March 8 · This Day in America
Two undefeated heavyweight champions step into a ring at Madison Square Garden, and for fifteen rounds the whole country holds its breath. It is more than a fight. Muhammad Ali is back after three years exiled from boxing for refusing the Vietnam draft; Joe Frazier is the relentless man who kept winning while he was gone. Frank Sinatra shoots photos from ringside. More than 300 million people watch worldwide. America in 1971 is split down the middle — war and peace, defiance and order — and somehow two men in satin trunks become the argument made flesh. In the fifteenth round Frazier lands a left hook that drops Ali to the canvas. Ali rises. He loses the decision but not the legend. Some nights a sport stops being a sport and becomes the country talking to itself.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1983
Speaking to evangelicals in Orlando, President Ronald Reagan abandons careful Cold War diction and names the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world." Allies wince; the press recoils; dissidents behind the Iron Curtain take heart. Whatever one made of it, the speech reframed the contest as a moral one, and six years later the wall it described came down.
Source: www.reaganlibrary.gov
“They are the focus of evil in the modern world.”Ronald Reagan, on the Soviet Union, 1983