Round 8: The Knockout

[Muhammad Ali]
People ask me who will be the next heavyweight champion after me. And I tell them: I intend to hold the championship for eight years. Then I'm gonna give it to my younger brother Rudolf, like the Kennedys do in Washington. When I retire, I will become an even bigger businessman than I am now. I'm already a big businessman. But I'm going to be the AT&T of the fistic world!

I have a unique product: I sell good boxing, a beautiful body, culture, and the world's most perfect face! I'm so beautiful the girls think I'm Chubby Checker. I am the greatest, I'm too much. When I retire from the ring, I'm going into business by making boxers out of other handsome, talented, cultured, young men. If a kid can box and if he can write poetry, and if he's anywhere near as pretty as me, I'll sign him to a contract.

I will have a stable of fighters, a coast-to-coast chain of Cassius Clays. The flyweight Cassius Clay will weigh 112 pounds. And he will write short, little poems. The heavyweight Cassius Clay will write long elegies. They all will predict things. They will predict that I will be the first man elected to the Hall of Fame while I'm still alive. And they won't have to put up a statue of me, because I will appear at the Hall of Fame in person — live, from New York, in living color!

Yes, I will revolutionize the boxing world. And then I will revolutionize the literary world. First, I will get rid of the beatnik poets. And I will make the world safer cleaning this. We don't need beatniks: their poems don't rhyme, their clothes don't match, and they can't fight a lick. I saw some of those beatniks doing my poetry reading in Greenwich Village! One beatnik had bad feet, dirty fingernails and a long beard. You know, if that beatnik had put on shoes, gotten a manicure and a shave, she'd been beautiful!

And she had the nerve to challenge me to a poetry duel! I predicted that I would beat that beatnik with one quick poem to the brain. And I did, I said: "Little Miss beatnik, go sit on your seatnik." Now, I'd beat her with that short little old poem, and I can write even shorter poems. While I'm talking to you, I'm writing the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feel to be as great as I am.
This is it, the greatest short poem of all time: "Me? Wheeee...!"

[Announcer]
That's it folks, the album's over! Clay had the audience dazzled with a superb poetic style, and he hit them with a lightning poem full of truth and beauty! At the end of the album in eight rounds. He's the greatest!

[Muhammad Ali]
Man, they know it! You don't have to tell them folks nothing, I'm what's happening!