THE HALL OF FAME OF BOXING

Muhammad Ali we love you. Thank you for all that you did. Thanks for showing us the benefits of hard work. And thank you so very much for showing us what it means to have character and integrity. We love you.

1975

The Oldest Boomer is 29 years old.

Cost of the Average House: $42,600

Median Family Income: $11,8000

Minimum Wage: $2.10/hr.

Gallon of Milk: $1.19

Gallon of Gasoline: 57 cents

New Car: Chevrolet Caprice: $4,819

Ford Mustang II: $4,105

October 1, 1975 -Muhammad Ali fights Joe Frazier for the third time. The bout is promoted as the “Thrilla in Manila”

From the book BOOMERS How We Changed The World by Richard A. Jordan
A great book that would be a great gift for the baby boomer in your life. A real cool book

.Muhammad Ali – Amazing Speed

The Art of Boxing

100 Greatest Sporting Moments : The Rumble in The Jungle

It’ One On One, It’s Personal…It’s Boxing

Boxing is drama on its grandest scale. No other athletic event is as electrifying as a championship fight. I continued to cover boxing perhaps longer than I should have because of my admiration for the fighters, their earthiness, and their honesty. Generally speaking, the ones who become champions spring from poverty; they work harder and sacrifice more than other athletes. Rarely do they make excuses. They have no teammates to lean on. They are out there all alone, exposed, vulnerable, valiantly summoning up reserves of courage in situations where a lot of other athletes would simply call it quits. There are no secrets in the ring, and they willingly accept the fears and the pain and the scars as part of their trade. One need only climb into a ring to understand how terrifyingly small it is and what guts it takes to ascend those three or four little steps to engage in battle with another man. And always they must wonder, “How will it be when I come out?” Early on, in the days when ABC was carrying the big fights on radio, I worked with the late undefeated heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, and it was through him that I learned a lot about the inside of boxing. At the time, my interest was further inspired by a great writer named W.C. Heinz, and I became fascinated with fighters as people. Few athletes were more captivating subjects than Floyd Patterson, who carried his emotional baggage like a huge stone on his shoulders who use to sit alone and afraid in the subway beneath the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. And then there was Patterson’s eccentric manager, Cus D’Amato, a reporter’s dream. His Freudian lectures on boxers and boxing made you feel like you were sitting in a musty old classroom in Vienna. I called nearly all of Patterson’s championship fights, and then after Patterson came Muhammad Ali, and we would become locked in the public’s mind as an inseparable television team. Joe Frazier and George Foreman were also favorites of mine, and soon thereafter came Sugar Ray Leonard- and I had the same kind of identification with him as I had had with Ali. And so it was, until all my years of covering fights and fighters come crashing down around me, and I could no longer justify my association with the sport.
From the book I Never Played the Game by Howard Cosell with Peter Bonventre
Lots of Ah Ha moments, a page turner, real cool man.<a

Sugar Ray Robinson Knockouts & Highlights

SmithsonianMuhammad Ali from Thriller in Manilla

Big Dogs Old School Biker Graphic Crew

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Muhammad Ali with Actor James Earl Jones at the Jim Thorpe Pro Sports Awards, July 6, 1992

That summer, Ali, who also spent time at Kutsher’s cornered Red at breakfast one morning. “I am sick and tired of Chamberlain running his mouth,” he said, the irony of that comment not lost on Red. “He keeps saying he could take me. Here’s what I want you to tell him: get in the ring with me and I’ll give you the whole damn purse. I just want to fight him, show him and people that boxing isn’t just about size and strength. Most ridiculous thing I ever heard. You tell him-the whole purse is his If he gets in the ring with me.”

From the book LET ME TELL YOU A STORY by Red Auerbach & John Feinstein

Boxing Page

The Golden Age of Boxing

Boxing Page

“No man could have seen Clay that morning at the weight-in and believed that he could stay on his feet three minutes that night,” Murray Kempton wrote later in The New Republic. “Suddenly almost everyone in the room hated Cassius Clay,” Kempton went on. “Sonny Liston just looked at him. Liston used to keep sassy Negroes in line and he was just waiting until his boss told him it was time to throw this kid out… Northern Italian journalists were comforted to see on Liston’s face the look that Mafiosi use to control peasants in Sicily; Promoters and fight managers saw in Clay one of their animals utterly out of control and were glad to know that soon he would be not just back in line but out of business… Even Norman Mailer settled in this case for organized society. Suppose Clay won the heavyweight championship, he asked. It would mean that every loudmouth on a street corner could swagger and be believed.” Clay’s performance seemed to be the sweaty ravings of a nut, the frightened brat of a kid who had been terrified ever since he confronted Liston in that Los Vegas casino more than a year before, but what no one saw was how deliberate and effective this performance was, how it unnerved Liston. “It convinced Liston to the end of his life that Ali was crazy,” said Clay’s corner-man, Ferdie Pacheco. “Ali became impossible for his opponents to gauge. Years later, when Ernie shavers almost knocked him out in the Garden, Ali was falling back against the ropes but Shavers held back because he thought Ali was kidding. The same thing happened to Joe Frazier, in the third fight in Manila. He saw Ali start to fall, staggering back, and instead of rushing him; Frazier just stood there and looked, because he couldn’t believe that Ali was hurt. George Foreman, too, didn’t know when Ali was hurt or when he was kidding. People always thought he was crazy. His reputation was so huge that you imputed things to him that he wasn’t really doing. And it all began in Miami, at the weigh-in with Liston.” As Clay kept barking away and ignoring warning after warning, Klein stepped in and shouted, ”Cassius Clay is fined two thousand five hundred dollars for his behavior on the platform and the money will be withheld from Clay’s purse.” The commission doctor, Alexander Robbins, took the pulse and blood pressure of both fighters. Listen’s counts were slightly above normal. Considering all the commotion, there was no worry there. Robbins could barely get to Clay, who kept jumping and shouting as if he had been stuck with a cattle prod. Several times Robbins approached Clay with his stethoscope outstretched and then Clay would keep wriggling and Robbins would jump back, frightened, bewildered. Finally the doctor was able to make his reading: Clay’s pulse, which was normally fifty-four beats per minute, had shot up to 120, and his blood pressure was soaring, too, at two hundred over one hundred. Jimmy Cannon, who carried himself with such authority that one might have believed him to be chief of surgery as well as the columnist from World-Telegram, slid into a chair next to Dr. Robbins and said, “Could it be that the kid is scared to death, Doc:” Yes, yes, Mr. Cannon,” the doctor said. “This fighter is scared to death, and if his blood pressure is the same at fight time, it’s all off.” Both fighters finally cleared out and went to their makeshift dressing rooms. Clay was already calming down. “What do you think?” he asked as he sat on a training table. “He was really shook u. He was little and he was short, and they’re telling me he was so big. I think he was shook up.” ….The Commission instructed Pacheco to keep a regular watch on Clay’s blood pressure and to report if the numbers were still too high. Clay went back to the dressing room and came back out in his “Bear Huntin’” jacket. He and his entourage drove back out to his house. “I was the most amazing thing,” Pacheco said. “An hour after all the commotion, I took his blood pressure and the pulse was at fifty-four, normal for him, and his blood pressure was one-twenty over eighty, perfect. It was all an act.”
From the book King of The World by David Reminick
He is a great story teller. This book is a Knock Out.