He whipped Liston. It begins.
So many have hated him. Especially conservatives. Traitor, coward, black Muslim trash. I was there for him from the very beginning. And I am here for him now.
He had two careers. In his early years you couldn’t hit him. He just danced, out of reach of your gloves. Then he came in and struck like a cobra, a flurry of left and rights no one could withstand. Why he stayed so pretty. Here’s the last fight he fought before they stripped his title. Against a fearsome puncher named Cleveland Williams. Who never landed a single punch.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7zRPLJbqRM8
Then the three year suspension. When I saw him speak at Harvard. He was right. He was pretty. Not a bad angle. Beautiful suit. He was not intimidated by the venue. This guy who graduated last in his class at a Louisville high school. He charmed us with a speech he’d written by hand delivered from memory. You could see the twinkle in his eye from the back row, where I was sitting. Then he rushed back into the fray, two no-name fights and then Madison Square Garden against Joe Frazier. He lost. We were crushed. Too soon, too quick we rationalized. What nobody realized at the time was the signal of Ali’s second career. Frazier knocked Ali out in the 15th round of that fight. Knocked him out. Ali admitted as much. Lights out. Then he jumped up and finished the round. The second phase had begun.
If you look at the Cleveland Williams fight, Ali the boxer never ever gets hit. What no one had ever figured was that Ali could endure more punishment in the ring than any heavyweight ever.
How can anyone be Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano AT THE SAME TIME? But he was exactly that.
The popular narrative we all subscribed to at the time was that Ali spontaneously adopted the rope-a-dope strategy when he realized just how devastating Foreman’s body punches were. Norman Mailer wrote a book about this fight, describing the terrible sound of those punches.
New evidence suggests Ali planned the rope-a-dope strategy from the beginning. He ordered his sparring partners to beat and beat and beat his body on the ropes. Coward? Champion.
Then came Ali’s second career. Heavier, a bit slower, he was living on borrowed time, as we now know. The rubber match of the Ali-Frazier contest was in Manila. Ali by all accounts was a beaten fighter at the end of the 13th, after three rounds of Frazier’s body shots, slumped on his stool and out of gas. Then this happened.
From nowhere, the Ali of old. Afterwards, Frazier in his darkened hotel room said “Lawdy, Lawdy, what a great champion he is.”
The Ali I remember and revere. And always always will.