1. Larry Holmes was born on November 3,1949 and is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1973 to 2002 and was world heavyweight champion from 1978 until 1985.
58 Facts About Larry Holmes
1. 2.
Larry Holmes is often considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time.
3.
Larry Holmes grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania, which led to his boxing nickname of "the Easton Assassin".
4.
Larry Holmes won his first 48 professional bouts, including victories over Ken Norton, Muhammad Ali, Earnie Shavers, Mike Weaver, Gerry Cooney, Tim Witherspoon, Carl Williams, and Marvis Frazier.
5.
Larry Holmes retired after losing a rematch to Spinks the following year but made repeated comebacks.
6.
Larry Holmes was unsuccessful in four further comeback attempts to regain a variation of the heavyweight title.
7.
Larry Holmes fought for the final time in 2002, at age 52, against the 334lb Eric "Butterbean" Esch and ended his career with a record of 69 wins and 6 losses, with all of his losses coming in world title fights.
8.
Larry Holmes is frequently ranked as one of the greatest heavyweights of all time and has been inducted into both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and World Boxing Hall of Fame.
9.
Larry Holmes is the only boxer to have defeated Muhammad Ali by stoppage, a 38 year-old Ali in 1980, and the last living boxer to have defeated him.
10.
Larry Holmes was the fourth of twelve children born to John and Flossie Larry Holmes.
11.
Larry Holmes' father went to Connecticut, where he visited the family every three weeks and worked as a gardener until his death in 1970.
12.
Larry Holmes later drove a dump truck and worked in a Lehigh Valley quarry.
13.
Nevertheless, Larry Holmes was chosen by a selection committee of the National Olympic authorities to fight at the Olympic box-offs at West Point, New York, where he had a match-up versus Duane Bobick.
14.
Larry Holmes was dropped in the first round with a right to the head.
15.
Larry Holmes got up and danced out of range, landing several stiff jabs in the process.
16.
Larry Holmes first gained credibility as a contender when he upset the hard-punching Earnie Shavers in March 1978.
17.
Larry Holmes won by a lopsided twelve-round unanimous decision, winning every round on two scorecards and all but one on the third.
18.
Larry Holmes met Ken Norton for the WBC Championship on June 9,1978.
19.
Larry Holmes rallied late in the fifteenth to win it on two scorecards and take the title by a split decision.
20.
Larry Holmes's third was against future WBA Heavyweight Champion Mike Weaver, on June 22,1979.
21.
Three months later, on September 28,1979, Larry Holmes had a rematch with Shavers, who got a title shot by knocking out Norton in one round.
22.
Larry Holmes dominated the first six rounds, but in the seventh, Shavers sent Larry Holmes down with a devastating overhand right.
23.
Larry Holmes got up, survived the round, and went on to punish Shavers in the eleventh round and the referee stopped the fight.
24.
On October 2,1980, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Larry Holmes defended his title against Muhammad Ali, who was coming out of retirement in an attempt to become the first four-time world heavyweight champion.
25.
Larry Holmes dominated the 38-year-old Ali, winning every round on all three judges' scorecards.
26.
Larry Holmes seemed to show signs of sadness in punishing Ali so much during the fight.
27.
The Larry Holmes fight is said to have contributed to Ali's Parkinson's syndrome.
28.
On November 6,1981, Larry Holmes rose from a seventh-round knockdown, during which he staggered into the turnbuckle, to stop Renaldo Snipes in the eleventh.
29.
Larry Holmes got up, but his trainer, Victor Valle, stepped into the ring and stopped the fight.
30.
On May 20,1983, Larry Holmes defended his title against Tim Witherspoon, the future WBC and WBA Heavyweight Champion.
31.
On September 10,1983, Larry Holmes successfully defended the WBC title for the sixteenth time, knocking out Scott Frank in five rounds.
32.
Larry Holmes then signed to fight Marvis Frazier, son of Joe Frazier, on November 25,1983.
33.
Larry Holmes was making $3.1 million to fight Frazier and felt he should get as much as $5 million to fight Page.
34.
Larry Holmes had an easy time with Frazier, knocking him out in the first round.
35.
Larry Holmes was promised $13 million and Coetzee was promised $8 million.
36.
Larry Holmes then decided to move on and fight someone else.
37.
On November 9,1984, after a year out of the ring, Larry Holmes made his first defense of the IBF title, stopping James "Bonecrusher" Smith on a cut in the twelfth round.
38.
Larry Holmes emerged with a close, and disputed, fifteen-round unanimous decision.
39.
Larry Holmes's next fight had the potential to make boxing history.
40.
Larry Holmes agreed to terms to fight Michael Spinks, the undisputed champion at light heavyweight, for his twentieth world title defense September 21,1985.
41.
Larry Holmes had a rematch with Spinks on April 19,1986.
42.
On November 6,1986, three days after his 37th birthday, Larry Holmes announced his retirement.
43.
On January 22,1988, Larry Holmes was lured out of retirement by a $2.8 million purse to challenge reigning Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson.
44.
Larry Holmes got up, but Tyson put him down two more times in the round, and the fight was stopped.
45.
Larry Holmes returned to the ring in 1991 and became a much more active fighter, usually fighting on USA Tuesday Night Fights cards every few weeks against up and comers and journeymen.
46.
Larry Holmes pulled off the upset and won by a 12-round unanimous decision.
47.
Larry Holmes was back in the ring five months later, resuming the pace he had set since his comeback.
48.
However, he was growing tired of the sport and, after he fought and knocked out Anthony Willis in June 1996 on another USA boxing event, Larry Holmes announced that unless he received a shot at the title, the fight against Willis was likely to be his last.
49.
On January 24,1997, Larry Holmes got his last opportunity to fight for a heavyweight championship when he traveled to Copenhagen to fight undefeated International Boxing Organization champion Brian Nielsen.
50.
Foreman received a nonrefundable $1 million deposit, and Larry Holmes got to keep a $400,000 down-payment of his $4 million purse.
51.
Larry Holmes's final fight was on July 27,2002, in Norfolk, Virginia, in which he defeated Eric "Butterbean" Esch in a 10-round unanimous decision.
52.
Larry Holmes invested the money he earned from boxing and settled in his hometown of Easton.
53.
When he retired from boxing, Larry Holmes employed more than 200 people through his various business holdings.
54.
In 2014, Larry Holmes sold his business complex in Easton to entrepreneur Gerald Gorman, CEO of mail.
55.
In 2016, Larry Holmes guest starred as himself in an episode of Mike Tyson Mysteries, titled "Unsolved Situations".
56.
Larry Holmes was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2008.
57.
In 1979, Larry Holmes married Diane Robinson, with whom he has two children.
58.
Larry Holmes's younger brother, Mark Larry Holmes, was a middleweight boxer from 1980 to 1987.