What Larry Holmes Never Forgot About Muhammad Ali

What Larry Holmes Never Forgot About Muhammad Ali — this is not a story about a fight. It's a story about a debt that could never be repaid. Before Larry Holmes was The Easton Assassin, he was a seventh-grade dropout from Easton, Pennsylvania, getting paid $300 a week to spar with the greatest heavyweight who ever lived. Muhammad Ali didn't just give Holmes a job. He gave him belief. He made him feel, in Holmes's own words, ten feet tall. Then in 1980, Holmes had to walk into a ring and dismantle the man who built him. He held back. He cried after. And when the fight was over — he went straight to Ali's dressing room. What happened next is the part nobody talks about enough.