And mine !!! Maybe the biggest fight of ANY lifetime. Numerous others such as Louis-Schmelling II and Johnson-Jeffries,to name but two,have been mentioned but FOTC matched the hype and then some
As a fourteen year old I can still hear the roars of Ali-Frazier before the fight started. Nothing matched it in my lifetime.
Two undefeated Heavyweight Champions, one of them Muhammad Ali, at a time when the Heavyweight Champion was recognized as maybe the top sports figures, with the social and political climate at the time, it's hard to imagine another boxing match approaching the gravitas of the Fight of the Century!
Frazier was great....he'd beat Jeffries..Liston....and anyone since Ali's times save Tyson ..hate to say it..thanks again rez
As an aside the motto on Fraziers T shirt of 'Kelly for brickwork' relates to a interesting father and son and famous daughter/sister. John Brendan "Jack" Kelly Snr and Jr, their daughter/sister being Grace Kelly.
There's similar footage shot the same day or at the same time by the BBC. In the BBC footage, he's sparring Ken Norton. I believe that's who he's sparring in this video you posted here, too. (The guy in the dark shirt.) This is the 1971 version of Norton. You can tell a couple times that it's Ken by the way Norton holds his right palm toward Frazier (briefly around the 1:31 or 1:32 mark - which he often did later in his career, too) to try to catch the punches. Norton hadn't mastered his cross-arm defense yet.
The AP Archive has some great footage, but they do a terrible job of labeling their stuff. If they put Joe Frazier-Ken Norton sparring before Ali-Frazier 1 ... they'd probably get a lot more views. You have to click on everything, no matter how poorly it's labeled. But you find good stuff. For example, here's something labeled Mohamed (spelled wrong) Ali and Joe Frazier November 1973. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CD4HKpZORA You click on it, and it's Ali and Frazier being introduced before the Jeff Merritt-Ron Stander fight ... and they include Merritt knocking out Stander. Not including the names of Merritt and Stander is kind of a big deal, considering how little footage of those guys (Merritt and Stander) there is. I don't know. Just something I wanted to complain about. It's a great source though. You've just got to look at everything.
