Greatest boxers from middle class or upper class backgrounds?

Maybe not in a material sense as compared to middle class life in the West, but given that their dad was a senior officer in the Soviet Air force, they would definitely have been 'up there' in terms of Soviet society.

 

Being given a bike doesn't mean your family was well off. It means they came up on enough money to do something special for there 1 of two kids on a special day. You really think a black man in the south in the early 50s was paid well for painting? Again you don't seem to have any clue about American history

 

I worked for years in a unionized truck paint shop with a crew of about 40-45 men with jobs ranging from cleanup, painter's helpers, spray painters, body and fender workers, detailers, sheet metal workers and fabricators, and one sign painter. The sign painter was by far the highest paid shop employee in the company. He was considered a skilled craftsman. This was in the same time period as Ali's father was practicing the craft before digitized vinyl graphics made most of a sign painter's work obsolete. IMO, Ali was brought up in a solidly middle-class environment. This is not to say that his father was paid a wage comparable to white people who did the same work, but I am confident he was better paid than most African-American males.

 

The forums newest race baiter.

 

Simply put Ali never worked. He went from a sterling amateur career straight into the pros. He never held down a job. He's basically the prototype of the amateurs of today who go straight from the Olympics into the pro's (minus maybe the network contracts).

Frazier was working from his early teens until he was forced to leave Beaufort and make his way to Philadelphia by himself as a 15 year old. He worked in slaughterhouses even when he was developing as a top amateur fighter in Philly. Never mind Frazier was also one of 13 kids sharecropping sh!t soil in a dirt poor and segregated part of the USA.

Ali simply never came up as tough as the like of Frazier, Liston or Foreman despite being the superior fighter. The revisionist history of his life is one of the more annoying things about the Greatest for mine. I mean his story was interesting enough without inventing stuff about him being from the underclass.

 

Jim Jeffries came from a somewhat middle class family. Harry Greb's family may have been lower middle class with his father, Pius, able to support his family fairly well as a stone mason contractor.

By white standards of the time, Muhammad Ali came from a working class family. That is despite the fact that Ali's family was better off than many other black families of the time.

- Chuck Johnston

 

A complete myth fabricated by the reptilian Bob Arum.

Pac lived a luxurious life growing up in a 4 bedroom sea side villa with his favourite meal being his mother's lobster Thermidor

 

I believe Jim Corbett was working at a bank when he first took up boxing, so I would assume he was solidly middle class. I’m not sure what his life growing up was like though.

 

Corbett was not middle class.

He was part of the aristocracy.

He was a Gentleman.