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my favourite myth I read once involved sylvester stallone going pro in order to train for rocky balboa with like 10-10 record or something

 

Category of Womanising

Corbett was claimed to have had a number of affairs - including one with Mae West.

My man Ingemar allegedly got jiggy with Elizabeth Taylor among other female celebrity conquests.

So the Swede was the GOAT in the bedroom also…..it seems. And I refuse to make any silly jokes like Liz feeling Thor after being Hammered…or instead of experiencing fireworks Liz saying it was better than that, more like Toonder and Lightning…. that’s childish stuff, no need for that.

Proof? See below for Liz with hubby Eddie Fisher watching Johansson vs Patterson 2. See how distressed Liz appears - did Eddie notice??- no doubt it was when Floyd laid her man out with that mighty left hook. I think Ingemar was blowing Liz a kiss when he got caught off guard.

In fact, I think Ali, then Clay, might’ve also said jokingly that he was distracted by “Cleopatra” ( as he called Liz who was in attendance) when he was caught and dropped by Cooper’s left hook.

[url]https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/elizabeth-taylor-and-eddie-fisher-attend-boxing-match-news-photo/166705173[/url]

 

Superhuman category:-

Re Jeffries. There’s the deer carry story already mentioned but there was also the claim of Jeffries drinking a case of whiskey to cure pneumonia. I think one doctor even claimed that Jeffries blood wasn’t like that of ordinary men.

In general a lot of the old time newspaper reports described fighters surviving punches that would’ve otherwise felled ten ordinary men - they must’ve had some chins back in the day…..or there were the KOs that rendered fighters unconscious for periods ranging from 10 to 30 minutes…..that’s a helluva long time to be stone cold “out”….

 

Not sure if this counts but most myths seem to be pre 1960s. It's a lot easier to start a myth that doesn't get fact checked if its about someone who died over 70 years ago.

 

The mention of deaths in the ring made me think about how basically anyone who caused a ring death ‘was never the same again’ even though many of them were very, very successful after — seems to only come up when they lost after as an excuse.

It’s basically ‘well he didn’t want to ever hurt anyone again so he didn’t want to knock people out and if he hadn’t lost that he would have knocked out all these guys he lost to.’

 

I'll only disagree with two of those. Physical abnormalities are definitely real. Everyone's not built for the fight game. Also, close fights have clear winners sometimes. The rest is pretty spot on.

 

Sonny Liston's wingspan may be the most controversial.

 

I notice that many myths repeat themselves, with the players changed.

For example the Greb Walker street fight, is a carbon copy of a similar story involving Jem Mace and Tom King.

 

No different in our sport.

 

Teeth being knocked out and the number of same. I’m sure some claims are true but certainly not all.

Even after KO’ing Ketchel the way Johnson wipes his glove doesn’t gel with his trying to remove embedded teeth from his right glove.

Financially strapped fighters winning bets in saloons after successfully avoiding every punch thrown at them without stepping off a handkerchief - stories of same generally attributed to accepted defensive masters - e.g. Young Griffo.

Quite the feat unless they had ridiculously oversized handkerchiefs back in the day.

Many acknowledged old school defensive whizzes were described as plucking incoming punches out of the air - very romantic but perhaps a tad exaggerated.

Street fights are plausible but the stories of real ones have likely been hijacked and falsely applied to other fighters. We know for sure that Randall Cobb was coming for Ken Norton after their boxing match. LOL.

Organised matches behind closed doors. For one, Johnson vs Dempsey. There was some substance to the misguided belief. It was originally written up and duly qualified as a fantasy/fiction fight. It was reprinted in another newspaper - but without the qualification - accidentally or deliberately I’m not sure.

As such, it read as if it was an authentic retrospective recounting of an actual fight between the two - I believe the original article was written in the mid 20s or so.

Perhaps not as strongly circulated but it was rumoured that Jeffries secretly boxed Sam Langford just prior to Reno to test himself - and that Big Jim was KO’d in 4 rounds.

Finally, even today we still have our own, living, breathing and walking folklorist - George “My knees were knocking” Foreman. The homicidal stare he was giving Frazier told a different story as did the near homicide he carried out shortly thereafter.

 

I'm sure his knees were knocking, his performance in the fight was the potential that fear helped him achieve

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Nice vid. Thanks. Very enjoyable.

Fear is a broad definition, open to subjective interpretation.

It's helpful when a fighter like Mike breaks down exactly what fear means to him and how it effected him. Such breakdowns really are necessary from each and every fighter rather than trying to guess what fear means to them in a blanket sense.

Ali was interviewed by Burt Lancaster before the FOTC and was asked about fear or being nervous. Ali admitted to having butterflies I think but qualified that it related to fearing the possibility of performing poorly and also losing. It seemed Ali was talking in terms of both giving the audience their monies worth and most importantly, winning the fight. Ali made it clear that he didn't have literal fear of his opponent or the physical dangers involved.

In all possibility, George's knees were knocking. It's just that he didn't appear at all intimidated, rather, he was attempting to intimidate. Also, in the broader context, it seems Old George became that much more self deprecating than he was in his first career. The first time I heard him refer to his knees knocking was in CHAMPIONS FOREVER released 1989. Now if George claimed the knee knocking prior to that or more specifically, around the time he beat Frazier, then I would take that claim much more seriously. Maybe he did, but I haven't read or heard of same.

 

The only common thread I've found in professional fighters is a madness that can't quite be expressed any other way. They are, almost to a man, crazy people.

 

I did a deep dive into various archives of claims of poisoning fighters after Fury Wilder 2, they seemed to have their heyday in the 20s and 30s.

It's funny to think that even for fairly committed fans if you missed a fight in 1960 you might have waited several decades to see it. They were only going to devote so much time on the three or four channels (which didn't broadcast 24/7 even) to boxing re-broadcasts.

I guess you could buy a film reel if you had a projector, but that's some serious devotion. You might have caught it in the 1990s when Classic Sports/ESPN Classic showed lots of old fights (this is how I got exposed to history), maybe ordered a DVD collection in the 2000s, or just recently been able to watch it free of YouTube.

The increased availability of video has been exposing a lot of mythical figures. Various club fighters or regional heroes who were supposedly ATG punchers or master technicians.

Eventually video surfaces and you see "oh OK, the guy was very limited actually."

Cus D'Amato once showed me film of a fight between Liston and Big Cat Williams staged behind closed doors for the Sultan of Brunei where you can both see and hear Liston saying "go go gadget reach" before every jab.