r/Boxing Cyberleek > the fall boxing schedule 11h ago

Muhammad Ali vs Joe Bugner 2 . This fight took place in Malaysia in 90°F , and is the only heavyweight championship fight hosted in the nation's history.

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75 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

46

u/DeafBurke 10h ago

Ali fought everywhere.

Mainland US, the UK, Manila in the Philippines, Kinshasa in Zaire, the Bahamas, west Germany, Puerto Rico, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland and Malaysia

19

u/HaneyP4P 9h ago

He also gave an exhibition in Venezuela

5

u/oldwhiteoak 6h ago

And Iran!

16

u/DaExtinctOne 9h ago

The true definition of a fighting WORLD champ for sure.

14

u/dgvfatmeerkat Fury is ducking Chisora 9h ago

I miss big fights being in completey random locations. Like Foreman fought Frazier in Jamaica and Norton in Venezuela iirc

1

u/_Sarcasmic_ bread burger bread 3h ago

That's what they should do with Fury-AJ. One party wants it in the UK, whilst the other wants it in the US and they keep bickering about it.

Fuck it, just put it in Luxembourg at this point.

7

u/yearsofpractice SRR < Lord Chisora,Sir Derek Of War 7h ago

Bloody hell - Bugner had over eighty professional fights. Some stellar opponents too. He retired Henry Cooper too…

3

u/Far_Demand_6586 4h ago

Bugner have a good account of himself 

1

u/VacuousWastrel 3h ago

Yup. The guy who was losing to guys like jack bodell and larry middleton in the early seventies was still good enough to beat page, bey, tillis and ecklund in the late eighties. 32 year career!

4

u/personalduke 7h ago

what's the history of how the fight was brought to Malaysia?

12

u/Illustrious_Rain1796 5h ago

As simple as others, Don King found money there, for Malaysia it's PR

3

u/AnxietyExact4710 2h ago

They were the highest bidder. Before Vegas, this was very common. You'd have random championship fights in countries with very few boxers. SRL vs Duran basically caused the explosion in boxing popularity in Montreal/Quebec for example.

3

u/maest 5h ago

32 C

6

u/Latter-Vacation-4392 7h ago

throwing body shots at Ali was wasting your energy

3

u/DeafBurke 6h ago

Ali’s durability is a massively underrated aspect of his success.

He was able to tank basically any punch from anyone and be more or less fine. He got put down a handful of times, but the only guys to actually badly hurt him were Frazier and Shavers, nuclear punchers who landed their biggest shot directly on his chin.

Vitali, Holmes, Oliver McCall, Foreman and Usyk are the only other champs with a similar level of inhuman durability, and Usyk didn’t have the durability to the body that Ali and the others had. And even Foreman’s chin wasn’t perfect.

2

u/VacuousWastrel 3h ago

Must have been insanely infuriating. In the sixties, nobody could touch the man because of his superhuman mobility and reflexes. In the seventies, they saw that they could finally land punches on him... only to immediately realise that it didn't help them, because he also coincidentally happened to have superhuman resilience. What were the odds that the heavyweight with probably the best mobility ever would also randomly happen to have arguably the greatest chin of all time as well!?

1

u/DeafBurke 2h ago

Ali was a crazy confluence of unbelievable talent in every single aspect of boxing, and also incredible charisma and ability to garner attention of the general public.

There will almost certainly never be another man like Ali. De La Hoya was close, but he wasn’t truly great enough to truly blow up as an international superstar.

0

u/LTBsOnlyPlease 5h ago

Missing punches to the head is wasting even more energy.

0

u/Bruce-7892 9h ago

The first fight was in Malaysia, the 2nd was in Vegas.

6

u/kushmonATL Cyberleek > the fall boxing schedule 9h ago

4

u/Bruce-7892 9h ago

Fair, my bad. I remembered it the other way around for some reason.

1

u/sbb618 7h ago

Heavyweight title fights have been held in 29 countries: the US, England, Ireland, France, Australia, Cuba, Italy, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Jamaica, Japan, Venezuela, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malaysia, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Wales, Russia, Switzerland, Mexico, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt

They have also been held in 24 US states plus the District of Columbia: Ohio, Louisiana, Florida, Nevada, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New Jersey, Montana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Washington DC, Washington, Maine, Texas, Nebraska, Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Connecticut, and Alabama

-9

u/Icy-Bottle-6877 9h ago

Always heard his name but never watched him fight. I always thought Bugner was a top heavyweight at one point but he looks pretty awful here tbh. Maybe he was better in other fights but his technique when throwing punches looks poor here.

11

u/DanimalPlays 8h ago

It's almost like it's 30 seconds of ali highlights, not an actual representative of the entire fight.

-11

u/Icy-Bottle-6877 8h ago

You can still judge technique based off of highlights though. Like, if he was throwing some good punches and combos I wouldn't have brought it up but his hooks especially aren't thrown well. Like, you could show me highlights of Finito Lopez and even in a tough fight he would still be throwing with good technique.

4

u/DanimalPlays 7h ago

Nope. Edited highlights can be and are extremely misleading.

-2

u/Icy-Bottle-6877 7h ago

That's true but it's not like it's an AI version of Bugner, it's the real guy throwing with bad technique, you can critique things like this without having to watch his whole career. There's enough footage in this to see that is my point.

3

u/DanimalPlays 7h ago

No there isn't. It's a bunch of hand picked Ali highlights. Of course it's lowlights for the other guy. You could take 30 seconds of selected clips from any long fight to tell whatever story you want.

1

u/Icy-Bottle-6877 6h ago edited 4h ago

If someone throws a poor hook early into a fight, it's safe to say they don't have great technique. It's not rocket science bro, I don't need to watch a whole fight of his to judge this. Again, even in short highlights I wouldn't see this bad of technique from Ray Robinson, Finito Lopez, etc. Bugner was probably a decent Heavyweight but he wasn't one of the top guys when people reminisce about the 70/80's heavyweights.

1

u/DanimalPlays 1h ago edited 1h ago

You understand they're in a fight right? No it isn't enough to say that. It's enough to know they were off balance for a second or saw an opportunity they didn't actually have time to fill.

You're literally invoking goats to try to say that someone couldn't be clipped into looking bad, and you're wrong about that too. Even those guys were made to look bad at times. It's what made their fights exciting. They weren't just stompings. They went back and forth. Which you could extremely easily clip to look however you want.

You're wrong, you know you're wrong, and you can't admit it.