From 1974 onwards, Would Ali Have Lost To Prime Holmes?

Ali and Dundee unfathomably underestimated Joe Frazier . Based on his fight with Ellis who Dundee had worked his corner they felt Frazier was past his best and they were doing him a favor by giving him one last big payday before he retired. I don't think for a minute Ali thought he would be in a life and death battle but when he found himself in one he wasn't going to be the one to get the short straw. To the people who say Ali wanted to quit that's bull****. Dundee was there and swore it never happened. Did he think about quitting? Yeah but that's different than wanting to quit. I wish I could find the interview where Ali said about the championship rounds that he repeatedly told himself I'm rhe champion of rhe world and nobody is taking my title. Mark Kram nailed it. He said Ali and
Frazier came into that fight as an Is and came out as a was. Joe wanted it but Ali wanted it more

 

Thank you most all of that may be true.
It is ambiguous with asking the gloves to be cut off...It happened a decade earlier with Liston & Dundee rejected it, understandably because Liston's ointment had blinded Ali for a while.
Also Ali was to a lesser degree a "was" after this fight that many say finished them both.

This [url]entry in Wikipedia [/url]with sources referenced about the fight states Ali volunteered he wanted to stop fighting.
I did not realize until reading this that Futch gave Frazier bad advice about fighting more upright late in the fight, & that the extreme heat prevented them from effectively icing Frazier's face (it kept melting quickly).
The book about Ali is much admired: I am open to argument, but please show your sources if you can rebut it.

"Seeing the results of round 14, [url]Eddie Futch[/url] decided to stop the fight between rounds rather than risk a similar or worse fate for Frazier in the 15th. Frazier protested stopping the fight, shouting "I want him, boss," and trying to get Futch to change his mind. Futch replied, "It's all over. No one will forget what you did here today", and signaled to referee [url]Carlos Padilla, Jr.[/url], to end the bout. Ali would later claim that this was the closest to dying he had ever been.[url][25][/url][url][26][/url] Unbeknownst to Frazier's corner, at the end of the 14th round Ali instructed his cornermen to cut his gloves off, but Dundee ignored him. Ali later told his biographer [url]Thomas Hauser[/url], "Frazier quit just before I did. I didn't think I could fight anymore."[url][27][/url] Padilla, who scored the fight, and the ringside judges had Ali ahead by a comfortable margin on points but many of the ringside press had the fight scored much closer. The [url]Associated Press[/url] had the fight even after 14 rounds.[url][28][/url]


The one thing I disagree with is that Ali wanted it more. You have it exactly backwards.
Ali wanted it a great deal. Frazier wanted it more.
He never would have even thought about verbalizing ending the fight in Ali's condition-& with his eyesight nearly entirely gone, he was in worse shape.
He was legally blind in one eye for years, & there was little vision left in his other eye!
Still, Frazier begged to continue.
He did not talk with Futch for a while after his trainer stopped the fight, not wanting to see another man die in the ring.

The victor does *not* always want it more.
Futch said Ali had "outgrew" Frazier-that at best is a partial truth. Only the very greatest larger fighters could have possibly taken Frazier out by then, & it was in part that the smaller swarmer Frazier had absorbed more punishment & declined more than Ali.
And peak for peak I pick Ali anyway...

Frazier would literally have willingly risked death if say he knew he might well beat Ali.

He was driven by hate that Ali fed with cruel & immoral taunting-with racist overtones-& public humilation, even years after he gave Ali money when he could not get fights, & intervened at the highest levels of government to try to get him his boxing license back.

Ali wanted it a great deal.
Frazier wanted it more.
He just did not have quite enough left to do it-or if he had any decent chance, his own corner would more than understandably not let him try.

 

Consensus from who?

 

I do not know why you are laughing.
The consensus means most people.
In this case if anything people who are considered more expert will favor Ali even more strongly.

Have you not seen the many threads here dedicated to prime Ali vs. Tyson?
Just do a seach & check.
Feel free to start a new, neutrally worded thread with yet another poll.
Make sure you set it so people have to show who they vote for, so there can be no cheating with new alts lol!

Also add a second thread question, which would ask "what do you think most people & most boxing experts think about who would win?

 

Who is "most people"? I don't go around asking people who have zero experience for advice.

 

Please excercise more precision: you literally had a laughing icon when I said most people believed Ali could beat Tyson.
Now you are shifting the goalposts. i am correct about that, & you cannot dispute it.

Also you ignored my claim that most experts will fel if anything even more strongly that Ali would beat Tyson.
Do you not respect the opinions of people on this website?
Why ignore everything I said, including to check/search for the many threads & olls on this website about this issue.

Finally, show me your sources where people you respect agree about Tyson.
But you cannot cherry-pick those who agree with you-it must be from a broa durvey of experts.
Otherwise one could "prove" anything by just finding individual cases.
Such as say "proving" that the average person is at least 7' tall by listing numerous folks.
Although there are only ~ 2800 of them around today.

If you present nothing substantive, please take my suggestion to run a double poll here.
Which includes not just who the respondee thinks will win, but who everyone believes most EXPERTS pick.
Then make sure that it is not anonymous, & you can see how most easily choose Ali for both questions.

 

I have read Hauser's book several times. If you are referring to Ghosts Of Manila Mark Kram actively disliked Ali when he wrote the book and advances his point of view which is the right of any author. Nobody was closer to the action that night beside the combatants than Eddie Futch and Angelo Dundee. Here's Angie on whether Ali wanted to quit:

This content is protected

 

I am not shifting goalposts. Never have I ever pointed to "consensus" in my posts.

 

I explicitly referred to the celebrated Hauser book. Which said that Ali was about to quit, as I quote.
Why skip the claims there & go on to another book?

But even what you included above does not establish or even *speak* upon whether Ali wanted to quit.
It avoids that issue entirely: it only says that HE would not want to quit'
Which would seem to suggest he ignored Ali's pleas to cut off his gloves.

Now it may well be that Ali was no more than ambiguous about that even if he said it, because of their dynamic from a decade ago.
But your text neither addresses the Hauser book evidence-which I believe is very reliable-nor even speaks to the question: what Ali said or wanted.

Also in another matter, it is absolutely false that "Ali could have gone all night".
As amazing as Ali's reserves were, clearly he would have to rally tremendously to even go another round like/at the pace as the round before.
When Dundee offers such a transparently false exaggeration, his credibility is in question.

 

All I would say is that at the end of the day he didn't quit. There was no quit in Ali. Everything else is speculation. He was ahead on the cards and that was the first time in 41 rounds he actually had Joe backing up. I cited the Ghosts Of Manila book because I thought that was what you were quoting.

 

You laughed at Ali beating Tyson being the consensus.
You have no response when I show you that whether here or other places, & even more so with experts, most people pick Ali.
You have ignored most all of the substance of my polite arguments: including show me WHERE folks commonly pick Tyson.
Or do a post about it here & also ask what people believe is the consensus.
You can ask them what they believe the xpert consensus is too!

You "shifted" things by saying you did not ask folks who do not know for advice.
It is not avvice: & I am not talking about people who know nothing.
But what is both the common & expert consensus opinion.

As reflected if you search this website for the many threads asking who would emerge victorious.

 

But nothing you wrote-even the Ghosts of Manilla book which was not the one source, Hauser's biography, I cited-supports any idea about whether Ali WANTED to quit.

Your passage by Dundee says nothing about what Ali said to him.
I do not know if HE avoided the question there because he wanted to focus on what HE decided.

SO we are back to having on good authority Ali was urging for the gloves to be cut off.
Although there is some ambiguity about whether he expected to be talked or ordered out of it or not.

We really do not *know* if Futch had not thrown in the towel whether Ali would have lost because he quit.
But that is what the estimable, not directly disputed Hauser book QUOTES him as saying!
I am unaware of Ali likely lying about that.

Frazier sure wanted it more.
Ali was amazing, but the most we can say is he possibly would not have quit.

 

Holmes beats 70s Ali.

 

Let's just set The Ghosts Of Manila aside. I thought you were using it as a source and you weren't.

“I was worn out, beat down, but I would have come out, of course, I was not going to let Joe say I quit.”
-Muhammad Ali

The whole cascade of events surrounding the end of that fight will remain in dispute but the final results aren't.