adminLONDON. — Ken Norton, the fighter, who has died aged 70, boxed with uncommon elasticity for someone who looked like a bodybuilder, never more so than the night he pounded away on Muhammad Ali. Even allowing for boxing’s penchant for mythologising its past, Ken Norton, who has died in Las Vegas was some heavyweight.
He won a world title in Ali’s gilded era, breaking his jaw when beating him on the most memorable night of his own career, and there is no reason to doubt he would have been similarly impressive now. Could he have beaten either of the Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, who between them own all four current versions of the championship?
He certainly would have delivered them more grief than contenders who consistently have come up short over the past decade, and he would have been formidable opposition for everyone else in a depleted field.
Unlike many of the undisciplined American heavyweights since the 60s and 70s, Norton was a gym-sculpted athlete, muscles bulging on a 6ft 3in, 220lb frame so glisteningly perfect it won him the role of the slave Mede in the 1975 movie, Mandingo.
Yet he boxed with uncommon elasticity for someone who looked like a bodybuilder, probably never more effectively than the night in 1973 when he pounded away on Ali for 12 rounds to win the NABF title.
Ali entered the ring in the Sports Arena in San Diego wearing a white robe given to him by Elvis Presley, embroidered with the words “People’s Champion” and weighed down with sparkling rhinestones.
He left with a grotesquely swollen jaw, the result of a devastating Norton left hook. — Telegraph.
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