Entries tagged with "Cassius+Clay":
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For Brooklyn kids back then, Coney Island was the world. The impressionable Rollino grew up quickly amid the fellow strongmen and bearded ladies…
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It was February 25, 1964. The fight was for the heavyweight championship of the world. In one corner you had the champ, boxing’s Darth Vader, the formidable Sonny Liston. In the opposite corner you had the young challenger, a poetry-spouting loudmouth from Louisville, Kentucky, named Cassius Clay (soon…
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There's nothing like an upset to make one believe. All the questionable decisions that cast doubt on the sport are rendered meaningless when an upset occurs. And when the upset is during a contest between world-class heavyweights, the satisfaction is that much greater. This sampling covers some of the…
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Both men insulted their opponents but paid themselves compliments. They were all ego, all the time…
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I have a strong hunch that if Jefferson Davis were fighting today a lot of so-called elite heavyweights would meet their Appomattox…
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It’s more accurate to say that Golovkin faced a great fighter, he tried his best, and he came up short. There is no shame in that…
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“Mae West replied, ‘No, I won't be in it. What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?’ So the Beatles wrote her a personal letter and she changed her mind…”
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Boxing is here to stay. Much like any other sport, it has its stumbles, but the sport itself is too strong to wither away and die…
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Billy Joiner, a journeyman heavyweight in the 1960s, has a few fascinating tales to tell. Let him tell you in his own words…
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In the end it was reported that he attended 3,514 live shows in 49 states and over 400 cities…
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Ali’s moral and religious position cost him a three and a half year absence from the boxing ring during his prime years...
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Boxers are men who turn their psychological problems into a paycheck. And Robinson was pretty good at receiving paychecks…
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Gleason's sat in the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx, streets so violent and depraved that Hollywood made them into a movie…
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Klitschko is a fine architect, calmly deconstructing faces, subtly carving through the resolve of the man opposite…
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The determined and business-like Jones was very much his own man. He was never in awe of Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali or anyone else…
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When he passed away at the relatively young age of 64, his professional boxing career was not mentioned in his Miami Herald obituary...
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Probably the high water mark in the boxing career of Amos Johnson Jr. was his defeat of Muhammad Ali in the amateurs…
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Against Ali, Sonny had looked like a man having a snooze. Against Martin, he looked like a luckless pedestrian who hadn’t seen the truck coming…
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Phenomenon or just a fast guy who got away with it in the time that was granted to him? Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder…
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Henry Cooper referred to Wipperman as an American "cowboy." Maybe that's because to Brits, all Americans are cowboys…
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We fans of the sport can reengineer boxing as the sport of tastemakers: the sport of thinkers, history buffs and scribes, rather than the bloodthirsty…
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“I can’t put my finger on it and tell you exactly what it done to me but I can tell you factually that I was never the same fighter afterwards..."
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There are so many Harold Johnson stories I could tell that would fill up an entire book. Here’s one of them…
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Johnny died in 1998 at age 60, but Johnny Bizzarro's Fleetwing Auto Sales ("Erie's Legend in Your Corner") is still going strong…
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He was both a top defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers football team and a Top 10 heavyweight contender…
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While never as popular as Curly, Shemp was incomparably superior to the two men who replaced him…
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The moment Ferguson entered that gym, spotted the two rings, and smelled the stench of stale sweat; he knew he had found a home…
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Two Muslims visited Sonny and threatened to kill him if he didn't lose the bout. Things were getting worse for the ex-champ, but the worst was yet to come…
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“Great competitors who happen to be great friends are rare. Jimmy Ellis was that to me and I will miss him…"
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“The idea of boxing remains as pure as the idea of bravery. It remains as compelling as any collision with something at stake. It stirs questions…”
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There is strong reason to believe that someone in Liston’s corner tried the same illegal methods used in the Marciano-Walcott fight…
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When Ali visited Boise years later and saw Logan for the first time since their fight, the reunion was not warm and fuzzy…
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“I like chasing crooks. I drive through town at eighty miles an hour, my red light flashing and my shotgun on my lap. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun...”
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Who would dare question the credibility of a memo “so sensitive that it was addressed directly” to J. Edgar Hoover? What a story! What a joke...
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“I was used to excitement. I was made for excitement,” Pacheco told me. “But that night was something else, something beyond excitement…”
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Most champs—Matthew Saad Muhammad, Floyd Patterson and Johnny Tapia—were tortured souls who sought boxing psychotherapy…
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What would Budd Schulberg say of the soul sucking sport that fifty years later still has not addressed his emptiness?
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During the course of the film, which is as heartbreaking as ever, I kept telling myself, “This is just a movie. This is fiction...”
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Needless to say, things didn't work out the way he had planned. In less than two years, he would complete the most precipitous fall in the history of sports…
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Let us set aside the present and recall the days of more gifted and charismatic champions. Here are the ten best heavyweights of all time…
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St. Nicholas Arena, better known as St. Nick's or The Rink, was on the northeast corner of 69 West 66th Street on Manhattan's Columbus Avenue...
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It's been said that only the good die young, which doesn’t do much to explain Sonny Liston. He was born dirt poor, could neither read nor write, but he was able to do things with his fists that proved useful. Before he became a boxer, he was an armed robber known as the "Yellow Shirt Bandit," but that…
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What runs through the mind of an old ex-fighter? The cheering crowds are gone, the rigor of training is a faint memory, and the thrill of competition has vanished...
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Ali wanted to mark the occasion by delivering a sack of black cats to Liston’s training camp but was talked out of the idea by his handlers...
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Jack Dempsey had spotted Lavorante’s talent on a sojourn to Venezuela, where Jack saw the Argentinean youngster in several amateur fights in Caracas...
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Paul Gallender’s new book reveals the real deal on Charles “Sonny” Liston. It also opens one’s eyes to the real Muhammad Ali…
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Three days before winning gold in Rome - and less than four years before becoming world heavyweight boxing champion - Muhammad Ali spoke to ITN about his "Romanic" name and why he took up boxing...
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Wolfing down crimson steak, abusing sparring partners and reshaping medicine balls with his gut, Liston’s red-blooded lifestyle stormed into 1959...
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Here's a look at some of the most significant early KOs ever to grace the sometimes graceless heavyweight division…