[cheering] >> All of that bouncing is All of that bouncing very nicely. >> Muhammad Ali is being penalized an entire round for holding on to Leon Spinks his life depends on it. Maybe it does. Seven months earlier this 25-year-old took his title in just his eighth professional fight. Tonight in front of 63,000 people Ali is trying to become the first man in history to win it back a third time and right now the referee is the only thing slowing him down.
>> The challenger Blue Haven Ali the greatest THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD LEON SPINKS LEON SPINKS >> That eighth fight happened in Las Vegas against the champion nobody thought he had any business sharing a ring with. Only 5,300 people bothered showing up at the Hilton to watch it live. Some sportsbooks wouldn’t even post odds.
The ones that did had Spinks at 10 to 1. Almost nobody believed in him including some of his own team. But his assistant trainer a sharp old Philadelphia fighter named George Benton saw something nobody else did. He’d later say he knew Ali was finished as the fighter he used to be and he knew Spinks had a real chance.
Spinks didn’t read the script everyone else had written for him. He came forward for 15 straight rounds and never let Ali settle into a rhythm. When the score cards came back two of the three judges had him winning and Ali lost his title in the ring for the only time in his entire career. What happened to Spinks after that night might be the strangest seven months any heavyweight champion has ever had.
He was arrested seven separate times. He crashed two different sports cars in two different states. He got popped for cocaine possession an amount so small barely worth the paperwork while defending the most important title in sports. And through all of that the rematch with Ali was already signed. Ali wanted it the moment first fight ended and Spinks riding the highest moment of his life didn’t seem worried about it.
Asked what losing it back might cost him he just shrugged it off and said Ali could always go make commercials. Ali saw the stakes completely differently. He told reporters this would be his last fight, win or lose, and that he intended to leave the sport as the only man in history to win the heavyweight title three separate times.
>> Two fighters in the ring with the referee, with Eddie Futch and Sam Solomon with his back to you rubbing the champion’s back and his shoulders. >> On fight night, Ali stepped on the scale at 221 lb. Spinks, defending his title, came in 20 lb lighter and 11 years younger, looking like a man who’d actually trained this time.
The discipline didn’t survive contact with his own corner. His training camp had splintered into three voices competing for control. His head trainer Sam Solomon, the same George Benton who’d believed in him before anyone else did, and his own younger brother Michael taking turns advising him round by round instead of working as one team.
Ali’s camp had no such confusion. From the opening bell, his plan was obvious. Jab, throw the right hand, and the moment Spinks closed the distance, wrap him up before he could load up anything dangerous. He’d hook an arm around the back of Spinks’s neck, pull him into a clinch, and only break when he was ready to dance away again.
This wasn’t the rope-a-dope that had carried him through fights with George Foreman and Earnie Shavers. There were no ropes involved at all. This was a 36-year-old man controlling distance instead of absorbing punishment, and the difference would matter more than anyone realized in the moment. It wasn’t beautiful boxing.
Ringside reporters that night called it sloppy, and they weren’t wrong. His own trainer had a better word for it. Angelo Dundee called it beautifully sloppy, gorgeous, wonderful sloppy, because it was the only way they were ever going to beat this kid twice. >> Very unorthodox isn’t it? A former champion Oh, a great left hand.
Oh, QUICK MOVING SPINKS. >> [cheering] >> TOO BAD ALI NOW, PRETTY GOOD GOOD RIGHT. >> BY THE THIRD ROUND, SPINKS HAD no real answer for any of it. Every time he found his range, Ali was already gone, circling one way or the other, never staying still long enough to get hit clean. That’s when round five happened, the moment we opened with.
Referee Lucien Joubert took the entire round off Ali’s card, ruling he’d held Spinks too many times to let it stand. But round five did something else, too. Something that happened away from the judges entirely. George Benton, the one trainer who’d believed in Spinks before that first fight, had seen enough.
Fed up with three voices fighting for control of his fighter mid-bout, he walked out of the corner for good. He told people afterward it had turned into a zoo. Ali’s corner had no such problems. From the fifth round on, Dundee could see exactly what was happening to the younger man across the ring, and he wasn’t shy about announcing it.
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He shouted over at Spinks’ own corner, asking where his fighter had gone, because by round six, Spinks didn’t seem to know himself. The numbers by night’s end would prove it wasn’t just Dundee talking. Ali outthrew him by more than 150 punches across the whole fight, landing far more of what he threw, while Spinks grew increasingly wild, trying to force something that wasn’t there anymore.
In their first fight, Ali had faded hard in the championship rounds, while the younger man came on strong down the stretch. Tonight, the roles had completely flipped, and there was no sign of Ali slowing down as the rounds piled up. >> all of those right hands Ali’s been landing. Good all these jabs. Oh, I can’t >> Going into the 15th, Dundee told Ali the same thing he’d been telling him all night. Stay off the ropes. Keep moving.
Don’t give this away in the final three minutes the way he almost had seven months earlier. In the last fight, the 15th round had nearly killed him. Spinks came on so hard in that final stretch that two judges scored the night for him almost entirely on the strength of it. Tonight, Ali came out for the 15th, still moving on his toes, flicking the jab the way he had in the first round.
Not the way a 36-year-old man is supposed to look after 42 minutes of fighting against a much younger opponent. Spinks tried to find one last surge, the kind that had won him the title back in February, and it never arrived. The crowd inside the Superdome could feel it before the bell even rang. When it finally did, 63,000 people rose at once.
For the first time all night, the outcome didn’t feel like it belonged to three men sitting at ringside with scorecards. It felt decided already. It wasn’t, officially, not until the names were read. >> He did it, folks. It’s over. >> Ali is the world heavyweight champion for the third time, and here comes the Ali circle. A tremendous crowd of people are pushing their way in.
The usual riot is taking place, and Ali has fallen in his corner and and a which is his way. >> 10 to 4, 11 to 4, 10 to 4. Unanimous. Every card for Muhammad Ali. At 36 years old, in the largest crowd ever assembled for an indoor fight, he became the first man in history to win the heavyweight championship three separate times.
He’d fight twice more before his career was finished, and he’d lose them both, which means the night New Orleans crowned him a third time was the last time Muhammad Ali ever won inside a boxing ring.
