15 years, this is what Muhammad Ali did to people. The fastest hands the heavyweight division had ever seen. Sonny Liston, Cleveland Williams, George Foreman in the dark in Zaire. When Ali decided a fight was over, it was over. This is the last time it ever happened. Munich, West Germany, May 24th, 1976. After this night, Ali would fight for five more years, and he would never knock another man down again.
Ali came to Germany with a new coach and a new weapon. For this camp, the man running his training wasn’t Angelo Dundee. Dundee was still in the corner, but the work was being led by a Korean Taekwondo master named June Ree, a friend of Bruce Lee. Ree had spent the weeks teaching Ali a punch Lee had once shown him.
They called it the AccuPunch, a straight right with no shoulder load, no windup, no warning. Engineered to land before the other man even registers it’s left the glove. Ali had been drilling it for 6 weeks, and he was about to use it on live television. So, you’ve taken six to seven parachute drops.
Well, I want you to mark this down now. You have one more big [laughter] drop to come. I mean a big hard drop. This going to be the longest short drop you’ve ever had. And he went further than the trash talk. Before the opening bell, Ali had a prediction tucked inside his own gloves. Written in one, Ali wins. Written in the other, round five.
He’d already decided when this was going to end. He just had to go and do it. The man across the ring was Richard Dunn, a 31-year-old scaffolder from Yorkshire who held the British, Commonwealth, and European titles, and who almost nobody outside Britain had heard of. He wasn’t even the original opponent. Ali’s promoters had wanted the young German, Bernd August, a home fighter on home soil.
Then Dunn stopped August in three rounds six weeks earlier and took his place. With the German gone, the card stopped making sense and started losing money. Ali agreed to cut $100,000 off his million and a half dollar purse just to keep the fight alive. So, the greatest heavyweight in the world walked into the Olympia Halle to face a man who couldn’t afford full-time sparring partners.
And for two rounds, it didn’t go the way anyone expected. The bell rings and the first surprise arrives immediately. Dunn comes forward. He’s a southpaw, left hand leading, and he throws it like he means it. Ali, who told the German press this would be easy work, suddenly finds himself eating jabs from a man built like dockyard machinery.
Oh, they’re trading early. Yes, they are. So, Ali does what Ali does. He clowns. He drops his hands. He pretends to be hurt by punches that never landed, buying himself time to think. In the second round, Dunn actually boxes him, not survives, boxes. He cuts off the ring. He digs to the body.
And the crowd that came for a clinic starts to wonder what it’s watching. Between rounds, Dundee tells Ali to stop playing. [cheering] Look at him COME BACK. AND ANOTHER RIGHT MUSCLE TO THE KNEES OF DUNN. DUNN IS IN TROUBLE, BUT FIGHTING HARD. AND IN THE THIRD, THE PICTURE CHANGES. ALI’S range finding clicks.
The right hand starts coming back fast, straight and short. The accu punch, the thing they drilled in camp. Dunn’s left eye begins to close. He keeps walking forward because walking forward is the only thing he knows how to do. It grazed the nose of Dunn. CLOSING SECONDS, ROUND THREE. Then comes the fourth round and the floor opens up underneath him.
RIGHT HAND AND THAT’S DIGGER DOWN. A SHORT RIGHT HAND. TRYING TO WEATHER OUT THE ROUND. OH, ANOTHER RIGHT HAND. [applause] A RIGHT HAND LEAD PUTS HIM DOWN THE first time. He gets up. A combination puts him down again. He gets up. A third knockdown late in the round and somehow he’s still on his feet when the bell rings to save him.
Three knockdowns in three minutes. By every rule of common sense, this fight is over right here. The referee, Herbert Tonzar, lets it continue. SAVED BY THE BELL. AND ALI PUTS DUNN DOWN AND DUNN WAS DOWN THE bell rings for the fifth. The round Ali had written inside his glove before the fight began and the first thing Ali does is point to the canvas.
He’s telling 12,000 people exactly where this is going to end. HURT AGAIN. DUNN KNEES ARE JELLY. OH, WHAT A RIGHT HAND. LOOK AT ALI. IT’S ALL OVER. IT’S ALL OVER. MUHAMMAD ALI HAS BEATEN RICHARD DUNN. Five knockdowns, 2 minutes and 5 seconds of the fifth round. Exactly the round he’d called.
The last man Muhammad Ali ever put on the canvas and the last fight he ever won by stoppage. And here’s your man that you defeated, Richard Dunn from Yorkshire. Any comments about the courage of the the challenger? This man I would have He the fight with no doubt cuz he’s a great fighter. He’s better than I thought he was and I predict you’ll hear a lot about Richard Dunn.
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He landed some punches. Then Ali did something almost nobody reported at the time. A British promoter, Mickey Duff, was raising money for Chris Finnegan, a former British champion who’d lost the sight in one eye and was facing a hard retirement. Ali handed over the gloves he’d just worn, told Duff’s man to look inside, and auctioned them off.
Side and his own prediction were the two words that had been there since before the bell, round five. He’d called it, landed it, and given it away all in one night. Ali fought seven more times over the next five years. He went the full distance with Ken Norton and with Ernie Shavers. He lost his title to Leon Spinks, a man with seven professional fights, and won it back in a rematch nobody can fully explain.
Then Larry Holmes beat him for 10 rounds while his own corner begged for it to stop. And his final fight, in the Bahamas, used a cowbell because the promoters couldn’t afford a ring bell. Across all of it, five years, seven fights, two more title belts. He never knocked another man down again. The last man to feel the real thing was the Yorkshire scaffolder who wasn’t supposed to be there.
He’s 81 now, and whenever a reporter asks him about Munich, he says the same thing. That the winner of the European title would fight the big fellow, Muhammad Ali, for the heavyweight championship of the world. That is a dream come true indeed for anybody. It was the proudest night of his life. Ali threw thousands of punches in his career.
The last one that ever put a man on the floor landed in Germany on a Monday night in May. And after it, the greatest heavyweight in the world was never quite the same.
