Word: muhammad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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REPORTING on the tense training days of Boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali for this week's cover story required a generous amount of footwork and feinting by Correspondents Robert Anson and Joseph Kane. Both men nearly suffered technical knockouts in the first round...
Correspondent Kane found that Muhammad Ali was also difficult at first. "Appointments for interviews are unheard of. After four exasperating days, I simply followed him down the steps of Miami's Fifth Street Gym and piled into his limousine with him, told him who I was and we started talking." Ali finally talked for eight hours, much of the time while reading articles about himself in boxing magazines. He admitted that he is what he calls "a walnut personality." Says Kane: "By that he means he is hard on the outside, difficult to penetrate and wary of everyone trying...
...predicted Muhammad Ali three years ago, after the World Boxing Association, in a fit of moral fervor, stripped him of his heavyweight title because he had been convicted of draft evasion. Ali's prophecy was at least half right. Never more than a scene-stealing shout away from ringside, keeping in the headlines with a flurry of lectures and boasts, the champ-in-exile did indeed haunt the sport. He was a titleholder stripped of his rights?not by the fists of another fighter but by decree of a pretentious body of boxing executives...
Then comes the end, and that is anybody's guess. Ali's for example: Five minutes before the fight, he plans to remove a sheet of paper from a sealed envelope inscribed: THE SECRET OF MUHAMMAD ALI. Then, while the closed-circuit TV cameras zero in, he will predict the round in which Frazier will fall. That, of course, is not Joe's style at all. But his prediction makes more sense. "I wouldn't really want to say who will win," he says. "But one thing I do know. It will be one hell of a fight...
None of which bothers Muhammad Ali one whit: "Humph! Bob Foster, a li'I ol' 188-pounder. Now ain't that something! I wouldn't even spar with a man that size. But the press and the bookies are shoutin' 'Who-e-e-e! Joe Frazah knocked him out, knocked him dead!' What they should have done is look what I did to Oscar and what Oscar did to Joe Frazier. All Oscar did was to knock Joe Frazier down twice in their first fight and then whip his face so bad that his eyes were swollen closed. And when...