Boxing - Ali's gloves fetch £500,000 at auction

Two pairs of Muhammad Ali's fight-worn boxing gloves, one of which he wore in a 1964 fight against Sonny Liston and the other in a 1971 loss to Joe Frazier, went for a combined £500,000 in an auction.

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  Eurosport - Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier
  

The estate of Angelo Dundee, the legendary ex-heavyweight champion's trainer, sold the gloves to an anonymous bidder along with other memorabilia following the legendary trainer's death earlier this year at the age of 90.

Part of the proceeds of the memorabilia sale, which raised over £800,000 in total, will benefit the Muhammad Ali Foundation. Another portion will go for the care of Dundee's daughter, Terri, who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis. The two most popular items in the sale, handled by SCP Auctions, were the gloves.



Ali, fighting for the heavyweight title against Liston under his birth name Cassius Clay, wore a pair of Frager gloves to stop Liston after seven rounds in Miami.

He wore Everlast gloves (pictured below) in his March 8, 1971, match in New York's Madison Square Garden against Frazier, which remains the most significant bout in boxing history. Frazier won that bout, punctuating his victory by knocking Ali down in the 15th and final round.

It wasn't uncommon during Ali's time for the trainers to keep things such as the boxer's gloves, trunks and robes. Dundee did that, though not for all of Ali's fights, and amassed quite a large memorabilia collection.

An interesting note about the gloves is that Dundee wrote the date and the result of the fight inside the gloves.

Each pair of the gloves sold for $385,848, or £250,000, which according to David Kohler of SCP Auctions is a world-record price for any piece of boxing memorabilia sold at public auction.

However, at Ali's 70th birthday celebration at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas earlier this year, UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta paid $1.1 million for a pair of gloves Ali wore in a 1965 win over Floyd Patterson - though a condition of that sale included Fertita's demand that rival promoter Bob Arum publicly declare that he "loves UFC".