- #Mohamed ali columbus city schools movie
- #Mohamed ali columbus city schools full
- #Mohamed ali columbus city schools pro
Judge Hofheinz in Houston - we had done some fights together - called and said he could come up with the money. I thought he was just some Hollywood clown. “I heard this guy Jerry Perenchio was offering $5 million to the fighters,” Arum says, “and I laughed. On March 8, 1971, the fight was not Arum’s promotion. Starting in 1966, Arum would promote 16 Ali fights in the next 12 years, including several outside the country when Ali was banned in the U.S. That eventually led to a partnership with the Black Muslims, where Arum became Ali’s attorney and fight promoter.
Joe McCarthy during the controversial Congressional hearings on communism in the 1950s and was also a lead lawyer and confidant for a young Donald Trump.Īrum had become a boxing promoter, almost out of happenstance, through his friendship with former NFL star Jim Brown.
Attorney General, Arum stopped a tax fraud attempt by New York lawyer Roy Cohn, who was promoting a major fight and trying to pay his boxers out of the country to avoid taxes. Once, at the behest of Bobby Kennedy, then U.S.
#Mohamed ali columbus city schools movie
It was always Monday nights because that’s when the theaters did their least movie business.Īrum was a young Harvard law school grad who made his mark as the lead tax lawyer in the government’s prestigious Southern District of New York. The big fights were at your local movie theater and you paid your $5. This was before pay-per-view on your home TV, before satellite hookups, before the internet. Those were the days when movie theaters, along with the live gate, provided the fight revenue. Joe Frazier in the ‘Fight of the Century’ on March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York.Īmong Bob Arum’s most searing recollections of that night was heading to Madison Square Garden, while hearing from friends scrambling for tickets to the closed-circuit telecast. It is sometimes lost in all the memories and story lines about the fight that Frazier won a 15-round decision and knocked down Ali in the 15th round. Their paths met on that Monday night, 50 years ago, with Ali staring across the ring in his bright red shorts and Frazier staring back in his strangely less-than-macho paisley green.
#Mohamed ali columbus city schools pro
Sylvester Stallone portrayed that, Frazier actually did it.įrazier also turned pro quickly and won his first 10 fights by knockout. As a pro, he was the original “Rocky,” working in butcher shops, punching meat carcasses and running up long steps. He broke his thumb in the semifinal, told nobody and won the final mostly one-handed.
#Mohamed ali columbus city schools full
He ended up in Philadelphia, a city full of boxing gyms.įrazier won the next Olympic gold, taking the Olympic title in Tokyo in 1964. He left South Carolina after seeing the beating of a fellow worker by a plantation owner and knowing that being a witness put him in danger. There were no medical facilities to treat the fracture, so Frazier worked hard to strengthen it as it healed on its own. According to a book written by Jerry Izenberg, “Once There Were Giants, the Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing,” that’s where Frazier acquired his huge left hook. He worked the fields with his family, once breaking his left arm chasing a 300-pound pig. When he beat the feared Sonny Liston twice a few years later, the sports world stood up and took notice.įrazier was the son, and 12th child, of a one-armed South Carolina sharecropper. He changed his name from Cassius Clay, told the world that “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and won his first two pro fights before that Olympic year ended.
He won an Olympic gold medal in Rome in 1960, bounced off the top rung of the victory podium and never stopped moving, or talking. The hyperbole was justified, the label accepted to this day.Īli was the star, as much for what he had done outside the ring as in it. The minute the two signed on to do battle, it became the Fight of the Century. It was a time when boxing mattered, when it often shoved aside the likes of pro football and pro basketball for prime space on newspaper sports pages. Muhammad Ali, 31-0, would fight Joe Frazier, 26-0. Into a boxing ring in Madison Square Garden stepped two men who had never lost a fight, had no intention of losing one that night, and who had story lines that played into the anger and divisions of a time of war in Vietnam and a Richard Nixon presidency.
0 kommentar(er)
