“Joe had some alcohol at the luncheon. And Joe doesn’t handle his liquor particularly well. Ali was sort of floating around like Mr.Magoo. Joe was in an ugly mood and would sort of brush up against him. You could see trouble was coming. So wherever Joe walked, Larry Holmes would walk with him and interpose himself between Joe and Ali…Larry did this for about ten minutes and then George Foreman took over.” Hauser.
Joe really stands out as the only one who really hated Muhammad Ali, even Sonny Liston did not generate that much hate towards him.
“The truth is I’d like to rumble with that sucker again – beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus…people ask me if I feel bad for him. Nope. I don’t. Fact is I don’t give a damn. They want me to love him, but I’ll open the graveyard and bury his ass when the lord chooses to take him…Clay always mocked me – like I was the dummy. Getting hit in the head. Now look at him. He can hardly talk and he’s still out there trying to make noise…he’s a ghost, and I’m still here. Let’s talk about who really won those fights.”
“It would have been a good thing if he would have lit the Olympic torch and fallen in. If I had the chance, I would have pushed him in.”
“That Uncle Tom stuff was an attempt by Clay to make me feel isolated from my own people. He thought that would weaken me in the ring. Well, he was wrong. It didn’t weaken me, it awakened me to what a cheap son of a ***** he was.”
ALI "You saying you could of beat me?" LOUIS "Back in my day, we had something called the bum-of-the-month tour." Ali "Are you calling me a bum?" LOUIS "You'd have been on the tour."
While it is not good to gold a grudge, Ali was a vicious betrayer to Frazier & essentially expolited racists stereotypes against blacks folks & at best was uncaring that his words caused so much harm. Including Frazier's kids needing police protection. Frazier both gave/lent Ali money when he was banned & went to bat for him to get his license back at the highest level of the Nixon administration. Giveing Ali every benefit of the doubt, maybe he was not consciously cruel, but he at least did not care about the effect of his hateful betrayal of Frazier in his quest to sell tickets. Really Ali was great & magical in many ways. But in some ways he was an unintergrated, underdeveloped personality. As late as 1975 in the Playbo interview he was describing the virtures & necessities of murdering his fellow black people who were romantically with other races.
Here is a better question... Name anybody that likes a non stop **** talking loud mouth that relentlessly demeans and insults them.
Terrell claimed that Ali rubbed his eye on the ropes and then thumbed it. The doctor diagnosed the damage after the fight as a "blow-out fracture of the bony structure under his eyeball." To put it mildly, Ernie was upset with Ali after the fight. I have never heard that Terrell changed his mind. Has anyone else?
I don’t think anybody as far as fighters are concerned ever really hated Ali, but many of them definitely disagreed with his methods of promotion and think he pushed things too far regardless of how effective it was.
