Ernie Terrell obituary
He was not on the list.
Ernie Terrell, who has died aged 75, lost his heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali in the infamous “What’s my name?” fight, one of the most brutally cruel displays in boxing history. In the buildup to their match, Terrell insisted on calling Ali by his “slave name”, Cassius Clay. This tactic had backfired for Floyd Patterson in an earlier loss to Ali, but because Terrell also held a belt that Ali felt was his, Ali was infuriated. He called Terrell “an Uncle Tom ni…..” and said: “I’ll make him eat those words, letter by letter.”
For 15 rounds Ali taunted Terrell as he inflicted as much damage as he could. He thumbed Terrell’s left eye and later pushed it on the ring-ropes, leaving Terrell nearly blind. By the 12th round Terrell was simply covering his face and in the 13th Ali landed a stream of unanswered punches, but the referee, Harry Kessler, did not stop the fight.
One of 10 children, Terrell was born in Inverness, Mississippi, and grew up in nearby Belzoni. His father, a sharecropper, moved the family to Chicago and worked in a factory. By the time he graduated from Farragut academy, Terrell had won the Chicago Golden Gloves as a light-heavyweight, and begun his professional career as a heavyweight. He had also formed a singing group, the Heavyweights, with his sister Jean and brothers JC and Leonard.
At 6ft 6in (just under 2 metres) tall and weighing 15 stones (95kg), Terrell had an exceptionally long reach, but he lacked a knockout punch and, some said, a killer instinct. His record stood at 24-3, all three losses by split decisions, when in 1962 he lost to the hard-punching Cleveland Williams.
His style changed after the loss; rather than purely jabbing, he began extending his left arm to keep opponents away from his body, then moving in to clinch and do damage. He won his next 12 fights, including a rematch with Williams, and wins over the title contenders Zora Folley and the light-heavyweight Bob Foster, and in March 1965 defeated Eddie Machen for the vacant World Boxing Association title. He defended the title against George Chuvalo and Doug Jones to set up the match with Ali.
The then-Cassius Clay had won the WBA heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in February 1964, but had been stripped of the belt for agreeing to an automatic rematch, which was against the WBA’s rules. The World Boxing Council and New York State Athletic Commission continued to recognise Ali as world heavyweight champion, as did the Ring magazine, following the unwritten rule that the belt could change hands only in the ring.
The unification fight was held in February 1967 in the Houston Astrodome, where 37,000 spectators made it the biggest indoor boxing crowd ever. In his pre-match poem, Ali talked of knocking Terrell out of the stadium in the first round: “The ref is frantic/Terrell’s over the Atlantic/Who would’ve thought, when they came to the fight/They’d see the launch of a coloured satellite!”
In reality, after 15 gruelling rounds, Terrell was suffering from double vision in his left eye, and was never the same fighter again. Only two months after the fight, Ali was again stripped of his title, by all sanctioning bodies, for refusing induction into the US Army. But Terrell lost to Thad Spencer in an eliminator for the now-open title, and after an ugly loss to Manuel Ramos in Mexico City, he retired from boxing and turned back to his singing.
The Heavyweights found some success, but in 1970 Jean Terrell joined the Supremes when Diana Ross left. Terrell then came out of retirement as a boxer. He won seven fights in a row against lightly regarded opponents before, in June 1973, losing a hotly disputed bout against Chuck Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder”, in Wepner’s backyard, Atlantic City. Fights broke out at the ringside as one of Terrell’s handlers watched the promoter alter the referee’s scorecard and give Wepner a decision contrary to the scorecards of the Ring and all the other press at ringside. Wepner would go on to face Ali, and inspire Sylvester Stallone’s film Rocky.
Three months later, at Madison Square Garden, New York, after being knocked out in the first round of his next fight by Jeff “Candy Slim” Merritt, Terrell retired for good. He resumed singing with his siblings, and began producing records, making more money, he said, than he ever had in boxing. Later he would train and manage fighters including James “Quick” Tillis, Alfonso Ratliff, and Renaldo Snipes, all of whom won titles. He tried politics, losing an election for alderman in Chicago’s 24th ward, and started a cleaning and maintenance services company that, with contracts for city offices, was very successful. He was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 2004.
Terrell is survived by his wife, Maxine Sibley, whom he married in 1974, and two stepchildren. He remained philosophical about his beating by Ali, and in 2009 said: “We were fighting … I bore no animosity. What he say, all that, don’t count. That was his way of promoting the fight.”
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