Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream by Cashill Jack

Author:Cashill, Jack [Cashill, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2006-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

ALL IN THE FAMILY

On December 30, 1970, the deal was signed for what by any objective standards loomed as the fight of the century. Twenty years earlier, sportswriters had overwhelmingly chosen the wild 1923 brawl between Jack Dempsey and the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” Louis Firpo, as the fight of the first half of the century. After having been knocked clear out of the ring in the first round, Dempsey came back to knock Firpo out in the second. By any variable other than the number of knockdowns, that fight would not compare with the drama of the Ali-Frazier fight set for New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 8.

ON THE SAME day that the Ali-Frazier deal was signed, an undercover narcotics agent paid a visit on Charles “Sonny” Liston at his luxurious Las Vegas home. He was the last person to see Liston alive. When Liston’s wife, Geraldine, returned to the house a week later, she found Sonny long dead, most probably from a heroin overdose. The raised welts on Sonny’s back were vestiges of his father’s whippings.

Like every other major moment in Liston’s troubled time on earth, even his death was shrouded in controversy. More than a few serious people have speculated that he was murdered. This mystery, like the others, went to the grave with Sonny as well. The bronze plaque on his tombstone listed his name and the inscription, “A MAN.” Only one of his twenty-something siblings was there to see it.

ALI HAD BEATEN Quarry in Atlanta in October 1970 and the current Wild Bull of the Pampas, Oscar Bonavena, in New York in December. He was ready for Frazier, and Frazier was ready for him. Both were undefeated. They were inarguably the two best heavyweights since Marciano and Louis, quite possibly the best two of all time. And they were bringing to the fight an unprecedented degree of passion.

Ali had launched the war of words. He was relentless and brutal. All that could be said in his defense is that he did not know that his words would have such consequence. By January 1971, Ali had more media power than he suspected. With the winding down of the war and the violent protests it spawned, America’s rebels, young and old, had stomach only for proxy battles. Ali became their symbolic warrior.

Ferdie Pacheco completely misunderstood the media dynamics. Like many of Ali’s faithful, he saw Ali’s attacks on Frazier as part of an “act,” an attempt to build box office. “For one fight,” Pacheco observes, “Joe Frazier became white, the public made him the good guy, the white guy.”What Frazier understood better than Pacheco, however, was that the “good guy” in this drama was no longer “the white guy.” The white people that mattered, the ones who controlled the switches and toggles of the broadcast media, colored Frazier white at the prodding of Ali, and they did this to insult Frazier. As Ali friend Jim Brown accurately observes, the post-exile Ali had become “part of the establishment.

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