[johnforbes]

Entertaining fellow, but lost 5 title bouts.

The Liston bout was controversial, and arguably the knockout blow was invisible.

He lost to Jimmy Young very obviously, but the ref gave it to him.

Ali was a draft-dodger. He claimed racism and religous objection.

17,000 draftees died in Vietnam, and a lot of them merely wished they could sit in a mansion like pampered Ali and await the next million dollar boxing match.

The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years.

The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.

One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,148 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.7 million who served.

[Dogzilla]

That was a war that never should have taken place. It was sponsored by the military industrial complex, who had learned from WWII how easy it is to make gazillions of $$$$ from the fighting.

[brandon]

I don't blame the man one bit. Glad I wasn't alive for it.

Woof!

[johnforbes]

If you were not of draft age, few people would care.

Indeed, the leftists in the media love Ali because he dodged the draft.

Ali, a millionaire, sat with his staff of lawyers and came up with some race/religion claim for conscientious objection.

Poor kids had to go, and Ali's draft board surely had to move to the next kid and take him.

This matters because of all the talk of justice and Obama's recent claim that Ali "fought for us," by which he must have meant blacks.

[sillydaddy]

There was a joke back then.....

The only rich guy that went to Vietnam....was Bob Hope! :lol:

[Dogzilla]

I was right in the middle of it, but I drew a pretty high number.....don't recall zackly what it was, but in the end, it was good enough. After school, I went with science teaching, because that gave me a guaranteed deferment. It also gave me access to all kinds of young pussy (Just ask Interrible....he'll tell ya.) LOL

I always did like Ali.....Got to meet him a few years back. He was already shaking pretty bad, but I still felt very humbled to shake his hand

[johnforbes]

My older brother, a math teacher, was deferred as a teacher.

Pretty much everybody liked Clay/Ali because he was almost childlike in his demeanor.

He barely made it through high school (dyslexia?), so I always assumed he might have been a puppet of the Black Muslims in terms of all that.

But who knows? Perhaps he really did have some conscientious objection which he was simply not educated enough to articulate very well.

But his local draft board had to go to the next kid, and that kid didn't have money or fame.

But really, who wants to pretend to be on drugs, or go to divinity school, or flee to Canada?

I listened to my uncle, who was a Marine rifleman on Iwo when the second flag was raised, and went ahead into the military.