When I was a kid, I used to think that my grandfather knew everything there was to know about sports. It seemed to me that he had seen every hockey, football and baseball game ever played. Same thing with boxing.
If he wasn't busy out on his farm tractor, or fixing stuff in his shop, he was either watching sports, reading about sports, or talking about sports.
Being the curious type that I was, I would pepper him with questions. "Who was the best hitter you ever saw?". "Who was the best pitcher you ever saw?". "Who was the best hockey player you ever saw?"
It wasn't until I asked him who he thought was the best boxer of all-time that it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, my grandfather didn't know every about sports after all.
"Joe Louis", he blurted out, his attention never leaving whatever it was that he was working on. "Joe Louis? What about Muhammad Ali?"
"Ali's got a big mouth." he said, as he turned to look at me, probably taken a little aback by my new found unwillingness to simply take his word on it. "But he's so fast. And he can take a punch, look at what he did to Foreman."
My reference to the legendary Rumble in the Jungle, failed to impress. "Foreman just swang away like a madman. Louis would have picked him apart had he stood in ropes like that." he replied, not quite sure what to make of my sudden incredulity. "I dunno..." I said, as we moved on to another subject.
Few days later, he handed me a book. "Here. Read this." It was a well worn paperback. Joe Louis. My Life. "If you're going to argue, you might as well know what you're talking about." Clearly I had struck a nerve.
Before he let me go that evening, he went on to tell me about how in 1938, he and some of the men he was working with in the woods had piled into an old truck and traveled over the bumpy roads that led them back into town where they were to listen to the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight on the radio.
He told me how two years previously, Louis and Schmeling had met in the ring in New York's Yankee Stadium. Schmeling, a German, represented the Nazis, which meant all that was evil. Louis, on the other hand, was a young kid from the southern U.S. who had risen from utter poverty, and was undefeated going into that fight.
Many observers, my grandfather included, felt that Louis didn't take the first fight as seriously as he should have and let his 24-0 record get to his head. "Schmeling gave him a boxing lesson that night" was his verdict. Like most boxing fans, he thought that ultimately Louis was a better boxer and if he trained properly and headed into the fight with the right mindset, he could take down "Hitler's man".
"By the time I got home, the fight was over" he said, a mixture of sadness for having missed it, and pride in the job done by his favourite boxer. "It didn't even go one full round.".
It certainly was one of the most impressive boxing displays in the history of the sport. Right from the opening bell Louis went on the attack. In the 2 minutes and 4 seconds, he threw 41 punches at Schmeling. 31 of those punches landed solidly, causing the German to hit the canvas on three occasions before the referee mercifully stopped the fight. "Sent Schmeling to the hospital for 10 days, before they shipped him back to Germany".
I did go on to read the book. I could certainly understand why Joe Louis was held in such high esteem by fans of my grandfather's generation. He had slayed the symbol of Nazi Germany and stood as the World Heavyweight Champion for an amazing 12 years. But Ali was still my man.
Louis may have knocked out Schmeling, but Ali had taken out the dreaded and feared Sonny Liston not once, but twice. And, like Louis, Ali lost a big fight to a formidable foe. It was dubbed "The Fight of the Century" and it was held in Madison Square Garden in 1971.
It pitted Ali against the reigning champion, "Smokin' Joe" Frazier, and it was to be the first of three legendary battles between the two great champions. Ali would come back to defeat Frazier twice. By unanimous decision in New York in 1972 and one more time, in one of boxing's most memorable fights, The Thrilla in Manila, a technical knockout win, 1975.
And then came 1978. Leon Spinks had won the Olympic gold medal boxing medal in the light heavyweight division in Montreal, just as Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) had in Rome in 1960.
Spinks headed into the fight, held at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, with a professional record of 7 wins and a draw against a largely unimpressive group of opponents. Ali on the other hand was coming off three very tough 15 round decision wins against top notch fighters, Ken Norton, Alfredo Evangelista, and Earnie Shavers.
Heading into the Spinks fight, Ali was merciless towards his fellow Olympic champion during interviews that lead up to the first fight. He called him stupid. He called him ugly. He denigrated his boxing skills.
Ali went into the fight seemingly expecting to easily cruise to victory against a much less experienced boxer. What he ended up getting was a much younger, and much fitter, opponent who came at him for 15 rounds. Spinks took the fight in a unanimous decision, that shocked many, but not all.
"You can't go around talking about your opponents like that. Last night, Ali got what he's had coming for a while", was my grandfather's analysis of the bout. "He's finished, he should call it quits".
Had Ali followed his advice and retired following that fight, the question of who was the better champion, Louis or Ali, would be a much more debatable one.
Louis' last fight had also been a loss, but against a young Rocky Marciano. And Leon Spinks, all would agree, was no Rocky Marciano.
In an interview with his longtime friend and confidant Howard Cosell just prior to the second Ali-Spinks fight, held at the Superdome in New Orleans, Ali stated that there were a few main reasons why he chose to fight Spinks one more time.
The first reason he mentioned was that he wanted to become the first black boxer to retire as the heavyweight champion of the world. The second reason was that he wanted to become the first boxer to win the heavyweight crown three times. He also mentioned that he believed that he simply was a better boxer than Leon Spinks.
On September 15th 1978, Muhammad Ali defeated Leon Spinks in a unanimous 15 round decision. Although Ali had lost much of his legendary speed, he controlled the match from start to finish.
"A pretty impressive fight," was the family patriarch's assessment "a good way to retire". Alas, as we now know, Ali did not retire.
Instead of hanging up the gloves as reigning Heavyweight Champion of the World, the only boxer to win that title on three different occasions, he chose to go on.
Two years after the last Spinks fight, Ali, by then out of shape and showing the signs of what was later to be diagnosed as Parkinson's disease, stepped into the ring with one of his former sparring partners, Larry Holmes.
At 30, Holmes was the reigning champion and at the top of his game. From the outset it was clearly no match. Had it not been for Holmes' unwillingness to embarrass or injure his boxing hero, the bout would have ended much sooner.
The sight of his longtime trainer, and friend, the legendary Angelo Dundee, yelling at the referee who asks Ali "What do you want to do?" before the start of the 11th round "The ballgame's over, I'm the chief, stop the fight", was heartbreaking.
As Larry Holmes walked to the centre of the ring after taking a moment to speak with Ali who was still sitting on his stool, unable or unwilling to stand, tears rolled down the younger champ's face.
Announcer Howard Cosell, one of the best boxing analysts of all-time said at that moment, "For Muhammad," his voice cracking, "it is time to face the final curtain".
Unbelievably, there was to be one more fight, this time against Trevor Berbick. Although Ali was in somewhat better condition than he had been for the Holmes fight, he lost an unanimous 10 round decision. A sad ending to an unfitting final 3 years of boxing.
While my grandfather and I never did agree as to who was the greatest boxer of all-time, we did agree that Ali stayed on too long.
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