It’s not where you are start but where you finish that counts!! This was Cassius Clay’s (Muhammad Ali) main gym throughout his career. ? 5th Street gym was actually a rat infested termite ridden gym at the corner of Washington Avenue & Fifth Street. To get there you had to enter a door next to […]
Why waste time? Cassius Clay was just 18 when he traveled by train from Louisville Kentucky to Miami Beach. It was December 19, 1960 and Angelo Dundee (trainer at 5th Street Gym) told him to wait until after Christmas but Cassius insisted on coming down immediately. Hank Kaplan (boxing historian in Miami beach) recalls the […]
Ali: His Olympics Story Still as Cassius Clay, with an impressive amateur record of over 100 victories, shortly after he graduated high school he headed off to Italy to compete in the Olympics. On September 5, 1960, he was being inaugurated with the gold medal winner for boxing. While many of the other young fighters […]
Joe Elsby Martin was Muhammad Ali’s First Boxing Teacher. Joe Elsby Martin came to Louisville Kentucky in 1937 and joined the Louisville Police Department, serving until his retirement in 1974. In 1938, he became a boxing coach at the local recreation center called Columbia Gym in Louisville (now the student center of Spalding University). In […]
Grace Community Center Gym Some gyms inspire from a distance. Some transcend the tides of time. Grace Community Center Gym holds on through history, though its doors have long since closed, because of one of the Greatest boxers of all time. Ali. Once a young Cassius Clay dedicated himself to boxing, it was about all […]
Muhammad Ali: The Columbia Gym Today Today, Spalding University’s athletic departments stands where Columbia Gym once reigned. In honor of Muhammad Ali and his illustrious career, the University recently renamed the location back to its original: Columbia Gym. Shortly after Muhammad Ali’s death in 2016, Spalding University placed a replica of that Schwinn bicycle Ali […]
Muhammad Ali listening attentively to Joe Martin. Six weeks after that fateful day, having lost his precious, beloved bicycle, 12-year-old Clay got into the ring with another boy his age. He was a white boy and Cassius Clay enjoyed his first victory. As the next several years of his training unfolded, Joe Martin took a […]
Cassius Clay was born on January 17, 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky. One day, he would become more commonly known as Mohammed Ali, and during his childhood, while out riding his bike, events unfolded that changed the true course of it. His brand-new $60 red and white Schwinn bicycle that he cherished was parked outside the […]
Nestled within the Catskill Mountains in New York was Grossinger’s Training Camp. It was an incredible location located next door to Grossinger’s resort camp and the Grossinger Hotel. The resort enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s. It offered a quiet retreat ideal for fighters seeking an escape from the concrete jungles of big cities. Sprawling […]
Gramercy Gym®* Turning off 14th Street off Irving Place in the heart of New York City, slipping past a collection of garbage cans standing guard by the curb, and then climbing two creaking flights of stairs, an ambitious young boxer would hear the snarl of a large dog on the other size of a large, […]