The boxing gloves Muhammad Ali wore in the first fight of his famed trilogy with Joe Frazier, 1971’s Fight of the Century heavyweight championship bout, are going up for auction again.
The gloves will be part of Heritage Auctions’ July 31 auction in conjunction with the annual National Sports Collectors Convention, which this year takes place in Cleveland.
The gloves came from the collection of the late Hall of Fame trainer Angelo Dundee, who trained Ali and died at age 90 in 2012. His son, Jim Dundee, put much of his father’s collection of boxing memorabilia up for auction to help pay family medical bills.
The gloves sold for a public auction boxing memorabilia-record $385,848 in December 2012.
They were sold in the same auction for the same price as the gloves that Ali — then Cassius Clay — wore when he won the heavyweight world title for the first time in his first fight against Sonny Liston in 1964.
The gloves from Clay-Liston I went up for sale again in February and sold for a record-shattering $836,500 in a Heritage Auction almost 50 years to the day of the fight.
Now the Ali-Frazier I gloves are on the block again and could challenge the record price.
This match was billed as the ‘Fight of the Century,’ and, despite the fact that Ali lost, it more than lived up to its billing, said Chris Ivy of Heritage Auctions. These gloves are more than sports memorabilia. They’re artifacts of early-1970s American pop culture.
Ali and Frazier were both undefeated with claims to the heavyweight title when they met March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York in one of the biggest sporting events of the 20th century. Frazier knocked Ali down and won a 15-round decision.
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