I wasn't a big guy. People thought the big guys would eat me up. But it was the other way around. I loved to fight bigger guys.

I don't think a man has to go around shouting and play-acting to prove he is something. And a real man don't go around putting other guys down, trampling their feelings in the dirt, making out they're nothing.

Since I was a boy of five or six, I had it in my mind I would be a world boxing champion.

I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.

Joe Louis is the greatest heavyweight champion of all time. Rocky Marciano is second only to Louis. Where do I rate Ali? Somewhere below me. I beat him, and if I could beat him, no doubt Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano could have beaten him.

If I said 'Fall down', he's gonna fall down. I'm still his father.

If I lose, I'll walk away and never feel bad because I did all I could. There was nothing more to do.