60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
5/21/66 – Muhammad Ali beats Henry Cooper by a TKO in the 6th round
The bout was a rematch of their 1963 meeting, which Ali also won on a TKO due to Cooper's excessive bleeding. At the time, Ali was still a contender, looking for his first match with Sonny Liston ... and didn't really take the match seriously. When Cooper knocked him down in the fourth round, it was a surprise to everyone on hand. Ali came back with a flurry in the fifth, however, at which point the fight had to be stopped.
After the match, he told reporters that he had greatly underestimated Cooper's abilities and called him "the toughest fighter I ever met and the first to really drop me. He's a real fighter."
The experience stayed with him ... even after Joe Frazier knocked Ali down in the 15th round of their 1971 fight, Ali said that he had gone down "more from exhaustion" ... but "the punch Cooper hit me with, he didn't just shake me. He shook my relations back in Africa."
The rematch wasn't nearly as exciting. (It wasn't every day back then that you saw Muhammad Ali hit the canvas ... so this bout would be hard to top!)
Ali cautiously stayed away from Cooper for the first three rounds of the fight, and then began to turn it on a bit more in the 4th and 5th rounds.
During the 5th round, he opened up a cut above Cooper's which began bleeding profusely during the 6th round, at which time the fight was stopped.
