![]() But if he had $40,000 in $10 bills, there was no way he'd give any of that away. To him a check was just a piece of paper. He didn't even associate that with money. "He'd reach in his pocket and pull out checks that were all tattered. "He had this crazy, crazy need for cash," his accountant Frank Saccone said. He earned it the hard way and was determined to keep it'." Don't make me look bad, Willie.' Pep remembers: 'Rocky was a tough guy with a buck. The next thing I knew he kicked me under the bar." After the pair excused themselves from the group, Marciano told him: 'I'm not gonna spend any money, and I don't want you to spend any. "But then I saw Rocky was squirming under his seat. "I figured I'd take care of the next round," Pep told Marciano's biographer, Everett Skehan. Willie Pep, the great featherweight and friend of Marciano, once told how he tried to buy a round while out with Rocky and some wealthy men in a Baltimore nightclub. But $3m in ring earnings, an addict's craving for more and an aversion to paying for anything – he even used wires to avoid putting a dime in public phone boxes – ensured that was unlikely to happen. Marciano always feared a return trip to the cloying poverty of his upbringing. He kissed the cheeks of made men and did deals with spaccones, who saw him coming from blocks way. Marciano had remained active in other ways following his final fight against Archie Moore in 1956. Retirement had been better for his wallet than his waistline: the energy burnt with women other than his wife a timid counter to his binges on rich Italian food and lack of exercise. Photograph: Corbisīy the time Rocky Marciano faced Ali, he had not fought for 13 years. THE ROCK RETURNSĢ3 September 1952: Rocky Marciano knocks out Joe Walcott in the 13th round of their world heavyweight title bout in Philadelphia. He was short of money and options – "I was in the deep-freeze part of my exile and there was no thaw in sight", he confessed in his autobiography – and the Super Fight was born. Woroner offered Ali $9,999 to film a fantasy fight against Marciano and he accepted. This being boxing, an accommodation was reached. The NCR 315's circuit boards had calculated that Ali would have lost in the quarter-finals to Jim Jeffries – a fighter Ali dismissed as "history's clumsiest, most slow-footed heavyweight." The government had stolen his title, he fumed, and now Woroner was taking his good name. Wars! Hitler's Germany against the Roman Empire! Napoleon versus Alexander the Great! How about election campaigns? George Washington versus Franklin Roosevelt! Abraham Lincoln against George Wallace! And debates? Socrates takes on Karl Marx! Thoreau against Jean-Paul Sartre! Why not? Why not?"īut before Woroner could solve every pub argument in history, Ali hit him with a $1m lawsuit for defamation. "We could do more than sports," he told Sports Illustrated. Woroner, incidentally, was not someone acquainted with hubris. ![]() From the computer readouts, he produced breathless blow-by-blow broadcasts, peddled the tapes to 380 stations the world around and, after 15 elimination bouts, let it be known last December that Computer Fighter No.004 (Rocky Marciano) had knocked out Computer Fighter No.002 (Jack Dempsey) in the 13th round of the finals." Sullivan to Muhammad Ali) to keypunch perforations, fed them into a National Cash Register 315 computer and let them fight: the bareknucklers v the gloved sluggers, the rigid standers v the dodging dancers, the quick v the dead. He reduced 16 magnificent fighters (from John L. Woroner, it added, "brought to our wondering ears, via radio and computer, the All-Time Heavyweight Tournament and Championship Fight. NCR 315', hailed the tournament as "one of the most astonishing marketing successes in radio history". Soon it had 12 million listeners.Ī flattering 1968 Sports Illustrated piece, entitled 'And In This Corner. ![]() A fantasy radio boxing tournament to determine the best heavyweight of all time with a twist: the results would be calculated by a second-generation NCR 315 computer, packed with 5k of handmade core memory and the icy dispassion of an implacable neutral. While Ali's career was being parked in a pallid wasteland for nearly four years, the best years of his fighting life, Woroner's was accelerating from first to fifth. It was Murry Woroner, a short, chunky, balding advertising executive from Miami, who was among the first to grasp that marrying fantasy with nascent computer technology was a licence to print money.
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