See where an unranked and seriously declined 36 y/o Cleve Williams fought a fast rising ten years younger heavy hitting #5 ranked Mac Foster in later '69 and got stopped in 5 when--as the wiki summary notes--"Foster was hitting him at will when the referee halted the bout." This content is protected This content is protected and Cleve was KO'd in 3. Imagine the cumulative brain damage Cleve suffered in those two fights? HOW could his management have pursued that second fight (much less the first) and the sanctioning bodies allowed it? As the New York Times story related before the Quarry-Foster bout 9 months later...On the small gray movie screen, Mac Foster was pummeling Cleveland Williams in a slow‐motion barrage of punches. When the film ended, Jerry Quarry strode away without a word. “Scared me to death,” Quarry said, smiling, later. “He had a corpse in front of him. If that was meant to impress me, it didn't.”
Traditionally there’s been little to stop fighters from putting themselves in harm’s way. Some state athletic commissions are more strict than others but for the most part there isn’t much protecting boxers who are very clearly risking their health. Certainly not back then. And my only guess for Williams taking both of those fights is he badly needed the money.
Let me tell you something about the fighter and his downside... I once knew a professional boxing athlete fighter and he kept saying curse words, over and over again, around the clock, no concern for the types of blasphemies that can occur with such language inside of the human skull's mouthal fortress. Fearing for his eternal mortal soul (oxymoron?) I told him that there was a hell fire and pits of sulfuric damnation rose and ebbed and flowed like tides upon the...um...horizon...an event in and of itself, one which would circumnavi-oop-wait-Amazon delivery, I gotta go. I think it's my stainless steel, full-tang pasta spoon, German engineered for an ergonomic-it's not important-I just need to get the box while it's still on my porch, goodbye.
