Cassius Clay-Henry Cooper 1

You can hear the bell ending the fourth round on the radio broadcast ?
That surprises me. I would have thought the crowd going nuts drowns it out, but perhaps they had the radio commentator sat right near the timekeeper.

Good work. :good

 

Ali should have been disqualified for the use of smelling salts. That was against the established rules, but then again rules didn't apply to Ali: witness his refusal to go to a neutral corner in the Bonavena fight.

 

As a piece of trivia, "Barry" was probably W Barrington Dalby, who'd been a fixture on the inter-round summaries for many years.

 

Of course there is controversy. Smelling salts were illegal.

 

Please show a source on this.

I find it strange that the commentators don't say anything or that it doesn't seem to have been mentioned after the fight at all. A whole myth is cooked up around the extra rest, but nothing is said about a rule violation that happened in front of everyone and should have earned Ali a DQ?

If this truly is the case, it's quite bizarre. So please supply a source.

 

Hookandjab - I may be wrong on this but I seem to remember that although smelling salts are illegal now in UK rings, I don't believe they were in 1963. Can anyone confirm?

BTW - If they were illegal, I don't believe that would stop Ang being "unaware" ahem, that they were...

PS - I seem to remember that the long break between rounds myth was debunked over here years ago...my impression was that the break between rounds 4 & 5 was actually around 65 seconds...

My curiosity about this fight is the "what if" aspect...say Cooper had landed that shot a minute earlier? The course of HW history may have been altered...

Cooper was a very good finisher...he may well have stopped Clay...of course, we will never know...

 

Wow, amazing work Klompton. And thank you for sharing your findings.


Ali haters are gonna be livid lol

 

Thank you for sharing the specifics.

Before fights were broadcast via satellite from Europe back to the U.S., fighters could return home and tell wild tales of what took place.

Angelo Dundee spent years telling that story about the delay to replace the glove ... and it simply never happened. I heard him tell that false story dozens of times over the years. He's the person who appears to be the one who started the "story" about the long delay to change gloves. Maybe he told it to boost his standing with the Nation of Islam when they decided to come in and run things. And he came up with that story to show them how he saved Ali. Who knows.

Certainly, that was always the idea behind it - that Ali was stunned and Dundee saved him by making the rip bigger and providing Ali with a long break so they could swap out the glove. The only person a story like that benefited was Dundee. Which is why he was the one who always told it.

The news reports and magazine articles at the time never mentioned a time delay. And the film footage never showed one. But the story grew over the years because Angelo kept telling it, and people kept writing about it after the fact.

 

The BBC beat you by a couple of decades Klompton, when they released the original live radio feed in the late 90s. 1:05 they said...

 

Had Cooper decked Clay a bit earlier in the round...or shortly after the round began.....