Saturday, October 2nd, 2021
“Ali screamed”
This boxing debacle should never have happened
The career of the great Muhammad Ali actually ended two years ago. But on October 2, 1980 he returned to the big boxing stage. He should have left it, is the devastating conclusion. Larry Holmes humiliates him. And actually already fighting on a completely different front.
The fight, which should never have taken place, ends after the tenth round. Muhammad Ali’s coach Angelo Dundee intervenes after the “greatest” was humiliated round by round by his opponent Larry Holmes. “The game is over,” he yells at the referee.
For this “game”, the world championship fight in a makeshift arena in front of the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Ali had returned from boxing retirement at the age of 38 after a two-year break. In the ring, the living legend competed on October 2, 1980 under the title “The Last Hurray” against his former sparring partner Holmes, who was eight years his junior.
But this passive, sedate Ali is only a shadow of himself, a human punching bag for the dominant Holmes, who obviously wants to spare his opponent the knockout. In the ninth round, Ali even screamed out loud in pain when he was hit in the kidney area. “I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” recalled Lloyd Wells from Ali’s entourage, “Ali screamed.”
“Was an abomination, a crime”
What only becomes known after the sad episode: The heavyweight was swallowing medication for a suspected thyroid disease at the time. However, a neurological examination before the fight had already shown worrying abnormalities. Still, the Nevada State Athletic Commission granted him a boxing license.
“Everyone involved in this fight should have been arrested,” Ali’s former ring doctor Ferdie Pachecho was later quoted as saying: “This fight was an abomination, a crime.” Actor Sylvester Stallone put it drastically as well: “It was like seeing an autopsy of a man who is still alive.”
It is all the more incomprehensible that Ali gets into the ring for one last fight in December of the following year, the “drama in the Bahamas”, which he clearly loses on points. Less than three years later, Muhammad Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.