A Story About Meeting Muhammad Ali at this Famous Deer Lake Training Camp
Guest Author: Anthony Ventre
The boxing world is full of the walking wounded, the crushed, the broken, the vanquished, and the proud. There’s a good British fighter I know who got KO’d by Mikkel Kessler in one round and never quite recovered. He’s just one example of thousands. There are some who came out of boxing okay, too, like Larry Holmes who lives in nearby Easton, Pa and runs a gym on Easton’s south side.
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As a kid, I listened to the radio broadcast of Ali’s second fight against the”Big ‘Ole Bear” Sonny Liston in Lewiston, Maine. Ali had been broadly insulted and denounced by many sportswriters who previously referred to him as the “big mouth Cassius Clay.” As everyone knows, the lean and hungry Cassius changed his name to Muhammad Ali after the first Liston fight.
If the ring doctors threatened to stop that fight because of Ali’s incredibly high pre-fight blood pressure, the doctors should have stopped me from listening because my own blood pressure followed suit as Liston lay on the floor after a 1st round knockout from what boxing writers called a “phantom punch.” My father, hearing me shout out from the upstairs floor, offered to set up a tent in the yard for me if I “hollered” like that again.
So far as “phantom punches” go, you’ve got to get hit with one before you can call it that. In the sparring sessions at Deer Lake, I’d seen Ali lash out with quick, short punches which wobbled the knees and bloodied the faces of sparring partners. Ali could be incredibly mean in the ring one minute and crack you up the next. I remember one Ali sparring session when he took a big left hook and went down on his back in the corner where I was standing. He sort of rolled back his head, looked directly at me, winked and then rolled back up on his feet to administer a beat-down that left his sparring partner gasping against the ropes.
Image Credit: Public Domain
