We're in agreement...
I get what you're both saying and feel the same for the most part, especially Adam. I have my own favorite boxers (Marvin Hagler among them) and others I don't care for especially when they're out of the ring.
The thing with me, I suspend either type of prejudice whenever any fighter steps into the ring and judge them and their performance by what happens there, regardless. In my own opinion, having watched all 3 Ali/Norton bouts a number of repeat times, I was honest in mentioning to Ken at his IBHOF Inductions that "in my opinion" he'd never lost to Ali; it looked like he'd won all 3 fights in their end. Jimmy Young was another I thought outpointed Ali but didn't win...they took it away from him because of his tactics repeatedly sticking his head through the ropes anytime Ali started to get off on him.
Frazier beat him outright in their first and gave him hell in another-- still, overall Ali was the best of his era (regardless of by what degree.) That was an era that arguably included the best group of heavyweights all at once in history. Yes, the crap he said to Frazier (and how he treated Patterson) went too far; made Frazier carry the scar for life and hate him to the end.
It seems hard to say Ali didn't have a championship heart in the ring throughout his entire career, though; he got up from Frazier's hook when that hook was knocking everyone else out; went the distance with Berbick at the end when he never should have been in the ring in the first place; and took his worse beating from Holmes, on his feet, and kept coming out until they finally stopped it. He faced Foreman, Shavers, and Liston twice (I know the controversy so let's not debate Liston, too); 3 of the most feared punchers of any time or era. What he did, said, or didn't do outside the ring is one thing; for me, boxing has always been my only sport and I've always judged a fighter by what he did in the ring, not outside it.
Ali was no coward in or out of the ring. His stand on not serving during the Vietnam Conflict (it never was declared an official "war" whereas China warned that, if we declared so, they'd enter it against us)---took as much courage, if not more than if he accepted his draft--being stripped of his title and denied a license to box afterward. He accepted the repercussions that followed and still kept his beliefs on his own terms. A lot of us who did serve didn't like it, and still don't like him for it, but that doesn't necessarily make him a "coward" just because he went a different path than us others.
I also don't believe that specific reason is any primary reason for his cards being undervalued. For every person who won't collect him because of it there are a dozen who do for other reasons. Maybe some of that popularity IS related to "marketing" and that was what Jim was talking about. Nevertheless, his cards out-price most all other boxers' issues produced during the same period as well as a lot of earlier era ones.
Isn't that what we were talking about here, and cards-in-general what this forums is supposed to be about covering, politics-religion aside?
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