Jersey Joe Walcott Quotes Before The First Rocky Marciano Bout.........

Here's the story of when Ali and Marciano had there sparring session........

''For a while in the fall of 1966, it appeared that they would get him back. There were rampant rumours that Marciano would come out of retirement to fight Ali. At one point, a rich texan came foward and offered $4 million to do so. Marciano thought about it and declined the offer. It was a wise decision. He would have found himself in the middle of a racial passion play. Moreover, the forty three year old had no chance of defeating Ali, who was then at the peak of his powers. A decade earlier it might have been a good match, but not now. As sports Illustrated obderved ''Forty Three is no age for a white hope.

''Eventually, Marciano did fight Ali- sort of. In 1969 a Miami advertising executive named Murray Woroner came up with the idea of staging a simulated, computer-generated match between Marciano and Ali on closed circuit television. Because both men were alive and well (Marcaino on the banquet circuit, Ali in exile), woroner could pay them to act out various scenarios in front of cameras. Then he could feed data on both fighters into the computer have the computer spit out how a mythical fight between the two would unfold, mtach the film to the computerized script and release it across the country, keeping the outcome very much in suspense. And thats' what proceeded to do. Woroner called his brandchild ''Superfight'' ''

So in the summer of 1969, Marciano went on a diet, lost fifty pounds and put on what boxing historian Bert Sugar called ''the worst looking toupee i've ever seen'' Over the course of a week he and Ali boxed more than seventy five one minute rounds in a miamiwarehouse as the cameras rolled. ''They both had a pot on them'' recalls a bemused Angelo Dundee ''They were way out of shape. But thank God for the camera work. They looked like they were throwing punchers. Slow motion and they speeded them up with cameras'' Dundee remembered one especially amusing moment; ''Muhhamed threw a jab that came from the back that picked up the toupee. And Rocky says 'cuts the cameras, cut the cameras' He didn't want anybody to know that he had a rug on''

Before Superfight, Marciano was not a big fan of Ali's. ''He never did like Muhammad'' recalls Dundee. ''He said he talked too much'' Lipstye says that Marciano had told me that he was ashamed of Muhhamed Ali because he felt that, in retrospect, it somehow stained the honor of his own championship-it kind ofreflected badly on the heavyweight champion''

During Superfight though, according Dundee, Marciano became very friendly with Muhhamed'' Peter Marciano recalls that Ali always adresses Rocky as champ. Never called him Rocky, naver called him Mr Marcaino. It was Champ. it was the highest resoect you could give. Still, a competitive fire existed between the two men, at least from Marciano's standpount. Indeed after Superfight, Marcaino said to duva ''Ask him about his ribs'' When Duva did Ali responded ''Oh man, that guys crazy'' and lifted his shirt to reveal bid red welts.