What comes to mind when you hear the name Earnie Shavers? Undoubtedly it will be his punching power and no surprises when I listed him in my article of hardest punchers in history. Infact I don’t believe there ever was a harder puncher than Shavers. It usually comes down to between Shavers and George Foreman when it comes to the hardest punchers, of course there are fighters who may have been better punchers such as Joe Louis, Thomas Hearns and Julian Jackson but none of those names could compete with the thunderous punching power of Earnie Shavers.
Shavers though wasn’t all about power – when you know you have such great power then it is only right you will use methods to capitalise on the opponents fear of getting hit by you. Shavers was excellent at using feints to set up his right hand. I have written about the use of feints in the past and it is essential reading if you are looking to improve your game.
Earnie Shavers would start using that right hand feint because he knew you were thinking about it, especially after he had already tagged you with it and you had felt his power. The way Shavers would do this is by feinting the right hand and he would then use this right hand feint to instead throw the left hook, so punch from the opposing side when you were worried about the punch coming from the other side. What Shavers could also do then is throw the right hand off the left hook which was preceded by the right hand feint. So the sequence would be right hand feint, left hook, right hand.
The feint would be thrown with a sudden shrug or jerk of the rear shoulder so you are throwing the punch without actually throwing, you’ve got to sell the feint to the opponent so they think the punch is actually coming, get them to react to it and then throw the left hook from the other side. What this also accomplishes is often the left hook will turn your opponent into the path of your right hand so even though the opponent was looking out for the right hand they still get hit by it because the left hook has set up the right cross coming behind it.
Watch the video below to see Earnie Shavers giving a demonstration of how he uses the right hand feint.