I think Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Wladimir Klitschko, and maybe even Larry Holmes were (are in the case of Klitschko) better heavyweight fighters.

Ali was 56-5 with a 61% KO ratio.

Compare that to Joe Louis who kept the heavyweight belt for 11 years and went 66-3-1 with a 75% KO ratio.

Larry Holmes even had more fights, and won more of and had a very, very slightly win/loss ration than Ali (really it’s not enough to matter as they’ both won 92%), with a 69-6 record. But a slightly lower KO ratio of 59%. But who knows what Ali’s record would have been if he had fought an additional 14 bouts.

Then of course there’s Marciano. 49-0 with an unmatched 88% KO ratio.

By the numbers even Klitschko looks better than Ali with a 64-4 record and a 78% KO ratio.

Now you obviously can’t just go by the numbers because it depended on who you had to fight. That’s one of the knocks on Marciano as the talent pool, say those who were there, wasn’t quite as deep. But then Marciano fought EVERYBODY there was to fight, which is what a champ is supposed to do. It isn’t his fault if there weren’t as many other good fighters to fight as there were in some other eras. And I recall they measured the force of right once. I don’t want to try to recall the exact numbers as I’ll get it wrong, but I’ll just say I’d rather be shot than hit by Rocky Marciano. I think I’d survive longer, long enough to get to the hospital if I was only shot. With a handgun that is.

I also think everyone agrees Rocky Marciano had the best chin of any heavyweight ever, which he needed as he got into the game late and and never developed much in the way of footwork. So he took a lot of punishment. But he could take it and give a hell of a lot more.

As far as not going to Vietnam, I don’t even know if that would have happened had Ali let himself be drafted. But I don’t think he had any more idealistic reasons to do what he did than any other draft dodger. I think he was just trying to preserve his boxing career and as Old Flyer says he bluffed.

But I don’t if he lost the bluff as I think that’s one reason he’s so overrated as a fighter and as a cultural icon. All the hippies and protesters loved him because they thought he was standing up to “the man.”

All in all I liked Joe Frazier better when I was a kid and rooted for him.

This isn’t to take away from the fact that he was a great fighter. Not as great as the baby boomers remember him, and he may have nicknamed himself “The Greatest” (one of the reasons I didn’t like him so much during his fighting career) but he certainly wasn’t the greatest.

That’s always the case; if you really are the greatest, you don’t have to pick that nickname yourself.

But he was a great fighter; I’d put him in the top ten of the twentieth century. And he mellowed into someone that I could like. It’s not fair to draw any final conclusions about anyone during just his early years. I wouldn’t want anyone doing that to me.

R.I.P. Muhammad Ali.

“Never understood him—same with Lew Alcindor. Why reject the name your parents bestowed on you? Does Islam require that of converts?”

When Clay and Alcindor did it was an act of revolution. And the Nation of Islam certainly demanded converts lose their “slave names.”

But the Nation of Islam was never Islam. As far as actual Islam goes that certainly wasn’t true of Islam in other countries.

Sorry to interject, Molly. That may be how somebody explained it too you but it’s not quite correct.

You might have been born a Muslim in Indonesia or the southern Philippines and your families had never changed their surnames to an Arabic name for generations (they’d likely adopt localized versions of traditional Arab personal names). Look at President Obama; his adoptive father’s surname was Soetero. Those were the moderate forms of Islam we hear about. So nobody would expect a local convert there to change their surname (perhaps not even their personal name) because it was never part of the local Islamic culture. Or at least wasn’t. That seems to be changing for one simple reason. Money.

But Islam is an Arab-supremacist religion. After all Allah only accepts prayer in Arabic, and in at least six places the Quran points out it is written in Arabic. It is particularly true when Islam comes in the form of Wahabbism spread by Saudi petrodollars. It therefore tends to supplant the local moderate Islam because of the Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rule.

Through Wahabbism, and its even more evil progeny Salafism, eventually Islam begins to export 7the century Arab culture wholesale. Why?

Surah 33:21 says:
“There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.”

If you look at pictures of people in Iran, Afghantistan, or North Africa in the 1950’s or ’60s you won’t see men wearing long flowing robes and keffiyahs or women in the naqab. They’ll be wearing suits in the case of men and dresses for women. Patterning your life on Muhammad was taken in more of a spiritual sense. But with the spread of Wahabbism it’s taken on a very literal sense. You’ve got to dress like, him, eat like him, even go to the bathroom like him. And yes, you can learn about that in the hadiths. Otherwise (it’s clearer in the Arabic) you won’t see paradise. Eventually your whole household is an island of 7th century Arab culture.

When the Saudis export Wahabbism to a Muslim country like Indonesia they don’t start by lecturing them that they’ve been doing it wrong for centuries. But that’s exactly what they’re thinking. And they gradually arabize them because that’s just how you do it in Saudi Arabia, home of pure Islam as far as the Saudis are concerned.

So it’s not quite right to say converts have to change their names to Arabic names. With the spread of Wahabbism/Salafism people whose families have been Muslims for centuries eventually are pressured to change their names as well.

Now aren’t you sorry you brought it up, Old Flyer.

” JOYCE CAROL OATES
Never the White Man’s Negro

When Muhammad Ali was a young man, the best black boxers were expected to be cautious and restrained. But Ali would have none of it.”

Oates fled a teaching position in Detroit to Canada in 1968 due to Vietnam and the 1967 Detroit black riot.

http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/boxer-muhammad-ali-and-iran-hostages/

Onece he sid:
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me — black, confident, cocky,”

Did you and others ask themselves why he went through many transformations… HIS Religion?

In the 1940s and 1950s, Louisville, Kentucky — Ali’s hometown on the Ohio River — was a world of divisions: segregated schools, churches, public spaces. Two Americas, one white and one black….

“I’m the heavyweight champion of the world, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can’t move into,” he said after his first victories in the ring — at the Rome Olympics in 1960, and his initial heavyweight title in 1964…..

Veteran civil rights activist Jesse Jackson summed up Ali’s influence in just a few words: “A champion in the ring, a hero beyond the ring.”

http://www.firstpost.com/sports/muhammad-alis-fight-beyond-the-boxing-ring-the-battle-for-civil-rights-2817868.html