Posted on 06/06/2016 10:11:31 AM PDT by No One Special
I remember as a young boy, maybe 7 or 8 hearing that Ali was able to skip the draft, listening to my two uncles that both had each completed 1 tour in Korea and 2 full tours in Viet Nam and just how outraged they were, I remember thinking if you are an American, why wouldn’t you want to fight for your country, unless you were a coward...I say that after faithfully committing my life to the Country, the Navy, and my fellow service members for 20 years. I’ve never held him in all that high regard.
If there were more men like him and less men like my uncles I wonder just how along everyone could count on being free?
***Joe Frazier still bested him.***
Yet Frasier still lost. He landed ONE BLOW so hard on Ali that it left him permanently brain damaged and punch drunk.
Joe Frazier was no White Man’s Negro either, in fact he supported Clay both publicly and financially while Clay was banned from boxing, and what thanks did Clay give this son of a sharecropper? Called him an uncle tom.
Clay may have been a talented athlete, but he was an a class arse. No hero in my book.
Howard Cosell owned Ali lock stock and barrel.
I don't recall Frasier being punch-drunk after that fight, or later in life. , I saw interviews with him after retirement and he seemed coherent.
As for Ali, his Parkinson's disease was no doubt caused by boxing. Sad, but a risk he took.
He was a good fighter, but I always thought that he was exceedingly arrogant, and didn’t like him because of it. I could care less about his skin color.
So far as I know, no white man ever tried to enslave him.
Even disrespectful.
Ultimately, Ali took the sport of boxing down with him. I think it’s the main reason the popularity of boxing took a nose-dive, was that people saw what it did to Ali, and whether or not it was boxing’s fault, that is the perception.
Ali was the most famous athlete in the world at one point, and his primary competitors, like Frazier and Foreman were also household names.
Now, most people couldn’t even name one current professional boxer.
I will take the soft-spoken Joe Louis and the affable George Foreman (own his grill) over the loudmouth Cassius Clay any day of the week.
***I don’t recall Frasier being punch-drunk after that fight***
That’s not what I said. Frasier landed the punch so hard on ALI that from that moment on ALI was punch drunk.
Joyce Carol Oates - nuff said.
Gave it some thought today. Ali/Clay was *in my opinion* a great human being. If you met him one on one as so many did - he was a warm and giving person.
Unfortunately (and even his dad said this while alive) his fatal flaw was that he allowed himself to be managed by others - most often the so-called Nation of Islam but also by various other people and entities.
I think this is the basic disconnect and why people are now sort of struggling to come to terms with his historical time here on earth.
If I was writing his biography I would work hard to separate these two aspects of his character and to give each its due.
So, was Tiger Woods the “white man’s negro” or was he the negro’s negro? The writer displays her stupidity by writing a piece that a fourth grader could. Nothing of substance, no new news and using the “N” word a few times. She takes it upon herself to speak for the way white men “felt” 50 years ago.
The “times” hungers for crap like this to fill the empty pages.
Bat, (the white man’s white man.)
It went on for weeks until even those of us in the military were sick of it.
********************************************************
I was stationed at Boling A.F.B. Washington D.C., Air Force Honor Guard, when he was assassinated, was part of his funeral. Yes, indeed we got sick of it.
Psst, Joyce, uh, he voted for Reagan.
We found another cool use for the grease: We live on a corner lot, so lazy passer-bys would let their dogs crap on our lawn. We poured the grease on the pile and next day it would be gone. It must be kind of gross to see your dog eat dog poop, because it doesn't happen nearly so often now.
Tiger Woods is not all that motivated by racial identification. He’s said that he’s Cablanasian. He’s never identified as anything but what he is, which is Caucasian, Black and Asian.
Just picked a star black athlete there RC. Woods may have not identified but the media did or, have I missed something?
I thought Negro was fine, and not an “N” word.
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