21.09.07 -By Michael Klimes: When Muhammad Ali, the World Heavyweight boxing Champion uttered the sentence, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong…no Vietcong ever called me a nigger,’ massive controversy gripped him and the sport of boxing.
The responses to Ali’s comments demonstrated that he was more than just a boxer and was on his way to becoming a cultural icon. Today, people remember Ali for many different reasons: His pacifist line against the Vietnam War, him maturing into a spokesman for his race, his funny one liners at fight conferences, his innovative trash talking, his affairs and entertaining interviews yet how many remember Ali for his boxing?
Even more importantly, do people know what made Ali such a formidable force in the ring? It can be put forward that Ali’s iconic stature and his accomplishments outside of his profession (both positive and negative) have overshadowed his sporting achievements, which are very significant in their own right. It also must be realized that Ali was first and foremost a boxer who grew into a business brand, an entertainer, an icon and so forth through boxing. Boxing was a ladder that he climbed to reach higher goals and prominence.
Similarly, it can be surmised that Ali was better at boxing than anything else in his life. If the argument then follows, one can then say Ali’s sporting achievements were in a sense more profound than his political accomplishments because they could not have existed without the former.
Ali’s gifts as a fighter were not average by any standard. The only word that could describe the level of his natural talent was ‘blessed’ and that rings well for a man who was and remains deeply pious. Famously, Ali was so ‘blessed’ that in the sixties he was able to predict what round his adversary would fall in. He was able to do this for numerous reasons. Ali’s body possessed natural advantages, which any person who wants to fight at a distance requires:
He was tall for a heavyweight of his time at 6” 3” and had abnormally long arms. His reach was 80” or two metres which is extraordinary. This height advantage gave him a sort of bird’s eye view of his opponents and his albatross like span allowed him to box at range and avoid unnecessary damage. Furthermore, Ali was unique with his exceptional speed. To this day, it is hard to think of any heavyweight who combined such quickness of hand and foot with outrageous reflexes. This allowed him to literally move faster than other fighters thought. In the acclaimed documentary ‘When We Were Kings’ about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ there is footage which shows Ali enthusiastically recounting one of his punches he landed on Sonny Liston. He says that in one of the Liston bouts Sports Illustrated measured his punch from when it was thrown to the time it landed.
It traveled at four-hundredths of a second or 0.04 seconds, which he proudly boasted is like ‘a camera flash or an eye blink.’ If one begins to think Ali normally doubled or tripled his jab, was adept at launching strong straight right hands and unleashed combinations, one can begin to see his prowess. He was never the most destructive puncher yet he did not need to put a lot of power into every shot. He scored points and inflicted damage cumulatively rather than suddenly.
Aside from his physical attributes, Ali was perhaps even more proficient in the mental side of the sport. Although the physical aspect of boxing is extremely important, the mental is more so due to the fact that if a boxer lacks confidence, fears his enemy or is too lazy to train properly then these can cause him to lose a bout. Here the boxer is at fault in his mindset, not his physical fitness. Tyson is the prime example of a champion who had won many of his contests before they started because of his aura. The biggest fights he lost against James ‘Buster’ Douglas, Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis were largely due to his aura being punctured. Tyson’s foes had the proper mindset while he did not.
Ali was a magnificent psychologist who could examine his opposition beautifully in the run up to any fight and during any bout. His first confrontation with Liston in 1964 where he captured his first world title is a perfect instance of Ali pretending to be crazy in order to unsettle the hard punching and experienced ‘big, ugly bear’ as Ali called him. Ali knew he needed every advantage against the mob connected Liston who not only had a mean streak (both in and out of the ring) but knew people who had ones as well.
Unfortunately, Ali was not the perfect fighting machine. His style: Holding the hands low and exposing the chin was very unorthodox for its day and many critics saw through it. In the sixties and seventies Ali demonstrated he was vulnerable to left hooks and he was floored twice by two incredible ones, once by the fine Englishman, Henry Cooper in 1963 and on a second occasion by Joe Frazier in 1971. The left hook from Cooper was particularly noteworthy for its dramatic efficiency at sending Ali onto his backside, and that it came from nowhere.
Furthermore, when Ali jabbed (and he had a great one) his right hand was held too far away from his face, which left him open to a counter jab or hook. He was given horrible trouble by fighters like Ken Norton who could jab well. Ali’s tactic instead of blocking was to lean back and be put off balance which in boxing is like claiming to be literate and spelling your own name incorrectly. Similarly, he never body punched and these mistakes prove Ali was never sound in his fundamentals and if he had been, he could have avoided a lot damage that led to his present condition. On the other hand, this cannot be pushed too far because Ali was successful due to his unorthodoxy. At times, he also underestimated his opponents; he did this to Joe Frazier not once but twice.
As Ali returned from his three and a half year exile (1967-1970) the lack of fundamentals showed because a bit of his quickness disappeared and he could not out-speed his flaws anymore. His return against the talented but inconsistent Jerry Quarry proved he was still a force but was he a force to be reckoned with? Quarry landed some good punches and Ali’s body did not move with the same effortless grace that had propelled him through his three round master-class against Cleveland Williams in 1966. There he arguably put on the best nine minutes of pure boxing and punching in his career. Nevertheless, although Ali started to get hit more often during the seventies, he demonstrated qualities which he had not shown in the sixties model.
If Ali was slower and carried more weight during the following decade, this was not always a disadvantage. In March 2006, the boxing writer Monte Cox wrote a stirring account about ‘Fight of the Century’, suggesting Ali never looked better in the first five rounds against Joe Frazier insinuating, ‘he was sitting down on his punches and never hit harder.’ The area where Ali was carrying the extra weight on his body was in his torso and this allowed him to not only hit harder but wrestle with Frazier who mauled on the inside.
This set a trend for Ali’s bouts in the seventies as he could not move as well or as fast to get out of trouble so he needed to clinch more. His long arms were suited for tying up his opponents to allow him time to rest and his extra weight made each of his punches potentially harder although the volume thrown decreased.
Other assets Ali used to compensate the loss of some of his ability were his intelligence and experience. Ali was one of the most erudite practitioners of the noble art and utilized these two invaluable commodities to prevail against George Foreman and regain the title at the advanced age of thirty two. In the midst of the terrifying Foreman, Ali launched a coup under the nose of what was supposed to be his nemesis. He fought a brilliant tactical battle with his killer recipe of the ‘rope a dope’, superior hand speed and clever clinching mixing together to serve Foreman the cocktail of defeat in the scorching climate of Kinshasa. Even Frazier at ringside complimented Ali saying, ‘he’s fighting real smart.’
The final virtue that Ali revealed was his recuperative powers. He was unbelievable in the punishment he took, whether to the head or the body. As we all know, it was his undoing and as commentator Larry Merchant said during the super bantamweight title clash between Wilfredo Gomez and Lupe Pintor, ‘It is a virtue to take a punch but not a virtue to take too many.’ He was speaking of Pintor but he could have been speaking of Ali too.
However, for all his flaws Ali is still probably the greatest heavyweight of all time. He defeated three all time greats in George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston during their primes or near to them. He out-fought numerously valiant contenders like Ken Norton, Jerry Quarry, Ernie Shavers, Oscar Bonavena, Jimmy Ellis, Henry Cooper, George Chuvalo, Floyd Patterson and Joe Bugner. He was the first ever heavyweight to win the championship three times. He was involved in the most exhilarating heavyweight trilogy in history with Joe Frazier and his most lasting achievement was that he came back from a three and half year exile as a lesser fighter to a deeper division than the one he reigned over and regained the title in a way no one thought possible.
His record makes one believe that it was only due to Ali’s peerless excellence in the ring that he had such an impact outside of it. After all, Ali once said, ‘It’s not bragging if you back it up.’ His words would have meant nothing if he did not have the scope to reinforce them. Would they?