Advanced Striking 2.0 – Tommy Loughran

The light heavyweight division is one repeating, bittersweet story. It has been the home of some of the craftiest fighters in the history of the game, but at some point each and every one of them has tried his luck at heavyweight. A light heavyweight champion might fight every few months like any other belt holder, but the heavyweight champion would fight once a year and probably make more money doing it. From Bob Foster to Joey Maxim to Archie Moore almost every one of those light heavyweight greats found out the hard way that in fighting size really does matter.

Perhaps the greatest example of the undersized light heavyweight masquerading as a heavyweight was Tommy Loughran. From 1927 to 1929, Loughran was the light heavyweight champion of the world and in 1930 he went up to campaign among the big boys. After a rough start, losing to Jack Sharkey and then twice to Ernie Schaaf, Loughran tore off five victories back-to-back over King Levinsky, Max Baer, Ernie Schaaf, Tuffy Griffiths and Paulino Uzcudun. In each fight, Loughran fought as the smaller man—against Baer, for instance, he gave up three inches of height and eight inches of reach—and yet Loughran out-jabbed every single one.

Finally, Loughran met Primo Carnera in a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Carnera was an actual giant who suffered from acromegaly; he outweighed Loughran by upwards of sixty pounds and towered over him. Carnera was awarded the win, yet the scant footage of the bout shows Loughran easily scoring his jab on the Ambling Alp and the newspapermen declared almost unanimously that Loughran deserved the nod.

The jab is well understood to be the basis of scientific boxing but Loughran’s jab was an anomaly. Tommy set himself up to jab and only to jab. His stance was completely side on to the opponent, presenting only shoulder and lead hip. His right hand was draped across his belt line, costing him no energy to maintain. And his left hand—the be all and end all of his style—hung low, sometimes on his thigh, sometimes about hip height. The moment that his man drifted into striking range, Loughran thrust forward like a fencer.

Fig. 1

Tommy Loughran’s jab was rated as the best in the world in his day and anyone who saw him fight quickly picked up on it, but he was not a jabber in the mold of the modern boxer. The modern ideal of a great jabber is a man who slides in, pops his opponent on the eye or nose, and glides out of danger as his opponent clumsily swings at the air after him. Despite his brilliant jab, Loughran was less and in-and-out fighter than an in-and-stay fighter.

Lougrhan scored just fourteen knockouts in a 163 fight career. It baffled many in the press that Loughran couldn’t get opponents done inside the distance: especially as he wasn’t wanting for muscle mass in an age where most fighters were skin and sinew. But Loughran didn’t use his muscle to wind up on big swings, he used it to smother his opponent at every opportunity. Tommy Loughran’s greatest skill was using the jab to control and stuff his opponent.

Figure 2 shows a typical Loughran entry. Flicking out his jab (1), Loughran would either score it, be slipped or be parried. This most often resulted in Loughran’s left hand going over the opponent’s left shoulder—placing it in position to frame on their left collarbone and neck. But Loughran’s real art was in picking off his opponent’s own left. His right hand always went forward to palm the opponent’s jab at the same time he threw his own. If the opponent’s left hand stayed at home, Loughran would go to it. Crashing into his opponent, chest-to-chest (2), Loughran would jam his right wrist or forearm into the crook of his opponent’s elbow and peel it away from their body (3). Often Loughran closed with the force to almost turn his opponent around by the crook of the biceps. With a check on both their head and left arm, Loughran could render the opponent largely ineffective without fully tying them up.

Fig. 2

That was Loughran closing on his own terms—a simple jab-and-clutch—but just as often Loughran yanked his opponents around and leaned on them off their reaction to the threat of his jab. Loughran’s jab was so effective that he could paradoxically make taller men try to fight shorter. The six-foot-two Jim Braddock (who would go on to become heavyweight champion of the world) was forced to crouch and slip deep to try and get inside of Loughran’s all-seeing left hand. Fighters who were naturally shorter than Loughran—like Mickey Walker—never stood a chance of avoiding Loughran’s collar ties and headlocks.

Most of Loughran’s opponents would try to slip to the outside of his jab in order to try to close the distance underneath it. When they did this, Loughran would take the opportunity to slide his missed jab across the base of their neck and close to meet them, bringing them in underneath his armpit. Rather than hold his opponent’s head from underneath in an obviously illegal headlock, Loughran would simply drape himself over the top of the opponent and close his elbow to his body and stand up straight, pulling the opponent forwards over their toes. If he felt he had the chance and could get away with it, Loughran would dig his arm underneath his opponent’s armpit to apply a stockade and put more pressure on the back of their neck. The purpose of these tactics was never to draw a submission of course, but to tire his opponent out by stooping them over and forcing them to hold him up or fall to the floor and get up again.

But there were times when Loughran wanted to maintain the distance or reposition in the ring and in that case he would frame off the opponent with his jabbing hand just the same. Figure 3 shows a sequence that played out a couple of times in the Jim Braddock match. Braddock tried to advance on Loughran and ducked down to his right the moment Loughran’s shoulder twitched towards him. Loughran framed off the side of Braddock’s neck with his palm and locked out his arm to keep the distance.

Fig. 3

This brings us to another Loughran trick. Because Loughran fought in such a bladed stance he regularly made use of the cross step. Figure 4 shows this in action in the context of framing. As Braddock pushes forwards and Loughran frames off him, Loughran withdraws his lead foot underneath him (4). This is identical to the start of an L-step, where a fighter draws back his lead foot underneath himself and side steps out with the other one to make the most use of the little room he has left before the ropes. But instead of stepping out to his right with his right foot, here Loughran drives his lead foot in again, this time on the outside of Braddock’s lead leg (5). The cross step allowed Loughran to pivot around his lead foot and cut a deep angle out to the side of his opponent.

Fig. 4

A fist fight is a chaotic event and there are no tactics that do not have counters. Every trick Tommy Loughran used could fail, and all of them relied on Loughran having the wits to identify what his opponent was doing and move to stuff it. In the first round of his fight against Leo Lomski, Loughran was dropped twice with right hands off his jab. The kind of right hands he would normally pick off effortlessly, but he just couldn’t get Lomski’s timing. After that disastrous start, Loughran began to read his man and cruised to victory over fifteen rounds. In the final round Lomski looked as ineffective as any other Loughran opponent.

While Loughran was often able to frame off Jim Braddock as he tried to enter in a crouch, Braddock was sometimes able to get clean underneath Loughran’s extended arm. Figure 5 shows Loughran’s mastery of control on full display. As Braddock slid in underneath his extended arm (2), Loughran kept his hand on the left side of Braddock’s head and moved in to meet him, dropping his lead elbow in between them to smother Braddock’s right uppercut (3).

Fig. 5

This sequence played out a number of times in the Braddock - Loughran match, but went even further (Figure 6). After Loughran stuffed the right uppercut, Braddock would come up swinging his left hook and Loughran would check it inside the elbow (4). Loughran would then use his frame on Braddock’s neck to stand the taller man up and circle his right hand over the top of Braddock’s left to hold it behind the elbow (5).

Fig. 6

While he was the furthest thing possible from a knockout artist, Loughran could still put in some good punches in his bouts. Almost all of his control techniques off the jab allowed him to take the collar tie with one hand and start blasting uppercuts with the other. He did the same thing when he could get an opponent chasing him back out of the pocket—catching them behind the head and pulling them off balance onto his blows. Against Mickey Walker—who repeatedly tried to swing right hands over Loughran’s jab—Loughran pushed the point of his elbow out into the crook of Walker’s (2), killing the blow with a leverage guard. This left Loughran in perfect position to pull Walker’s already moving weight forwards and score the uppercut.

The style of Tommy Loughran, despite hinging around the basic ideas of good boxing, seems completely alien on first glance. It is also difficult to enjoy because Loughran so seldom hurt his opponents but was so skilled that the chance of them hurting him was also near zero. While he will never be anyone’s top choice for a late night Youtube boxing marathon, Loughran’s style has tremendous value—particularly to fighters in sports that allow more involved clinch fighting. And should you ever find yourself studying the film of Loughran, pull up the records of the men he is boxing against and regularly remind yourself of just how good these men were as Loughran makes them look hopelessly lost.

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Tommy Loughran’s story appears in our heavyweight history episode The Great Depression Hodgepodge.

Check out the two previous entries in the Advanced Striking 2.0 series: Anderson Silva and Badr Hari