Word: aly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...attacks things. He plants his feet, leads with his head and explodes his fists at objects. His punch is a left hook and he will take punches in order to unleash it. Imagine a gas-driven, left-handed meatcleaver and you will get a sense of what dropped Muhammad Ali in the 15th round of his fight with Frazier twenty months...
...even after he beat Ali, Joe Frazier had not won the world championship he wanted. His victory in the ring had been decisive. He had boxed Ali to a stand-off and then out-punched him. Yet, it was precisely at that moment when Ali hit the canvas that the emptiness of Frazier's triumph became apparent: the crowd was silent, totally void of enthusiasm. When the decision was announced and Frazier stood arm-raised at center ring, he smiled alone, with difficulty and deep fatigue, in the roped summit of the crowd's ambivalence. From there, he was taken...
...Ali had punched him up badly, misshaping his face and distorting his vision. But there was something else, that silence, the absence of a crowd's cheers still ringing in his ears, that afflicted Frazier even more. As it has been at each of Ali's fights after his return to the American ring to fight Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, the crowd at the Fight of the Century was largely black. It was in their silent ambivalence towards him that Frazier, lying with his face in cotton gauze in a hospital after the fight, must have first found the tracks...
...Sargent Sargent Shriver, now one of his principal backers. In the ring against Frazier and during the last weeks of his preparation for the fight. Foreman won the allegiance of flocks of Jamaicans, who sensed in him something of the same quality that had drawn them to Muhammad Ali. When the fight was over, the Jamaicans carried Foreman out of the ring, a dozen of them holding him parallel to the sky above their shoulders. The arena was in the open air of the starry Jamaican night...
What was it about Foreman that captured the crowed as Ali does but Frazier never could? Don't ask Joe Frazier. Six times he got up from the ice-blue canvas after seeing it without seeing it at all and went back after Foreman to look for it. But, he never saw it. Two of the last three times, it hit him so hard that he was lifted several inches into the air. The final time, it just sort of crumbled him. But, he got up, like a twisted yo-yo, still looking, not quite understanding the sound...