“Wait a minute. You’re putting my gloves in jail? This is awful. How can you put my gloves in jail? They ain’t done nothing… yet!”
This was Muhammad Ali, according to his biographer Thomas Hauser, on hearing his boxing gloves would be held in a local prison until the day of his heavyweight bout with Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur.
The entertaining anecdote refers to the very padded leather mittens, used in that fight on June 30 in 1975, which are now up for sale on May 15-16 in London at sporting memorabilia specialist, Graham Budd.