[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlxiNol-9M[/ame] Kind of interesting. If you watch the video the first 5 punches either missed or glanced off of Foreman's arms. The only REAL clean blow there is the right cross. I always thought that Ali landed a combination on George and knocked him out. But he really only landed one punch.
It looks like four punches landed clean. The right-left landed on the temples, left-right landed on the chin.
**** man. Now I have to sit through pots explaining that Foreman wasn't really knocked out, that it was the heat that beat him...shame.
No. With his back to the ropes, Ali landed "a sneaky right hand" and then "another sneaky right hand" which suddenly seemed to discombobulate Foreman, who suddenly staggered into the ropes. The knowledgeable Ali noticed this and opened up with an extraordinary killer combination, topped off with a finishing blow of a right hand. As in the case of many knockouts, it was fatigue, the opponent's swift maneuver and solid fist out of nowhere that got George.
Without that last right hand, no, I don't think Foreman goes down. Ali has indicated that was the hardest single punch he ever landed. The following year, he used a similar right hand to send Lyle packing. Muhammad also expressed that he knew it wouldn't have done the trick early in their fight. His early round power did not produce basketball results in the 1970s, aside from Bob Foster and the china chinned Richard Dunn. Still, Kinshasa revealed what was likely the hardest punching version of Ali we ever saw. (In his previous outing that year, he stunned Frazier to the ropes with a big right in round two, by far the earliest outburst of power he exhibited in his second career.) Foreman was getting stunned as early as the opening moments of round four. I suspect Ali could have finished him as early as round six.