Advanced Striking 2.0 –
Jose ‘Mantequilla’ Napoles
A fighter can be considered to be the sum of his experiences. You can watch tricks peak through in his bouts and guess at a fighter’s coaches or where they might have acquired their habits. With Jose Napoles it is easy to look at the finished product and work out how he wound up that way.
‘Mantequilla’ learned his craft in the gyms of Cuba, an island rich with boxing history which has produced classy technician after classy technician. If you cannot box smart, you will not box for long on Cuba. Napoles was beginning to hit his stride at twenty-one years old when Castro banned professional sports: in a single blow, Napoles’ job no longer existed in his homeland. Rather than attempt to return to amateur competition Napoles decided that if he could draw a crowd by taking and giving punches, he should not be doing it for free. This attitude was perfectly at home in Mexico, where all but the most privileged fighters go professional young and fight often. Napoles emigrated to Mexico and became its adopted son.
Aggression is the hallmark of the Mexican boxing tradition. It is not a secret technique or something that runs in the blood of Mexican fighters, but it is valued by crowds and judges and promoters. In a country swelled with young, poor boxing talents, a good technician is not owed a living and Jose Napoles never acted as though he was. Beautiful technique was a key characteristic of Napoles’ style, but it was always in service of getting in to hit the opponent with both hands, and with thudding power.
Fig. 1
The traditional “boxer-puncher” is a fighter who throws his textbook straight shots and does good, consistent damage with them. Napoles was more like a great serve-and-volley master in tennis. He was capable of classy boxing on the outside, but there were moments in his fights where he prepared himself, flung out the jab, and then closed to the inside underneath it to rally off a good sequence of punches and weaves from exchanging range.
Napoles at his best had instincts that seldom let him down. That ability to see the punches coming in a split second, or better—to know what punches were coming while fighting on autopilot, because he had seen it all before. But his footwork was especially beguiling and it was the combination of dancing and weaving that earned him the nickname ‘Mantequilla’—he was as smooth as butter.
Mantequilla probably did not jot down diagrams of his own footwork to better understand what he had been doing, like Gentleman Jim Corbett, but he had an uncanny ability to switch up his feet. He could go between the economical, textbook footwork that is the standard the world over, and the more risky footwork that sets up specific shots and entries, without any telegraph to his opponent of his altered intentions. And he did it on the fly, while seldom being made to pay for it over hundreds and hundreds of rounds as a professional.
Jose Napoles was a demon on the inside. His finish of Ernie Lopez in the seventh round of their rematch is a beautiful example of this. After dinging Lopez with a good punch, Napoles closes for the kill, doubling up on punches from both hands. Left hook, left uppercut, weave, right hook, right uppercut. His dexterity in a firefight was like that of a top notch percussionist. But the look that carried Mantequilla to the inside so often was his jab.
Figure 2 shows the footwork of a textbook jab, thrown with the intention of making ground. The lead foot stabs in at the same time as the lead hand is thrust out. The back foot is second to move, being brought up to shorten the stance again. The intention is to keep the feet spread so that the fighter can duck, or take a blow at pretty much any point in the motion.
Fig. 2
Jose Napoles used a textbook jab in just about every round of every fight that made it onto film. It was this jab that he used to point score, and to set up counter punches. Figure 3 shows an example of how Mantequilla would use a stepping jab to needle and slide away. Driving in with a body jab, Napoles spreads his feet and extends his stance (2). Rather than draw the right foot up into his stance, Napoles remains extended so that when the opponent returns he can push off his lead foot and place his weight over his rear foot, swaying back into his extended stance (3).
Fig. 3
In this instance, Napoles returns with his jab (4) but against more aggressive opponents, who would throw their head forwards and pursue him, Napoles did great damage with the uppercut. Sometimes he would use a lead hand uppercut, but mostly he would land a good right handed uppercut. Sometimes he would even whip his right hand out to the side and swing it in theatrically in the bolo punch made famous by his countryman, Kid Gavilan. Lopez was knocked out cleanly with this fade-away uppercut, while Billy Backus was also an easy mark for it.
Yet Napoles had another jab he used to initiate his moves to the inside. It started with his stance (Figure 1). Napoles stood in the kind of “sprinter’s stance” favoured by great hookers. Heavy on the front leg, back foot up on the ball. This set Napoles up to crack with the left hook if his opponent stepped in on him. But from this stance, Napoles would make rapid ground by reversing the footwork of a stepping jab.
Fig. 4
Figure 4 depicts the footwork of Mantequilla’s Galloping Jab. Rather than extend his stance with his jab, his right foot is drawn up underneath him as his jab is flicked out (2). Napoles’ left foot then advances and he drops back down into his hooking stance (3). This was all done in one fluid motion so that he was almost galloping through the jab. Figure 5 shows the galloping jab in action.
Fig. 5
Stepping with the rear foot first (2) offers less safety if the opponent throws something back. It is harder to dip, or pull away, or take a flush punch without falling over when your feet are close together. But the galloping jab makes up for that on the offensive end: if the opponent gives ground as in Figure 5, Napoles is still able to step to almost inside their lead foot off his jab (3). The difficult part was the game of psychology that Napoles had to play, going between poking, annoying jabs, and this jab that worked best when the opponent retreated.
Continuing on from this jab was simple. Often Napoles could skip into a good right straight which extended well beyond the reach of the original jab. If he had a particularly tricky opponent who was circling out, Napoles would slide down the side of the opponent to his left, and shoot a right straight to the midsection (Figure 6).
Fig. 6
The key sequence of Napoles’ game was the galloping jab into left hook. Nobody hooked off the jab as often as Napoles, and nobody came close to making the distance he did in doing so. Many boxers struggle to work out hooking off the jab because you are using your longest punch, followed by one of your shorter punches, but the opponent will probably have given ground on the jab. Napoles’ galloping jab was an elegant solution to that.
Fig. 7
Figure 7 shows how Napoles would gallop in off the jab, land in his hooking stance (3) and then hop forward with both feet at the same time as he clubbed his opponent with the hook (4). This example shows how Napoles would then move in to punch the body and continue his inside fighting (5).
The kind of bouncing footwork that Napoles used on his left hook was another staple of his game. Letting both feet come off the canvas at once to bounce in and out with punches and evasions. In his more aggressive performances—such as his second bout with Augusto Urbina and his rematch with Hedgemon Lewis—Napoles used this in a fashion similar to Roy Jones Jr. in the 1990s. Every time he bounced forward he lowered himself into that hooking stance, and he might bounce away again afterwards, he might unleash a left hook, or he might come up the centre with a left uppercut.
In the pantheon of boxing greats out of Cuba, Napoles is one of the very greatest. Through the first half of the 1970s, he dominated the welterweight division, setting the record for most defenses of a unified world title at any weight. Napoles was so convincing that he moved up to challenge the great champion, Carlos Monzon in his very first go at middleweight.
Dwarfed by Monzon, Napoles was able to show his incredible swiftness of foot in closing in on Monzon in the early going, but ultimately suffered a beating as any other Monzon opponent did. Two years and a couple of fights later, Napoles retired and never came back for money, or love of the game, or out of boredom. He had done more than what he set out to, and he is one of the rare examples of boxing being as good to the fighter as the fighter was to boxing.
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Check out the three previous entries in the Advanced Striking 2.0 series: