TERRY MOSHER
MUHAMMAD ALI PUNISHING JOE FRAZIER
It’s about time for another trip to the Boneyard to get rid of excessive thoughts stirring about in my mind and causing sleepless nights. So here they come, streaming out of my head like steam from a hot kettle.
As one ages you begin to appreciate the small wonders of the world that you missed when you were so unnecessarily busy to take notice. Flowers seem brighter and birds fluttering together in what appears to be joyful play get your attention much easier than they once did.
Of course, it also has its negatives because many of your family, friends and associates in your business fall by the wayside, and recently that has been more frequent than I would like.
Al Smith, Dave “Coyote” Benedict, Nick Garguile Sr., Gordie Howe have been called home and our world is less for it. Of course, one of the great ones – Muhammad Ali – also just died, causing the world great consternation because he was truly a very much loved man who overcame so much and went on to show us so much.
I remember in 1964 and Ali, then just 22 and known as Cassius Clay, when he was set to fight Sonny Liston, the most feared heavyweight of that time, because everybody in my little group had Liston winning the heavyweight championship fight easily. Clay, was a 7 to 1 underdog and of the 46 writers covering the fight, 43 of them predicted a Liston win by knockout
The only one in my group who thought Cassius would win was me. Liston had won the heavyweight title by knocking out Floyd Patterson in the first round and then repeated that in their second fight and everybody thought Liston was unbeatable.
But I could see that Clay was just too quick for Liston and that if he stayed out of reach – which he did – that he would win. And that is what happened. Liston did not come out for the bell for the seventh round and Clay won by TKO and the rest, as they say, is history.
That fight is stuck in my mind for one special reason. I bet a friend in my group $10 that Clay would win. Ten dollars back then when the fight was held was a lot of money, especially for a college student like I was.
Why I remember that is because my friend, who now lives in Kansas City in retirement from a long career as a Navy officer, never paid off on the bet. I don’t know what the interest would be on $10 over 52 years, but I would like to have that interest along with the $10.
Since I’m talking Ali, mentioning his name brings up an old argument that crops up every so often, usually after a few beers among old-timers. Who was the greatest heavyweight fighter of all time?
It is my contention, and not just in boxing, but in all sports, that you can’t compare athletes from different eras because things change so much. The Green Bay Packers of the Vince Lombardi 1960s were great, but there is no way to effectively compare them to say the 2013 Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. I will say that athletes today are better trained and trained at an earlier age and that may give them an advantage, but how does anybody know?
But, and this is a big but, the game of football as changed so much from the Lombardi years that it’s almost a different world. Athletes who played back then probably came from farm families where hard work produced incredibly tough kids who only knew one way, and that was to smack people in the face with their raw power and courage built wrestling cows and hay bales and working long hours, either in terribly cold conditions or terribly hot conditions.
I know, for example, that my father, who was about 6-foot-3 and 220 to 240 pounds of pure muscle, grew up on a farm, as many did back then, and he knew nothing but hard work and that became the norm for him, and produced what I believe was the kindest, gentlest man I have known, but also on the other hand the most powerful and strongest man I have known.
And his generation and generations immediately after him produced men that were naturally strong and were used to – especially in football – running straight at people and powering through them like Lombardi did with his Packer sweep with quarterback Bart Starr handing off to Paul Hornung or Jim Taylor and they would follow Forrest Gregg and guards Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston around the ends and it was like a huge bulldozer clearing paths as bodies were thrown aside in the Packer advance.
So who was the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time?
I can’t tell, and I would suggest nobody can with any certainly. But Ali is in the conversation, along with Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Jack Johnson and others.
My favorite would be Louis, because of where he came from and because even as a champ he had, as an African-American, to endure a society that was still simmering from its’ slavery days.
My least favorite was Marciano, who retired unbeaten (49-0 with 43 knockouts) because he was a dirty fighter who took delight in delivering punishment no matter how it was delivered.
But I also was forced to respect Rocky because he was not a big man. He was 5-11 and 188 pounds at his best, and he took a lot of punishment to deal out a lot of punishment. And he could hurt you with either hand.
The saddest fight night I can remember – okay, the third saddest fight I can remember – is the night of Oct. 26, 1951 when Marciano won his 38th fight by an eighth-round knockout of an aging Louis. Louis was 37 then and immediately retired after the fight. He only took the fight because he had tax problems with the U.S. Government and was guaranteed $300,000 to fight Marciano, who didn’t want to fight his idol and apologized to Louis after the fight.
In his later years, Louis and wound up being a greeter in a Las Vegas casino.
The two other sad fights that I mentioned?
On March 24, 1962 in a fight in Madison Square Garden in New York, Emile Griffith knocked out Benny “The Kid” Paret in the 12th round of a welterweight title bout. I was watching on TV when Griffith backed Paret into a corner and unleashed 29 consecutive Griffith punches on a trapped Paret, who went into a coma and died 10 days later in a hospital.
I was a big Griffith fan and he had almost got knocked out in the sixth round. The bell saved him. So when Griffith went on the attack in the 12th round I began to scream at the TV set “kill him, kill him”. I didn’t really mean that, but I was hyped up and rooting for Emily to pull off the upset.
But, alas, he did kill Paret, and for yelling like that I will always be ashamed.
The third sad fight for me happened on Jan. 10, 1980 when Larry Holmes won his 36th straight fight with a 10th-round TKO of Ali, who would turn 38 a week after the fight. Ali was obviously done and Holmes, like what Marciano did to Louis, punished him unmercifully. It was a sad day for me.
Holmes, by the way, is another heavyweight who could be in line for one of the greats of all time. He had an unbelievable left jab that landed like a sledge hammer.
I should tell you here that Ali made at least two appearances in Bremerton. I’m still researching those and may write about them later if I can confirm the details.
I enjoy watching the Golden State Warriors play basketball. But I’m getting a little tired of Steph Curry’s showboating. He’s a great shooter, one of the best of all time, but c’mon, get rid of that pose you go through after nailing another one of your 25-foot shots.
But I also have to respect him for being relatively quiet for the physical punishment he is taking. Every time he tries to escape his defender he runs into a Cleveland screener who – and you have to watch closely to see this – sticks out an elbow or a hip to hit him hard.
Sometimes it’s even more blatant. If you were watching the end of the game Friday in Cleveland, LeBron James tossed Curry down and when Curry got back up, LeBron shoved him. They then started talking to each other. I couldn’t hear what was said, but you can guess they were not inviting each other to a party.
What sort of amused me is when they began their little chat, it looked real weird because Curry looked like a midget standing close to LeBron. I thought if LeBron wanted to suddenly attack Curry, it would be the worse mismatch in basketball history.
Give kudos to Curry, he didn’t back away, although some might thing that also was a little stupid of him considering the differences in size.
I will readily admit I don’t like LeBron. Not as a person. I think he’s probably a wonderful guy. But as a basketball player. I think he’s a phony leader, a guy who has the most wonderful physical gifts you could wish for ‑ and I agree he is one of the better players of all time ‑ but he often backs away from dominating the game like I think he could, and should.
LeBron often drives in the lane, jumps and makes a cross-court pass to a teammate. Great. That shows he’s a great passer. But, c’mon, you are six-foot-eight and 270 pounds of muscle, finish the drive and go right through your defender and score. And if you don’t score, you will smash your defender so that the next time you go in there he will back off because he will remember what happened to him the first time.
But, no, LeBron more often than not refuses to finish the drive. He refuses to take over the game like other greats in the past have.
LeBron is also a cherry-picker. He will hang back on defense and look for a long pass so he can get a breakaway basket, a dunk that is his signature, and which brings his home crowd to its feet.
I don’t think the great ones cherry-pick. They would be in the action on the defensive end rather than thinking about sneaking back to get on occasion an easy basket.
As you might know, I like tough guys, no matter t the sport. I don’t think LeBron is tough. Although, to be fair he tried to intimidate Draymond Green early in game four last night by bumping him hard several times in the first quarter and then smacking him hard a quarter later. Then they had dust-up in the final quarter where Green almost went off, but quickly calmed down when he remembered another technical and he would be suspended.
I look for the Warriors to win their second consecutive NBA championship on Monday when they meet in Oakland for game five.
Ever since Safeco Field opened in July of 2001, the talk has been how it is a pitcher’s park and that it’s extremely difficult to hit home runs there. So how is it that the Mariners lead the American League in home runs with 92, 43 of them at Safeco?
And this is a team general manager Jerry Dipoto put together to fit Safeco Field, which is to say he did it based on making sure he got players who could make contact and put the ball in play. He wasn’t looking for home run hitters.
The only thing I can think about is that sometimes it better to be lucky than it is to be good. Dipoto wanted one thing and got the other thing. I’m not complaining. It’s fun to watch, and last night the club set a Major League record by having a player hit two home runs in a game for the fourth straight game.
I don’t know what to make of this team. I am not going to jump on the early bandwagon and say this team will make the playoffs. I believe Texas is far the better team in the AL West and that Houston, which got off to a terrible start, will be there at the end. Houston has climbed up to third place and it would not surprise me if the Astros overtake the Mariners by the all-star break in July.
It seems to me that the Mariners season will come down to whether their starting pitching will come together. If it does, they may make the playoffs. But, right now, I would say the starting pitching needs to get better and avoid injury. So we’ll see.
As for them hitting home runs at an amazing pace, keep ‘em coming. It’s fun to watch.
That’s about it for today. I feel better already, and I need to take a break and watch the build-up to the Belmont Stakes, which I believe like most others that will be won by Exaggerator.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.