Muhammad Ali: The Unorthodox Fighter Rooted in Timeless Fundamentals Of A Good Asswhooping. Part 1. The Old School Roots

Preface: I could have chosen to write many things about Ali, but I've decided rather than repeat what everyone already knows and has written since his death, I'd like to celebrate how his boxing style was effective despite it's previously unheard-of appearance. In short, Ali was an athlete of such gift and boxing genius that he was able to create out of whole cloth a style that both embodied everything he was as an athlete and showman, but, as his politics would do, completely reshape the landscape of how the old school fundamentals could be applied. To whoop a man's ass.

The great debt he owes is to the beloved icon and second black heavyweight of all time, Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. Louis' fight against Max Schmelling is the single most socially and politically important event in the history of all sports, pitting the black American champion against the ideology of the Nazi regime that declared the black man inferior to the white. Schmelling himself wanted nothing to do with the Nazis and was largely an unwilling propaganda tool. In fact, Louis and Schmelling remained good friends for the rest of their life.

The perfection of the fundamentals of old school boxing Louis embodied paved the way for a young Cassius Clay to become the great pugilistic artist we know as Muhammad Ali.

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Many great heavyweights came before and a few after Ali. Many of them hit harder, but none of them moved faster or punched more accurately. It seems obvious to say that Ali won because had the greatest footwork of any heavyweight, but in most cases it is said for the wrong reasons. If he simply bounced around the ring in an attempt to befuddle an opponent he would have had great fighters up his ass in the gym and in the ring from day one. There are many different styles of boxing—inside fighters, outside fighters, brawlers, boxers, punchers, and combinations of all of them.

What you’re really seeing in great fighters no matter what their style is a flavor of ice cream rather than a different dessert. Regardless of how you choose to fight, the basic principles don’t change, and the one that most defined Ali is the one that defines almost everything in boxing: footwork.

Footwork does not mean moving around the ring quickly or shuffling your feet for the crowd before unloading a seventy-seven punch combination directly into your opponent’s ass. The Brown Bomber Joe Louis—the second black heavyweight champion of the world who owns the most title defenses in any division in history (25) from the 30's to the late 40's)—is usually the only other candidate for the title of Greatest Heavyweight of All Time was very methodical with his feet and usually moved in small steps to gain position before unloading short, ridiculously powerful shots—essentially the antithesis of Ali. His footwork was about economy rather than deception, and once he got in position, or worse, made you think you were, your charming little tilt would result in a strange continuity. The last thing you’d remember in the ring was being on your back staring up at the lights in the arena, and when you woke up in the hospital you’d be laying on your back staring up at the lights in the emergency room. This is classic old school boxing at its finest.

In fact, it is precisely Louis’ economy of movement that got people into trouble, and the logical place to begin before Ali’s dramatic ring generalship and footwork can be explained and understood. Louis was most dangerous not for the last punch that plowed you into the third row, but the first punch that took you from feeling good to “oh shit…”. This punch was usually delivered when you decided that this unobtrusive gentleman in front of you slowly following you around the ring was a bitch and you were going to just walk right in the front door and rob him. A fantastic example in miniature of what Ali did on a grand and flashy scale is the first round of Louis vs. Baer in 1935.

Max Baer had won the heavyweight title in 1934 by bashing the living fuck out of a gigantic, 6’6’’ 275 lb. Italian named Primo Carnera. Now you have to remember that this was long before HGH and anabolic steroids. The last heavyweight champion who was that big was Jess Willard (235 lb, 6’6 ½’’), and he was the Great White Hope who finally took the heavyweight title back from the 37-year-old Jack Johnson’s—the first black heavyweight champion in history—in 1915. Willard was dominant until he ran into a little-known fighter named Jack Dempsey, who beat him so brutally to take the title that rumors persist to this day (erroneous, but entertaining nonetheless) that Willard had six broken ribs, a skull fracture, a broken jaw in multiple places, had seven teeth knocked out, and when Dempsey went back to his corner after the fight he surreptitiously removed a railroad spike from his glove and tossed it under the ring apron.

Anyway, the point about Baer is that he was no pushover. He was a former heavyweight champion when the title meant something. 

In the first round, Louis and Baer felt each other out with a few jabs, and Louis using an old school version of the shoulder roll that was half duck half roll to avoid Baer’s occasional lazy jabs. Then, at 1:41 into the fight, Baer threw the real shot he was trying to land. He threw a quick and powerful right hand that he lowered about six inches, and caught Louis clean on the cheek.

Louis staggered back, but wasn’t really hurt. Baer moved in, and hit him with a few more shots, driving him into the corner. At 1:54, Louis smothered him, stepped around Baer to reverse their positions in the corner. As Baer turned and tried to walk in on him, Louis caught him with a combination of short power punches that connected so flush with Baer’s skull that he damn near would have fallen out of the ring if the ring ropes hadn’t been doing a lot of ab work and pushups in preparation for the fight.  Louis continued stepping around the wounded Baer, all the time improving his position, and this time blasting him with a left to the liver that crumpled him from the waist up and throw his hands across his face in a desperate effort to stop the assault. Louis, utilizing the increasingly available angles as Baer fell apart, drove him into the corner with hard, clean shots, and proceeded to pummel him from face to asshole with a delightfully impressive collection of all power shots known to man, plus a few more he came up with on the spot. This process of slowly driving his gloves deeper and deeper into Baer’s ass went on for a full minute…

So how was Louis so effective in positioning himself to land these punches? Simple. The stance of old the old school fighter was the following (this is Louis, by the way):

As you can see, Louis has created several problems an opponent has to overcome if they want to hit him cleanly. The first is the left hand, which can parry and block. Straight shots. The second is the shoulder, a much less used piece of defense today. As you can see, Louis has kept his head off-center and below his left shoulder for protection. At any time he can simply turn and lift the shoulder in front, or bend his torso down at the waist a bit (moving down and to his right) and let a punch glance over the shoulder and back. This is an old school technique that has been repopularize by such modern fighters and hall of fame champions like James Toney, Bernard Hopkins, and of course, Floyd Mayweather Jr. 

The final difficulty is that a fighter turned this way creates additional distance his opponent's punches have to travel to land a meaningful punch, which meant doing exactly what Louis wanted: stepping into him so he could land his short, devastating shots.

Louis often held his left hand low in order to make the terrible mistake of stepping forward look like a tempting opening, and it’s surprising how many people fell for it. There are videos of fighters moving in and being knocked halfway across the ring and smacking into the canvas with both feet literally off the ground. Others just broke in half at the knees and went down like a Jacob’s ladder made of depleted uranium.

After the first shot, that's when the subtlety of Louis’ footwork began creating horrific results, even from a Guadalcanal standpoint. One of the other fundamental principles in boxing is finding the “centerline” of your opponent. This is basically the line from your nose straight down the middle of the sternum. If a fighter can step around and align himself with your centerline, you become a disarmed target that looks like this (Max Baer):

This is where fighters make their bread and butter, usually by furiously churning the creamy soft bits of their exposed opponents with their fists until they become a hot mess of room-temperature butter collapsing under its own weight and covered in sour buttermilk.  

To end this section, I’m going to include a few basic graphics to demonstrate how this works. If you understand these old school, timeless principles, then their virtuosic elevation by Ali explains why his unorthodox style was effective: it wasn't breaking any rules. 
 

Note: Yes, Joe Louis' name is spelled as it is here. I was tired—sue me. These are a pain in the butt to change, so I'm letting it go.

Next up: How Ali's style incorporated and advanced all boxing knowledge of how to apply the fundamentals of boxing.

The Symphony and the Stars: How the Mysteries of the Universe and the Mysteries of the Muse Shaped our Mind and our Spirit pt. 2

The Symphony and the Stars: How the Mysteries of the Universe and the Mysteries of the Muse Shaped our Mind and our Spirit

Part 2

Sunrise of Civilization

    The humble beginnings of the Western tonal system extend back at least as far as recorded history. The Sumerian culture dates to the mid-6th millennium B.C.E., and at its core was a priesthood class performing the rites and rituals at the famous ziggurats that kept the Sumerians in good graces with their gods. Early cuneiform manifested in the form of clay tablets inscribed with logograms, and by the time of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 2100 B.C.E. they had given way to the first fully syllabic writing system. An organized system of writing music emerged in tandem. Their literary legacy tells of priests accompanied by hundreds of musicians, and there are dozens of surviving hymns glorifying the gods and goddesses. 

    Instrumental music had also come into its own. Tablet VIII of Gilgamesh speaks of drums accompanying singing, and a fragmentary verse speaks of a “flute of carnelian” that is offered as a gift to the sun god Dumuzi. Statues and paintings depicting musicians are common. Several well-preserved lyres have been unearthed in the tombs of Sumerian kings, the majority of which feature a bull’s head and its lunar horns in honor of Nanna, the moon god. Although opinions are divided, evidence suggests that Sumerian tonal system was comprised of diatonic scales, which would certainly be in sync with the mechanics of lyres, flutes and pipes.

    This new plethora of deities required many more shrines, priests, and of course,  music. Therefore it is no surprise that it is to the Sumerians we owe the first example of written music. A cuneiform tablet dating to 1400 B.C.E. has been definitively identified as containing pitch notation. Although there are a handful of claims by archeomusicologists to have unlocked the tonal secrets of the hymn, but like a tree falling in an empty forest, it will always remain in the realm of speculation.

    This explosion of gods and music was no mere coincidence. The Sumerians were an agrarian society and therefore at the mercy of the seasons and elements. Knowledge of when to plant and harvest requires an accurate system of measuring time, and the phases of the moon and the movement of the sun through the zodiac were an obvious clock.  In fact, it is to the Sumerians that we owe the hexadecimal system for measuring minutes and seconds we still use today.  In that sense we also owe them credit for the metronome, for which they will never be forgiven. Mathematics and astronomical observation resulted in the first calendar—lunar of course—and a star chart from 3300 B.C.E. features Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, and the North Star at the center. Thus, the ancient moon bull is forever being chased by the great hunter as they spiral around the world axis. 

     It is for this reason that the prehistoric religious icons such as the moon bull were retained with ease, and the roster of gods simply integrated into existing myth. Because of their constant observations of the night sky they quickly became aware of the constellations and the five visible planets. The discovery of these starry images and celestial wanderers in the sky prompted new gods and goddesses associated with them. Although they didn’t recognize the Morning Star and the Evening Staras the same planet—Venus— the new brilliant light became associated with their most revered goddess Inanna, patron of Gilgamesh’s city of Uruk and daughter of Nanna the moon god. As the new science built upon the old, so too is the new pantheon the offspring of the ancients, and myth and legend were embroidered in the very fabric of the universe.

NEXT—PART 3: THE DOLDRUMS OF IGNORANCE