score and everything else a jab is good for. So I think Savon, Casamayor, Hurtado, Ariel Hernandez, etc are still going to have jabs, but when they are scoring with their lead hand it's with flashy hooks and uppercuts and it's there, but they are still scoring with the back hand more often like everyone else.

The other way is the Eastern Euro way of gloves high, plod forward, and out-muscle. I don't think those guys used the jab much at all, they don't have the flash so when they are scoring with the lead hand it's probably going to be after throwing the power hand.

So why all the lefties? I don't know. I think the Cubans convert a lot of guys, and I think a lot of their coaches have moved on to all of these other countries and brought it with them.

The Americans have never had a workable philosophy other than to bitch about the scoring and fail to make the appropriate changes to deal with it. And we end up with a very small percentage of mega-athletes who can succeed at the top am level because they are just flat-out good...i.e. Reid, Oscar, Ward, Andrade and not because their style is appropriate.

 

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I like dominance, but 2008 with its lack of scoring and 2012 with its controversy makes it really hard to figure out who can fight, especially 2012. I really didn't care for all of the superclose bouts in the round of 32 and 16 and then fairly clear wins in the round of 4 and the finals. That's not supposed to happen in 2012 with the seeding.

 

I agree with this. Too many bad decisions for me this year.

 

I was VERY impressed by that Kazak fella. Great work rate, very nice, meaty jab and lots of properly thrown combinations.

MTF

 

Completely agree. He deserved to win the most outstanding boxer award this year too, from what I saw.