Shame on Wilt Chamberlain for disrespecting Ali and his sport. To even think he could be THE man without ever lacing up the gloves before shows not only disrespect but ignorance of the highest order.
It's a real pity the 'fight' never took place. Ali would have gone out of his way to humiliate him before putting him out cold. The beauty of boxing is that when one loses and suffers the humiliation and loss of pride, it is not just mental like in other sports, but oh so brutally humiliating and degrading in a tangible, visual and physical way- the sight of being battered, bloodied, bruised, laid out on one's back, on one's hands and knees struggling to stand up in life. In this sense, boxing is extremely Darwinian and a microcosm of the struggle for life itself. Oh how I would have loved for Chamberlain to go through all that on world wide television.
At least Jim Brown acknowledges that he wouldn't have stood a chance, even if it did come in old age. In Tom Hauser's bio of Ali, he mentions a friendly sparring session between Ali and Brown (they were friends) and Brown could not lay a hand on Ali at all. Where as Ali could hit him at will. Size means nothing without skill, unless you get into extremes, say a 115lb fighter taking on an NFL lineman. Even then, there's a good chance the little un would score an easy points victory, without ever receiving a blow.
People who take boxing as lightly as what Chamberlain did in his head do not know boxing, they only see it. Shame on an 'informed' guy like Cosell making a thing about the size difference in hands and reach. The focus on the size comparison served to undermine the very nature of the sport, as if just having big hands and a longer reach on a non trained individual could negate 20+ years of skill. D**kheads! Using that laymans logic, the tallest man ever at 8ft 11" should have been the baddest man on the planet. He wasn't.
