In 40 years of heavyweight title fights, the men who faced Ernie Shavers had one thing in common. They knew the moment that right hand landed whether they were still in the fight or not. There was no uncertainty. There was no gray area. One second you were standing in Madison Square Garden with 60 million people watching.
The next you were in a different place entirely. In round two, that hand found Muhammad Ali and what happened next had nothing to do with boxing. >> [sighs] >> Ernie Shavers came out of Garland, Alabama, grew up working at a General Motors plant in Ohio, and didn’t lace up a boxing glove until he was 22 years old.
That was, by most reckonings, too late. Fighters who start that late rarely get to the top. Shavers got to the top by doing what he’d always done. He hit people. Jimmy Ellis, a former heavyweight champion, lasted one round. Ken Norton, the man who broke Ali’s jaw, lasted one round. By the time Shavers signed to fight Muhammad Ali in the autumn of 1977, he had stopped 52 men out of 54 wins.
23 of those finishes came before the first round was over. The Ring magazine would later rank him among the 10 hardest punchers the sport had ever seen. And Larry Holmes, who survived Shavers twice, said that nobody, including a young Mike Tyson, hit him harder. George Foreman was asked about Shavers on late night television. His answer was three words.
>> I never fought Earnie Shavers. Thank goodness. >> Yeah. Thank goodness I didn’t. Against all of that, Muhammad Ali walked into a press conference and dropped a bag of acorns on the floor. He’d named his opponent the acorn because of his shaved head. And then, for the cameras, he said, “Acorns fall in September.
” What Ali knew, what he wouldn’t let anyone see, was that he was 35 years old, 14 lb heavier than his challenger, and moving like a man whose body had started keeping its own accounts. The reflexes that once made him untouchable were gone. His corner had watched him absorb shots in sparring that 2 years earlier would never have landed.
His own doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, had written a letter to Ali’s management warning that continued fighting risked permanent damage. Nobody wrote back. The bookmakers in Las Vegas looked at the situation and declined to put up a price. >> You don’t bet on acorns. >> 100,000 dollars plus 10,000 and the fight’s over. They usually take that out in the >> In the first round, Ali moved.
Not the Ali of 1964, bouncing on his toes and making champions look foolish, but movement with purpose, keeping Shavers at the end of his right hand, using the jab to set distance, turning corners. The crowd in the garden had come to see something familiar, and for a round or two, Ali gave it to them. Then the second round happened.
Shavers caught Ali with an overhand right that landed exactly where he’d been trying to land it for 2 minutes. Those who were ringside that night described the sound as distinctive, not the sharp crack of a clean shot, but something lower, like something structural giving way. Ali’s legs separated from his intentions.
His knees bent in a direction they weren’t supposed to bend. For the fraction of a second that followed, everyone in Madison Square Garden had the same thought. This was over. What Ali did next was one of the stranger things that has ever happened in a boxing ring. He smiled. Not a grimace, not a man fighting through pain.
He smiled at Shavers, the way you smile at someone who’s just tried to pick your pocket and missed. He dropped his hands slightly, widened his stance, wobbled with theatrical generosity, and looked at Shavers as if to say, “Was that the best you’ve got?” And Ernie Shavers, the most dangerous finisher in heavyweight boxing, backed off.
Shavers knew Ali’s history. He’d been Ali’s sparring partner 4 years earlier out at the Deer Lake training camp in Pennsylvania. He’d knocked Ali down in those sessions and watched Ali pop right back up, sharp-eyed and deliberate. He’d seen the way Ali had absorbed Foreman’s heaviest shots in Zaire and played possum for seven rounds before the knockout came.
A man that calculated, showing you that much hurt that quickly, maybe it was real. Or maybe it was exactly what it looked like it wasn’t. Shavers would spend the rest of his life answering for that hesitation. Years later, he shook his head and said, “I should have jumped on him.” He was right, but Ali had counted on him being right and doing nothing about it.
Through the middle rounds, this fight was not what it looked like from the cheap seats. Shavers was landing. He was landing heavily and often, backing Ali against the ropes and working the body with shots that would have folded most heavyweights in half. What Ali was doing in return was more subtle, firing the jab in short bursts, clinching to kill time, and finishing each round with a brief, concentrated flurry that consistently caught the judges’ eyes in the last 30 seconds.
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Round seven was the kind of round that ends careers. Shavers landed a sequence of right hands to Ali’s head, clean, flush shots that any reasonable observer would have scored as a clear Shavers round. What made the moment extraordinary wasn’t the punches, it was that Ali was still standing afterward, still talking, still working the crowd.
Fore! >> [cheering] >> Shavers had never gone more 10 rounds in his career. The assumption going in, the assumption Ali had built his entire strategy around, was that a man who finished 52 fights before the championship rounds would run out of something eventually. By the ninth, Shavers’ combinations were coming slower.
The right hand was still there, but the legs behind it were asking questions. Ali took those rounds. Not cleanly, not comfortably, but he took them. Dundee had a contact watching the NBC broadcast, which was running the round scores live on television for the first time in history. The information was coming back to the corner between rounds.
Ali knew where he stood, down to the point. What he didn’t know was that Shavers had been lying. In the 13th round, Shavers found something he hadn’t shown all night. He came out like a man who’d been holding back, which in a sense he had, pacing himself for a fight that was supposed to be over by now. Conscious of his own stamina limits, he’d coasted through the middle rounds.
Now, needing a knockout, he threw that caution away. The 14th was worse. Shavers drove Ali into the ropes and hit him with the kind of right hands that had put 52 men on the canvas. Ali’s knees buckled again. This time, without the smile. His legs carried him back to the corner at the bell, looking like they were working from memory rather than instruction.
Angelo Dundee looked at his fighter on the stool, eyes flat with exhaustion, and said the only thing left to say, “You don’t look so good. You better go out and take this round.” When the bell rang for the 15th, Ali’s legs trembled as he stood. Dundee and Bundini Brown gripped his arms to steady him.
Shavers saw it and came out fast, landing early in the round, and for 90 seconds it looked like the story was going to end differently than anyone had written it. Then something happened that has no clean explanation. Ali began to punch. Not the careful, measured bursts of the middle rounds. He threw with everything left in him, stringing together combinations that the crowd in Madison Square Garden hadn’t seen from him in years.
Shavers, landing his own shots and seemingly in control, suddenly found himself absorbing a volley he couldn’t stop. He was driven back. The ropes caught him. Ali threw 30 more punches in the final seconds of the fight, and only the bell and the ropes kept Shavers from going down. >> [cheering] >> The final bell rang.
The judges scored it 9 to 5 and 9 to 6 twice. Unanimous decision. Muhammad Ali, still champion. Across the ring, Eva Shain had just made history as the first woman to judge a heavyweight title fight, and she had seen the same fight as her colleagues. Teddy Brenner, the Garden’s matchmaker, told reporters the next day that he thought Shavers deserved the win.
He also said Madison Square Garden would never make another offer for an Ali fight. He wasn’t wrong on either point. Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s doctor for 15 years, quit the camp that winter. He’d sent the letters. He’d seen the test results. He knew what the accumulation of nights like this one was doing. Ali fought four more times after Shavers.
He lost three of those four. The man who fooled Ernie Shavers into backing off in round two couldn’t fool the one thing he’d spent his whole career outrunning. He fooled the puncher. He fooled the judges. He fooled 60 million people watching at home, but you can only run the con for so long before the house collects.
The night was September 29th, 1977. The quote came the morning after. Ernie hit me so hard it shook my kinfolk back in Africa. Only Ali could take a near catastrophe and make it sound like the best night of his life.
