Muhammad Ali " Jack Dempsey Is A Joke " ?... no muhammad ali is a joke...proof

I think Dempsey would have given Ali fits. He was much faster and less predictable than Frazier. I think Dempsey was also tougher and hit harder.

I think it would have been a wonderful fight to see what it was Dempsey and Ali both had.

I'm an Ali fan and I'd pick him over 15 rounds. I doubt it would be one sided or boring.

 

Here's a more serious interview with a young Ali/Clay all the way from 1964... Might open some people's eyes on him, or maybe it won't.

'I'm A Little Special'

Everybody is familiar with the public image of the challenger for Sonny Liston's heavyweight title: a loudmouth and braggart who spouts obvious verse. What Clay has seldom let the world see is the sober, ambitious man inside the child's skin. Here, at last, he reveals his true nature, in which zaniness is always a calculated ingredient

Cassius Clay

"If I were like a lot of guys—a lot of heavyweight boxers, I mean—I'll bet you a dozen doughnuts you wouldn't be reading this story right now. If you wonder what the difference between them and me is, I'll break the news: you never heard of them. I'm not saying they are not good boxers. Most of them—people like Doug Jones and Ernie Terrell—can fight almost as good as I can. I'm just saying you never heard of them. And the reason for that is because they cannot throw the jive."

"Where do you think I would be next week if I didn't know how to shout and holler and make the public sit up and take notice? I would be poor, for one thing, and I would probably be down in Louisville, Ky., my home town, washing windows or running an elevator and saying "yes suh" and "no suh" and knowing my place."

"Part of my plan to get the fight has made me say some pretty insulting things about Sonny Liston, but I might as well tell you I've done that mostly to get people to talking about the fight and to build up the gate. I actually have a certain amount of respect for Liston; he's the champion, isn't he? That doesn't mean I think he's going to stay champion. I have too much confidence in my own ability to think I'm beaten before we start. I do mean he is a strong, hard puncher, and he's not a fighter anybody can laugh at. When I walk into a room where he is and see him staring at me with that mean, hateful look, I want to laugh, but then I think maybe it's not so funny. I'm pretty sure the way he acts is just a pose, the same way I have a pose, but that look of his still shakes me."

"I've been criticized for leaning away from the other man's punches instead of ducking, but I'm not going to change my style. Leaning away is a faster reflex than ducking and I'll go on doing it until somebody proves it's a mistake—and that somebody has got to be another boxer, not a trainer. They also tell me I carry my hands too low—that it's showoff and dangerous. Well, I just answer have you ever seen a mirage on the desert? You walk along locking for a drink of water, and suddenly you see a lake and you jump in. All you get is a mouthful of sand. Mr. Liston will get a mouthful of leather the same way."

"So I'm saying I will win this fight in the eighth round because I think Liston will be worn out by then. If he's not, I sure can go on longer until he is. I'm 22 and he's 34 or 36 and I just don't believe he can outlast me. If I don't win the fight in any round—and "if" is a big word—if I don't win, I still think I will have given Liston a good fight and there is bound to be a rematch. That wouldn't bother me too much, either, because that way I'll be able to have another big payday. I'll just start hollering, "Look out, world, here I come again. I didn't feel too good that night, but now I'm on my way back." I don't think I'd have too much trouble drawing another crowd."

"I don't seem to have trouble drawing a crowd anywhere. I can even do it on the sidewalks of New York, where people are used to everything. But when I get a crowd around me, somebody always wants to know if I'm really like the way I act. Well, of course I'm like I act or else I couldn't act this way. But what I have done is to exaggerate the natural way I am. I wouldn't sit around my house shouting and carrying on if it was just me and my folks, but I would if there was anybody else there to hear me. I do that for the reason I've already said: to attract attention and to get rich."

"I remember one day in Louisville I was riding a bus reading in the paper about Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. It was right after I had won the Olympic gold medal in Rome and had turned professional, and I was confident then I could beat either one of them if I had the chance. But I knew I wouldn't get the chance because nobody much had ever heard of me. So I said to myself, how am I going to get a crack at the title? Well, on that bus I realized I'd never get it just sitting around thinking about it. I knew I'd have to start talking about it—I mean really talking, screaming and yelling and acting like some kind of a nut. I thought if I did that people would pretty soon hear enough of that and insist I meet whomever was champion. I would be like Georgeous George, the wrestler, who got so famous by being flashy and exaggerating everything and making people notice him."

"You can see how it has turned out—just the way I wanted it to. I started off slow because I was feeling my way, but pretty soon I caught on to what reporters like to hear and what would make the public pay attention. I told this man I was going to knock that boy down in the sixth round, and then I did. I said I am the greatest, I am a ball of fire. If I didn't say it, there was nobody going to say it for me. Then people commenced to say, "What's that loudmouth talking about?" and it grew and it grew. And pretty soon other people were saying I'm the greatest, and I said, "Didn't I tell you so in the first place?" And you know what? The more I talked, the more I convinced myself. I believe in myself so much by now it's embarrassing."

"All the time I was building myself up, of course, I was fighting and winning. I don't pretend I fought a lot of great boxers in the beginning, because I certainly did not. I fought a bunch of bums exactly like Liston and Patterson did when they were starting out. But every time I won a fight, I also made a lot of fresh enemies. One thing people can't stand is a blowhard, and the more I blew, the more people would come out to see me get beaten. I said I was pretty (I'm not as pretty as I let on), I said I was fast, I said I was terrific and it got so you couldn't keep people away. And those that got in would yell, "Take away his pink Cadillac, the bum," and, "Bash in his pretty nose," and, "Button his fat lip." Well, that's just fine. I don't really care what people say about me personally as long as they buy a ticket to come see me. After they pay their money, they're entitled to a little fun."

"After the Doug Jones fight in Madison Square Garden last year, for instance, people who thought Jones should have had the decision got so mad they didn't know what to do. They were booing and screaming and trying to get at me as I walked out of the ring. So I just yelled right back at them to shut up or I'd beat their ears off, and all the way to the dressing room I was thinking, "Cassius, you are even better than Gorgeous George. You have just made a whole lot more enemies and every one of them will be back for your next fight. Only then the tickets are going to cost more."

"Of course, the real way I built up my fame was by predicting the round I would knock out some guy. I forget now when I first started doing that and how many times it has worked, but I know it has worked most of the time. How do I do it? I do it by trying extra hard and the other boxer helps by worrying extra hard."

"Already they're saying I can't get Liston in eight. Maybe I can and maybe I can't, but you better believe he's wondering about the same thing right this minute. If I do get him like I say, there won't be anybody who will care, because they'll be for Liston anyway. It's easier to like an ugly old man than it is to like a loudmouth kid, and everybody wants him to teach me a lesson. But just as sure as I do the teaching and win, people will say, "Aw, so what? Liston was a nothing anyway." People are hypocrites, if you don't know that already."

Read the whole article here:

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1075663/index.htm

Ali as the champ:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Moyfhz4TWiQ
6:45

 

Ali's self promotion was learned from wrestling. He took his cues from Gorgeous George. He promoted himself the way an entrepreneur would promote a product he was going to put on the market. He did it for maximum sales effect. He was quite successful.

 

Thank you for your wonderful post, GreatA. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

"...the more I talked the more I convinced myself," a very telling phrase. As a kid I always had the feeling that's what Ali was trying to do on some level. It's like what Cary Grant, (Archibald Leach), the movie star who in his youth in the rough, was nothing like the debonair, icon of suave, said: "I (Archibald Leach) pretended to be Cary Grant for so long, pretty soon I became Cary Grant."

For those of you not yet born in Ali's time, I can see how he would seem like a clown, a walking and talking insult, a travesty to the tradition of humble walking the walk, so no need to talk the trash kind of champions like Marciano and Louis. But I assure you, that for those of us who were around to witness it, this breath of fresh air, or was it hot air, Ali was a Godsend to the game,. Guys like Holmes and Leonard who came up in his shadow tried to emulate him and though it was a tribute, and I'm sure flattering to the Greatest, it was a bit embarrassing by comparison.

 

I have had the same conflict thinking about it too. I could not stand S.R. Leonard's smug cockiness, but Ali didn't bother me a bit.

The only reason I can come up with for my sentiment is that when Ali did it it was more or less original. Afterward he began to be 'copied'. That's my take on it.

 

Hey guys ... it's like anything else. Someone trying to be funny who's just not very funny, a not so good lookin' chick dressed in a mini skirt and tank top T shirt throwing it all over the sidewalk. To your "double standard" point DaBox, nobody would have thought poorly of Holmes and Leonard and others if they did it as well. It's not like Muhummad had an asbestos suit that protected him from the heat of criticism; the guy was funny, and he was articulate. When he joked we knew it was just that, a joke. When Larry tried to joke it seemed like a strain, not really in his character. If Muhummad got away with this stuff and others didn't it was for one simple reason ... he was good at it.