Word: frazier
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...three or four rounds, the strategy seemed to work. Keep the feet planted firmly on the mat, dodge Frazier's punches, guard the kidneys with the bobbing elbows, wait for an opening, and then . . . connect. Frazier would be smoked out before he could pummel Ali's body into submission...
There was no other way for Ali to do it. He could have played his old game against a lesser fighter, but Frazier's endurance would have been too much. To land enough blows on his opponent. Ali would have had to shuffle eight or ten rounds-something for which his 43 months of inactivity had left him completely unprepared. So he decided to anchor himself on the mat, to gain enough sheer strength to put Frazier to sleep with as few punches as possible. But to do that, he had to stay close and inside, which is where Frazier...
...whole inside strategy, it turned out, was completely inadaptable to Ali's style of fighting. Ali can only take down an opponent with punches to the head. But Frazier stayed so insistently close that Ali, with his awkwardly long reach and his constant dodging of Frazier's jabs, couldn't get off the punches he needed. His game that night was a purely defensive...
...Frazier tracked him relentlessly, often missing but sometimes landing one big body blow after another. Frazier's whole strategy was to pummel Clay's body and arms, something which the in-close fighting allowed him to do all too often. After round ten, Ali was badly bruised and exhausted from all the dodging...
Those head shots which Frazier landed late in the fight were little more than a fluke. The groundwork for the slaughter of the last five rounds had been skillfully laid during the previous ten. Forget Ali's jaw for a moment. Even if he couldn't talk to reporters after the fight, even if that lip of his will be hung up for a few days, it isn't nearly as hurt as his midsection, which will probably be on ice for the next few weeks...