Muhammad Ali vs Larry Holmes was the first fight I watched in my life. I was six years old. It was Oct. 2, 1980 and Holmes was in his prime, defending his WBC Heavyweight belt for the eighth time. Ali was coming out of retirement and fighting Holmes after a match with Mike Weaver for the WBA Heavyweight belt fell through.
I didn’t know any of that at the time, obviously. I just knew who Muhammad Ali was because everyone on the planet knew who Muhammad Ali was. He was an institution and probably the most famous human being currently on the planet. So of course I rooted against him.
I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted the underdog to win. At six, I knew Muhammad Ali only as “The Greatest.” He fought Superman in a comic book for God’s sake.
I had no idea who Holmes was, but to me he was the underdog. I didn’t know he was 35-0 and seven years younger than Ali. I didn’t know, and no one did at the time, that Ali was already suffering from the beginnings of Parkinson’s Disease. Holmes dominated the fight and Ali’s corner threw in the towel after the 10th round. It was the first stoppage of any type in Ali’s career. They probably saved his life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sqjkeqrvWo
Now for me, as a kid, my mind was blown. It was like Holmes had beaten the boss in a video game. He immediately became my favorite boxer and I was hooked on the sport from then on out. It turns out what is widely considered the “most disgusting” boxing match in the sport’s history made me a fan for life. Go figure.
Like a lot of legendary figures that were “before my time,” my appreciation for Ali, who he was and what he meant to the sport and the world only came later. You have to pick up all the information second-hand, through news stories, features and documentaries and Ali was the subject of plenty. I got to know his humor and his courage. I got to see him in action and exactly how great he was. He said he could “float like like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” but it was a lot more sting like one of those giant Japanese killer hornets. Ali could put a man flat on his back with a single shot.
He was born Cassius Clay, which seemed weird to me. It was like finding out Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was somebody named Lew Alcindor. Ali renounced his “slave name” after beating Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight title in 1964. He’d joined the Nation of Islam, which he would be a member of for the next 11 years. In 1975 he converted to mainstream Sunni Islam, then to Sufism in 2005.
He famously refused to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, citing his faith as a conscientious objector. His response became one of his most famous quotes of all time.
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, some poor, hungry people in the mud for big, powerful America,” Ali said. “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn’t put no dogs on me.”
The idea that a segregated society could draft an oppressed person to serve in its military seems barbaric today and it should. That’s what Ali stood up against. He was stripped of his title and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released on appeal. It took nearly four years for the case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court but they overturned his prison sentence. Ali could fight again.
This is when the real era of Muhammad Ali began, where the ring legend became larger than life through three battles with Joe Frazier, which Ali won two. Knocking out George Foreman, which seemed impossible at the time. Avenging his first-ever loss to Ken Norton Sr. When you see the films, when you see the documentaries, this is the Ali you learn the most about. The Ali that retired after going 56-5 with 37 KOs in a career that spanned 21 years.
When he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1982 Ali spoke to the New York Times. He said, “I’m in no pain. A slight slurring of my speech, a little tremor. Nothing critical. If I had won my last two fights, if I had no problem, people would be afraid of me now. Now they feel sorry for me. They thought I was Superman. Now they can go, ‘He’s human, like us. He has problems.'”
Ali died Friday night at 74 years old at a Phoenix, Ariz. hospital. He’d been in there for a few days suffering respiratory complications, but the feeling was that this was it. Watching the Premier Boxing Champions show on Spike Friday night, many of the commentators treated the news like Ali’s time was coming to an end. They were right. Ali had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for 30 years. He was the same age as my dad.
