The History of the Heavyweight Championship - 1977

It was a mixed-up year for the winners and the losers, the champions, the former champions, the has-beens and the wannabees in the heavyweight boxing business.

More demons, epiphanies, more decay, more denial, so many crazy fights and nights – Muhammad Ali was still the champion, he made two defences but men in high boxing places were plotting his end – scheming to put in place a multi-title future that would forever dilute the heavyweight championship of the world.

The crown of kings was about to fall into the greedy hands of far too many dubious princes.

In May – after a long overdue and necessary seven-month break – Ali defended his world heavyweight championship when he met the Lynx of Montevideo… a young kid from Uruguay, who was now based in Madrid, called Alfredo Evangelista. The fight took place in Landover, Maryland. It went the full 15 rounds.

Evangelista had only turned professional in 1975, he had lost one of his 16 fights, he was 22 and he had no idea how to deal with Ali.

“I wish I could speak English – I wanted to ask Ali why he was running?” said Evangelista.

Before the random selection of Alfredo The Novice there was bold talk of a fight with unbeaten Italian Alfio Righetti – part-car and part-pasta sound alike – for the May date. Neither were good enough, but they satisfied the cash demands of the champion and his people. Ali got 2.75 million dollars for beating Evangelista.

There was even talk – an early hint at the desperation to find the man to beat the old man – that the May fight would be against Don King’s boxer, Larry Black Cloud Holmes. King knew that the right fighter on the right night could beat this version of Ali. Holmes, a former sparring partner, was certainly ready, but he would have to wait another year for his crack at the title.

There was so many fights planned and then abandoned in the first half of 1977 – it was a time of turmoil and unpredictability in the heavyweight division.

Anyway, Ali had Evangelista and once again, the old fears surfaced about Ali’s health and the wisdom of fighting on in a business that was probably killing him slowly.

After Evangelista, Ali’s fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco spoke: “The fight proves I’m right and that Ali must quit. The old Ali would have got Evangelista out of there in five rounds, tops.”

Pacheco had his critics then and still does – people asked why, if Ali was finished and in danger, did a doctor remain on the payroll. The answer then, as now, is simple: Pacheco, like everybody in Ali’s tiny inner circle, loved the champ.

After the verdict, the crowd jeered the champion. And that was an unforeseen development. Well, it had not been much of a fight.

Even Ali knew, he was not a fool, and said after the ponderous, one-paced and total dominance of Evangelista: “My timing is gone, I can’t do the same things anymore.”

The problem was… we had heard it all before. And heard it from Ali’s mouth. Ali said a similar thing after beating the Dutchman Rudi Lubbers, back in 1973. He had failed to stop him, then apologised and blamed age.

The signs could not be any clearer and the Great Man was shining a very bright torch on his own faults.

The Evangelista fight was Ali’s 56th – he was 35. In June, in Los Angeles, he married Veronica Porche.

The domestic love part of his lunatic life was much calmer. However, the ever restless Ali managed only 48-hours of a honeymoon in Hawaii and he had taken his friend, Howard Bingham the photographer, with him to stop him getting bored.

In the early summer there was talk of a fourth fight with Kenny Norton, this time to take place, according to Don King, in Rio.

Contracts were circulated for the heavyweight championship contests. Then the fight hype stopped and the Rio fight vanished. Norton had other important business in 1977.

It was announced that Ali’s next fight, his next defence of the heavyweight championship would be against Earnie Shavers. Now, Shavers had stopped or knocked out or maimed or ruined 52 of the 54 men he had beaten.

Sure, he’d lost five, but he was acknowledged as the heavyweight division’s most ferocious puncher. Ali called him The Acorn, because Shavers had made the malevolent-shaved head look his very own. Shavers was lethal, make no mistake.

Ali was getting $3million for the fight, which was back at Madison Square Garden in New York. Ali had first fought inside that spiritual dome of boxing excellence back in 1962. This Garden was a new Garden, but the venue’s right to be called the home of boxing remained intact.

The Ali factor was still the biggest attraction in sport – the title defence against Shavers in September 1977 attracted 70m viewers, The Garden was sold-out and it was calculated that over half of every television set in America was switched onto the NBC broadcast.

They are figures that make a mockery of modern pay-per-view audiences of one million being celebrated.

America was tuning in to watch the last days of the Greatest.

Before the fight, concerns about Ali’s health increased. Jerry Izenberg, of the Newark Star-Ledger, sat with him one afternoon in a hotel in the shadow of the Garden. Izenberg asked him to listen to recent recordings of his voice, hear the slurring and then listen to the old Ali.

Izenberg said: “It would be a horrible tragedy if you were to wind up punch-drunk.”

In many ways Shavers missed his chance to win the title that night. He had Ali hurt in the second and the 15th – I mean really hurt. Ali managed to kid his way out of danger and relied on his chin.

It was heroic… again and perhaps the last round, the 15th torrid round of that fight with Shavers in 1977 deserves to be mentioned with the other great rounds in Ali’s fighting life.

Here’s Pat Putnam, the Sports Illustrated boxing writer and a man on the Ali journey from the moment the train left the station back in 1960: “At the end of the 14th round, the champion had to dip into his reserve of strength just to get back to his corner.

“Wearily he slumped on his stool, his eyes glazed by fatigue. When the bell for the 15th round rang, Ali could barely stand.”

He survived the round and caught and hurt Shavers at the end. The scores were wide enough for Ali – just convenient paint to cover the decline. Ali had been brilliant in that 15th round.

“Before the fight people said that Earnie would break me up and knock me out. Well, next to Frazier that was the hardest I ever got hit.”

Shavers was not happy with the scoring and the result: “You just can’t win against Ali – the judges only see him. That was robbery. I was robbed tonight.”

There is an argument that Shavers is one of the best heavyweights to never win a world championship.

A day after the Shavers fight Teddy Brenner, the head of boxing at Madison Square Garden, asked Ali to quit.

They were backstage before the ritual post-fight conference at the Garden. Ali said “No”. Brenner then upstaged his old friend and went out in front of the media and said that Ali would never be offered a fight at the Garden ever again as long as he was there. It was brutal.

Brenner said: “I don’t want him to come over to me some day and say ‘What’s your name?’

“The trick in boxing is to get out at the right time, and the 15th round for Ali last night was the right time.”

A week after the Shavers fight … Pacheco quit. He had seen, so he said, some damning medical reports. He had shown them to Ali and Ali’s new wife and other important people in the Ali business. Nobody had come back to him. He had to quit.

Pacheco walked with a heavy, heavy heart: “I didn’t want to be a part of what was going on. There was talk of only ‘easy fights’, but there was no such thing as an easy fight anymore. The Shavers fight was the final straw for me.”

The other heavyweights were watching the decline in Ali, fight-by-fight and hoping they would get the call. There was one man leading the charge, screaming about his rights for a rematch and insisting that Ali would not give him a second chance: That man was big George Foreman.

In January Foreman destroyed in four rounds Pedro Agosto. The latest win meant that George had stopped, knocked over and out five men, including Ron Lyle and Joe Frazier, since the catastrophic loss to Ali in Zaire in 1974.

Foreman had a fight scheduled for March in San Juan, Puerto Rico, against Jimmy Young. He was a massive favourite and plans for his Ali rematch were being hatched. Foreman was doing his best to get the fight, including an insult or two or three.

Foreman was bitter and it came across in a strange interview in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in January 1977. In the interview he calls Ali both Ali and Clay – very odd: “My whole concern is if I can get the fight with Ali. I think it was rather obvious that he didn’t want to fight me. I ain’t chasing no rainbow, but if would be a nice personal achievement if I could fight him again.”

Foreman insists that Ali is not an attraction: “Clay is a comical guy and that’s a defence mechanism. Don’t think Clay has created one boxing fan. I doubt if anyone went to see him fight, then went out and saw someone else.”

It was truly odd stuff. A second Ali and Foreman fight was the biggest fight in the boxing universe. He had to just beat Young.
Foreman was only 28 that night in San Juan. The rematch with Ali was all anybody talked about. It was, so it seemed, arranged. However, nobody told Jimmy Young.

Foreman was late arriving in the heat of San Juan. He was having some trouble in his camp, the usual stuff with people trying to position themselves next to the fighter. Gil Clancy had been in charge since the first fight of the return.

In San Juan, Clancy saw the chaos coming: “He was getting the shit kicked out of him in sparring by Duane Bobick. It was bad.”

Young had been there three weeks, preparing away from the limelight. That was Jimmy Young style.
On fight night, Foreman was distracted and had all the vents and doors taped closed in his dressing room. He was convinced that somebody was going to pump in poison gas. It was sweltering, a hellish place.

The fight was hard and in the 12th and last round, Young dropped Foreman briefly to secure the win. All the plans and schemes for the heavyweight division were turned upside down. Foreman went back to his dressing room, clearly distressed and probably dehydrated.

He showered and then emerged, naked and hallucinating: “I see God, I see God,” Foreman hollered.

He tried to run out of the room, still naked and screaming. His team tackled him, restrained him and he vomited brown liquid. Clancy knew what was happening, the veteran had seen a heat-drained fighter before.

Foreman was taken to hospital, rehydrated and brought to his senses. In his epiphany, God had told him to stop fighting and preach. Foreman walked away from boxing and would not fight again until March of 1987. He took his worn bible out and started to spread the word of God from street corners.

The plans of men and boxing promoters were ruined that night when a multi-million dollar second fight with Ali vanished. Some might say, amen. The Young win was not the only shock at the start of 1977.

In May, Norton was matched with unbeaten Duane Bobick at Madison Square Garden. The winner would get Ali – the winner was expected to be Bobick. The veteran trainer Eddie Futch was with Bobick – he had once worked with Norton – and he was convinced his new man would win: “He will be heavyweight champion of the world.”

Bobick had turned professional in 1973. He had been on a sixty-fight unbeaten sequence as an amateur going into the Munich Olympics and that included a win over Teofilo Stevenson. However, at the Olympics, Bobick was stopped by Stevenson. He was unbeaten as a pro in 38 fights, with 32 ending early.

Ding-ding in the Garden and 42 million people watching on NBC in America watched Kenny Norton – the marine, the actor, the man with the style Ali simply could not master – knock Duane Bobick out in just 58 seconds. A big right hand and bang, that was that.

Bobick and Foreman had been the two men selected to fight Ali. They were both finished.

In November Norton and Young met at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The WBC sanctioned it as a final eliminator.

During Frazier, Foreman and then Ali’s reign starting in 1970 the two rival sanctioning bodies – the WBA and the WBA – had backed just the one champion. There had been no confusion, everybody in the world knew the heavyweight champion.

But, by the last few months of 1977 there was a lot of talk about a split. Ali’s days were numbered and the WBA and WBC both wanted to make sure they had the best available fighter to replace him. It was, in many ways, a disgraceful way to prepare for business.

The ‘final eliminator’ status meant that, according to the Mexico City-based WBC, Ali had to fight the winner and agree to fight him soon. Norton and Young knew going into the fight that win, and there was every chance that they would end up getting the title by default.

It was the very start of the future of the heavyweight division, the beginning of the days when the heavyweight championship of the world was held hostage by the men in control of the sanctioning bodies.

Norton beat Young over 15 rounds to win the final eliminator. It was a good fight, a fight worthy of the title. Still, Muhammad Ali held the title, had won in Zaire and defended it all over the world against everybody put in front of him.

Two old Ali victims met in March in Las Vegas on a Sunday afternoon. The winner would, in theory, be back in the championship mix. Joe Bugner and Ron Lyle had both been promised Foreman – Lyle looking for revenge, Bugner looking for the crucial win he needed. It was high stakes in Las Vegas that weekend. However, just a few days before they met, Foreman lost and the plans vanished.

That seems to be a cruel theme in 1977.

Boxing News in Britain tipped Bugner, who turned 27 in the week of the fight, to win by late stoppage. It was a gruelling fight and at the end Lyle won by a split decision.

Bugner suffered: “It took me six months to recover from the Lyle fight. I ended up in hospital in an ice-tank to ease the internal bleeding.”

Once again the British heavyweight was criticised, his greatest enemy Henry Cooper was quick to pass judgement: “Bugner must decide: quit or have a go.”

The criticism hurt and Bugner started to drink, living and flopping in the cheapest Las Vegas hotels. He would not fight again until 1980 and would play no part in the carnival of title fights coming up.
It was also the end in 1977 for Jerry Quarry – he retired after beating Lorenzo Zanon in the 10th.

Quarry, having his 63rd fight, was way behind until the stoppage. He had met the finest heavyweights of his generation – Ali, Patterson, Ellis, Frazier, Norton, Chuvalo, Lyle and Shavers. He had lost just eight times. He had battled against prejudice, hated being billed as the Great White Hope and had fought with universal dignity. He would have a tragic end.

There was, trust me, no shortage of contenders still in the sport, all with their eyes sport’s greatest prize.

A young kid in New York called Gerry Cooney turned professional in 1977 and won all seven of his fights – all seven by knockout. Larry Holmes won four times.

And there was Neon Leon Spinks – the light-heavyweight gold medal winner from the Montreal Olympics: He turned professional as a small heavyweight and finished 1977 with six wins and a draw in seven fights. He was being fast-tracked.

There was a rumour, a mad rumour, that seven-bout novice Spinks might just be the “easy fight” Ali was looking for to start 1978.

It was, like all the greatest boxing rumours, true.

The heavyweight boxing landscape was about to change forever.