The battle raging between the Bullion Banks and Gold Speculators is every bit as spectacular as the Ali-Frazier fights of the 1970s, says precious metals expert Michael Ballanger.
As a young man of fourteen with my older brother Donny having introduced me to Ring Magazine a few year earlier, I can’t remember ever being so hyped up for a heavyweight title fight than when Cassius Clay took on Sonny Liston and “whupped” him to take the title and then repeated in the rematch. From that point onward, the hero of my youth (excluding Bobby Orr, of course) in the world of sports became Cassius Clay-turned-Muhammad Ali, who became the greatest heavyweight fighter of all time and dominated the game for over a decade, despite being banned from boxing for refusing to join the army in 1967. Ali was a big man standing over 6’4″ tall but he moved with the fluidity, speed and lethal grace of a jaguar.
The greatest series of boxing matches ever seen were not the Joe Louis-Max /Schmeling/U.S.-versus-Germany matches of the mid-1930s, nor even the Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” but rather the 1970s matches between Ali and Joe Frazier. What made these matches so legendary was the pure hatred demonstrated toward each other by the combatants, as well as the high levels of emotion they evoked, with Ali the bastion of the Liberal Left, anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s while Frazier had the hearts of the right-wing neo-con, pro-war conservative element. Ali was the loud-mouthed radical Black Muslim while Frazier was the slow-speaking Uncle Tom, and the tension of their battles was like no others before and certainly none since—at least in BOXING, that is.
Fast forward 45 years and we are now witnessing an epic battle of another nature and it isn’t in Manila …read more