January 2002 - July 2006 - The Jerry Quarry Foundation

mark was 31-15-4; another was to Uber Bacilieri who achieved an abysmal 23-20-3
record. Clearly a fighter who lost to bums such as these can hardly be
classified as even a second rate fighter. Henry Cooper is remember for
one reason he nearly knocked out Muhammad Ali in their first fight with a single
left hook to the jaw. The NY Times reported that the punch, “caught Clay on the
side of the jaw and Cassius went over backwards through the ropes. He rolled
back into the ring, then got dazedly to his feet. He was gazing off in the
distance…starry-eyed. He wobbled forward gloves low. He started to fall but his
handlers caught him.” But there is more to the story. Seeing that
Clay/Ali was out in the corner they used smelling salts to revive him. Then they
cheated in order to illegally give their fighter more than the legal one minute
rest. The rules state that if a fighter cannot answer the bell in the allotted
one minute rest period he is deemed the loser by technical knockout. Dundee took
his finger and ripped a tear into Ali’s glove. Angelo Dundee has told this story
many times. Since there were no extra gloves in the corner Ali was given up to
five minutes of rest time to recover from the knockout that he actually suffered
against a third tier heavyweight. Given enough time he was able to recover and
came back to win not by kayo but by a nasty cut. But that is not all
that can be said about Ali’s fights with Cooper. Even in the second fight Cooper
showed that a third tier heavyweight who was slow of hand and foot could hit Ali
with jabs without trouble. Because he never learned how to block a jab he was
always vulnerable against any fighter with any semblance of boxing skill and not
the bums, third tier heavyweights and raw, wild amateur sluggers that he
preferred to fight. CONCLUSIONS Consider the fights in which Ali
was badly beaten or nearly beaten. Truth be told he lost 2 out of 3 to Ken
Norton, and his only real win was razor thin. He was beaten soundly and made to
look foolish by Jimmy Young who exposed his lack of real boxing skills. He had
the shit beat out of him (literally) 3 times by Joe Frazier (a boxer who knew
how to slip Ali’s jab and get inside). He was dominated by Larry Holmes, Ali not
winning a single round or landing one significant punch in the entire fight. He
was even bested by one of the rawest amateurs he faced in Leon Spinks, a fighter
who had only 7 pro fights and not all of those victories. And truthfully he
knocked out by Henry Cooper, a third tier bum who never beat a significant
heavyweight in his career. He was knocked down by Chuck Wepner, who was not much
more than a bar room brawler. An objective clear eyed look at Ali’s
record and that of his opponents proves beyond a doubt that Ali was not a great
fighter and has been vastly overrated by the media hyping machine who needed to
build Ali into something he wasn’t at a time when the sport lacked a visible
star. That is the truth. There is only one more fighter on Ali’s record
worth mentioning and that is the one that made his reputation, Sonny Liston (50-
4). Liston was a great fighter who could box and punch. The problem with basing
Ali’s asserted greatness on his fights with Liston is that they were both fixed.
Liston was owned by the mob this is a well known and established fact.
Charles Farrell, wrote,
http://www.boxingranks.com/Articles/Article646.htm “After the
second Patterson fight, there were no viable opponents for Liston. Aside from
Ali, he had thoroughly destroyed every possible title aspirant. No one thought
he could be beaten and, more importantly, no one was willing to pay to see him
beat up anyone else. Sonny was getting old…and he had no great love for
fighting. It didn’t make economic sense to have him fight an endless series of
low paying title defenses for another ten years. The guys who controlled his
career decided that it was better to make two huge, quick scores. They
fixed the fight in Miami. Ali never knew about it. Liston’s people bet huge
amounts, getting almost eight to one odds, on Ali. Because the conclusion of the
first fight was so ambiguous, Liston remained a betting favorite—at about seven
to five—in the rematch. The wiseguys got to clean up twice with the same play.
It’s clear that, in the second fight, Ali spotted what was going on the moment