Chuck Wepner, 83, stands 6 feet 5 inches tall, with broad shoulders and heavy-kneed hands. Bone calluses serve as reminders of a life spent piercing.
His profession as a fighter also scars other parts of his body.
“I was a big bleeder. I got 328 stitches in my career. I broke my nose nine times in 16 years. And, uh, it never bothered me, you know?” Wepner tells BBC Sport with a shrug.
In fact, his face was so prone to injury in the ring that he eventually adopted the nickname others gave him as an insult.
Bayonne Blader — Bayonne is the New Jersey town that Wepner still calls home — was a fighter who lived up to his billing.
So perhaps it was fitting that the most famous bout of his career came drenched in claret.
“Tony Perez was the referee for my fight with Muhammad Ali,” Wepner recalled of their 1975 meeting.
“After I fell. He says to me: ‘Chuck, you’re bleeding profusely.’
“I said, ‘No way, give me this round, let me finish the fight, I’m fine.’ So Tony says: ‘Okay Chuck, how many fingers do I have?’
“I look at his hand and say: ‘How many guesses do I have?'”
Despite Wepner’s protests and the cheers of the 15,000-strong crowd inside Ohio’s Richfield Coliseum, the referee stopped the fight just 19 seconds into the end of round 15.
After the bout he needed 23 stitches and took home just 15th of Ali’s purse but like much of Wepner’s life, focusing on his injuries was to lose sight of the glory of his success.
As a 36-year-old part-time heavyweight from New Jersey, Wepner was 10-1 before the Ali fight. He had never trained under a dedicated coach before. But he defied expectations with his performance.
