Word: cassius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay would spend three weeks in May training, at Harvard if Bob Nilon, copromoter of the coming Liston-Clay fight, could...
...Cassius Clay looks ahead. Not to his next $1,000,000, of course: that is already assured if Sonny Liston can only learn how to drive a Cadillac in a straight line. But after Liston, what? Champion Clay thought he had just the thing: Canada's George Chuvalo, 27, a slabsided, 208-lb. heavyweight who had won 29 out of 39 fights, 23 by knockouts. Chuvalo seemed to be a pressagent's dream: broken-nosed, granite-chinned, he had never been knocked off his feet ("Belt him in the face," said one admirer, "and all he does...
White Hope. Clay handled the publicity himself. He touted Chuvalo as "the white hope," nicknamed him "The Washerwoman" for his rough, free-swinging style. Patterson was "The Rabbit"; Cassius went so far as to visit his training camp and present him with a bunch of carrots. The campaign worked like a charm: every one of Madison Square Garden's 18,400 seats was sold three days before the fight, and sidewalk scalpers were getting $10 for standing-room tickets. Closed-circuit TV carried the fight to 51 cities across the U.S. and Canada-with Clay doing the between-rounds...
...predicted that Chuvalo would put him down as soon as he tapped him on his china chin. "I proved that I could take a punch much better than you gentlemen gave me credit for," he said. "I would say that I am deserving of a chance to fight Cassius Clay for the heavyweight title. And if I didn't feel that I could win it, I wouldn't be fighting...
...bought bear traps and honey, all of it wasted," said a wan and relatively subdued Cassius Clay, 22, as he left Boston's City Hospital after his hernia operation. But the suffering had clearly left the winningest Pooh-Bah an older and wiser man. "When I went under surgery," he noted, "the doctor told me to count to ten, and on nine I went out. I thought it would be Listen, but I went out on nine...