Per Capita Southpaws

[p4pking]

In the old days you turned a fighter around, a lot of it being because it was hard for a leftie to get fights. that is why hagler learned to fight both ways. Now, there is a thing among boxing trainers to let a guy go with what is natural, so you see more lefties. But a lot of that is laziness/ignorance on the part of trainers and i think it hurts the quality of boxing overall because, in general, you don't become as skilled a fighter as a southpaw as you could have otherwise.
that comes down to a misconception about what is important for a fighter. A lot of guys turn southpaw because they hit harder/more comfortably with their left hand, so they box that way and their front hand never gets developed. but here is the thing...In boxing, 80% of the work is done with the front hand, the jab, the hook and so on. The back hand catches, blocks, parries, and sometimes punches. So there are a lot of guys, even upper level pros, that don't use their hands well, they look to potshot the left but don't jab well, don't hook well. They end up being very limited as fighters.

One thing very common with successful converted lefties be it those mentioned or Tyson, Cooney, Basilio, Cotto etc is the left hook. Devastating. Winky and Andrade are two guys that were born right handed and fight left which is much more rare.

It the early days southpaws were actually thought to be retarded and many doctors considered it a birth defect.

As a southpaw myself I'm afraid I can't definitively refute this

Good point on the left hook, you can tell Ward has about as much power in his jab as any other punch he throws as well. Didn't know that about Winky or Andrade, but having just watched him that makes perfect sense. His jab is about his only good punch by the seems of, and his feet are all over the place. He looks exactly like a really athletic guy trying to fight the wrong way, I wonder why on earth he decided not to stay orthodox.