January 2002 - March 2004 - The Jerry Quarry Foundation

discussion here to boxing? Wilt Chamberlain boasted for years he could win the
heavyweight boxing championship as well as most other athletic standards. He was
a supreme egotist, and of course, a great athlete. Any decent professional
heavyweight would have cut the Big Dipper in two. Yes, he knew Shaquille O'Neal,
but it was almost impossible for Wilt the Stilt to acknowledge that any other
center was good. Did they ever play together in a pickup game, maybe at Pauley
Pavilion? Probably, but so what? Wilt may have been the greatest player in NBA
history, for as I believe Frank Deford once wrote, "There were times when Wilt
could dominate in such a way as to be a man playing against boys." If anyone
thinks Shaq dominates the league now (and he certainly does), you should have
seen Wilt. God bless all of you. (What was Jerry Quarry's best fight and his
finest hour in the ring, by the way? Anybody have an opinion?)(Oh, and yes,
to the gentleman from La Habra, I know your town well. Between 1957 and 1967,our
Boys Club competed in Fight Nights and smokers with you several times every
year, and you usually came out on top. You always had outstanding Mexican-
American kids who could box their way out of the gym and hurt you in a hundred
ways. The best La Habra fighter I knew was a guy named Larry Hughes, who used to
spar with Jerry Quarry. Larry served in Vietnam as a Green Beret, and afterwards
came close to winning a spot on the USA Pan Am Games team, except a war injury
caused him to be disqualified. His right cross was a real mule kick and I can
still feel it. La Habra and Santa Ana had the best fighters in Orange County in
those days.) |
|8/26/03 04:44:51
PM|Roadscholarette|Chicago||roadscholarette@hotmail.com||||10|Hi Tubby! I'm
going to respond to your other post, but I want to answer this one first.
There's a lot of wishfulness in fights that never were (as well in ones
that ~were~!), to go along with analysis of objective factors, as objective as
we can ever be about such a sport as boxing. Even when a fighter is KOd, or
TKOd, you always hear sentimental cries of "off night" or "luck," or "if this
(or that) hadn't happened," etc., their man would have won.One thing
that's interesting to do is to evaluate fighters based on their best night. I
know this has its flaws, but going with this, best night and all, among heavies,
who could taken Frazier the night he clipped the Butterfly's wings in '71? There
have been more destructive fights, but I can recall none in which the opponents
were not also elite performers (Dempsey-Willard, for example, was more brutal,
but look at the disparity in the fighters). Smokin' Joe was ~more~ than human
for those 15 rounds. I also put this close to Ali's best night, possibly his
best. Keep in mind, he's ~looked~ better, but never against such an opponent,
the likes of which he'd never faced before or after, yet he still kept it
interesting, even close.Foreman never went through the number of
challenges others did (handling himself well when in trouble), though it did
happen. I still look a little fishy eyed at his fight with Ali, but he responded
superbly against Lyle, no soft touch. If George hit someone, they were going,
period. Others might have kept it from happening, and if indeed endurance ~was~
a problem for George in the late rounds, they might have gotten by, if they also
had chin of concrete. Marciano and Foreman? Sorry, Rock fans, George would have
bounced him as easily, or more so, than he did Frazier (though I believe it
would have been a different story if Foreman had fought the Joe who fought Ali
the first time). Unfortunately, the great George Foreman has been subject - or
victim - of the reverse of what many fighters have enjoyed. Some are built into
indestructible gods in retrospect, while Foreman has had to suffer a fair amount
of denigration, in some cases putting him in the class of a deluxe amateur with
a big punch. Yes, staying away from George might have been the recipe for a win
over him, but he was no dummy or stiff, and threw a lot of punches. My guess is
that few could have, and that there wouldn't be ~any~ who would come out ahead
in a theoretical "Best of 10."The only sort who might have stood a chance would
be tricky, unorthodox, fast, and unpredictable, hopefully all four (power nice,