Probably the high water mark in the boxing career of Amos Johnson Jr. was his defeat of Muhammad Ali in the amateurs?
Though he climbed to the lower rungs of the heavyweight Top 10 in the mid-1960s, probably the high water mark in the boxing career of Amos Johnson Jr., who died at 77 on November 4, was his defeat of Muhammad Ali in the amateurs.
It happened in the light heavyweight finals of the U.S. Pan American boxing trials in April 1959. The 17-year-old Louisville boxer then called Cassius Clay had his 36-fight winning streak ended when Johnson, 25, scored a major upset by taking a 2-1 decision at the University of Wisconsin Fieldhouse in Madison.
As a professional from 1959-?74, ?Amos the Atom? went 24-10-2. His biggest win was a verdict over fourth-ranked Henry Cooper (in London, no less) in ?65. ?I beat Cassius Clay before and I can take him again,? Johnson said then, but within a year his career was in freefall. He lost to Brian London, Sonny Liston, Oscar Bonavena and Leotis Martin.
Johnson claimed another slice of ring immortality in 1966 when he allegedly knocked down George Chuvalo in a sparring session. ?He started butting me and this made me mad,? said Amos. ?So I dropped him. Then they threw me out of camp.? A letter in the October ?66 issue of Boxing Illustrated magazine from a reader who said he was at the training session at Huntington Golf Club in Toronto insisted that Chuvalo fell after tripping over the feet of his trainer, Teddy McWhorter, who was behind him in the ring, not from a Johnson punch. In his 2013 autobiography ?Chuvalo: A Fighter?s Life,? ironman George ? staunchly and famously vertical in all 93 of his professional matches ? did not deign to mention the incident.
Johnson?s obituary by Stephanie Warsmith in the Akron Beacon Journal notes that when he was inducted into the Summit County (Ohio) Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002, Johnson didn?t even tell his children about it until after the fact. That kind of modesty is why, when he made Medina, Ohio, his headquarters in the ?60s, a local policeman was quoted as saying, ?This town?s full of boxing fans now ? but only when it comes to Amos Johnson.?
