



Whether you agree with the notion or not, you are a product of your surroundings. Where you came from made you into who you are today. In today's world, what we do after our early years continues to mould us—we can travel the world, and even if we don't, most of the world's information is freely available right to your computer screen. If you are a boxer, or a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu player, or a wrestler, you can watch the best competitors in the world in action on youtube and take their ideas.

Make no mistake, with the highest level of athletes being filmed under HD cameras in all of their best performances, there are no true secrets to fighting any more. Just this year at the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu world championships, Keenan Cornelius' worm guard was the new thing. But I can guarantee that every major competitive BJJ gym started working on the worm guard and attempting to pass it in the week following the worlds.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the polar opposite to boxing though, it develops rapidly from year to year. Boxing is slow to change. Your BJJ school might be run by a guy who loves the butterfly guard, or the cross guard, but there will be someone there playing inverted guard. Someone else will love the half guard. But for the longest time in boxing, national styles were a real trend.

Reasons for Stylistic Development

I once had a conversation with a friend who was a professor in history about the Brazilian Empire (Brazil was the only South American nation to ever have a modern empire). In the course of our chat, he told me about a Brazilian novel which centred around the slums of Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century. The plot is a traditional love triangle, with two men fighting over the same woman. Here's the interesting bit, the book reaches its climax as the two men fight for the girl—one using a long stick, the other using a razor. What is the significance of that, you ask?

The cut-throat razor was the weapon of the capoeira practitioner—the Brazilian martial art. The long staff was the weapon of the Portuguese, in the art of Jogo do Pau or “game of stick”. Using this love triangle as a microcosm, the author was discussing the tensions between the Portuguese and Brazilian population in Brazilian cities at the time. The fact that the author could do so with each country's fighting tradition illustrates how strongly and recognizably styles become linked with locations.

An illustration of a Capoeirista diving in with a razor to the belly.

It is only very recently that we started coming out of the age of national styles and traditions in martial arts and people started cross training freely. You will remember that even in the 1960s there were Chinese kung fu practitioners who wanted to fight Bruce Lee for teaching his art to Westerners. Cross training has made us all very forgetful of how big a deal nationalism was in martial arts... except in boxing.

In boxing, a Mexican fighter will still infight a great deal and at high pace, and an Eastern European fighter tends to be more upright. These are really just relics from a bygone age, but it is fascinating to learn a little about the history of them.

Styles can develop from a lack of training equipment, a focus on one particular type of training, or a cultural preference towards one style. Panamanian boxers before Roberto Duran, for instance, valued defensive perfection over excitement.

Today, however, I want to focus on the great rift that occurred in boxing thinking between Great Britain and the United States of America. Infighting versus Outfighting.

And His Fist Be Ever Ready for a Knockout Blow

It is well known that the Cold War caused increased funding of the sciences and a great deal of progress. Sometimes conflict spurs an arms race in technology, other times it holds thinking back. While the Cold War had an enormous affect on boxing (which we will discuss at another time) the initial great conflict of boxing was the good old English method against the new fangled brawling of America.

The United States, a significant boat ride away from the old world, began to develop a boxing tradition all of its own, and important in that tradition was the infight. There were no rules preventing infighting in Britain, it just simply wasn't how British boxers trained. British boxers believed in the primacy of the lead straight. Putting home the lead was enough to stifle anyone in their eyes.

Now infighting was a tremendous advance as part of the game. Except as soon as Brits and Yanks started fighting each other, the stylistic differences were acknowledged, then amplified to cartoonish levels as each side insisted it was their styleof boxing which was better, rather than individual practitioners.

Jim Driscoll, a remarkable Welsh featherweight who was acknowledged as “Peerless” Jim until his death, literally wrote the book on the straight left. In The Straight Left and How to Cultivate It, Driscoll insisted that the recent success of infighters against traditional outfighters had been due to a tailing off in quality outfighters, rather than any value in the infighting method.

“The faulty boxers of the past few years have lost fight after fight where they have been pitted against the Battling Nelsons, the Wolfgasts, the Papkes, the Gunboat Smiths, the George Chips and all the other members of Bear-cat and Tiger tribe who confidently rely for their success on their brute force and—varying degrees of ignorance.”

Battling Nelson, for instance, was most famous for catching the legendary Joe Gans on the rear end of his career and finishing the job, rather than for any incredible ability of his own aside from furious pace and punch.

Driscoll, who was a master boxer in his own right and had drubbed George Dixon three times, and Abe Attell among others, continually makes disparaging remarks about the infighting style in general, and it is clear that he has little interest in learning it.

“The “Bear-Cat” brigade are fond of boasting that they pick their punches up from the floor. This is just boast (for, as I trust to be able to show later on, all punches should be picked up from the floor), but they omit to mention that their arsenals are almost entirely occupied with the manufacture of giant howitzers and that their attacks are consequently only of real use when they are directed against a more or less stationary and exposed fortification.”

Driscoll pointed to the fact that the British only held one world title at the time of publication, and that they had lost two in the past couple of years. That title was held by Jimmy Wilde, Driscoll's protégé and still ranked by ring magazine as the number three power puncher of all time. Wilde was a marvel—variously called the Tylorstown Terror, the Mighty Atom, and because of his elusive outfighting style, The Ghost with the Hammer in his Hand.

The Mighty Atom

In his The Art of Boxing, Wilde devoted a chapter to “American Boxers and their style”. In this chapter Wilde insisted that there was no overarching style among American boxers, but that each attempts a “whirlwind attack” with both hands and tries to bring something new, whether it be good or bad. Wilde suggested that the mixed legality of boxing in America, and the limit placed on rounds (never more than 12, Wilde notes with disappointment) favors the all-in fighter, not the strategist.

Wilde's answer to why so many British fighters lost to American infighters? They didn't hit hard enough. Wilde said he had never faced opponents so easy to hit as the American infighters, but that most British fighters did not cultivate enough stopping power in their left to do the damage. After reeling off an enormous list of things he found unfavorable in America (his gloves were tampered with, he was robbed of a decision, he was asked to gain weight for a fight), Wilde concludes his chapter with:

“On the whole, I was well satisfied with my visit to America, where I hope and believe I made many friends.”

One interesting point of Wilde's personal approach to boxing was his belief that the right (rear) foot should remain as still as possible throughout a bout. Wilde would sway back at the waist (as Prince Naseem would) when in danger, but attempted to do most of his moving with his left foot, which seems to be a bizarre belief of his own rather than a British Tradition.

Putting in Work with Both Hands

Of course, the other side of this rivalry was the infighting of the United States. Just as Driscoll and Wilde refused to credit the new methods with any value, Frank Klaus, one of the leading exponents of early infighting, was keen to throw mud over the traditional boxing style. Speaking of that straight left (which you will note, neither Wilde nor Driscoll called “the jab”), Klaus stated:

“… [one] must not be confounded with the jab, which is but a rap to the face or body, carrying but trivial consequences. The expression “jabbing a man's head off,” although often used by writers, is sometimes an inaccurate description of a series after series of half-arm left flicks.”

“It seems to me that decisive victories are seldom brought about by the aid of this mysterious 'jab'.”

Klaus was, in his own right, a brilliant fighter. He succeeded in beating Billy Papke, and fighting the great Stanley Ketchel to a draw. On poor Stanley Ketchel's untimely murder, Klaus was elevated to middleweight champion of the world. Curiously, Ketchel seems to be an excellent example of pace and activity, rather than the simple, sloppy power punching which Driscoll accused him of. Indeed, Klaus had a finishing ratio of about 22%.

Klaus' style, and consequently his manual, focus on getting to the inside by parrying the jab with the right hand and striking the solar plexus with the left, taking the punch on the forearms and moving in, or “catching the right on the neck” meaning to get inside a right swing.



Traditionally infighting is about moving opponents to the ropes and using one's head under their chin or on their sternum to keep them upright while you pound on their ribs.

To see some pure infighting in action from a little later than Klaus' days, check out Henry Armstrong. Getting his head up against opponents, he battered opponents from featherweight to middleweight, winning the world featherweight, welterweight and lightweight titles and holding them simultaneously. Possibly the most accomplished boxer of all time, and he did it all while looking down at his opponents' feet.

Enter The Orchid Man

While fighters like Klaus, Driscoll, and Wilde were caught up throwing bile at each other over national styles, a couple of boxers out there were clever enough to recognize the old methods and the new. Perhaps the most interesting story is Georges Carpentier.

Carpentier, a Frenchman, came from a country which traditionally just didn't care all that much for boxing. Savate was popular in France, a form of kickboxing while wearing boots, but boxing had little foot hold. Carpentier is a fascinating figure for a couple of reasons—for a start he is the only man in boxing history to have fought in every division. Starting as a gangly 14 year old, he fought grown men and worked his way up to fight for the heavyweight title.

Mid career, Carpentier took a break to become a war hero in the First World War—being awarded the Croix de Guerre. This, and the fact that he was extremely good looking, allowed The Orchid Man to attract the French public to boxing in a way which they had never been before.

Carpentier is just an all around fascinating character, but among his greatest achievements was successfully combining the British and American schools of boxing. Carpentier was one of the few fighters to genuinely value the styles of both nations and the merits which both brought. Beginning as an upright boxer, Carpentier fought his way into the public eye in France.

“When I first took up boxing there are reasons to suppose that my style was particularly English. The straight left, right-cross counter, aided by my fast footwork, about made up the sum total of my learning.”

That is, until he met Frank Klaus and Billy Pepke, both great infighters, when they visited France.

Carpentier lost to both, but rather than put it down to a failure in his outside game, he decided to learn the inside game.

The next year, Carpentier met two American infighters—Cyclone Smith and George Gunther—and bested both. Before fighting the accomplished British boxer, Bombardier Billy Wells for the European Heavyweight Title. Carpentier recounts this bout at length in My Methods: Boxing as a Fine Art—with an entire chapter devoted to “The Principal Punches Used in my Contest with Bombardier Wells”.

Calling Wells the most difficult boxer he ever faced, Carpentier recounts getting down behind his right forearm and elbow, wedging his way through Wells' punches (just as Klaus would), and finding the mark with his left and right hook to the body. He was able to take Wells out in four rounds, and in just one round in the rematch, and cemented himself as one of the finest fighters in the world at any weight.



The method Carpentier used to take out Bombardier Billy Wells.

But Carpentier did more than adopt the infight, he learned how it worked and developed counters for it. Including his infamous “waltz.” Feinting in order to get a fighter into that famous wedging guard, Carpentier would parry their guarding arm at the tricep and drag them past him, bringing him out behind them. As they turned to face him—he would crack them with a clean punch.

The Waltz. Getting behind an opponent and cracking him as he turns is a brilliant strategy. Check out T. J. Dillashaw versus Renan Barao to see it in action recently.

Another favourite of Carpentier was to perform the same parry to shuck the opponent to the side of him and come back with an uppercut. In this manner, Carpentier was able to get the better of Gunboat Smith and Battling Levisnky to win the world Light Heavyweight Championship.

While Carpentier's beloved “French school” of boxing never really found itself taking over the world, his principle of “the medium” between British outfighting and American infighting proved to be the future. When Carpentier drew the first million dollar gate, against Jack Dempsey, it was not Dempsey's ferocious infighting that beat Carpentier. It was that Dempsey was a great puncher, a bigger man, and he could do it all. He got the better of the infighting and the outfighting. Wearing Carpentier down in clinches and pounding him with hard straights while stepping in, Dempsey was able to finish the much smaller man with a good 1-2.



Dempsey finishing a battered Carpentier, and a touch of class at the end.

Conclusions

Historically, national styles are fascinating, but they were perpetuated for a great while by pointless patriotism and arrogance. There is absolutely no denying that Frank Klaus could have been a better fighter with a great outside game to transition into his inside game, and that Jim Driscoll could have excelled even further with a strong inside game.

In the modern era there are leftovers of national styles. Mexican fighters still fight aggressively because that is how you get yourself pushed in Mexico. Eastern block fighters still fight more on a straight line with looping blows than with lateral movement, because that was the coaching strategy from the 1970s and 1980s and many of those coaches or their students are still around.

The availability of excellent coaches the world over to anyone who wants to train with them has changed boxing. Now we have men like the Klitschkos, who are often pointed to as traditional European fighters, training with Emmanuel Steward—someone who produced many great American infighters and outfighters.

Part of me would love to see national trends in styles continue, just for the sake of variety. But the other part of me recognizes that the fight game only really moves forwards when fighters commit themselves to understanding every area of the game in a little depth, rather than having a PhD in one alone.

Pick up Jack Slack's new ebook, Fighting Karate at his blog Fights Gone By.Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Check out Jack's previous Fighting Motive's on Fightland:

Fighting Motives: Life, Death and Humiliation

Fighting Motives: The Kingdom with No Weapons

Fighting Motives: Broken Weapons and the Search for Alternatives