Terry D wrote:TheOneIsHere2008 wrote:Since this thread is about Ali we might as well watch him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA9Uqu6k ... re=related
Go to the 6:00 mark...In his autobiography Ali said out of all his opponents he liked Quarry among the best...Ali showed a great deal of compassion... A Tyson, a Liston, a young Foreman would have killed a helpless opponent...To his credit Ali didn't...That's why he's Muhammad Ali....
Is that the real autobio, dealing up to his fight with Foreman? 'The Greatest'. I have two copies but don't recall reading that about Quarry. If there is another edition I would like to look at it. It's been a while since I read 'The Greatest' and naturally the bits that stick out pertain to the prostitute and his advice on pre-fight sex, advice he stopped heeding himself at a certain point!
I guess Quarry would be the type of guy liked by Ali, he liked Frazier also, in many ways Frazier was everything Ali was proclaimed to be by the press, Frazier was down home country black.
Ali is a mass of contradictions. Early in the book he muses about the fact that all other weight class fighters are generally friendly apart from the 'heavyweights, the dinosaurs' and that they tend to not acknowledge one another, with the idea being that the lower class fighters can avoid fighting one another but the top heavies have nowhere else to go.
If you watch that fight he could have hurt Quarry a lot more...He literally threw pitter patter punches to start the round...And then when he got him on the ropes he beckoned the ref to stop it...IMHO, Ali was more about heart than killer instict as Liston and Tyson were more about killer instinct than heart...Ali was a prideful person who didn't want to lose...Tyson and Liston wanted to hurt people...
Back to the book..
So you read in the book how Ali and his buddy lost their virginity to two prostitutes....His friend chose the older white one...He chose the younger black one...I read that Ali reconciled his philandering in his own mind by only having sex outside of marriage with black women therefore denying himself the forbidden fruit of white ones... I have read some great anecdotes in that regard... In the States , the ex American football player Jim Brown almost shares the same iconic status as Ali...In the movie 100 Rifles which came out in 1969 he shares the first interracial kiss in American cinema with Raquel Welch...He also had a torrid affair with feminist icon, Gloria Steinem when she was "hot"...She was a Playboy Bunny for a spell...
Him and Ali were great friends...Along with Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and I believe Rafer Johnson, Jim Brown was one of the prominent black athletes that Ali consulted with before formally oppsing induction into the Armed Forces...All those gentlemen are iconic figures in America and the photo of them together is an iconic image...
Jim Brown says in his autobiography that Ali is "lying" when he said he never had sex with white women...When they were in Italy together they both were having sex with the local women...Ali said since Italian women were Mediterranean they weren't technically white....He's a card... Did you read
A View From The Corner by Dr. Ferdie Pacheco...You know he never took a dime from Ali? He wrote that Ali was frustrated because he couldn't find women he was attracted to in Zaire:
"The African (Zaire) experiment was an odd event. Ali arrived expecting to see great black beauty, but his image of black was rooted in his mother's image, in Belinda's beauty, and both these women had a high percentage of white blood in them, as did Ali.
Ali's views of Africans were comical. He could not shake the idea that Africans just look like American blacks....
And when Ali had scoured the countryside for a beautiful black girl , he would dejectedly go back to his villa saying "These girls are too black; what they need is a little white blood in them."
Racist? Probably by today's heightened sensibilities, but to Ali he was just speaking his mind. There were no Odessas, Sonjis, no Belindas in Africa. At least until Veronica Porsche showed up."
I might have read about Quarry somewhere else but he was genuinely fond of him...I think the only opponent Ali disliked was Terrell... I don't think he disliked Patterson...He just saw him as the perfect foil; the perfect straight man....
