Not with a whimper but a bang
Forty years ago today, Ali fought his last bout of the 1960's, knocking out an old and overmatched Zora Folley in the seventh round of their heavyweight title fight at the Garden. It was just over a month after the Champ's "what's my name?" debacle with Ernie Terrell in Houston, and the fallout from that fight combined with his blunt refusal to fight in Vietnam had reinvigorated the anti-Ali sentiment in the public and the media.
Of course, no amount of public opposition could make the 35-year-old Folley into a worthy foe for Ali in 1967. The great tragedy of Ali's Vietnam exile from a boxing angle is that in '66 and '67 he had evolved into a type of athlete as yet unseen in the heavyweight ranks, and one we may never see again - a 212-pound man with power in both gloves and the agility and handspeed of an elusive middleweight. Watching his fights from that period, you almost have the feeling of a man who has cracked some grand mathematical code and is operating in another dimension than his opponents. As for his fight with Folley, Jimmy Ellis was probably giving the Champ harder sparring sessions that the bout that Zora put up that night. Ali put Folley down in the fourth and finished him in the seventh, looking for all the world as if he'd barely had a workout.
And that was that for the Ali decade in the ring. By the end of the year, he'd been convicted for refusing to serve in Vietnam and stripped of both his boxing license and his title. He would not fight again until October of 1970, when he began his comeback in Atlanta against that hard-as-nails Irish bridesmaid, Jerry Quarry.
(The video below is a short recap of the Folley fight and includes Ali's famous "you're being extremely truculent" exchange with Cosell.)
Of course, no amount of public opposition could make the 35-year-old Folley into a worthy foe for Ali in 1967. The great tragedy of Ali's Vietnam exile from a boxing angle is that in '66 and '67 he had evolved into a type of athlete as yet unseen in the heavyweight ranks, and one we may never see again - a 212-pound man with power in both gloves and the agility and handspeed of an elusive middleweight. Watching his fights from that period, you almost have the feeling of a man who has cracked some grand mathematical code and is operating in another dimension than his opponents. As for his fight with Folley, Jimmy Ellis was probably giving the Champ harder sparring sessions that the bout that Zora put up that night. Ali put Folley down in the fourth and finished him in the seventh, looking for all the world as if he'd barely had a workout.
And that was that for the Ali decade in the ring. By the end of the year, he'd been convicted for refusing to serve in Vietnam and stripped of both his boxing license and his title. He would not fight again until October of 1970, when he began his comeback in Atlanta against that hard-as-nails Irish bridesmaid, Jerry Quarry.
(The video below is a short recap of the Folley fight and includes Ali's famous "you're being extremely truculent" exchange with Cosell.)
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