Las políticas, programas y acciones a favor del adulto mayor

Superfight II started the year in grand style. Now it was time for George Foreman to remind boxing fans who the heavyweight champion really was. March 26 marked the date of Big George’s first legitimate title defense. His opponent: Kenny “The Jawbreaker” Norton. If George got past Norton’s challenge, a mega-bucks fight with Ali beckoned on the horizon.

The most fascinating aspect of Foreman–Norton was that it was the first major heavy-weight title fight of the 1970s that didn’t include either Frazier or Ali (Foreman–Roman doesn’t count). By now, though, Foreman and Norton were superstars in their own right, and their pairing generated as much public interest as the Ali–Frazier reprise.

In his short title tenure, Foreman had become the Magellan of boxing, winning his title from Frazier in Jamaica and defending it against Jose Roman in Japan. Now he was set to tangle with Norton in Caracas, Venezuela.

Foreman wasn’t necessarily a globe-trotter by inclination. He was simply avoiding the web of contractual disputes that would ensnare him if he defended his title in the United States. As it was, Foreman still hadn’t received a penny of the purse he had earned in the Roman fight. Financially, he would have been better off hocking his championship belt at a pawn shop.

The contractual mess Dick Sadler had led him into was the principal reason behind Foreman’s inactivity. Considering his bleak fiscal outlook, a healthy payday he could get his hands on was imperative. But scarcity of cash wasn’t his only motivation for accepting the Norton fight. Foreman was coming under increasing pressure from boxing’s governing bodies to defend his title against a legitimate challenger. He had been champion more than a year, but had racked up only one defense.

Because the World Boxing Association refused to sanction the Roman fight, in that organization’s eyes Foreman had not yet defended his title. So the WBA issued an ultimatum.

“They sent me a letter,” Foreman revealed, “stating that action would be taken unless serious negotiations began immediately toward the defense of my crown.”³¹

Accordingly, in December 1973 the Foreman team began to look for a qualified chal-lenger to face their dreadnought early in 1974. With Frazier and Ali tied up in Superfight II, only two logical and lucrative options remained: Jerry Quarry and Ken Norton.

Foreman chose Norton, much to the indignation of Quarry and his manager, Gil Clancy. The feisty Clancy issued written complaints, arguing that since Quarry had beaten Ron Lyle and Earnie Shavers while Norton had lost to Ali, Jerry was the more qualified con-tender.

Still, Norton’s performance in his two fights with Ali had earned him more than suf-ficient credentials for a title challenge. As well, Clancy conveniently forgot that Norton’s record against Ali was 1–1, with both fights ending in split decisions. In contrast, Quarry’s Ali log stood at 0–2, both losses coming by stoppage.

Although some fighters lose their competitive drive or hunger once they become cham-pion, Foreman’s financial difficulties had given him a different perspective. The richest title in sports had yet to parlay itself into bundles of cash, but Big George was still determined to hold on to it.

For all his bumbling outside the ring, Dick Sadler also knew the value of the title, and he took every precaution to ensure that Foreman would hold onto it as long as possible.

Once the Foreman entourage arrived in Venezuela, Sadler demanded an American referee for the Norton fight.

His reasoning was straightforward. Foreman’s success depended partly upon his ability to shove his opponents into ideal punching range, as he did in the Frazier fight. Sadler believed an American referee would be more lenient toward the champ’s roughhouse tactics.

After the inadvertent swipe George took at Roman while he was down, Sadler was deter-mined not to risk a loss on a foul at the hands of some narrow-minded referee who might interpret the Marquess of Queensberry Rules too strictly.

However, the Venezuelan boxing commission proved just as stubborn as Sadler, and refused to bend on their demand for a local referee. The impasse continued until the morning of the fight, when Foreman suddenly began to limp along the streets of Caracas and complain of a pinched nerve in his knee. The “injury” threatened to scuttle the fight and sink the promoters’ investments.

Catching the true cause of Foreman’s mysterious malady, the Venezuelans engaged the services of Jimmy Rondeau, an American referee who happened to be in town at the time.

Then, miracle of miracles, Foreman’s knee healed and he was ready to fight.

Like Frazier–Foreman the year before, Foreman–Norton looked interesting on paper.

A matchup of two of the biggest, strongest, hardest-hitting heavyweights in modern boxing history should have yielded action at least on a par with the crowd-pleasing performance Ali and Frazier had recently provided.

In the buildup to the bout, Norton talked a good fight, saying that if Foreman used his pushing tactics on him, Ken would put a dent in Big George’s protective cup. However, like his old buddy Frazier, Norton represented another example of the wrong style at the wrong time. Against a back-pedaling boxer like Ali, the naturally aggressive Norton was in his element. As long as Norton could move forward, he could comfortably and effectively control the pace of a fight.

But a strong puncher, even one as frail-looking as Jose Luis Garcia, who had the ability to back Norton up, could nullify Ken’s offense. Not only was Foreman a strong puncher;

he was also one of the few fighters in the division who could out-brawn the muscular Nor-ton.

To most observers, the Garcia loss was a fluke rather than an indicator of a chink in Norton’s armor. Based on his performances against Ali, Ken was given an excellent chance to dethrone the untested champion. All Norton had to do was make it past the first two rounds.

Ali, for one, fully expected Norton to win. In fact, only hours before Norton entered the ring in Caracas, Ali received confirmation that if Ken pulled off an upset, he would replace Foreman in a proposed multi-million dollar September showdown against Muham-mad.

Ali was in Caracas as part of the broadcast team for the fight. The moment he heard the news, he scurried to Norton’s hotel to let Ken know what was going on. Unfortunately, Norton had already departed for the stadium.

In his book The Greatest, Ali contended that if Norton had found out about the big payday that awaited him, he would have fought a much more focused fight against Foreman.

“I still think if he had known earlier, I would have fought Norton, not Foreman, in Zaire,”

Ali wrote.

Ali’s speculations aside, it is doubtful that news of any kind would have helped Norton in the ring against Foreman. Ken was a world-class contender, but he didn’t possess the style or the chin to stand up to a wrecking machine like Foreman.

As Norton stepped into the ring, it was obvious that he was tense. But no one knew just how nervous he was until opening bell clanged.

As Foreman treated Norton to a Liston-like glare during Rondeau’s instructions, the physical disparity between the fighters was startling. Norton’s well-chiseled 212³⁄⁴-pound physique actually looked puny next to Foreman’s 224³⁄⁴-pound, fat-free bulk.

From the opening bell, Foreman stalked his prey with the patience of a hunter. Norton moved and landed the occasional left jab, but he looked tight and his punches lacked snap.

Midway through the round, Big George picked up the pace and began to attack Norton’s well-defined abdominal muscles. Ken continued to retreat, but it was obvious that he couldn’t “float like a butterfly.”

As awkward as Norton looked when he was on the attack, he appeared positively clumsy moving away from Foreman. The stiff right leg that anchored his offense was now impeding his backward motion, making him an easy target for Foreman’s pile-driver blows.

To an idle observer, nothing much was established in the first round other than the fact that Norton stayed on his feet. To Foreman, however, the first round told him everything he needed to know about Ken Norton.

In the second round, Foreman marched forward like a man on a mission. He effectively cut off the ring and began to muscle Norton into the ropes. As Ken tried to get away, Foreman hauled off and hit him with a long, sweeping right hook. The moment that blow detonated against Norton’s jaw, the fight was over, for all practical purposes.

Ken’s legs wobbled and his eyes took on a glassy look. Foreman, the consummate finisher, blasted him with three more rights to the head. Norton fell backward, landing on the bottom rope. Referee Rondeau gave him a standing eight count, then Foreman rushed in with a right to the body and a right to the head. Once again, Norton bounced off the bottom rope.

Amazingly, the dazed Norton got up so quickly that Rondeau didn’t bother to issue a count. The referee actually pushed Norton back into action. This time, Foreman met him with two left hooks and a shattering right uppercut. As the defenseless Norton teetered, Foreman caught him with another right. Then a short left came close to tearing Norton’s head off.

Ken fell a third time. Valiantly, he attempted to pull himself up for more punishment.

But his knees had turned to Jell-O, and Rondeau wisely called a ceasefire to spare Norton from certain annihilation.

The drubbing Norton took did as much damage to his professional reputation as it did to his body. For the entire Norton team, the fight had turned into a disaster from every conceivable standpoint. A matchup that was supposed to have been competitive had turned into just another early-round rout by Foreman. It didn’t seem to matter whether a top fighter or a mediocre one challenged Big George; the outcome remained the same.

“The fight was awfully disappointing,” Norton’s co-manager, Art Rivkin, admitted.

“Kenny didn’t do much of anything.”³²

But the worst wasn’t over yet. When the fighters and their entourages went to the Caracas airport to fly home, they were forcibly detained until they paid an 18 percent non-residence tax on their purses. Promoter Hank Schwartz had already returned to New York and couldn’t be reached.

Both camps were miffed at Schwartz, who had assured them that the Venezuelan gov-ernment had waived the tax as an incentive to lure the promotion to Caracas. However, in the period between the agreement and the fight date, a new government had taken power.

And the new government refused to honor the waiver agreed to by its predecessor.

As a result, Norton was stripped of $85,000, and Foreman was forced to hand over an astounding $241,000! Both fighters were detained in Caracas until they coughed up every last dime.³³

The widely-traveled Foreman said that he’d never been treated so shabbily in any other country. As Foreman’s entourage was turned away from the airport, the champ felt that they were in serious danger of being shot. Although Big George had looked like a Superman in the ring against Norton, he knew he was far from bulletproof.

Norton’s team suffered a further indignity when co-manager Bob Biron was left with a $4,000 hotel bill, an indemnity that is customarily taken care of by the promoter. “No doubt about it,” an angry Biron fumed. “We were railroaded! This whole thing was a story of broken promises and unpaid bills.”³⁴

Eventually, both fighters made it home in one piece. Norton wanted to forget the Cara-cas experience altogether. As for Big George, although he left South America a little lighter in the wallet than he had anticipated, his aura of invincibility now shone brighter than ever.

He had chewed up the only two men to defeat Muhammad Ali and spat them out in two rounds apiece.

Since Foreman was only 26, and heavyweights tend to mature later than fighters in lighter divisions, a title reign spanning the rest of the decade didn’t seem out of the question.

Some boxing purists scoffed at Foreman’s brutish tactics. But no one could dispute the results: a 40–0 record with 37 knockouts.

Dick Sadler summed up the boxing world’s opinion of Foreman when he boasted: “I have created a monster!”³⁵Foreman wasn’t loath to embellish his menacing mystique. When asked what nickname he thought he might like to go by, Foreman issued a deadpan reply:

“The Executioner.”

Now it was Ali’s turn to try to bring the monster down. Not many people thought he could do it, but they were certainly willing to pay through the nose to see him make the attempt.

Foreman–Ali was the fight the public wanted to see. Many millions of dollars sat ready for the taking. Big Question #1 was, where would the next superfight occur? And Big Ques-tion #2 was, who would promote it?

The answers to both those questions were as unexpected as the outcome of the fight.

Up in Smoke

Following Superfight II, the conventional wisdom decreed that Joe Frazier was on his way out, regardless of the narrow margin by which Muhammad Ali had defeated him. Many observers believed that the internal fires that kept Joe “smokin’” earlier in his career had diminished to an ember. At the early age of 30, it seemed that the undisputed, unstoppable champion was on the verge of becoming a big-name “opponent” for the division’s younger guns.

Many of Frazier’s admirers hoped he would avoid such a sad fate. In an article titled

“The End of the Road,” Newsweek sportswriter Pete Axthelm paid tribute to Frazier, but also urged Smokin’ Joe to retire. “For the sting is gone from Joe’s once-savage left hook and the smoking speed has deserted his fists,” Axthelm wrote poetically. “Now he is left with only his fierce fighting courage and a personal dignity that has grown even more striking in defeat.... It is time for Joe Frazier to take his considerable fortune and his hard-used 30-year-old body and walk away.”

Axthelm’s view was echoed by many who believed Frazier had given too much of himself in both the Ali fights, and had too much taken out in the Foreman debacle. While Axthelm and other experts were busy penning Frazier’s professional obituary, others waxed enthusiastic over the resurrection of another holdover from the 1960s: Jerry Quarry.

Quarry’s storybook 1973 comeback had convinced his army of supporters that a title was close at hand. In his wins over Neumann, Lyle, and Shavers, the Irishman had displayed a degree of desire and conviction that was conspicuously absent earlier in his career. With the shackles of a bad marriage and a domineering family finally cast aside, Quarry had ram-paged through his opposition like a man possessed. Now he had firmly established himself as a prime contender for Foreman’s crown.

But then it seemed Quarry had always been a contender for somebody’s crown.

James Tuite described the “new” Quarry as a “renascent Californian purged of his Freudian restraints.” Others were satisfied merely to say Quarry was a damn good fighter.

With his career cruising in high gear, Quarry and Gil Clancy believed they deserved an early 1974 shot at the title. But Foreman signed to fight Norton in March, and Ali’s win over Frazier had set up a title fight for “The Greatest” later in the year.

Those moves convinced Quarry and Clancy that they were being frozen out of the title picture. Clancy had verbally assaulted Foreman the year before, accusing him of “ducking”

Quarry. There was also a story going around that Quarry had beaten the stuffing out of Foreman during a sparring session that occurred in 1968, long before George turned pro.

Since then, Foreman had supposedly vowed to steer clear of Quarry.

Although the truth of the sparring story may never be known, it is doubtful that a man who had scored a total of nine knockdowns against Frazier and Norton and come to

believe in his own myth of invincibility would feel intimidated by Quarry. As an amateur, Foreman had also sparred with Sonny Liston and suffered no long-term psychological effects from the experience.

Opinion on the outcome of a Foreman–Quarry fight swung between two extremes.

On the one hand, it was thought that Jerry was just too small to stand up to the kind of bombardment Big George was certain to unload. However, Quarry’s greatest victories had come against huge, hard-hitting sluggers like Mac Foster and Ron Lyle, not to mention Shavers, who was thought to be a better puncher than Foreman. Quarry had taken the best those giants had to offer, then came back to destroy them.

Could he have done the same to Foreman? It was beginning to look as though the answer to that question would never be known, much to Quarry’s chagrin.

With Foreman tied up for the foreseeable future, a frustrated Quarry turned his sights on Ali. He insisted that Muhammad had an obligation to fight the “new” Quarry, with the winner to get the shot at Foreman. Although his rationale was shaky at best, Quarry con-tinued to hound Ali for a third match.

Never one to duck the chance to pick up a few hundred grand against a fighter he had already beaten twice, Ali accepted Jerry’s challenge and set Bob Arum to work on securing the promotion. The grapevine soon indicated that Ali–Quarry III was set for May 6, 1974, at Madison Square Garden.

Unfortunately for Quarry, the grapevine’s information proved faulty. The fight fell through because Ali’s brain trust did not want him to jeopardize a guaranteed title bout against Foreman. Left in the lurch again, Quarry bitterly complained to anyone who would listen that the top heavyweights were intentionally avoiding him.

Some of the seamier elements among Quarry’s fans even raised the specter of “reverse racism,” conjuring up a conspiracy among black contenders to keep the title out of the

“White Hope’s” hands. Quarry himself believed he was being squeezed out. “I say it’s a black conspiracy,” Quarry declared. “They’re trying to keep me away from the title, from making a decent payday. I’m talking about three black fighters — George Foreman, Ken Norton and Muhammad Ali!”³⁶

Anyone who understood the economics of boxing dismissed that theory out of hand, knowing that a good white heavyweight was a highly marketable commodity. It was

Anyone who understood the economics of boxing dismissed that theory out of hand, knowing that a good white heavyweight was a highly marketable commodity. It was