30 years today: Holmes won the WBC title from Norton (6/9/78)
We're getting old!
Damn, I remember the night of Norton-Holmes like it was yesterday. I was working the door with a guy named Buck Estelle, (who I'm still very good friends with today) at a place called the "Back Street" cafe. I remember telling, Buck, who was a big boxing fan, "Holmes is really good. He looked great in his last fight versus Earnie Shavers. He'll decision Norton tonight, and that'll pretty much be the end of Norton as a title threat." Then we watched the fight on the TV over the bar. It was a Friday night and I had already been going to Philly to train. I remember the next day at Frazier's, everybody was talking about what a great fight it was, and debating the outcome. Which to me was ridiculous. Holmes won it 9-6, and it's closer to 10-5 than it is 8-7. I can still recall the picture in the Philadelphia Daily News the next day of Holmes later that night in the pool at Cesars Palace, holding the WBC belt over his head. It was exceptionally hot for June then, as it is now.
On June 7th 2008, Larry Holmes was rightly inducted into The International Boxing Hall of Fame. And without a doubt, Larry Holmes is among the five greatest heavyweight champions of all-time.
posted by Frank Lotierzo @ 11:54 AM
14 comments
14 Comments:
Here's a boxing writing/history question: What do you do about Holmes's claim, which he has made consistently since the fight, that he hurt his right arm before it? If you accept it, it makes a great fight even greater--or, rather, it makes his performance in it even greater. Many accounts do accept it, enough that if I write about the fight I feel some pressure to mention it. But I never do, I always consider and reject it, because as far as I can tell it's not a fact. I've watched the fight a few times, and I'm not necessarily seeing a guy with a useless right arm. It's not like a reputable doctor confirmed the self-diagnosis, and I'm not even sure if there's such a thing as a reliably disinterested medical opinion in the fight world. To me, it's just talk, whether it's true or not, so I don't mention it. Now, I realize that it's not that big a deal whether he was hurt or not, and I'm as big a supporter of Holmes's greatness as you're likely to find, and I don't his arm to be hurt in that fight in order to put him in the very first rank of all-timers (which, in my case, would be Ali, Louis, Holmes, and Liston), so it's not a question about debunking; rather, it's a question about what's worth mentioning and why. Really, it's about what qualifies as a meaningful fact in the fight world. Even an obvious-seeming piece of information--that, say, a guy got punched in the head and went down and stayed down--isn't necessarily a fact, or, rather, its meaning depends entirely on whether he was faking or not when he did go down. So the fact that Holmes often says his right arm was hurt, thereby slightly increasing his own greatness, is, to me, not stable enough to work with, unless what you're writing is a discussion of how fighters spin fights after they're over. I bring all this up, trivial as it may be, because when we talk about all-time greatness we talk about a huge mass of such variable, fluctuating, and unstable facts, and what we do is compare one heaving pile of them (Holmes's career, for instance) to another (Dempsey's career, say) to decide who has the stronger record of accomplishment and how they'd do head to head and who was better at his best, which tend to be the three standards we employ in this discussion. It's enough to give you vertigo, if you think about it long enough. Not that that's all bad. One of the joys of reading Gary's assessments, I would say, is to experience exactly this vertigo as he takes apart the meaning of apparent facts until they're paper-thin and floating this way and that in the wind.
There's a word missing; sorry. That phrase in the middle should read "...and I don't _need_ his arm to be hurt in that fight in order to put him in the very first rank of all-timers..."
Here are two scripts I've heard a lot in boxing: A fighter will go into a fight with an endurable injury or will sustain an endurable injury during a fight. Losing, he then opens the door for one spin on things. Winning allows for a different spin, bumping the victor (already praiseworthy) up another notch from simply good to good and noble and courageous. I don't think that Holmes is writing fiction here with his story of an injured right arm, but he may be magnifying its severity in order to provide an even more dramatic narrative to a fight that doesn't need one.
Like Carlo, I never mention it. And Charles has down the reason these type things are said. If you think about some of Holmes's toughest fights, (Norton, Weaver & Withersponn) he was supposedly sick or injured going into all of them. Not sure where to go with that?
Something that's seldom mentioned, but that every fighter knows (and which I'm sure Frank can comment on), is that nobody comes to the ring at 100%. There's always some minor malady that needs to be put aside at fight time.
What's funny is, is even if there's nothing wrong, fighters think there is. They are never happy with their preparation. Wishing they had more time, or sparred more, or came down in weight sooner. You name it, they imagine it.
And don't let them think they have a tingle in their neck, or a cramp in their arm, because that's monumental. To which they convince themselves that there's no way they can be 100% for this fight. I pulled the same shit with myself, as an amateur.
That's it exactly, Frank. Part of it is to give themselves outs, if needed. But the other thing is that boxers, more than any group of athletes I've ever seen, are hyper-aware of their bodies--completely sensitive to every minor ache and pain. They're also definitely the most hypochondriacal bunch I've ever.
Maybe the strangest part about this phenomenon is that there's an almost direct correlation between how much of a blueblood a fighter is and how quick he is to spot a problem. Ray Robinson was notorious for it. Somehow I can't picture Gene Fullmer suffering from the same anxieties.
Charles - Part of it is to give themselves outs, if needed:
Frank - Yeah, this way we don't have to accept it totally, after we got our ass kicked.
Charles - They're also definitely the most hypochondriacal bunch I've ever seen:
Frank - How right you are. That's also why a lot of them find some form of Religion or spirituality. They don't want to think they're all alone in there!
Rocky Marciano is another example, like Gene Fullmer.
Marciano and Fullmer brings up a question. They are two fighters who didn't much care how they looked in winning. There was nothing self-conscious about either of them. Does the impulse to find problems that might come up during a fight stem largely from a need to look good, to not be embarrassed?
I think you're onto something, Charles. Rocky & Gene only thought about the end result, winning. The important thing was the"W." Guys like Robinson, Ali, Ray Leonard, and even Holmes, wanted to look like a ring genius. So it might depend more on a style in which a fighter fought.
But getting back to the original question; I think most fighters always want to feel they could've been better and more efficient. So if they're injured, that fight where they put it all together. Is always ahead of them.
Holmes said almost exactly those words to me when I talked to him about his major fights--that is, that he had never been 100% in the ring, that there had always been an injury or a circumstance that kept him from being at his best. When I pressed him to identify the fight for which he was closest to 100%, he picked the Cooney fight. He was healthy, he'd trained long and well, he was just past the peak of his speed but had added power and experience to more than balance out the slight dropoff in speed. If the Holmes who fought Cooney was the best Holmes of all, that should increase your respect for Cooney, who, given his handicaps (inexperience, weak opposition, not particularly expert corner, etc.), acquitted himself well.
Carlo, I've always said, "Cooney wasn't a great fighter, but Holmes had to be great to beat him the night they fought." Exactly 26 years ago today.
Also - When I match Holmes with other greats in a mythical fight, I take the version who fought, Cooney. Like I would Frazier, from the first Ali bout, or Foreman from the first Frazier fight. I guess I'd take Liston from either one of his fights versus Cleveland Williams, if I wanted vintage, Liston. Although, the one that destroyed Zora Folley, could also be in the equation.
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