But Muhammad was a different guy in the lead-up to our fight; much more somber and restrained than I’d ever seen him. I remember how quiet and humble he was at the press conference. He told the Toronto Telegram, “The people here in Canada are very nice. Honestly, I am not saying that just because I am here. I have never been treated so nice in my whole life. There are no people making wisecracks, everybody is friendly—the children, waiters, hotel people, policemen. Everybody is as nice as they could be. It’s a lot different than from where I come from.”
You could tell that he felt the sting of being a social pariah in so many ways. Today the man is an icon, the most recognized face on the planet. Everybody loves him now, but it was a much different story in 1966. Back then, a lot of people—white and black—hated him. There were always interviews in the papers and on TV, with people saying, “My kid’s in the war, my kid went to Vietnam. What the hell is this guy doing? Who does he think he is?” That kind of thing.
I didn’t feel sorry for the guy, but I remember thinking that it must be a hell of a thing when you’re despised in your own country and people make it so clear that they don’t want you to ever come back home. I thought Muhammad must be a pretty strong guy inside. Here he was, facing the wrath of the U.S. government, the wrath of the army, facing possible imprisonment, facing exile from the fight game and not being able to earn a living in his chosen profession. He was bucking a lot of very powerful people, and for what?
Of course, to the Black Muslims, to millions of black people, Ali was a hero. His courage lifted them up and made them proud. He made them feel good about themselves. I could see how it would be very easy to root for somebody like him, who stood up for what he believed and was willing to accept the consequences. To my way of thinking, Ali was a guy who had some big problems, but I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. I had enough on my own plate to worry about—and only 17 days to get ready.
In the meantime, Ungerman was in a dither trying to help Teddy and me prepare for the biggest fight of my life. He made sure to let the newspapers know he was “sparing no expense” by bringing Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano into my camp—again—but it was just window dressing, like it had been for the Terrell fight. Marciano was only interested in getting paid and getting laid, and Joe didn’t do much more than pose for pictures.
To be honest, it was a pain in the ass having those guys around. I just wanted to concentrate on training, but Irving was always setting up silly photo ops, with Joe and me sipping tea or Rocky and me looking at film. If that wasn’t bad enough, Ungerman also brought in Drew “Bundini” Brown, Ali’s longtime cheerleader, confidant and cornerman. They’d had a big falling out a few months earlier over Bundini’s refusal to accept the Nation of Islam’s ban on drinking, and he was finally kicked out of Ali’s entourage after he hocked Muhammad’s championship belt to a Harlem barber for $500.
Ungerman wanted Bundini in my corner because he thought it would do a psych job on Ali, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with the guy. If Bundini was capable of selling out Ali after everything Muhammad had done for him, what the hell would he try with me? A few days before the fight I told Irving, “Get him the hell out of here. It’s like having a spy in my camp!” Bundini didn’t stick around after that.
My plan for the fight was simple: as the shorter guy, I wanted to stay close to Ali, nullify his speed and prevent him from using the whole ring. I knew I could hurt him to the body, so I wanted to wear him down and immobilize him to the point where I could knock him out.
I wanted to take him past the 12th round, which would be virgin territory for him. I’d gone 15 rounds with Terrell, but Muhammad had never been there before. I also wanted to make it rough. The rougher, the better. There’s more body contact at close quarters, and fights have a different feel at that range. When I’m in close, I feel like I’m the boss and I can impose my will on anybody.
It was a good plan, but the mistake we made, which I never realized at the time, was doing all my sparring in the small ring at the Lansdowne gym, which was like a snake pit.
The two quickest guys I worked with—Billy Joiner and Alvin “Blue” Lewis—were both fast, slick guys, but I had no trouble at all trapping them on the ropes and banging them to the body. It’s okay for a stick-and-move guy to work in a small ring, but for me it was too easy. Lewis, who was still an amateur, went home to Detroit after I busted him up pretty badly in the rib cage. Joiner, the 1962 U.S. Golden Gloves champion at light heavyweight, was 86–6 as an amateur—and two of those losses were to Ali. His style was pretty similar to Muhammad’s, and I was handling him with no problem.
Because time was so short, I did more running for this fight than was normal for me. To help with conditioning, we also brought in the renowned fitness guru Lloyd Percival—the guy who wrote the tips on those Kellogg’s trading cards I’d studied as a kid. I didn’t want Lynne and the boys being bothered by all the distractions, so I moved out of the house and into the Seaway Towers hotel, where I got up at seven in the morning and did four miles of jogging and wind sprints. In the afternoons, Teddy and I went to Lansdowne to spar with Lewis, Joiner or the other guys we had in camp: Hubert Hilton, Greatest Crawford and Richie Pittman, an old-timer who’d been a sparring partner for Ali, Liston and Patterson.
The day before the fight, the Canadian Press ran an interview with Ali and Dundee in which they called me a dirty fighter. “I know he fights dirty, I’ve seen it, but if Georgie tries it with me he’s going to be in real trouble,” Ali told the reporter. “Still, I can’t figure on putting him away early. He’s never been down, let alone out. I had a dream about it. I kept hitting him and hitting him and he wouldn’t go down, and pretty soon I was so tired, I could hardly keep punching. He kept punching and getting stronger. Man, I woke up in a sweat.”
Dundee was more succinct. “Chuvalo is dirty—and he’s good at it,” Angelo said. “He’s a tough guy who would fight a lion, and he can punch. We gotta watch out for his left. A guy like Chuvalo, you could hit him over the head with a pipe in a dark alley and he would turn around and hurt you with a left hook. We gotta watch out for that.”
That Ali was a 7–1 betting favorite struck me as absurd. I remember thinking, “Why should this guy be such an overwhelming favorite to knock me out?” That had never happened before, so why would it happen now? For people to think this was going to be an easy night for Ali seemed to be pretty unsound judgment.
At the official weigh-in, I was 216 pounds and Ali was 214½. On the afternoon of the fight, I had a nice meal of broiled filet of sole and then took a nap. When the bell rang a few hours later, he came directly to me—and it took all of about 30 seconds for me to realize he was the fastest fighter I’d ever seen.
It’s one thing to expect it; it’s another thing to feel it, live it. When you experience that kind of speed up close, there’s nothing to compare it against.
In the opening round, Ali tried to psych me out by holding me close behind the head while exposing his gut, like he was inviting me to rip out his kidneys. I knew what he was doing, holding me close enough so that my punching a short distance wouldn’t have that much velocity, but I gladly obliged him by pounding 15 short rights to his ribs. Today, people say to me, “Wow, the cat opened up and let you nail him to the body!” That’s true. But if you notice, he only did it once.
For most of the next hour, that was the story. A crowd of 13,540 (which paid what was then a Canadian record gate of about $165,000) watched as I kept trying to bull my way inside while Ali jabbed and moved, relying on his quick feet to get him out of trouble whenever I tried to trap him on the ropes.
Against the ropes is where I wanted him, so I naturally kept going to his body to try to slow him down. Probably 80 per cent of my punches were body shots. Over the years a lot has been said and written about me supposedly deliberately throwing low blows, but that’s not true. A few of my punches did land south of the border (one of which was immortalized in a great full-page p
hoto in Life magazine the week after the fight), but in most cases it only looked like they were low because Ali was wearing his cup about six inches higher than normal.
Dundee knew I was a body puncher, so he had a special cup made for Muhammad. It was made to fight George Chuvalo. In order to disguise it, they had to get custom-made trunks. I knew it as soon as I saw Ali in the ring. When I saw the top of his bright red jock a couple of inches above his belt line, I felt like Elmer Fudd when he fought Bugs Bunny. In the cartoon, Bugs wore his trunks up around his ears in order to avoid getting hit.
The referee was a clothing salesman named Jackie Silvers. Like everybody else, he could see that Ali’s trunks were way too high, but what could he do about it? Still, I’ve got to give Silvers credit for letting us fight. He was the complete opposite of what Sammy Luftspring had been when I fought Terrell.
Afterward, in response to Dundee complaining long and loud about my “dirty” tactics, Silvers told the reporters that he “didn’t want to ruin a good fight by being too intrusive.” I thought that was pretty good. When The Ring’s Nat Fleischer asked him about it, Silvers replied, “The low punches were of no consequence. They weren’t hurting Clay. Chuvalo is not a low-blow hitter, he’s a body banger. If you’re going to be watching that close for low blows, there would be no fight.”
Ali’s left hand was like greased lightning, but there wasn’t a lot behind it. His jab had more zing than sting, but it was a lot tougher for me to cuff aside, like I did with Terrell. Once in a while he tried to turn the jab into a power punch by putting all his weight behind it, but it wasn’t a whole lot harder.
To this day, people say to me, “He really hit you, he really pounded on you.” Maybe it looks that way, but I wasn’t taking any real hard shots. They weren’t nearly as hard as some of the punches I’d taken before, like from Mike DeJohn. And I got hit a lot harder by Mel Turnbow and George Foreman in later fights. But because of Muhammad’s speed, because of his movement, a lot of people think I took a real beating. When they ask if I was worried about getting hurt I have to laugh, because in my mind I always said to myself that I couldn’t be hurt. In a crazy kind of way, I felt indestructible. If another fighter said that about himself, I’d start laughing, but to my own ego, to my own sense of identity, that’s how it was. It made me feel special.
When I say Ali’s speed was amazing, I’m not just referring to his hands. When he moved his legs and hands at the same time, when he synchronized them, he was really something. In those days, heavyweights didn’t move around very much, so he really looked different. Before him, the only guys I ever saw move around the ring remotely like that were Jersey Joe Walcott and a blown-up light heavyweight, Billy Conn.
What surprised me the most about Muhammad was that he threw so accurately when he was in full motion. He’d be out of punching range, but as he moved back in he would already be starting to throw his punch, right on target. If I waited until he was back in range, it was already too late. I got hit, no question, but I was never hurt and he never landed anything hard in the most dangerous area, which is right along the jaw-line and up behind the ears. Most of the time he caught me high on the head—and I can take punches high on the head all night long.
As fast as Muhammad was, I still managed to shake him up three or four times. In Rounds 5 and 6 I nailed him with some left hooks that got his attention, and in the 15th I backed him up and had him hurt. He definitely proved he could take a punch—something nobody talked about before our fight, but which everybody wrote about afterward. He had a real talent for riding punches and being able to weather the storm when he was hurt. I know I hurt him to the body at times, and I should have followed up by punching to his head, but he was just too damn quick on his feet.
I’m sometimes still asked why I didn’t bob and weave more against Ali instead of going straight forward. The answer is pretty obvious when you watch the film. When you fight a quick guy and try to weave your way inside, you’re bent down and not positioned properly to strike, because he’s backing up. Bobbing and weaving is only effective when the other guy is right on top of you, but that wasn’t where Ali wanted to be with me. At close range I could hurt him—and he knew it.
Under Toronto’s five-point must system, Silvers scored the fight 73–63. The two judges, Tony Canzano and Jackie Johnson, had it 74–63. By rounds, Silvers had Ali winning nine and me winning two, with four even. Canzano scored it 12–1–2 and Johnson 13–1–1. The Ring scored it 72–62 and gave me Rounds 1, 2 and 12, with Round 8 even.
As the scores were being read, my oldest son, Mitchell, who was six at the time, climbed up into the ring. He gave me a big hug, but he had tears in his eyes. I felt bad for the little guy.
There was a lot of talk about me being the first to go 15 rounds with Ali, and people still bring it up because the fight has been replayed hundreds of times on TV in Canada and the U.S. At first I thought all the talk about my durability was a negative thing, but then I realized it was kind of special. The average person can’t conceive what it’s like to fight 15 rounds; that was the exclusive property of world champions and top-10 contenders. And now that the championship distance is 12 rounds, it will never happen again, so I guess it was special. And I can’t imagine anything that comes close to matching what that feels like.
When people meet me and say, “George, you went the distance with Muhammad Ali!” I say, “No, you’ve got it wrong. He went the distance with me.” When it was all over, he was the guy who went to the hospital because he was pissing blood. Me? I got to go dancing with my wife. No question I got the best of that deal.
In a crazy way, that fight is what defines me for a lot of my fellow Canadians, but it took a long time before I came to appreciate how good it made them feel. It happened almost 50 years ago, but I still hear it all the time, that it made Canadians proud. I feel happy about that, because it means the fight will kind of live forever. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get asked about it, and it’s always the same: “Hey George, you rumbled with Muhammad Ali! What a great fight!”
Although I was disappointed about losing to Ali, it was nice to finally get some positive press. Not surprisingly, it was mostly from U.S. writers rather than Canadians. Gilbert Rogin’s cover story in Sports Illustrated was headlined “A Battle of the Lionhearted” and described me as being “far tougher and more persevering than any lion, and it was these attributes which made the fight.” The New York Herald Tribune story said, “George Chuvalo deserves an apology from all who derided him. One-sided as a fight could be in points, he made this a memorable battle. It was a far, far better show than anyone could have expected. There wasn’t anything questionable or distasteful about it.” The New York Times report took a similar turn: “Some of us said that this Canadian should have been selling peanuts in the aisles rather than throwing punches in the ring. We were wrong. Cassius Clay has never been given a harder, more bruising fight. Chuvalo was the honest worker. He comes to fight. He wasn’t scared, or cocky or overconfident. He was willing to take a lot of punishment for the opportunity to give some. And he did.”
Even Joe Louis weighed in. He was signed up by the Canadian Press to write a ringside report, which was published under his byline in papers all across the country. “They can run and most of the time they can hide,” wrote Joe. “Cassius Clay hid long enough for George Chuvalo to get tired, so he’s still heavyweight champion of the world. But don’t let anyone say that George didn’t make this the best heavyweight championship fight since Rocky Marciano knocked out Archie Moore in 1956.”
Ali told the Toronto Star I was the toughest guy he’d fought to that point, adding, “I kept saying he was tough—tougher than Liston, tougher than Patterson—but people thought I was just trying to build up the gate. Now you know I was right.” That was nice—as was the last word from Dundee, who told the Star, “Chuvalo fought the greatest fight of his life. Canadians ought to be real proud of this man. I was proud of him … and I was in the other guy’s
corner.”
As for my minuscule payday, it wasn’t until decades later that I learned more, after Globe and Mail sportswriter William Houston got hold of the old accounting books from Maple Leaf Gardens. According to the MLG records, Ali received $125,000 and I was paid $49,000. Off the top, Irving pocketed $24,000 from my cut as a promoter’s fee, even though the Ontario Athletic Commission’s regulation that prohibited managers from promoting cards on which their fighters appeared. According to the terms of our contract, that left me with 50 per cent of the remaining $25,000—meaning that I fought 15 grueling rounds with one of the greatest champions in boxing history for $12,500 … in Canadian money, no less!
Contrary to his self-proclaimed and carefully cultivated philanthropic image, Ungerman entitled himself to $36,500 from my total purse of $49,000—and for that piece of the action he never had to take a single punch. I can only imagine the kind of creative accounting he came up with for several other of my fights that he promoted.
Oh yeah, one other thing. The night after the fight, Lynne and I, my cousin Eddie and his wife, Millie, were among several hundred Torontonians who reported seeing three UFOs alternately hovering and then moving at high speed across the sky above the city. With colors ranging from a glowing white to red, green and blue, the objects were unlike any commercial aircraft I’d ever seen before—or since.
The authorities never issued an official explanation for the mass sighting, but I like to think that maybe Muhammad and I had some extraterrestrial fight fans tapping into that closed-circuit telecast …
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