Muhammad Ali:Leon Spinks will go down as one of the greatest fighters in the his history of boxing

I've never seen Ali brag on an opponent SO much. Cosell didn't seem to buy it. It's sad that Ali's prediction didn't come true and Leon couldn't fulfill it. Ali's right though, Leon's crazy.

 

He should have quit for good after the second Spinks fight. He sounds good in this clip.

 

I feel what you're saying, but to me he should have quit after losing to Norton in the rubber match.

 

Leon's performance in the first fight with Ali was truly amazing. You didn't see guys fight like that for 15 rounds. The fact that he only had eight pro fights going in, and he did it against Ali, made it all the more impressive.

Leon didn't even fight that poorly in the rematch, Ali just jabbed and tied him up, and Leon let himself be tied up. Young fighters do that. Tyson let Bonecrusher do that all night, too. The rematch was how most people thought their first fight would go.

That's what made the one-round blowout against Coetzee so shocking. Nobody saw that coming.

 

Ali just knew about the performance that he gave in the Ali 1 fight, he didn't know about his lack of dedication and lifestyle

 

That would not have sounded so far fetched at the time.

He won the title with less professional fights, than any other heavyweight in history, and you would have expected him to get a lot better from there.

Even knowing Ali's condition, you would have had high hopes for him!

 

that would have still been a pretty dang good fight to end on; Ali looked sharp, just not as sharp as Norton

 

When Leon Spinks won the title from an aging Muhammad Ali on Feb 15 1978, it was impressive. But then Leon refused to meet mandatory challenger Ken Norton fresh off of his Nov 5 1977 win over Jimmy Young, thus giving Norton the WBC title that he eventually lost to Larry Holmes om June 9 1978. Everyone said that Norton would brutalize Leon, the boxing public assumed that the fix was on for a rematch with Muhammad Ali. The gate for a return was phenomenal but it robbed Leon from cementing his place as champion by not fighting Ken. The Holmes vs Norton fight gained more attention than a Ali vs Spinks rematch.

 

Norton would have had him out of there in 6 or 7. And as we both know, the Holmes-Norton fight deserved all the attention it got and more. That night those guys would have been tough h2h for the majority of great heavyweights in history imo. I don't think Ken was ever the same after that.

 

I agree, the Norton vs Holmes tile fight was one of the best fights I have ever seen. I have been following boxing since 1965.

 

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Now here is an interesting what if!

What if a piano had fallen on Leon Spinks from the sky, the day after he won the heavyweight title?

What sort of predictions would people be making, about what would have happened if the piano had missed him?

 

Assuming the piano killed him or injured him him to the point where he could never box again, he'd be a great "what if?"

Some would say that, based on the form he showed vs. Ali, he was an ATG who made a massive improvement from the Scott LeDoux fight.

Others would say that he only proved himself against a finished Ali, that LeDoux exposed him, that he wouldn't have amounted to much, and that he would've been exposed by the resurgent Norton or a properly trained Ali.