Boxing’s Black Eye   The race-related talk for the last few years has been all about baseball. So many concerns, so little activity, so waiting on results. • The decline of the black ballplayer seems to be the new epidemic: The sport that changed racial relations and acceptance in America has an African-American population of around 8 percent, less than half of what it was in 1997 (17 percent). • But with all the concern about the lack of blacks in baseball, another plague has slipped under the race radar in sports. • If you think baseball has a black problem, start looking at boxing… Scoop Jackson, espn.com

Esquire Covers Commemorate Boxing’s Prime There was a time when the sport of boxing actually had what one might call “juice.” Boxing once enjoyed broad cultural capital, as evidenced in words such as “pugilist” and phrases such as “the sweet science,” which echoed across everything from sweaty boxing gyms to haughty literary salons. I am reminded of boxing’s back-in-the-day ethos every time I see the George Lois-designed Esquire magazine cover from December 1963. This particular cover features a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston’s mean mug, while he sports a red and white Santa Claus hat. Might this image be what The Godfather of Soul had in mind when he said “Santa Claus go straight to the ghetto”? —Todd Boyd, sports.espn.go.com 

Electronic Arts Announces New Boxing Video Game Project: Fight Night Round 4 In a glitzy event Wednesday that brought in media from around the world and some of the top boxers in the sport’s history, Electronic Arts launched the development of its Fight Night Round 4 video game, promising it will raise this virtual world to new heights of realism. • The event at the company’s Burnaby campus was a hyped fusion of sports, entertainment and technology, blurring the boundaries between all three. With pulsing music and an authentic boxing ring set up in the games giant’s motion capture studio, “Sugar” Ray Leonard, Lennox Lewis and Ronald “Winky” Wright all came bounding out from behind a curtain to take centre stage under a sea of red lights and cameras that would capture their every move. —Yvonne Zacharias, Vancouver Sun

pound4pounddesign.com

Excerpt: Ebony, January 1975

MUHAMMAD ALI CHALLENGES BLACK MEN

‘Respect your women; love and protect your children; stand up for what you believe’

By Charles L. Sanders.

¶ 4           

Ali paused at the top of the plane’s steps long enough to savor the cheers of the crowd—paused just long enough. His timing is phenomenal and he is as much a master of showmanship as is Cab Calloway. He stood up there like a Black Prince. His well-fitting brown suit picked up, in the sunlight, the copper in his skin and he sort of, with his smile and all, sparkled like a penny polished with Bon Ami. His face was unscarred and, as men faces can be was something approaching beautiful. He bounded down the steps and plunged into the sea of people surging toward the plane and he headed toward Mrs. Odessa Clay, his mother, who stood a bit apart from the crowd wearing the white mink stole Ali gave her not long ago. The Champ, who cuts and batters men in the ring and sends them, as he sent Joe Frazier, on trips of suffering and pain, greeted his mother with a tender embrace.

¶ 19

“You mentioned something about me always standing up when my mother comes in a room,” [Ali] he said “One of the reasons I do it is because she’s my mother and she’s the one who gave me life.  But another reason is that all Muslims give great honor to womanhood, the black woman mainly, because the Hon. Elijah Muhammad teaches us that she is the Queen of the Planet and the Mother of Civilization. If a man doesn’t respect his woman then he doesn’t respect himself, for woman is man’s field which produces his greatest crop, his children, and if man doesn’t protect his field then bad children are produced.”

¶ 31

“I challenge all black men to not just play with their children and think about how cute they are and buy them all kinds of pretty things. I challenge them to help their children find their purpose in life and then see that the purpose is fulfilled.” —Muhammad Ali

Ali brought beauty and grace to the most uncompromising of sports. Thank you.

(B/W photo by Howard Bingham)