Is there anyone who saw John L. Sullivan AND Muhammad Ali fight?

I doubt it.

I know for a fact that a man who saw Preisdent Lincoln get assasinated as a child lived to see him tell that story in the 1950's so about a 90 years later.

Theoretically its possible that someone saw Sullivan in the late 1880's or in his fight with Corbett in 1892. But again, travelling was difficult back then and highly time consuming. Tickets would have been limited. And such a person would likely already be an adult so he would have to have been born in the late 1860's or early 1870's.

For this same person to have seen Ali live 68-72 years later. He would be nearing a 100 years old. He would either have to live in a city where Ali happened to be fighting or he would have to travel to see Ali fight. Again, not easy to travel in your 90's even if you have decent health.

I doubt it.

 

Very doubtful.


But I'll ask around
But seriously,if someone was born in 1882 and saw John l Sullivan in his last fight when he was ten, then he would be in his 80 s and see Ali beat Liston.

So then again, it's possible.. just

 

Ali's fights were televised, IIRC, which helps. I don't think the OP specifies that he saw both fight in person.

 

Ok. Fair. I didn't realize the live vs televised issue.

Still, i doubt anyone who travelled live to see Sullivan would have been alive for Ali's televised fights and still have been mentally sharp and know what was happening.

Very few people would have seen Sullivan live. The life expectancy back then was lower and while there have always been outliers who have lived long lives, the odds of someone being one of the few people to see Sullivan live AND living long enough to witness Ali are slim to none.

 

I wonder if anyone thought to ask Sonny “Methuselah” Liston if he happened to have seen John L fight in order to compare them.

He definitely got to see Ali fight, up close and personal.

 

Luis Ortiz probably has.

 

I doubt anyone managed to see both Sullivan and Ali at their peaks, but there were people that did see both live.

Jack Kearns and Ancil Hoffman both had the privilege of seeing Sullivan fight admittedly at the tail end of his career and Ali fight.

 

I shook Lennox Lewis's hand who shook Wladimir Klitchko's hand who shook Max Schmeling's hand who shook Hitler's hand.
This thread is a similar thing in theory It's possible to bridge such a gap. Ali was televised from 1960 onwards. A 13 year old local in that crowd born in 1877 and a lifelong fan...could've been alive to watch Ali-Liston in 1964 at age 85.

 

I'm sure there probably were. For example, Jess Willard was born in 1881. He died in 1968.

He was 10 when John L. Sullivan lost to Corbett and lived through Ali's entire first reign. But Jess Willard was born in nowhere Kansas and Sullivan never fought in Kansas when Willard was a kid. And, by most accounts, Willard wasn't much of a boxing fan anyway.

But it would have to be someone who was a boxing fan with an age range like that.

 

If you go by the revised date of birth of Liston that some posters have here, he may very well have seen prime Sullivan in his youth.

 

There is such a guy. And he said Ali was vastly inferior in every way to Sullivan.

 

Honestly, it's pretty much impossible that anyone ever saw both John L. Sullivan and Muhammad Ali fight live, especially at their peaks. Sullivan was in his prime in the 1880s and his last major fight was in 1892. He died in 1918. Ali didn’t even exist until 1942. So we're talking about two fighters separated by not just generations, but totally different eras of the sport, bare-knuckle vs. modern gloves, pre-radio vs. televised global events.

Even if someone was a kid at Sullivan’s last fight, they'd have to live to be at least 90 or older to even see Ali's early career in the '60s, let alone remember anything clearly enough to compare. Realistically, there’s no record of anyone doing that. The closest we have are boxing historians and writers who tried to connect the dots across time, but those comparisons are second-hand at best. They never actually watched both guys live in the ring.

And stylistically, the gap is massive. Sullivan fought with a style that was part brawler, part wrestler by today’s standards. He trained differently, fought under different rules and boxed guys who often weren't full-time athletes. Ali, Liston, Frazier, they were products of a much more developed fight game, with conditioning, strategy and competition that Sullivan never faced. Doesn’t mean Sullivan wasn’t a beast in his day, but it’s like comparing a Model T to a modern sports car. You can appreciate both, but they belong to different worlds.

So yeah, fun to think about, but no, there’s nobody out there who saw both with their own eyes and left us a direct comparison. If someone says they did, they’re either bluffing or time-traveling.