Meanwhile, Zach continued counting—with some blatant favoritism thrown in for good measure: “… four … five … six … seven—are you okay, Jerry? Are you okay?—eight … nine … ten!”
Unbelievable! Why not just ask Quarry if he needed something for his headache, or maybe a pillow to kneel on?
Officially, the knockout came with one second left in Round 7—and the crowd went berserk. As Teddy and Irving mobbed me in the middle of the ring, Quarry’s handlers stormed out of his corner and tried to get at Clayton. Cops and security guards materialized out of nowhere as people tried to climb through the ropes.
Quarry’s post-fight comments to the reporters were predictable. “Nobody knocks me out,” he said. “I wasn’t hurt. I was looking at the clock and I couldn’t hear the count because the crowd was yelling so much. I got gypped. I got ruined. This has destroyed me. I could have gotten up, but I couldn’t tell if he was at eight or nine or 10 just by his fingers.”
Like I said, predictable.
In an interview with The Ring, Clayton said, “I was signaling and calling the count right in Quarry’s ear. If I had allowed him to continue, I would have been crucified. They would have blown the place up.”
Lew Eskin broke down the KO this way in his report for Boxing Illustrated: “Jerry was seemingly on his way to victory when George dropped him with a smash to the head. Jerry went sailing backwards, hit the ropes, slumped to the canvas, then bounced up at the count of three before dropping to one knee. He removed his mouthpiece, holding it in his right hand as he rested the arm on the ropes and listened to Zach Clayton count him out. A fraction of a second after Zach shouted ‘10!’ into his ear and waved his hands in the out signal, Quarry jumped up and started screaming that he had been ‘short-counted.’ He wasn’t.”
All I can say is if Quarry couldn’t tell nine from 10, it must have been a pretty good punch. Jerry’s brother Mike, who was a world-ranked light heavyweight contender, came to my dressing room afterward and said, “My family is complaining, but you won the fight fair and square, George.” That made me feel pretty good.
Quarry had 25 more fights after I knocked him out. In his very next outing (March 3, 1970), he was decked by Rufus Brassell (my old sparring partner) at the end of the first round in Miami before coming back to stop Brassell in the second. Seven months later, after knocking out Mac Foster and Stamford Harris, Jerry was handpicked to be Ali’s opponent in Atlanta after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Muhammad’s banishment from boxing was unconstitutional. Ali’s jab carved up Quarry’s face, and his corner stopped the fight after Round 3. Ironically, one of the judges for that bout was Lew Eskin of Boxing Illustrated—the same guy who had so astutely analyzed my KO of Jerry in the magazine story.
Quarry then strung together six straight wins before being stopped by Ali again in their 1972 rematch. He rebounded to win a tough 12-rounder over Ron Lyle and starched big-punching Earnie Shavers in one round in ‘73, but after being knocked out for the second time by Frazier (1974) and stopped by Ken Norton (1975), Jerry called it quits—at least for a while. Two years after the loss to Norton, he returned at age 32 to KO fringe contender Lorenzo Zanon—after which he officially announced his retirement—only to come back again, this time as a cruiserweight, to knock out Lupe Guerra and beat James Williams in 1983.
While he was preparing for that comeback, Quarry was featured in a Sports Illustrated story about health problems among retired fighters. When he scored poorly on a series of cognitive tests, the experts concluded he was in the early stages of dementia pugilistica, an atrophy of the brain from repeated blows to the head. He retired for the third time after winning a majority decision over Williams, but on October 30, 1992, Jerry was back in the ring for one last fight, a six-rounder against somebody named Ron Cranmer in Aurora, Colorado.
Cranmer’s record was only 3–4–1, but by that time Quarry was 47 years old and his physical and mental decline was painfully obvious. He lost all six rounds and reportedly pocketed only $1,050 to serve as a human punching bag.
The last time I saw Jerry was on October 14, 1995, at his induction into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in Los Angeles. When I went over to say hello and shake his hand, he had no clue who I was; he just stared at me blankly and mumbled, “You look like you could be a fighter.”
Between Christmas and New Year’s 1998, after being hospitalized with pneumonia, Jerry went into cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness. He died on January 3, 1999, at age 53.
ROUND 11
FIVE MONTHS WENT BY BEFORE I FOUGHT AGAIN. Those uppercuts that Quarry landed just before I put him away had ripped open the scar tissue on my chin from the cut Don Prout originally gave me in 1964, so I took some time off to let it heal. Then my mother passed away from her terminal cancer in early February (I was glad she’d been able to watch me beat Quarry on TV), so Teddy and I didn’t return to a regular training schedule until the spring. I got back in the saddle with a 10-round stoppage of Billy Tiger in Detroit on May 1, 1970.
Tiger was from Miami, where he worked as a regular sparring partner for Ali and Jimmy Ellis at Angelo Dundee’s 5th Street Gym. After showing good knockout power as an amateur, he turned pro in 1964 and won his first eight, but then for some strange reason he ended up fighting the same guys over and over again, which kind of stunted his progress. By the time we fought he was 15–14–2, including five bouts with Willie Thomas, three with Duke Johnson and two with each of Sammy Stone, Florentino Fernandez and Art Miller. But after I knocked him out in the 10th, Billy never fought again.
A week later I was back in Kimberley, British Columbia, to fight a guy named Gino Ricci, who hailed from Noranda, Quebec. Zubray was promoting the show, so I knew it would be … different.
With visions of a sold-out arena dancing in his head, Nick had scheduled the card for the afternoon of May 10, a Sunday, expecting that the entire population would turn out. What Zube didn’t figure on when he made the fight was that the date corresponded with game four of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup final series between the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues. I can still hear him moaning in my dressing room: “That fuckin’ Bobby Orr! He just scored in overtime to give the Bruins their first championship since Christ was a cowboy! George, everybody’s watching the celebration on TV! You’re gonna be fighting in an empty barn!”
That wasn’t Nick’s only surprise of the afternoon. Ten minutes before the main event, he burst into my room to ask if I had any spare trunks. “Why would I have spare trunks?” I replied. Zube looked like he was about to have a stroke. “Because that asshole Ricci doesn’t have any. He thinks somebody stole them,” he said.
Picture the scene moments later: as the lights are dimmed and the sparse—and I mean sparse—crowd settle into their seats, I’m loosening up in the ring when I look across and see Ricci stripping off his robe. Underneath, he’s wearing hockey pants, held up by oversized suspenders, complete with an overstuffed waistband and thick foam kidney pads. I couldn’t believe my eyes; it was the most absurd thing I’d ever seen in the ring. I started laughing so hard it was all I could do to make it back to my corner.
When the bell rang, I was still chuckling. I cuffed Gino around a little bit, then nailed him with a payoff punch to the solar plexus, right between the kidney pads and those oversized suspenders. That was about the only vulnerable spot south of his shoulders. It was all over at 2:17 of the first round.
I’ve always enjoyed visiting the beautiful Pacific Northwest, so after the quick win over Ricci, I spent some time in Vancouver before heading down to Seattle to fight “Sweet” Charlie Reno a couple of weeks later.
Reno worked as a teaching assistant at a high school in nearby Renton, Washington. He turned pro in 1968 and had mixed success, getting stopped by Quarry in five rounds in ‘69, then battling tough Thad Spencer to a 10-round draw in March of 1970. A short, stocky guy, Charlie was a pretty good boxer, but he had problems with his weight, at one time ballooning to over 250
pounds. The day before our fight, a reporter for the Seattle Times described him as “sort of a combination of Archie Moore and Tony Galento.”
The card at the Seattle Coliseum attracted a nice crowd (including George Foreman, who was at ringside), and the referee for the main event was Tacoma native Pat McMurtry—the guy who had beaten me on a decision when I ran out of gas in my New York debut 12 years earlier. Maybe Pat was thinking that Reno might get the same result if our fight went long enough, because he waited until I nearly killed poor Charlie before stopping the bout. I dumped him with the first decent punch I landed and had him on the deck four times in the third round before McMurtry moved in.
In the dressing room afterward, I had a visit from Quarry, who came up from California to take in the show. Two weeks earlier, Jerry had scored a big KO over Mac Foster in New York. We didn’t talk about our fight, just exchanged pleasantries and wished each other luck.
Shortly after we returned to Toronto, Teddy Brenner came calling again, pitching a rematch with Quarry. Ungerman was all for it, of course; he couldn’t wait to get back to New York and act like a big shot. I was somewhat less enthused, and told Brenner that if he couldn’t guarantee us $100,000, he could forget about it. What would be the point? I’d have been happy to fight Jerry for peanut money when nobody thought I could beat him, but the KO had dramatically changed my bargaining position. I had nothing to prove and nothing to gain by beating him a second time. On the other hand, if I took a rematch for chump change and lost, where would that leave me? Why take that risk?
When Brenner finally figured out that I wouldn’t budge on my terms for a rematch with Quarry, he asked if I was interested in taking on George Foreman at the Garden.
Foreman had turned pro the previous summer after winning a gold medal for the U.S. at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Fighting every two weeks or so, he was already 21–0 with 18 KOs. Brenner’s offer of $51,000 sounded all right, but to be honest, I just wanted to rest on my laurels for a while. We’d heard rumblings for weeks that Ali was on the verge of getting his license back and that his management team wanted to maximize the publicity by having his first comeback fight against a white guy in the Deep South. Being the highest-ranked white heavyweight on the planet, I figured they just might pick me.
But Ungerman, as usual, was anxious to pose as a big wheel in New York again. Brenner convinced him that Ali was several months away from launching his comeback, so Irving cajoled me into taking the offer for Foreman. And what happens? A week after we signed the contract to fight at MSG on August 4, Ali’s people held a massive press conference to announce Muhammad’s comeback on October 26 in Atlanta. The opponent? Jerry Quarry—who was guaranteed a cool $400,000!
Foreman was a big, strong 21-year-old with an Olympic gold medal, but other than that, I knew very little about him or his style. In those days there wasn’t the easy access to film that there is today, so fight strategy was often based on stuff your trainer knew about an opponent, or information picked up from sparring partners who had previously worked with him.
When McWhorter found out that George was a converted southpaw, he figured Foreman might go back to “thinking left-handed” if I could keep the pressure on him. With that in mind, we planned to fight him the same way I’d gone after Quarry, by pressuring him with the jab until I could get inside and bang him to the body. The big difference, of course, was that George was a lot taller than Quarry and had a much longer reach, so it figured to be more difficult to get inside. And the fact he sparred a lot with Sonny Liston told us he was probably no stranger to getting pounded to the body.
We set up training camp in the Catskills, and one of the sparring partners Irving brought in was Charley “Devil” Green, a tough light heavyweight from the streets of Harlem who’d supposedly worked with Foreman.
Though he didn’t have a great record, Charley packed a big punch. Earlier that year he’d won a decision over Henry Hank, and before that, as a last-second substitute for Jimmy Ralston, he’d come out of the crowd at Madison Square Garden (after munching on a couple of hot dogs and swilling a couple of beers) to put former world champion Jose Torres on the deck twice before Torres came back to knock him out.
Green was always a wild dresser, very hip for the time. On his first day in camp, he showed up in a frilly white shirt with a long collar, and a lime-green jumpsuit, like a pair of overalls but made with nice material. To this day, when I think of Charley I think of that song “The Age of Aquarius,” by the Fifth Dimension.
Here’s a little aside: in the spring of 2009 I had a presentation scheduled in Hudson Falls, New York. My buddies Mike and Bernie Slattery, huge boxing fans who were accompanying me on the trip, mentioned that Green was incarcerated at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, a couple of hours’ drive from Hudson Falls. Charley had been handed a sentence of 45 years to life after being convicted of killing three people in a Harlem cocaine den in 1983. He always maintained he got a raw deal, but apparently there were eyewitnesses. A few hours after the murders, the cops nabbed Charley, who had taken refuge at his lawyer’s office in Manhattan. When they found him, he was hiding in an airshaft, bare-chested, snorting coke out of a plastic bag and threatening to jump 15 floors to his death.
Anyway, we drove out to the prison and spent an hour with Charley. A practicing black Ethiopian Jew from Mississippi, he shuffled into the visitor’s center wearing a prison-issue shirt and pants and a yarmulke. He looked like a wizened old man on his way to the synagogue—not at all like I remembered him. He didn’t really know who I was, but it was a nice reunion nevertheless. We kibitzed and told old stories for an hour, and he seemed happy that we were there. And I was allowed to give him $50, which is the most a prisoner can accept.
The Foreman fight marked the last time I headlined at Madison Square Garden, and to this day it bugs me that my final appearance there was so unsatisfying—both for me and, if crowd reaction is anything to go by, for a lot of the 12,526 fans who paid to watch it. I truly believe it might have ended differently if referee Arthur Mercante hadn’t been so quick to wave it off.
That’s certainly no knock against Foreman, who proved to be a terrific, heavy-handed puncher. He didn’t always maximize his leverage, but his massive arms were so powerful, it didn’t matter. When I’m asked to compare Foreman and Joe Frazier as punchers, my answer is this: Frazier’s punch was like getting hit at 100 miles per hour by a Pontiac; Foreman’s punch was like getting hit at 50 miles per hour by a Mack truck. Either way, it’s not pretty.
In the opening round I nailed George with a couple of good left hooks to the body, but by the middle of the second, when he started pressing forward behind those big telephone-pole arms, it broke my rhythm. I caught him with a solid right to the head just before the round ended, but it didn’t slow him down much.
Foreman’s jab was straight and very heavy … and believe me, it was no fun being on the receiving end of it. I don’t know if I was more surprised by that jab or by his quick movement, but about a minute into the third he cut off the ring and cracked me with as good a left hook to the jaw as I was ever hit with. Boom! It put me on the ropes in his corner, and as I tried to slide sideways he came back with a right-hand body shot. If you look at the film, I’ve got my right hand up as he lands a good one-two to the head, but I take those punches and then start shooting back to the body because I can see his breathing is getting heavy.
I fought my way off the ropes, but he kept coming forward, pursuing me into my own corner. By now George was missing more punches than he was landing, and while I’ll concede he connected on more than a few of them, at no time did I think I was going to be knocked out—or even really staggered. Quite the opposite, in fact. I knew exactly where I was and what was happening, and I could see that he was getting wild. It’s called “throwing punches out the window.” He was pitching from all angles, but not many were getting through. I don’t think I was hit by one good shot after that big left hook, but for some reason
that’s when Mercante decided to stop the fight. I turned to him and barked, “Are you fucking nuts?”—hardly the reaction of a fighter who supposedly was out on his feet, wouldn’t you say?
I was furious. Sure, a few of George’s big bombs landed with pinpoint accuracy, but it’s not like I was on the verge of being decimated. On the other hand, Foreman breathing through his mouth in just the third round was a sure sign that he lacked stamina, and I figured he’d punch himself out sooner rather than later. Some of the newspaper stories played up the fact that Lynne was screaming for the fight to be stopped because she thought I was badly hurt, so maybe that had something to do with Mercante’s decision. Either way, I wasn’t happy.
Now fast-forward to the spring of 1974. My buddy, sportscaster Mike Anscombe, put together a fundraising banquet in Sarnia, Ontario, with me and future NFL Hall of Famer Larry Csonka as guest speakers. When Csonka canceled at the last minute, Mike lucked out and was able to get Ali to come up from Detroit, where he was on a press tour to publicize his upcoming title challenge against Foreman in Zaire.
As soon as he saw me, Muhammad asked, “George, what do you think about me and George?”
“He throws punches out the window,” I replied.
“That’s what I been hearing,” Ali said. “I’ve got something special in store for him.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but Muhammad was referring to the extraordinarily brilliant rope-a-dope tactic he employed in Kinshasa a few months later en route to knocking Foreman out in the eighth round to win the world championship for the second time.
As he was starting to do with me just before Mercante stopped our fight, Foreman completely exhausted himself against Ali by giving way to emotion. Whether it was frustration or simply bad judgment, he didn’t try to establish a punching rhythm or any real targeting strategy, he just let ’em fly. Probably for the first time in his career, he discovered that punches that miss the mark tire you out a lot quicker than the ones that land.
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