Saturday, July 25, 2009

Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston Was One For The Ages

The year was 1964. The country was embroiled in the Viet Nam War. Racial tension in America was a powder keg. Network TV was only 17 years old, and most TV programming was still in black & white. President Kennedy had been assasinated only months before. The world was in transition. It was with this background that a brazen heavyweight, an Olympic Gold Medal Champion a mere four years prior, dared to take on the odious Sonny Liston. The scene was Miami Beach. Two black men were about to fight in a city that only a few scant years prior, had banned interracial boxing matches.

It was drama, action, power, speed, and intensity...all played out to a sellout crowd and a national closed circuit TV audience. The fight was one thing. Clay scored the upset. The social implications began the very next morning when Clay announced that he was now Muhammad Ali, a Black Muslim, having discarded his 'slave name' as he had his gold medal in a river in his hometown of Louisville a few years before. The world was never the same.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ironic that Cassius Clay has practically been "deified" by the allegedly atheist and secular, left-wing and communist-riddled media, as if some sort of hero.

And for what? For giving up his boxing title, a by-product of refusing to serve in the military of The United States of America, the land of his birth, when called upon to do so.

In the minds of most loyal Americans, such a stance makes one not a patriotic citizen, but a gutless coward and a criminal.

The thousands of other men, who were conscripted and died while in the service of their country, gave up a whole lot more than a mere title in an often fixed and rigged sport polluted by types from the criminal syndicates.

That Clay also chose to change his identity to "Muhammed Ali," to "convert" to a religion whose practitioners also advocate the destruction of The United States of America, also speaks volumes.

Clay/"Ali" should have been, should still be, tried for treason, as an enemy of the The United States of America!

Unknown said...



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