It is much like the myth Wilt Chamberlain was going to fight Ali
Wilt was a generational athlete but we haven’t a clue if he could take a punch, or learn to jab- it take more than being a great athlete to be a great fighter…Wilt knew that, and withdrew from fighting Ali…
CREDIT VIDEO YOU-TUBE AND F&B
The Ali haters love the slander that he was afraid to fight Wilt Chamberlain, when in fact, it was Wilt who withdrew from the fight. How do we know? Wilt said so.
On the above video, Wilt confirmed the story that his father told him to practice his free throws instead of fighting Muhammad Ali, and Wilt withdrew after an argument on money that Ali tried to solve.
The video says when the question of purses arose, Ali offered to give up part of his purse to Wilt, offering Wilt 50% more taken from Ali’s money – but Wilt still withdrew.
This question stipulates if Wilt had picked boxing – but just because Wilt was a fabulous athlete – among the best ever – doesn’t mean he could be a boxer, let alone a great boxer.
Just because someone like Hogan, or Jim Brown, or Wilt was a fabulous athlete does not mean he could be a great fighter
Gene Tunney said in A Man Must Fight:
“Even if God blessed you, as he did me, with extraordinary physical gifts, it is a long and hard road to develop them, and master a truly unforgiving sport.”
In 2017, 6.53 million people boxed in the United States.
Of that 6.53 million, only 13,000 were good enough to become professionals. Of that 13,000, only 12 earned over a million dollars, or one and a fraction for every 33,000,000 people in the United States.
Want it all day, Wilt might not have reached the boxing mountaintop unless God gave him not just strength and speed, which he had in abundance, but the special ring sense only great fighters have, and the discipline and willingness to work for years, decades, to develop it.
Boxing is the hardest sport in the world to master
How difficult is it to become a world class fighter? According to Gene Tunney, former undisputed heavyweight champion, in his book A Man Must Fight:
“You never truly master boxing. You learn its intricacies your entire life. It is as complicated as chess in its moves, and harder to learn. By the time your mind truly learns the skills you must have, your body has begun to fail you. Boxing is the most unforgiving of sports. Many try to climb the mountain – very, very, very, few get to the top.”
Boxing is generally considered the hardest sport of all to learn, and takes years or even decades. To not just learn to box, and learn well, but to then climb the mountain, as Gene Tunney said, to become elite, requires an extraordinary mixture of mental and physical ability, discipline, and plain old luck.
Jack Blackburn, Joe Louis’s legendary trainer, who had also been a great fighter himself, was asked once to compare Joe Louis to Jesse Ownes, which, Blackburn was asked, was the greatest master of sport.
Blackburn paused, thought, and said:
“boxing can kill you, or can kill the other guy. It ain’t just physical, it takes mastering your mind plus your physical talent. The heavyweight champion of the world is the number one athlete on the planet.”
And Blackburn was right. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guys have died in the ring since the dawn of the modern boxing age. Boxing takes years, sometimes decades, to master, and requires exquisite mental facilities as well as extraordinary physical talent.
And I mean EXTRAORDINARY physical talent, and EXQUISITE mental ability, plus LUCK.
Boxing is the most physically and mentally demanding sport that there is. Bleacher Report, examining which sport was the hardest, had this to say about boxing:
“Boxing at the highest level requires a plethora of physical and mental abilities. Not only must a boxer be in absolute top physical condition, they must also be extremely sharp mentally. A boxer is required to have superb coordination, foot speed, strength, power, quickness, and endurance in order to have even the least bit of success.
Boxing is the sport experts decided is the most difficult sport to master, mentally and physically
Why is boxing the toughest sport to master? That is subjective, however, you have to go by criteria established by experts, and in doing so, boxing again is very clearly is the toughest sport to master.
That’s the sport that demands the most, mentally and physically, from the athletes who compete in it, according to a panel of sports scientists created by ESPN.
three Ph.D.’s that specialize in the science of muscles and movement,
a Director of the Coaching and Sports Sciences Division at the United States Olympic Committee,
a sports star and
various other sports writers, historians and experts
The panel then voted on what makes certain sports more difficult. The committee evaluated ten categories; endurance, strength, power, speed, agility, flexibility, nerve, durability, hand-eye coordination, and analytic aptitude.
Boxing emerged as the consensus most difficult sport.
It’s tougher than football, harder than baseball, harder than basketball, tougher than martial arts, gymnastics, hockey or soccer or cycling or skiing or fishing or billiards or any other of the 60 sports which ESPN rated.
Not only are the physical demands incredibly arduous, the mental demands are extremely formidable as well.
So the bottom line is Wilt had a lot better chance of becoming an all time world class basketball player and track star than a world class boxer. Hogan, from his lack of wrestling ability, had no chance at all
So the question fails on its face, since there is absolutely no way to know whether Wilt, who found sports easy, would have put in the years and decades to become a boxing master…
Wilt did not even play basketball when he was young. He regarded it as a sissy sport.
Wilt was a shot putter, a champion high jumper, and a triple jumper. He could bench press 550 pounds in college. Wilt is also in the volleyball Hall of Fame and he only began seriously playing that sport when he was 36.
Guy Rogers, who was Wilt’s opponent in high school, and who played with him in the NBA, said of him:
“Everything came so easy to Wilt. He was so strong, so quick, so agile, he didn’t have to work to be the best.”
But that would not work in boxing.
The question to me would a natural athlete, a man who found everything easy, put the work in to box? Because boxing is different…
In the world that is, Ali would beat poor Wilt, who never boxed in his life, like a giant kettle drum!
Ali would show Wilt, just as he did Jim Brown, the difference between boxing and other sports!
Jim Brown considered boxing, and fighting Ali in 1965 – but only briefly
After the great Browns running Back retired in 1965, the 29 year old was restless for new adventures.
Brown, a genuine athletic freak just like Wilt, decided boxing would be his new pastime. Brown, like Chamberlain would after him, also decided why start at the bottom? What not go straight to the top and take Ali’s title?
Ali certainly cured Jim Brown of that stupid notion.
Chris Mannix told the story in Sports Illustrated in 2012, about how Jim Brown hatched the idea that he could prove his superiority as an athlete and make a boatload of money at the same time. So he approached Bob Arum, the boxing promoter Brown himself had introduced to Muhammad Ali. Brown was in the early stages of finding Hollywood stardom, but was enamored with the idea of dominating a second sport. Arum, who privately thought the idea was idiotic, but out of gratitude for Brown’s introducing Ali to him, decided he owed it to Brown to approach Ali with Brown’s wish to fight him and take over boxing:
“So I went to talk to Ali,” Arum told Mannix. “He says, ‘Jim wants to do what? Bring him here.’ So I took him to Hyde Park in London, where Ali used to run. Ali said, ‘Jimmy, here’s what we’re going to do: You hit me as hard as you can. So Brown starts swinging and swinging, and he can’t hit him. He’s swinging wildly and not even coming close. This goes on for, like, 30 seconds. Then Ali hits him with this quick one-two to his face. Jimmy just stops and says, ‘Okay, I get the point.’ ”
Brown dropped his idea of becoming a boxer, but the humiliation he got in being slapped around so easily by Ali poisoned any friendship between the two men, and led to Jim Brown encouraging Wilt to fight Ali instead.
Of course later Brown would encourage Wilt Chamberlain to fight Ali – since Jim liked neither of them, and knew how it would go with a non-boxer challenging the greatest living heavyweight, he thought it was a win/win.
Brown would also deny in later years that he ever considered boxing – but there were just too many witnesses to what happened. Brown is known to be a bit of a prickly personality (that is a nice way to put it) and being humiliated did not sit well with a man who regarded himself so highly.
There were two attempts to arrange a fight between Wilt and Ali, and Jim Brown was involved in both
There were two attempts to arrange a fight between Wilt Chamberlain and Ali, and both times, Wilt nixed the idea at the last second.
In 1967 the money was not what Wilt wanted, and before the promoters could raise the proposed purse enough to interest Wilt, at the last minute, the Philadelphia 76ers owner, Irv Kosloff signed Wilt to a one-year contract that prevented him from boxing.
In Wilt by Wilt Chamberlain, the big man discusses how he stuck with what he knew best, after his basketball compensation went suitably up, making boxing simply too risky!
The 1971 proposed fight got a lot closer to happening that the 1967 proposal
But in 1971 Wilt was again feeling unappreciated. He returned to the thought of proving he was the world’s greatest athlete by fighting Muhammad Ali.
That is not unusual. Every great athlete in a sport other than boxing thinks that, given time to get ready, he could successfully transfer his speed and strength to the ring. That’s why every big-time boxing match has a horde of baseball, football and basketball stars in the best seats.
That’s also why such football stars as Too Tall Jones entered the ring.
None of them, however, had much success.
Being bigger and stronger does not, in any world, make one a fighter. Boxing is the most difficult sport in the world to master, and it is not one any man, even the greatest of athletes, can learn in a few months.
We have a good idea who both Ali and Wilt thought would win, given the results of the failed 1971 fight which had been arranged between the two of them.
On the day the contract for the two to fight in 1971 was to be formally signed, on TV, Wilt withdrew.
No one can know for sure what would happen in any fight, but in this case, we know a fight between those two, Ali and Chamberlain, was arranged, and we know which one withdrew, and why.
A number of people confirm Wilt did not think he was likely to win, and certainly the odds are he was correct. Despite his enormous size, speed and strength, he was not a boxer, and had never had a real fight in his life.
I believe Wilt was right, and no matter how big and strong he was, his chances of beating Ali at his own game were remote, or non-existent. So Wilt withdrew.
Let me be clear there is no written record on why the fight fell through, as no reason is documented in the records – all that is known for certain is a contract was presented to Chamberlain’s people the day of the press conference to announce the fight and have the parties sign, Wilt and his people left the room, and when they returned they declined the contract, claiming that they had expected the purse to be after taxes, and with its structure as is, it was not enough money.
However, Ali offered to increase Wilt’s purse by 50% to compensate for taxes, giving the money out of his, Ali’s, purse. This is also on the above video.
Wilt still refused to sign.
Bob Arum has another story to tell about how Wilt changed his mind when Ali walked in and yelled Timmmmmmmmmmber!
But Bob Arum tells another story, one Wilt never denied, one that Thomas Hauser recorded in his book Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.
In 1971, Wilt Chamberlain wanted to challenge Muhammad Ali in a boxing match for his heavyweight title. The bout was supposed to take place in the legendary Madison Square Garden. ABC arranged a special sports segment with both Ali and Wilt appearing together to announce the fight.
Jim Brown was supposed to be the promoter and already managed to raise enough guaranteed money to tempt them both into contract negotiations. After several failed negotiations Ali accepted Chamberlain’s challenge after being offered more money than he had ever earned for a fight, money he and his family were desperate for after for 3 years in exile for refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam war.
Chamberlain was 35 years old, a year away from retiring from the NBA after 13 seasons during which he had set more than 70 individual records. He was a huge man, 7 feet tall, 275 pounds, and astonishingly strong, agile and fast. Ali was 29 in 1971.
After lengthy negotiations the two agreed to go ahead with the fight, according to Tom Hauser’s “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.” Chamberlain told Hauser:
““I was offered more money than I had ever gotten” (as a basketball player.)
For Chamberlain, fighting Ali was part of his attempt to show he was the greatest living athlete in the entire sporting world. His feats on the basketball court were already legendary. His records of 100 points scored in one game and 55 rebounds grabbed in another remain to this day, and many observers (then and now) considered him to be the greatest individual player, talent wise, ever to play the game. Wilt wanted to show he was more however, and fighting Ali seemed the ticket to do so, plus it represented a huge payday.
Bob Arum, who was present, reports that on the day of the press conference to announce the fight, Ali was waiting. Arum says that as Chamberlain walked in, Ali yelled:
“Timber!”
Arum told Hauser that:
“Chamberlain, turned white, goes into the next room with his lawyer, comes out and says he’s not fighting. I think Ali intimidated him; that’s all it was, at the moment of truth, Wilt realized that fighting Ali was a totally ridiculous concept.”
The official reason for Chamberlain’s withdrawal, provided by his attorneys, was that the after-tax money Wilt would earn from the bout was only $500,000. They claimed this was too small a purse to make the effort worthwhile. Of course, with Arum’s story, another view emerged.
Wilt himself offered another take on why he backed out of the fight
When interviewed later in his life, Wilt himself offered another explanation for his decision to withdraw from the fight. Chamberlain looked back and said:
““I remember leaving my place in L.A. and, my father is a big fight fan, and I said, `Dad, I got a couple of days off and I’m getting ready to go to Houston to sign to fight Muhammad Ali.’”
Wilt then said his father told him he should work on his free throws instead:
“And I looked at my Dad and said, ‘Well, Dad, you’re probably right.”
And subsequently, at the contract signing, Wilt withdrew.
So while there is nothing in writing on why the fight did not take place, according to Bob Arum specifically, and by Wilt himself later in his life, Wilt thought better of fighting the greatest living boxer, and withdrew.
There is no doubt, based on assessments of Hulk Hogan’s actual skill, that he would not have made much of a fighter, just as based on Wilt’s own words, who withdrew from his poor idea of challenging Muhammad Ali. It was a good decision! Just as Wilt would have eaten Ali’s lunch on the basketball court, Ali would have chopped him down like a very tall tree in the boxing ring!
Chamberlain, you see, isn’t the only other non-boxer endowed with such incredible physical ability that a lot of people believed he could return to action deep into middle age. Jim Brown, who won eight NFL rushing titles in his nine seasons with the Cleveland Browns, had been retired for 17 years when he appeared on the cover of the Dec. 12, 1983, issue of Sports Illustrated, wearing a Los Angeles Raiders uniform. The headline read “Jim Brown: Are you serious? A comeback at 47? Hey! You’re just what the boring NFL needs!”
Arum, interestingly, had introduced Brown to Ali after Brown’s final NFL season, in 1965. Arum began promoting boxing matches in 1966, at which point Brown asked the new president of Top Rank if he could arrange a title bout between himself and Ali.
Ali met with Brown at Hyde Park in London, where the champ asked the 6-2, 230-pound football legend to try to hit him, as hard as he could. A perplexed Brown then fired a succession of roundhouse shots for about 30 seconds, all of which Ali easy evaded, while occasionally landing stinging, open-palm slaps.
“Ali kept slapping him in the face, not hard, but hard enough and often enough to make the point that as great an athlete as Jim was, he’d have no change in the ring against Ali,” Arum is quoted as saying in Hauser’s book.
Bottom line: Boxing is not like any other sport. Just as there are great boxers who would be utter failures at football, basketball and baseball, so, too are there great athletes in those sports who would fare better trying to pole-vault across the Grand Canyon than stepping inside the ropes against an elite fighter.
Jim Brown once decided to become a boxer and challenge Ali for his title. Lucky for Jim, he changed his mind.
CREDIT PICTURE SHUTTERSTOCK
Jim Brown considers boxing, and fighting Ali in 1965
After the great Browns running Back retired in 1965, the 29 year old was restless for new adventures. Brown, a genuine athletic freak, decided boxing would be his new pastime. Brown, like Chamberlain would after him, also decided why start at the bottom? What not go straight to the top and take Ali’s title?
Ali certainly cured Jim Brown of that stupid notion.
Chris Mannix told the story in Sports Illustrated in 2012, about how Jim Brown hatched the idea that he could prove his superiority as an athlete and make a boatload of money at the same time. So he approached Bob Arum, the boxing promoter Brown himself had introduced to Muhammad Ali. Brown was in the early stages of finding Hollywood stardom, but was enamored with the idea of dominating a second sport. Arum, who privately thought the idea was idiotic, but out of gratitude for Brown’s introducing Ali to him, decided he owed it to Brown to approach Ali with Brown’s wish to fight him and take over boxing:
““So I went to talk to Ali,” Arum told Mannix. “He says, ‘Jim wants to do what? Bring him here.’ So I took him to Hyde Park in London, where Ali used to run. Ali said, ‘Jimmy, here’s what we’re going to do: You hit me as hard as you can. So Brown starts swinging and swinging, and he can’t hit him. He’s swinging wildly and not even coming close. This goes on for, like, 30 seconds. Then Ali hits him with this quick one-two to his face. Jimmy just stops and says, ‘Okay, I get the point.’ ”.”
Brown dropped his idea of becoming a boxer, but the humiliation he got in being slapped around so easily by Ali poisoned any friendship between the two men.
Of course later Brown would encourage Wilt Chamberlain to fight Ali – since Jim liked neither of them, and knew how it would go with a non-boxer challenging the greatest living heavyweight, he thought it was a win/win.
Brown would also deny in later years that he ever considered boxing – but there were just too many witnesses to what happened. Brown is known to be a bit of a prickly personality (that is a nice way to put it) and being humiliated did not sit well with a man who regarded himself so highly.
Wilt Chamberlain’s brilliant career was marred by one, deeply inexplicable decision: He chose a shooting technique that made him one of the worst foul shooters in basketball—even though he had tried a better alternative. Why do smart people do dumb things?