Jimmy Young and the Art of Awkwardness

I watched Jimmy Young become awkward. I don’t mean he couldn’t box, because Young could box his ass off and knew exactly what he was doing in a ring. But the Jimmy Young I watched early in his career wasn’t quite the same fighter who later gave Muhammad Ali fits, beat George Foreman and came within a split decision of earning another shot at the heavyweight championship. As the years went by, Jimmy became more awkward, and he also became better. I think the two things were connected.

Young figured out what worked for him and kept doing more of it. He wasn’t a puncher. He wasn’t especially big for a heavyweight, and nobody was ever going to mistake him for Ali when he moved around the ring. What Jimmy eventually became was one of the most difficult heavyweights of his era to fight. By the time he reached his best years, the awkwardness wasn’t something he needed to correct. It was one of the reasons he was so damn good.

Learning his trade

Young turned professional in 1969 and came out of the Philadelphia boxing scene, which was about as forgiving a place to learn your trade as a meat grinder. He spent time in the gym with men like Joe Frazier, Jerry Quarry and Ken Norton, and he learned plenty in actual fights as well. Some of those lessons came at considerable cost.

Young lost four of his first eleven fights. One came against Randy Neumann, and another came against Earnie Shavers, who stopped him in three rounds in 1973. Young had ten professional fights when somebody decided putting him in with Earnie Shavers was a good idea. Boxing was different then.

I’ve been around fighters too long to believe every loss produces some great revelation. Fighters learn in the gym, in fights, from trainers, from sparring partners and sometimes from getting the hell knocked out of them. I don’t know what Young took from the first Shavers fight, and I’m not going to invent it. I do know what happened when they met again nineteen months later. Shavers couldn’t get rid of him.

Young was hurt in the rematch, but he lasted the ten rounds and got a draw. There were people who thought Jimmy deserved the decision, and whatever he’d learned between those two fights. He was becoming much harder to beat. Then came Ron Lyle, and that’s where the Jimmy Young I remember really began to emerge.

Young couldn’t punch with Lyle, and he wasn’t crazy enough to try. Ron Lyle was the real deal, and brother, could that man crack. Young made him fight his fight and decisioned him over ten rounds. When they met in the rematch, it was rinse and repeat. Young decisioned him again. By then, I was noticing something about Jimmy that would become more obvious every time I watched him: the more awkward he got, the better he got.

Awkward on purpose

There’s a difference between awkward and clumsy, and Jimmy Young was never clumsy. He had good hands, could counter and knew what to do when somebody came after him. What changed was his willingness to forget about how a heavyweight was supposed to look while doing it. Jimmy found things that worked and kept them.

That’s why I’ve always seen a little of Ali’s rope-a-dope in what Young eventually became. I don’t mean they fought alike, because they didn’t. I mean both men took something a trainer might normally try to correct and found a way to make it work. Before everybody knew the name, the rope-a-dope sounded nuts: give up the middle of the ring, put your back on the ropes and let a heavyweight throw punches at you. Any trainer teaching a young fighter would’ve lost his mind, but Ali made it work.

Young did something similar with awkwardness. He didn’t have Shavers’s right hand, Foreman’s strength or Ali’s legs, so Jimmy became harder and harder to fight. He’d make a guy lead when he didn’t want to lead, get him reaching, tie him up when he got close and make a mess of whatever the other guy had planned. It wasn’t always pretty, but Jimmy didn’t give a damn. If it worked, he used it.

Muhammad Ali

Young got his title shot against Muhammad Ali on April 30, 1976, in Landover, Maryland. Ali was 34 and weighed 230 pounds, while Young came in at 209. Ali was no longer the fighter who’d danced through the 1960s, but he was still Muhammad Ali and still the heavyweight champion of the world. Jimmy gave him fits.

Ali liked a man who came to him. Young wasn’t coming unless he felt like it, so Ali had to go looking for him. Jimmy made him lead, countered him and spent fifteen rounds making the champion work for everything he got. It was exactly the kind of fight Young wanted.

Then there was the business with the ropes. When Ali got after him, Young repeatedly stuck his head and upper body through them. I didn’t like it when I watched the fight, and I don’t like it any better now. It was ugly, and eventually the referee had enough of it, but it was also very Jimmy Young.

Ali got the unanimous decision, and people have argued about it ever since. I thought Young had a hell of a case, but Jimmy didn’t help himself with the rope business. You can make a fighter miss all night, but if you keep putting half your body outside the ring, eventually somebody sitting at ringside is going to hold it against you. That was one of the risks of fighting the way Jimmy fought: sometimes he made the other guy look bad without making himself look much better.

George Foreman

If anybody still wondered whether Jimmy Young belonged with the best heavyweights in the world, George Foreman settled the argument. They fought in Puerto Rico on March 17, 1977, and Foreman came in at 45-1 with 42 knockouts. Since losing to Ali in Zaire, he’d stopped Ron Lyle in one of the wildest heavyweight fights I’ve ever seen and then knocked out Joe Frazier for the second time.

George Foreman could hit, and I don’t mean merely that he hit hard. Lots of heavyweights hit hard. George hit the kind of hard that made you wonder whether somebody had put something illegal in his gloves. He could catch a man with what looked like the wrong part of a punch and still hurt him. Jimmy had to spend twelve rounds with him.

Foreman nearly got him in the seventh. He caught Young with a left hook and had him badly hurt, and against a lot of heavyweights that would’ve been the beginning of the end. Jimmy survived the round, came out for the eighth and went right back to being Jimmy Young. Foreman got frustrated, Jimmy kept making him work, and George eventually lost a point for roughhousing. The longer the fight went, the better things looked for Young.

Then, in the twelfth round, Jimmy Young knocked George Foreman down. Nobody is ever going to confuse Jimmy with Earnie Shavers; he finished his career with twelve knockouts in fifty-six fights. But there was George Foreman on the canvas, and Jimmy had put him there. Young won the decision; The Ring named it Fight of the Year, and Foreman walked away from boxing afterwards and wouldn’t fight again for ten years.

I’ve never bought the story that Jimmy Young somehow broke George Foreman. George has told his own story about what happened to him that night and afterwards, and Jimmy doesn’t need the mythology anyway. He beat George Foreman. Against that George Foreman, beating him was more than enough.

Ken Norton

Eight months later, Young fought Ken Norton in Las Vegas. The winner would put himself in line for the heavyweight championship, so Jimmy was one decision away from getting another shot at the title. Norton was a different proposition from Foreman. Kenny was a tough son of a bitch, strong as a bull; he could punch, he worked the body, and he kept coming.

Norton and Young also knew each other from the gym, and they went fifteen rounds before Norton won a split decision. Young thought he’d won, and he wasn’t alone. Referee Carlos Padilla didn’t have a vote under the scoring system being used, but later said he would’ve voted for Jimmy. Young said afterwards that he thought he’d won nine rounds to six.

I’m not going to turn every close Jimmy Young loss into a robbery because I hate that habit in boxing. Sometimes two good fighters have a close fight and three people sitting at ringside have to decide who won it. Jimmy’s style didn’t always help him because he could make the other guy miss, spoil what he wanted to do and keep him from getting set without throwing enough punches himself. Young knew it too. Asked what he’d do differently against Norton. He said he’d throw more punches, and that’s hard to argue with.

Look at the names

Jimmy never got another shot at the heavyweight championship, but he kept fighting, and that’s where his final record of 35-18-3 gets interesting. Forget the eighteen losses for a minute and look at the names: Earnie Shavers twice, Ron Lyle twice, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Ossie Ocasio twice, Michael Dokes, Gerry Cooney, Greg Page, Tony Tubbs and Tony Tucker. Jesus, that’s a hell of a collection of heavyweights.

Young fought one generation and then hung around long enough to fight the next one. Dokes, Page, Tubbs and Tucker all became heavyweight champions, Cooney fought Larry Holmes for the title, and Ocasio became a cruiserweight champion. By then Jimmy had become the guy you put in with a younger heavyweight when you wanted to find out whether the kid could fight. There’s no easy money in that job because you know why you’re there, the other guy knows why you’re there, and everybody expects him to beat you.

Young wasn’t finished as a contender, either. In 1981, he put together five straight wins, and The Ring named him Comeback of the Year. His reward was Greg Page, which is one hell of a way to welcome a man back. Page decisioned him, and Young spent much of the rest of his career fighting younger men who wanted his name on their records.

So yes, Jimmy Young finished 35-18-3, and records matter to me. They matter to fighters too. But when you look at 35-18-3 without looking at the names on the other side of the ledger, you’re not really looking at Jimmy Young’s career. You’re looking at arithmetic.

The Jimmy Young I Remember

Jimmy Young died in 2005 at only 56 years old. He never became heavyweight champion, although he fought Ali for the title and came within a split decision against Norton of putting himself in position to fight for it again. I’ve heard Young called underrated for years, but I don’t think he was. We knew Jimmy could fight.

Anybody watching heavyweight boxing in the 1970s knew it. You didn’t decision Ron Lyle twice, give Ali hell, beat George Foreman and take Ken Norton to a split decision because nobody had noticed you were any good. Jimmy Young was rated just fine. What he was, more than almost any heavyweight I can remember, was awkward.

That’s what I remember most clearly because I watched it develop. Jimmy didn’t become better and then somehow become awkward along the way. The more awkward he got, the better he got. He found things that worked for him and kept them, even when some of those things would’ve driven another fighter’s trainer nuts.

That’s where the comparison with Ali comes in. Ali turned laying on the ropes into a weapon, while Young turned awkwardness into one. They were different fighters using different methods, but the idea wasn’t so different: if something works, who gives a damn what the boxing textbook says about it?

Jimmy couldn’t crack like Shavers or Lyle. He wasn’t built like Foreman, and he didn’t have Ali’s gifts. What he had was Jimmy Young, and somewhere along the way he figured out that was enough. The more he fought like himself, the harder the bastard was to fight, and I think that was the whole idea.