Word: clay
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leon Spinks, just 24, had fought only seven times as a professional after a busy amateur career that culminated, as had Cassius Clay's, with the winning of the Olympic light heavyweight gold medal. Spinks had never fought more than ten rounds. The demanding logic of a title bout requires 15 rounds: it is the final five that probe the heart and take the true measure of a fighter's will. Ali was perhaps the greatest war horse in heavyweight history, a man who had the guts and gifts to win the excruciating final rounds. The odds against Spinks were...
John F. Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency when Cassius Clay Jr. returned triumphant from the Olympic Games in Rome. The blithe boy-child stepped off the plane spouting poetry and singing of his possibilities. He was bold?some said brash?with hopes and dreams, but much seemed within the reach of American aspirations in those freshening days. Cassius signed with a syndicate of wealthy Louisville businessmen, who underwrote his early training as a professional fighter against a 50% belief in purses to come. He had been boxing since the age of twelve with the heavyweight title as his unwavering...
Dundee tells how he had barnstormed the country with the young Clay and finally brought him into Madison Square Garden in 1962 to fight Sonny Banks. "Banks hit Ali with the finest left hook I've ever seen. It would have floored King Kong. Ali's eyes glazed like he was out of it, and his keester hit the canvas. Then he sprang back up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and stopped the guy cold. He won by a knockout. That's when I knew for sure. I really thought for a split second that Bank's punch was goodbye...
...superbly displayed his talents for promotion in 1964, when he was matched for the title with Champion Sonny Liston, a great, seemingly invincible giant of a man. Clay called Listen an "ugly old bear" and pranced around carrying a bear trap to the delight of the photographers. Budini Brown, Clay's corner man and cheerleader, gave his fighter the perfect line: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." That is precisely what he did. Cassius attacked, disappeared on those marvelously fast feet, attacked again, disappeared again, until the bear was beaten, helpless in his corner...
...seemed at first that the conversion was just another idiosyncrasy, some kind of gimmick. It was nothing of the kind. Clay had actually changed his religion before the Listen fight. Harold Conrad, for mer sportswriter, sometime promoter, and, in the years when Ali was banished from the ring, tireless seeker after the means of his return, was privy to a prefight crisis...