Archive for the 'Boxing' Category
Muhammad AMuhammad Ali shows he can still strike a mean pose at a dinner in Louisville.
Holder of the self-proclaimed title, “The Greatest,” the former heavyweight champion turns 65 Wednesday, no longer fleet afoot but still revered by anyone who witnessed the magic he created in the ring.
“What makes him the greatest fighter is that he simply had skills that exceeded anyone’s expectations,” Sylvester Stallone, who created and starred in the epic “Rocky” films, told Reuters.
Stallone’s Rocky character was based on a 1975 opponent of Ali’s, journeyman Chuck Wepner, a liquor salesman who lost a technical knockout to the champion in the 15th round.
“He was the fastest, the best, the most positive and they’ll never see the likes of him ever again,” Stallone said of Ali. “Maybe the greatest athlete of all time.”
Ali was a remarkably gifted athlete during his years in the ring but Parkinson’s disease has slowed his gait considerably. Ironically, the most outspoken sports figure of his generation now has trouble talking.
“He still kind of echoes in the culture somehow, he’s still kind of out there,” said Stephen Brunt, award winning columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail who has written several books on boxing including best seller “Facing Ali.”
“In a lot of ways, for better or worse you see him in the modern athlete,” he said. “He was the first guy to go out there and tout his own horn to the degree that he did and of course now everyone does it, without the wit and the smile with Ali.”
What Ali did outside the ring is as memorable, to many, as his career inside of it.
At the height of his career, Ali refused to serve in the U.S. Army because of his Nation of Islam faith and in 1967, while the Vietnam war was raging, was stripped of his title.
“Well I think Muhammad Ali had the hearts and minds of most of the people in America with some of the issues he got involved in,” basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told Reuters.
Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON — [tag]Sugar Ray Robinson[/tag] would have considered being featured on a postage stamp “an honor for him, an honor for God and an honor for the community,” his son said of the latest accolade for a man once selected as the top boxer of the 20th century.
The new 39-cent stamp, designed to resemble a vintage fight poster of the 1940s and ’50s, is being released Friday in ceremonies at [tag]Madison Square Garden[/tag] in New York.
The elder Robinson once did a public service announcement urging the police to treat everyone the same, whether they were individuals on the street or famous athletes such as [tag]Jackie Robinson[/tag], [tag]Roy Campanella[/tag] and himself, the son recalled.
“I think he would have thought [the stamp] was a gift from God,” Ray Robinson II said in a telephone interview.
But not just a gift to him alone.
“He was a team player in a sport where you don’t have a team,” the younger Robinson said. His father valued his family, agents, lawyers, training staff and sparring partners, “that was the team.”
More here.