The good, the bad and the ugly: the 50 men who fought Ali

Three were killers, four were murdered while others were singers and pastors. What became of the 50 men who fought Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali hits Ron Lyle in May 16, 1975

Years before he became Muhammad Ali, and long before anyone — even he — thought he was the greatest, young Cassius Clay was eloquent in sport’s most brutal ­language.

Seeking revenge after his ­bicycle was stolen when he was 12, the boy was directed towards boxing. It didn’t come naturally. He showed little promise. No one thought him too smart. But the young Clay had formidable self-confidence and a rarely encountered work ethic.

The latter would see him rise quickly to his chosen sport’s summit with an Olympic gold medal and an unmatched professional career. The former would see him recover when his prime years were lost after his boxing licence was withdrawn in 1967 for refusing national service.

Ali famously came back in 1970, a lot less butterfly and a little less bee. Nonetheless, he floated into the world’s consciousness to sting us with his courage as a fighter, and his confronting views on race and poverty.

But overlooked after Ali’s death last weekend were 50 others: the sometimes good, the often bad, and — as Ali was quick to point out — the mostly ugly men he fought for the heavyweight championship of the world.

They were an unlikely mob, the fighters that destiny willed in to the ring with one of the world’s most extraordinary men. Together they form a profile of the often compelling chaos that was so much a part boxing life. And none better illustrated that than the man Ali defeated to become the world heavyweight champion on February 25, 1964.

Sonny Liston was born in Arkansas to penury. He had 24 ­siblings. “I had nothing when I was a kid, but a lot of brothers and ­sisters,” he once said.

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A mean-spirited, illiterate thug, he tried to make a living on the streets and was soon in prison for armed robbery. He was regularly harassed by police, often giving better than he got — but that only put him back behind bars.

His mafia connections were widely known, but not uncommon in an era when organised crime corrupted boxing with threats and fixes. Nonetheless, when it was clear Liston had literally knocked out all the other contenders for the right to challenge the popular Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight crown, some heavy-hitters wanted no bar of it, US President John F. Kennedy among them. Kennedy, aware of evidence in a Senate inquiry that Liston’s bosses were racketeers, met Patterson and, the boxer claimed, urged him not to fight the challenger. Esquire reported that the influential ­National Association for the Advancement of Colored People did the same believing the unpleasant Liston would undermine their cause.

Patterson demanded Liston drop his mafia management, otherwise he wouldn’t consider a challenge. Liston called Patterson’s bluff, sacked his minders and beat Patterson twice in first-round knockouts.

Liston’s own short fights with Ali followed — two of the most infamous bouts in history. Overwhelming favourite to defeat the loudmouthed upstart in the first, Liston failed to come out for the seventh round claiming an injured shoulder. The rematch lasted two minutes, 12 seconds when Liston was felled by what many consider a phantom punch.

Liston was still boxing until he was found dead on January 5, 1971. Unwrapped newspapers out the front suggested he’d died seven days earlier. There were traces of heroin in his system and furniture in the lounge and bedroom was disturbed.

Down on one knee, Archie Moore reaches the end of his gallant ring career in 1962, as a young Cassius Clay stands over him.

There were as many theories about Liston’s death as he had ­enemies. A hot shot? A puncture mark was found. Liston hated ­needles. He may have been 40. He never knew his birthdate. His headstone states simply: Charles “Sonny” Liston 1932-1970 — “A man”.

Days before, Ali had fought the Argentinian Oscar Bonavena, his second bout since returning from suspension. Bonavena lost that day in round 15, but came close to beating some quality opponents and was on a seven-fight winning streak when he was shot dead in Reno by employees of the brothel owner and extortionist John ­Conforte.

Conforte, with some justification, believed the boxer, whose last fight had been three months earlier also in Reno, was moving in on his business and his wife. Conforte recalled the scene: “Oscar,” I said, “the game is over. You’re going back to Argentina. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.” Early on the morning of May 22, 1976, Bonavena, then 33, is alleged to have returned, aggressively drunk. He was shot through the heart.

The last fight Ali had before his ban — which kept him out of the ring for 1315 days — had been against Zora Folley, a decorated Korean War veteran who didn’t drink or smoke and whose Arizona home town, Chandler, has a park and pool named after its hero.

The respected Folley had some narrow losses against skilled boxers, including Bonavena, and he once knocked out the British champion Henry Cooper, but he’d seen his prime when he faced Ali. “That Folley’s such a nice, sweet old man — eight kids — calls me Muhammad Ali,” said the champ almost fondly before their only bout on March 22, 1967, that Ali won in a round-seven knockout.

No one knows why the happily married Folley was in a Tucson motel, about 90 minutes from home, five years later. He was booked in with a couple and a second woman who was apparently unknown to him. The others later told police the two men were play wrestling around the pool when Folley slipped and hit his head.

For such a simple accident Folley’s injuries were catastrophic. A motel employee described trauma to Folley’s forehead, a hole in the top of his skull and another serious injury to the back of his head. He died a few hours later in hospital aged 41.

Even Ali — who was skilled, fit and focused — was ­unable to do that to him. Folley’s ­family never came to grips with his death, the mystery exacerbated by missing police and autopsy ­reports.

There is no such mystery for the family of Trevor Berbick, Ali’s final opponent. They fought the little remembered “Drama in the Bahamas” in December 1981, days before Ali turned 40. Berbick was a Jamaican who competed at the Montreal Olympics and then stayed on in Canada before moving to the US where he served 15 months in jail for the sexual assault of the babysitter of his four children, the worst of his many crimes. In October 2006, he was blud­geoned to death with a steel pipe in a Jamaican church. The killer was his nephew Harold, with whom he reportedly had a property dispute. Harold Berbick is in jail for life. His uncle, who was 52, is buried in the nearby Berbick family plot.

Florida boxing writers did not rate the teenage Ali, who they considered a vulgar braggart, when he turned up at Miami Beach where four of his first five fights took place and where he would, in little more than three years, be crowned world champion.

Ali would go on to make news, as would his second and third opponents — Herb Siler and Tony Esperti. Esperti was a violent standover man, who for a decade had boxed mostly no-hopers — who would often beat him — to make money. After losing to Ali, he lost one more bout before concentrating on the wild Miami mafia crime scene. One of the famed Gambino family wanted Esperti dead and planted a bomb at a bar that missed its target. Esperti decided to get in first.

When Thomas Altamura took his place at A Place For Steak on Halloween night in 1967, witnesses say a large man — Tony Esperti, as it turns out — fired a .38 pistol shooting his target twice in the head and three times in the body. Job done, Esperti went home, and then to prison for life, dying there aged 72 in 2002.

Herb Silar’s third fight was Ali’s second. Ali won by TKO in the fourth round. In 1972 Silar was convicted of manslaughter, having shot a friend dead, and served seven years in jail. In 1979, sober, he found God and started a building business. He died, aged 66, in 2001.

By the time Ali fought Ron Lyle, on May 16, 1975, Lyle had already served more than seven years for second-degree murder. Lyle, one of at least 19 children, had shot dead a gang rival. In jail he was stabbed and almost killed.

Ali fought his most unlikely ­opponent on November 15, 1962. Archie Moore had been born on December 13, 1913, more than a year before any Australian died at Gallipoli. Moore knocked out 131 opponents in his long career of 219 fights that started in 1935. He first retired in 1941, before Ali was born.

Moore came to Australia, by boat, in 1940 and despite no training facilities on board and, by his own admission, eating far too much while lonely and inactive crossing the Pacific, defeated seven fighters here, including Queensland’s legendary Ron Richards. While in NSW, he trained in the Megalong Valley, just beyond Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where he threw rocks to build up his strength.

In the book The Ageless ­Warrior, the visiting boxer told of an extraordinary encounter with an Aboriginal man that changed Moore’s life.

“I came across him throwing boomerangs,” Moore explained. He said the man was intrigued by Moore’s bright red jumper that, Moore explained, he kept on to try to lose weight.

The Aboriginal man passed on to Moore a generations-old family secret: His forbears chewed on slivers of dried meat but then only swallowed the juices. Moore ­swapped his jumper for the secret diet. “He even threw in the ­boomerang.”

Over many years when asked about this episode by doubting ­reporters, Moore would counter: “Have you ever seen a fat Aborigine?” The diet worked and Moore boxed on for years, losing to Ali in the fourth round by TKO days ­before turning 49. Moore passed away in 1998.

Identical twins Henry and ­George Cooper were born in ­London, just south of the Thames, in 1934. Big boys, they both loved sports but were destined to be ­boxers.

George competed as Jim ­Cooper and reputedly had the harder punch. But it was his ­brother’s left hook — known as ’Enry’s ’Ammer — that did the greater damage. It felled Ali in round four of their initial encounter which took place in London, Ali’s first overseas bout. Ali claimed he had been distracted by the ringside appearance of Elizabeth Taylor.

Cooper would lose both times to Ali with blood flowing from ­easily opened scar tissue around his eyes, but he remained ­England’s favourite sportsman. He won the British, Commonwealth and European heavyweight titles in a long career and received a Papal Knighthood in 1978 and was knighted by the Queen in 2000. He died in 2011, a year after his brother.

Despite his conversion to Islam, Ali also met a Pope: John Paul II on June 5, 1982, and they exchanged autographs. Neither George Foreman nor Ernie ­Shavers met the Pope, but both­ ­became ordained church ministers and each is alive, aged 67 and 71 ­respectively.

Of the 50 men who fought Ali, 28 have died. Too many of his opponents suffered dementia related to their time in the ring, and two were killed outright in fights: Sonny Banks, the first boxer to drop Ali, died aged 24 in 1965 three years after that fight following an encounter with Leotis Martin; and Alejandro Lavorante, 27, was in a coma for 18 months after being knocked out by John Riggins in September 1962.

Ernie Terrell, who was 75 when he died in December 2014, was for a time World Boxing Association heavyweight champion. He fought Ali in February 1967 to settle the debate about who was the legitimate champ.

Before the fight, Terrell, appeared on television and, to the tune of (Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey, sang:

“Won’t you come home, dear Cassius?

“Won’t you come home?

“I’ve trained the whole year through.

“Are you afraid, Muhammad, are you afraid?

“Of what I’ll do to you?”

Ali, enraged to be called by his “slave” name, confronted Terrell on the show and days later gave him a nasty beating as he asked over and again: “What’s my name?”

Terrell had a band called The Heavyweights in which his sister also sang. Jean Terrell replaced Diana Ross in The Supremes. (It is often reported that he was briefly married to Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye’s duet partner, but it seems she just assumed the name).

If he is alive, Jimmy Robinson, who Ali fought — for just 94 ­seconds — on February 7, 1961, is Ali’s oldest surviving opponent and would turn 91 this year.

Fans have set out to collect the signatures — these days mostly from old documents — of all 50 boxers who fought Ali. The best of them come up one short: Jimmy Robinson.

Known as Sweet Jimmy, he fought Ali as a last-minute replacement for a no-show and lived for many years in a poor quarter of Miami where the fight took place.

Sports Illustrated photographer Michael Brennan tracked Sweet Jimmy down to a homeless shelter on Saturday, August 11, 1979 and arranged to take his picture the following morning at a train ­siding.

The photographs are of a tall man defeated by life. His jaw juts out, but its feeble defiance mocks the sad, scarred face behind. Sweet Jimmy smells of beer. It’s a drawn- out death funded by benefits. But the pension hasn’t been collected for decades. No one has seen him since.

Pictures taken, Ali’s fourth opponent turns to go. As he walked up the tracks to the rest of his life, and looking straight ahead, Sweet Jimmy had a last word: “Tell Clay I ain’t doing too good.”