One of the foundational principles of our study of martial arts has been the idea that angles and positioning are key. At its most extreme, you can get around behind someone and hit them with very little chance of a return. In grappling and MMA you can physically climb onto someone’s back and keep peeling their hands and attacking chokes while they can offer almost no offence of their own. But in the striking arts out-flanking an opponent is a fleeting opportunity.
Unless your blows have already rendered the opponent dead on his feet, any man with a pulse and a pair of feet is going to turn to face you shortly after you get your angle. But while a man who isn’t facing you is an easy target, and a man fought head-on is a daunting task, a turning opponent falls somewhere in the middle. In the act of pivoting, a fighter’s hips are in motion in one direction and one of his feet is off the floor: he is very restricted in the blows he can get power into in this way and he is, after all, playing catch up as he does so. So while a fighter will very rarely get out to the side of his man and turn their chin around with a textbook right straight from three o’clock, it is still worth stepping to the angles because the act of the defending fighter turning-to-face still offers up substantial openings.
The easy example for everything related to angles over recent years has been Vasyl Lomachenko. While every top level fighter uses his feet to create openings throughout a fight, Lomachenko is notable for his endurance and discipline in this pursuit: forcing movement and moving to slight angles at almost every stage of a bout. For his opponents it is exhausting, not only on their body but on their wits, and while they never stop turning to face him, they soon slow down and Lomachenko is able to get off more and more blows, and sneak in more and more re-steps to the outside angle on each engagement.
Now Lomachenko is a brilliant fighter any way you slice it. Inside, outside, to his left, to his right, he does opponents in with every punch in the traditional boxing arsenal and he can fight on the lead or the counter. He is far from a one trick pony but as a southpaw his go-to method of bludgeoning orthodox foes is to step down the outside of their lead foot, pivot to face them from the side, and open up with punches. As the opponent turns to face him he will take another step and try to keep recycling this shuffle while letting off strikes.
Often on this outside angle there is another of our key principles at play: that of the closed / open side. While Lomachenko has taken himself away from his opponent’s right hand, and snuck past their lead shoulder—making the left hook less of an issue—he has placed his left shoulder and hand on their centreline, but his right hand runs into the problem of their lead shoulder. If the opponent steps back, the right hand can be straightened out after the left. If you get outside the lead foot and want to stay close and put together combinations however, your right hand has to loop in from the side, and the opponent can duck down behind their lead shoulder and back. Shoulder roll, Philly Shell, instinctive cowering—call it whatever you like. But this is one of the reasons that Manny Pacquiao did most of his two-fisted hitting from the inside angle, and most often doubled up left straights and neglected his right hand when working past the opponent’s lead foot on the outside angle.
But to hit with both hands from the outside angle, Lomachenko throws a slapping right hook that often comes in high over the opponent’s shoulder, but mainly serves to coincide with another step to reposition him for another cracking left hand to the body.
In Lomachenko’s last fight, Teofimo Lopez won a well earned decision over the Ukrainian and did a great job of undoing Lomachenko’s outside angle in the process. From the get go, Lopez got to work jabbing and made good use this weapon to the body of the shorter southpaw. He quickly unveiled a body jab to left hook combination that he would lean on throughout the fight, and a slapping left hook helped him take away Lomachenko’s outside angle. While Lopez has been a booming hitter with both hands in the past, his left hook in the Lomachenko fight was largely used to check Lomachenko and then apply a clinch over Lomachenko’s back to draw him close. As Lomachenko wants to get past the lead elbow and then stick to the back of his man’s lead shoulder, he is often close enough to hold—the difficulty is more in getting the arm outside of the line of the body and ahead of Lomachenko.
Of all Lopez’s tactics in this fight, trying to snap Lomachenko with the left hook and then tie him up was probably the least effective. It was a sound idea in principle but he suffered from two shortcomings. The first was that either by accident or savvy, Lomachenko kept managing to butt Lopez in the face when Lopez pulled him in. The second was that clinching with one hand around the back is not a great tie up. Recalling that in boxing the goal of a clinch is normally to stop the opponent working more than to apply ones own offence—or rather to “tie him up.” Loosely throwing an arm around the back—with a large stuffed oven mitt preventing you from digging your fingers into a good no-gi judo style lat grip—will not do much to stop the opponent from swinging his arms. Rather than chest-to-chest, with his own limbs smothering Lomachenko’s, Lopez often ended up side-on to Lomachenko with the Ukrainian under his armpit, free to swing in punches to the front of Lopez’s face and body with his left hand.
The second means of unravelling the outside angle was to do exactly what Lomachenko does himself when opponents try to slide down the outside of his lead leg. Rather than turn to face or cover up, Lomachenko will drop back and away from his opponent. For Lomachenko, the southpaw, that is back and to the left. For Lopez, it was back and to the right. Ideally you want to be moving directly away from the opponent, so the further they get into the angle, the more off to the side you’re going to be fleeing. This is something we have discussed many times over the years but if a fighter misses the moment and concedes a dominant angle it is often while trying to correct the error that he gets blasted—much of the time it is easier and safer to just move directly away from the opponent and re-establish distance. The angle game is undone by space.
Lopez’s third means of dealing with the outside angle was a direct counter-measure. Where turning around their lead foot to play catch is the area that so many fighters open themselves up or retreat into a shell, Lopez actually stole the fight from Lomachenko on the pivot. There’s a lot to this but first let us go back to the idea of punching purity—something that Jack Dempsey articulated in Championship Fighting and which is still a vitally important principle in the business of throwing hands. Dempsey differentiated between arm punches and “pure” punches. An arm punch might still knock someone out by chance but pure punches are by and large the ones that do the damage. To be “pure” a punch must have a good portion of the body’s weight moving with the blow. This is commonly a forward step on straight blows, or a “whirling of the shoulders” on curving blows.
The crux of it is that rotating your trunk provides a lot of your hitting power on most punches. When you are in the act of pivoting, your hips and shoulders are rotating in one direction. You will have seen a few beautiful left hooks thrown while pivoting clockwise around the lead leg.
But you will be hard pressed to find a good right hook or right uppercut while pivoting in the same direction. The slip, left hook, and pivot offline is a favourite because of the synergies between the movements of the hips and feet. When a fighter is being made to pivot by his opponent stepping off the centre line, his hips and shoulders are being forced to follow the turn: he is being locked out of half of his punches. This is part of the idea of circling away from the opponent’s power hand if they have one very obvious money punch.
When Lomachenko steps to the outside angle his orthodox opponent pivots anti-clockwise around their lead foot to face him. This means that they could use that rotation to get some force on a right hand, but because he is behind their lead shoulder the path of their right hand is lengthened and it would have to come all the way across the pivoting fighter’s body before Lomachenko can continue around and out of its way. To put it simply you aren’t going to pivot and catch Lomachenko by surprise with an overhand when he’s on his way past your lead foot.
Lopez was able to use his pivot to power a counter punch but instead focused on air-tight right uppercuts to the head and body. In each of these Lopez’s elbow stayed almost flush to the line of his body as his right hip rotated around. Coming out of the shoulder roll—as Gervonta Davis and Zab Judah did so well from the open position—Lopez would slip inside Lomachenko’s lead hand as he began the outside step, then force him back out with the counter uppercut. When throwing the uppercut Lopez often threw across himself, drawing his left shoulder back and finishing the uppercut in the space it previously occupied.
It was a very tricky punch and there were no spectacular sequences where he wobbled Lomachenko to his boots with the blow, but it absolutely served its purpose. The pivoting uppercut got Lomachenko away from his spot and back out to range, at which point Lopez would immediately follow with a stiff one-two.
While he didn’t go to the body with pivoting right hand as often as he went to the head, it did seem to go unanswered when Lopez committed to it. Sometimes it was an uppercut, other times it was like a tight right hook to the body with the elbow pressed to Lopez’s side.
Keeping his elbow tight inside the line of his body meant that the punch was linked to the pivot and not a swing lagging behind it or an awkward arm punch that was unconnected to it. At last, an occasion where differentiating between the hook and the shovel hook actually matters!
A final option that Lopez used as Lomachenko tried to get onto his angle was simply to push him out. A forearm across the chest or even hips, or a glove on the shoulder, and a direct push. It isn’t the prettiest, but if it works and the referee isn’t stopping you, it is the right thing to do. Remember that angles are lessened by distance: if you retreat far enough the opponent loses their angle and is back in front of you, and the same is true if you push them back.
Lopez versus Lomachenko was not one of those crushing masterclasses, where Lopez just worked Lomachenko out and Lomachenko never got back into it. But it was a case of Lopez taking away a lot of what Lomachenko had going for him and forcing Lomachenko to fight in an uncomfortable way. Lopez’s job was to keep Lomachenko on the outside, where he could use his longer frame and his powerful singles and doubles, and avoid Lomachenko’s two-handed flurries. Each time he got Lomachenko to step back off a counter uppercut, or pushed him out of his space, he followed up with a long one-two, or a good wide right to the body.
The other important point of course is that fighters who use lateral movement, to create angles and turn their opponents, do best when the opponent is following them. Think of Manny Pacquiao vs Antonio Margerito—a thirty pound weight difference overcome because Margerito was constantly plodding forward and letting Pacquiao flurry and slip out the side door. Against Lomachenko, Lopez was able to apply some offence with his one-two and occasionally pressure to put in body shots along the ropes, but he was always ready to give ground and to break off the line of attack. It was the difference between the bull chasing the cape and the bull pursuing the matador, and that is all the difference in the world.
Because of Lopez’s success in denying his angles, Lomachenko was then forced to fight the bout that did not seem to favour him—a head-to-head dogfight. And to Lomachenko’s credit he did far better than he was supposed to do there. He got marked up much more than he usually does but his best moments were actually when he engaged in the sort of fire fight Lopez was trying to force him into.
The decision has been done to death—and that is part of the reason for the break between fight and study—but that is beyond our purpose for today. Teofimo Lopez was billed as the young gun, perhaps too big, too strong and too powerful for Lomachenko, but he got it done with his quickness and his team’s intense study of the Ukrainian dancing master. For Lomachenko it was probably not much fun to lose his WBA and WBO titles, but if you consider the amount of opponent specific preparation that Lopez must have gone through to fight like that, there aren’t many more sincere compliments in the sport of fist fighting.
If you’re in the mood for more discussion of pivots and lateral movement, check out Stick and Move: The Meaning of Angles