Do The Ali Shuffle! Fillipone Wins WBA NABA Light Heavyweight Title
By Robert Brizel, Real Combat Media Correspondent
Do the Ali Shuffle! Virginia policeman Frankie ‘Freight Train’ Fillipone, fighting 14 days after decisioning Richard Stamino over six rounds at Dover Downs Casino in Delaware, returned to the ring with 10 days additional training in Wilmington and won a hard fought decision over boxer MMA fighter Kevin Engel to win the WBA North American Boxing Association interim Light Heavyweight championship by ten round decision. Scoring was 99-93, 98-92, 97-93 unanimous for Fillipone.
Real Combat Media has covered the recent rise in policeman Fillipone’s career.
Fillipone, now 13-2-1, with two knockouts, is an outstanding southpaw technical boxer with great movement and jab combinations on the inside, who outboxes opponents from different angles while maintaining superior movement and hand speed. Against Engel, Fillipone used flashy Muhammad Ali shuffle footwork, confusing the devil out of the slower Engel with lightning hand speed to tag Engel to the body and the head and win rounds while not offering a target. One judge gave Fillipone nine rounds, a convincing win for Fillipone, the biggest win of his career.
The Ali shuffle was actually invented by the late former heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott. Ali and his trainer Angelo Dundee used to watch tapes of Walcott’s bouts often, and Ali’s style was adapted from Walcott, particularly his superior shuffle foot movement. Walcott’s legendary foot and shoulder movement kept opponents confused and off-balance. The most notable fighter using the shuffle technique in his boxing repertoire today is Bernard Hopkins. Fillipone, a student of old fight films from Jack Johnson to the present, uses the Ali shuffle to outmaneuver
slower opponents, cause them to miss frequently, and shut down their offensive capabilities. As Ali demonstrated, if no target is available, there are no punches which can land, no points to score, and no rounds to win, leaving Engel in a bad fix.
Muhammad Ali Shuffle demonstrated by Ali on YouTube, 27 second highlight clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7GpM3tMT1k
Capitalizing on his last minute opportunity, Fillipone hopes for a WBA world ranking and televised world title opportunity against World Boxing Association Light Heavyweight champion Beibut Shumanov, 13-1, a Kazakhstan fighter out of Las Vegas, later in 2013. Fillipone would need to bring his fight game up one notch, switch to a world class trainer, and would need to acquire instruction in power punching technique to succeed in a closed ten week camp at the world class level.
Frankie Fillipone versus Adrian Armstrong on YouTube, 8 Rounder, Part I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6km27wzcFkc
Frankie Fillipone versus Adrian Armstrong on YouTube, 8 Rounder, Part II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eAAP-IVSpY
Shumanov, a 2004 Light Heavyweight Olympian at the Olympic Games in Athens, stands 6’2″ to Fillipone’s 5’10” but might have trouble with the southpaw Fillipone, who likes to walk his opponents down with short punches scoring for points with large volume in the same style as Gabriel Campillo when Campillo beat Shumanov in a WBA world title fight in his native Kazakhstan in August 2009. Also, Fillipone lands a lot of left hooks to the body of his opponents and breaks them down on the inside in later rounds, as he did in his WBA NABA title bout with Engel. Shumanov was dropped to the canvas and almost knocked out in the final round by a short left hand to the body thrown by Campillo, exposing his vulnerability to inside fighters.
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