8 Chapter 7 Thrilla in Manila

Chapter 7 Thrilla in Manila By the mid-1970s, Muhammad Ali was perhaps the most famous person in the world. More than anything, fans wanted to see a third fight between Ali and Joe Frazier. On October 1, 1975, the two veteran fighters met in the capital of the Philippines. The event was called the Thrilla in Manila. Ali and Frazier knew each other very well. They battled toe-to-toe for round after round. Each man gave and received awful shots to the head and body. Neither gave in until finally, Frazier had had enough. He could not come out to fight the fifteenth round. Ali won and remained champion. But he had taken a terrible pounding.

In the dressing room afterward, he said, "It was the closest thing to dying."

Some people hoped that Ali would stop fighting after the Manila bout. He had taken a lot of punishment for many years. But Ali kept boxing. He won six more fights, but he was getting hit more and more. He was not as quick as he had once been and could not avoid all the punches. Doctors and others worried that he would be permanently injured. In February 1978, Ali lost his title again. In one of the biggest boxing upsets ever, twenty-four-year-old Leon Spinks beat Ali in Las Vegas. But the old champion had one more comeback in him. Later that same year, Ali, then almost thirty

seven years old, won the title back from Spinks. He became the first person ever to win the heavyweight title three times. By this time, Ali had divorced Khalilah and married Veronica Porsche, whom he had met in 1975. He had two more children with Veronica, daughters Hana and Laila. (Ali also has two other

daughters, Miya and Khaliah, with women who were not his wives.) With his expanding family, Ali finally began to see that it was time to stop fighting. He retired in 1979, but he came back to fight a pair of embarrassing losses. He was beaten easily by fighters he would have defeated in his prime. He was fighting just to make money, not to earn a title. During this time, he continued to move away from the separatist views of the old Nation of Islam. He came to follow simply Islam itself. In 1981, he retired from boxing for good.

In 1984, Ali faced a new and more difficult battle, far from the ring. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which affects the central nervous system. His brain was not making the right connections to some of his muscles anymore, and this affected his ability to move properly. He trembled and had trouble speaking and walking.