Ken Pfrenger said:
Ju8st a s soon as the fighter left three contact point on the ground to two, it was legal to hit them. I suppose you could say it was not fair if that only applied to one of the fighters but that was the game then and I would be willing to bet that Willard did his fair share of stalking downed opponents as well.
One has to think, too, what it would have been like to be knocked out like that. I will speak from experience of someone who has been zinged before.
Here is basically how it works...
You trade punches with training partners. You feel the impact in training, the "flash" and light stars when you really get zinged, and the headache afterwords.
No big deal. So now your up against someone, trading some shots. Everything seems like normal. Then, he throws a punch. You don't see the whole punch; you maybe see the beginning like it is posed out. THen you blink, feeling the impact. When you open your eyes from the blink, you are on your back staring up at the ceiling, and the ref is on about count number 4. You don't know what the hell happened, but you know that if your not up soon, you will lose the fight. So you stumble to get up.
When you get zinged, time literally stops for you, as does your motor skills.
Being zinged like that is sort of like being drunk. Your brain knows what it wants, you tell your body what to do, but your body doesn't listen. You get to your feet, barely, and it took you another 4 seconds. You tell yourself to put your hands up, and to fight your opponent; but your legs are like jello, you can't straighten your back your hands aren't listening....
This is about how it was for Willard. I would imagine that he didn't expect this "runt" like Dempsey to be able to hit him as hard as he did. He couldn't believe, or make sense of how he was knocked down. So he kept getting up, and trying to tell his body what to do...but his body was not responding fully.
When you put the fight in context of what it must have been like for Willard to have been knocked down like that, you can figure out why he couldn't stand up straight and return to the fight.
Paul Janulis
