Why was the Ali-Foreman fight stopped?

[Panamaniac]

A fight is "stopped" when a knocked-down fighter fails to beat the count of 10 seconds. Foreman failed to beat the (referee's, not announcer's) count. The end result was an 8th. round KO (not TKO). Next question...

[Ray Corso]

..is the Atlantic Ocean older than the Pacific????????

[joseph5620]

The fight wasn't stopped at 8, it was stopped at 10. You hear the announcer counting, he says 7 then he misses a second in between because he began shouting, he then finished where he left off by saying 8.

However, the referee is clearly still counting. What you hear is not what the refere is doing.

REF vs WuH(what u hear)
Ref .6.....7....8.....9......waves off
wuh 6.....7....Foreman gets up to a knee! 8.....It's over!

If you watch the clock on the bottom right, you'll notice a second and a half clearly goes by while he is talking, and then you hear 8. The count is wrong, the referee had already gotten to 10. It was just the announcer failing to count properly.

I was just about to say the same thing. I've noticed over the years a lot of people only listen to the announcers count which was not accurate. The only count that matters is the referee's.

[joseph5620]

Because the referee is in a better position than we are to determine if a fighter is fit to continue. Just because a fighter isn't staggering doesn't mean he's ready to keep fighting. This happens in hundreds of fights. There was obviously something about Foreman that said "I'm done".

Nothing controversial about this. Foreman got KO'd, end of story. Similar to what happened to Taylor against Chavez: Taylor was done and the official exercised his discretion.

There is nothing similar about the two fights or the situation. Foreman didn't beat the count. That's not what happened to Taylor.

[Panamaniac]

Another perspective...

As Foreman started to go down, Ali pulled the 'coup de grace' right hand he could've nailed him with. A killer like Tyson not only would have landed it, the ref would have to pull him off the fallen fighter.

Below is Foreman's own account of the incident at the top of this "Facing Ali" trailer...

[vbtube]GRjvXcv63AU[/vbtube]

[TysonBomb]