Most impressive wins by young/green fighters

[Ambling Alp]

James Jeffries had several big wins very early in his career.
He had been a pro for less than a year and in about his 7th fight when he had a 20 round Draw with Joe Choynski.

He was a pro less than 2 years and in about his 8th fight when he knocked out Joe Goddard.
He was a pro less than 2 years and in about his 11th fight when he won a 20 round Decision over Tom Sharkey.

And he had been a pro for less than 3 years and in about his 13th fight when he won the title against Fitzsimmons.

[BroughtonRulesRefuge]

A young 18 year old Jimmy McClarnin beating the great Pancho Villa.
Although there were circumstances involved. Villa had an infected tooth/teeth that wound up costing him his life.

-Good shout for McClarnin, a greatly undersung, forgotten great. Believe he's the 2nd longest lived fighter ever at age 96 to Schmelings 99.

Nobody beats Jeffries record as a green, untested fighter, although I suspect he has some private bouts that have been given short shrift:

Hank Griffin, 6-0-1 in Jeff's 2nd fight, 17th rd TKO.
6th fight a 20 rd draw with Choynski, 32-7-2.
7th fight a 4th rd KO against Joe Goddard, 31-5-7
8th fight a 3rd rd TKO against Peter Jackson, 46-1-3
9th fight a 3rd TKO against Mexican Pete, 21-3-0
10th fight a 20 rd decision against Tom Sharkey, 28-0-5
11th fight a 10 rd decision against Bob Armstrong, 9-5.
12th fight an 11th rd KO for Bob Fitz's title, 49-3-5
Finally his 13th fight and first defense, a 25 rd decision. over Sharkey, 33-1-5.

Then Hercules took a rest to reset for a similar finish.

So, that's 9 opponents, 8 straight of his first 13 bouts that were big accomplished names in the day, 5 of the fights against HOFers. They combined for an average record of 28-3-4, 255-25-28 overall. Jeff ends up the undefeated heavy champ with one defense notched and stood with an 11-0-2 mark, not bad work for a tenderfoot.

Alas, I see Mr. Alp beat me to the punch, so it's all good.

[I Feel Fine]

Robinson at 20, nine months into his career, with 20 pro fights, scored his first win over Angott, who fought him a pound above the Lightweight limit, Angott having the fight at that weight not wanting to risk losing his Lightweight title. Robinson had him down and won a lopsided decision. I always find that win interesting, too bad it could not have been for the title, making Ray, eventually, a three division champion.

[Collins2000]

Joe Goes Out
Monday, Nov. 05, 1951

A vociferous claque of rooters burst into an excited hubbub when Rocky Marciano came bouncing into the ring. But the real roar of the crowd in Madison Square Garden came for the man with the magic name: Joe Louis. Only those right at the ringside could see that Louis at 37, balding and thick-waisted, was little more than a bloated, moonfaced caricature of the famed Brown Bomber. The gamblers, out of respectful memory, made Joe a 7-5 favorite-but it was the shortest price ever quoted on the ex-champion.

Cocky Rocky, winner of all of his 37 fights (32 by knockouts), acted as if he had never heard of Joe Louis. Crowding, bulling, pumping and pummeling with short-range piston blows, Rocky wrestled Joe around the ring. In the early rounds, Joe made a stand, fighting with some inner instinct that could still make his aging body respond on cue. Sharp, probing Louis lefts started a mouse under Rocky's right eye. But when Joe spotted openings in Marciano's vulnerable defense, he could not follow through with his once explosive right; when he did, it was almost invariably a misfire.

Left Hook, Right Cross. Louis looked wilted, and walked stiff-legged, like a man on stilts. But no one in the crowd, least of all Louis, saw what was coming. And no one in the crowd, even the most rabid of Rocky's fans, really wanted to see it. In the eighth, a solid left hook, thrown wildly from Marciano's awkward, hunched crouch, caught Joe flush on the jaw and sent him tumbling to the canvas. Louis had been knocked down in other bouts, and each time he had come up fighting. He did this time too, but there was no sting left to his blows, nothing to make a man back down before his attack. Rocky moved in for the knockout.

A short flurry missed. A sharp left hook smacked Louis against the ropes. Another left glazed the old champion's eyes. His hands dropped. For an agonizing second Rocky measure his man, then shot a right cross to Joe's chin that sent him reeling awkwardly through the ropes, flat on his back on the apron of the ring.

Farewell & Hail. Referee Ruby Goldstein, without even bothering with the formality of a count, threw up his arms to signal the end of the fight. Joe was out. Joe was clearly finished. Rocky, in the first wild joy of victory, kept repeating over & over, as if unable to believe it himself: "I knocked him out! I knocked him out!" Later, when he fully realized that he had flattened the man who had not been knocked out since Max Schmeling did it 15 years ago, Rocky said the proper thing: "I'm glad I won, but I'm sorry I had to do it to Louis." Joe, accepting condolences in a gloomy dressing room while soaking his bruised left fist in a bucket of ice, refused to state flatly that he was through. But the sportwriters were already writing their farewells to Joe-and sizing up a likely new champion.

[Collins2000]

Unlucky 13th
Monday, Oct. 06, 1952

For a few breathless moments it looked as though Jersey Joe Walcott might finish off Rocky Marciano in the first round. With unexpected boldness, the heavyweight champion moved right in on Challenger Rocky, battered his jaw with short, hard lefts and rights, then tagged him with a left hook. The spectators at Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium let out a roar of excitement and surprise as Rocky went down, for the first time in 43 pro fights.

At the count of four, Rocky got up and fought back. In the third round Walcott gave up trying for a quick knockout, reverted to his normal counterpunching, backpedaling, hit & run tactics. Frequently looking amateurish against Walcott's artful dodging and skillful clinching, Marciano kept moving in, shaking off one punch after another, occasionally jolting Joe with a hard one to the belly. By the end of Round Ten, Marciano had pulled up nearly even in the official scoring. But Walcott, hitting fast and hard, took both 11 and 12, leaving Marciano badly cut and bruised around the eyes.

At the start of 13. the referee and both the judges had Walcott ahead on rounds; all that Jersey Joe had to do was stay even in the last three. He retreated toward the ropes, threw one ineffectual left. Then Marciano drove home a short overhand right to the head. It was straight and true, not just a wild thrust that happened to land square. Walcott slumped as if his knees had suddenly turned to jelly. Marciano grazed him with a left, then confidently stepped back. Walcott hung on the middle rope for a moment, then slid to the canvas. The fight was over.

Though Jersey Joe had put up a good battle, Marciano's victory was the logical outcome. Once Rocky had delivered his knockout punch, it was obvious that he would have done so sooner or later, in the next fight if not in this one. And the resounding title, "heavyweight champion of the world," suits Rocky Marciano (43 straight wins, 38 of them by knockouts) better than it suited old (4O-plus), often beaten (15 recorded times before last week) Jersey Joe Walcott. Marciano is too awkward and too much a fighter of one talent ever to be a Louis, but the crown fits him better than passably, and it will take a good fighter to get it away from him. Probably none of the challengers now in prospect—Walcott, Ezzard Charles, Rex Layne, Roland La Starza, Clarence Henry—is good enough.

[Collins2000]

With a Straight Face
Monday, May. 30, 1955

No one in his right mind really thought that Don Cockell, chubby heavyweight champion of the British Empire, belonged in the same ring with Rocky Marciano. Day after day, before the two fighters tangled for the world championship in San Francisco last week, dutiful British sportswriters beat the drums for the Battersea Butterball. But most of the time it was easier to explain why Don might lose. For one thing, the 16½ft. square ring was too small. For another, the Britons reminded their readers, U.S. boxing is rotten with rackets. In Philadelphia, a light heavyweight named Harold Johnson claimed to have been doped before a fight by a stranger who gave him a bitter-tasting orange, so Cockell's California camp made a big show of not using tea sent by well-wishers.

Beauty and Power. When fight time came. Rocky showed that he needed no help from either ring or rackets. With rough-and-tumble power, as clumsy as any champion since Camera, he took 8 rounds and 54 seconds to batter Cockell senseless. Then the British writers, who once upon a time were renowned for understatement, really turned it on. Their champion, taking a savage beating, had indeed met defeat like a true Briton. "And that is why the high and the mighty, the men with power, the women with beauty and vast possessions are rising in a kind of primeval mass sympathy and acclamation for a man from thousands of miles away," wrote the London Daily Mirror's Peter Wilson. "They rise to him because they know he is exhibiting something which power cannot command, beauty cannot achieve nor money buy.

"The kind of courage which refuses to bandage in front of the firing squad. The driving urge which made men die rather than surrender to Everest, or perish in the white wastes of the Antarctic while trying to bend the very Pole to their driving will ..."

Jackal and Lion. "Killer Marciano was crowding in now, head down like a gorilla, except that a gorilla does not eat meat, and Marciano is the most carnivorous fighter I have ever seen. Truly I do not exaggerate . . . The sun had set on the arena, but it had never set on the heavyweight champion of the Empire."

U.S. sportswriters were a little less primeval. Scornful of The Rock's rule-busting violence in the ring, they still saw the match as a triumph of phony showmanship and unscrupulous exploitation. Said the New York Daily Mirror's Dan Parker: "As shameless as a jackal gorging on the remnants of a lion's breakfast kill, Al Weill, that distinguished promoter of international good will, is already talking of a return bout between Rocky Marciano and his Monday-night abattoir victim, Don Cockell. There having been no reason for the first match, except a grossly commercial one, there is even less cause for a second slaughter. And when Weill says, with a straight face, that he is considering a return bout in London, that is the supreme insult to everyone above the third-grade moron class."

[Collins2000]

The Next Champ
Monday, Feb. 06, 1956

In the year-end rankings of The Ring, unofficial bible of boxing, Floyd Patterson is not even a heavyweight. Last week SPORTS ILLUSTRATED set the record straight: "It is now as clear as anything can be in the future books of boxing that [the] lithe young Brooklyn Negro-who celebrated his 21st birthday last month by challenging Rocky Marciano-will be the next heavyweight champion of the world."

Patterson's story, says Sportswriter Paul O'Neil, "illustrates the fact that professional boxing, for all its seamy background . . . and its pitiful human flotsam, can be a power for good in shaping the character of young males."

Pitfalls on the Path. Patterson's path from Manhattan's slums to his high skill as a professional boxer was filled with pitfalls. As a boy Floyd was "a lonely, disturbed and defiant being-the third in a family of eleven children, whom his parents, for all their toil, could barely feed." He was a truant. He ran with store-breaking gangs. Eventually his mother had him committed to an institution for problem children. He was 14, a tall, skinny welterweight, when he first found Cus D'Amato's Gramercy Gymnasium & Health Club on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He climbed "the long, dim stairway up from 14th Street, passed the two garbage cans on the landing, walked through a scabrous hall and entered the dingy and barnlike gymnasium ... To Floyd Patterson, as to many another slum boy, the prize ring seemed the only avenue of escape to a better world."

After two years and two score amateur fights, Patterson found himself at Helsinki, Finland, wearing the blue blazer of the U.S. Olympic team. Floyd won the <null> championship with impressive ease. "He was fully as sensational when he mounted a dais to receive the victory award-he put one hand on his stomach, the other against his back, and gave the crowd a deep, dancing-school bow."

Upstairs & Down. When he came home Patterson promptly turned pro, with D'Amato as his manager. He was sent to Trainer Dan Florio at Stillman's Gym for advanced instruction. Today, at 21, Patterson is known as a "fellow who will leave you for dead. He is a good-looking six-footer with lean hips, long arms and broad shoulders powered by slabs of smooth muscle ... he fights with the violent gracefulness of a large cat hunting its dinner. He is a rarity-a good boxer with a knockout in either fist . . . He is hard to hit, but he has been clobbered, upstairs and down, without losing his poise or aggressiveness. He has never been knocked out . . .

To Floyd Patterson, at the moment, the future seems faintly hazy but delightful. He hopes to buy his father and mother a house in the suburbs and to get his younger brothers and sisters out of the slums; he also hopes to make a million dollars and buy a farm. Between him and his dreams stands Heavyweight Champion Rocky Marciano.

"He looks sloppy in the ring. But he is a good fighter," says Patterson. "They say Marciano is the fighter who can't be hurt. But if you want to beat him you have to fight him and make him back up. I think of Rocky Marciano a lot ... Maybe ... Rocky Marciano thinks of me."

[Robinson]

Thanks for that Collins.

Good articles .

[clubberlang]

A few random thoughts –

Samart Payakaroon was an ultra talented Muay Thai fighter, so massive things where expected of him. It all went tits up when he won the title though, his lax training got him knocked out by Fenech, afterwards the press found out that he pissed the title away so he had to enter a monastery as penance. After he left the monastery he became a successful pop star, tried an unsuccessful comeback, appeared in several films & now teaches Muay Thai.

The recently departed Saensak Muangsurin was also a Muay Thai champion before turning pro & again massive things where expected from him.

Fenech & Holyfield where both hard look stories from the Olympics (Shingaki was also a weak champion).

A modern fighter worthy of a mention has to be Beibut Shumenov, although he competed in the 2004 Olympics he was an unknown yet beat ex WBC boss Montell Griffin after only 4 pro fights.

[Ezzard]

Jeff Fenech is often overlooked. About time someone mentioned him.