Muhammad Ali’s MMA fighter grandson Biaggio Ali Walsh has a different pick for his favorite of his granddad’s fights.
Most fight fans will point to the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrilla in Manila as a peak Ali, but Biaggio looks back further for a more rounded performance. The 26-year-old believes his grandfather’s greatest ever performance was a fight against Cleveland Williams in 1966 that has been heralded as ‘flawless’.
Ali was making his sixth defense of the WBC heavyweight title when he took on Williams, who had heroically returned to boxing after being shot two years prior by a state trooper. And he put on a punch-perfect clinic against a man believed to be one of the finest boxers never to win a title.
Muhammad Ali’s grandson names his favourite fight
Muhammad Ali has dozens of iconic performances to choose from when picking his greatest of all time. But nobody will have studied him more and have a better idea than his own grandson; PFL MMA star Biaggio Ali Walsh.
“My favorite fight by him was versus Cleveland Williams,” Ali Walsh told Bloody Knockout in an exclusive chat ahead of his return to the PFL cage on June 27 in Chicago. “To me, that’s like if you were to take a clip and show a little kid like ‘this is Muhammad Ali. This is this is the guy right here’.
“It’d be a clip from the Cleveland Williams fight, I mean, he was so fast and so loose and comfortable and relaxed. He was just so fast, and he was a heavyweight, too, so I think that performance-wise that was, hands down his best fight, it was perfect.”
Biaggio and Nico Ali Walsh are both now fighters
After his daughter Laila Ali made history as an all-time great women’s boxer, it was the turn of Ali’s grandsons to get into the fight game. Nico Ali Walsh is a professional boxer under the Top Rank banner, and holds a 10-2 professional record.
Biaggio, after a promising American football career moved into the MMA cage, where he underwent an impressive amateur career in the PFL before turning over to the pro ranks last year. He is currently 2-0 as a professional, and faces Ronnie Gibbs on June 27 in Chicago.
“I believe that everything is already written, God almighty is the author of everything in existence,” Biaggio explained. “Everything that happens was already written down in a perfect record. By God. So you look at little things like this like, isn’t that weird? That’s funny
“That’s all divine writing. At least, that’s what I believe. It’s just so cool to see it start slowly unfolding. You know, I never even thought I was going to fight, like, I thought football was my life for so many years.
“Then when I was done with football I was like, ‘am I going to be a freaking real estate agent now?’ I didn’t know what I was going to do. So yeah, I would have never guessed that I would ever fight.”