Muhammad Ali’s 1975 fight against Chuck Wepner is known to be the inspiration for the first Rocky movie. But it also inspired something much less famous and far more personal: It inspired my commitment to collecting pieces of history.
As the top salesman in my company at the time—a twenty-two-year-old kid in my first job after college—I was given a ringside press pass for that fight, and as I sat there watching, I knew something special was happening. You could tell just by the energy in the air that this was truly a moment in history. Fifty-plus years later, I still have the original program from the fight. I paid $2 for it, and I’m glad I did.
I’ve been a collector of sorts since I was a kid, but when I began formally and intentionally collecting as an adult, as you know, my focus wasn’t on boxing or anything related to Muhammad Ali. And yet, it’s fair to say the experience of witnessing that fight—being a part of that moment in history—and then keeping the story alive by hanging onto that program is a cornerstone of my approach to collecting Jewish cultural artifacts today.
A large part of my purpose for collecting was to keep my Uncle Jerry’s memory alive, but it wasn’t just my Uncle Jerry. I realized that—like that fight program—every artifact in my collection was a piece of a story worth preserving. With every year that goes by and every survivor who passes away, the memory of the Holocaust becomes more distant to our society. But in collecting and sharing images and artifacts from that era, perhaps I can bring the stories back to life and use them to educate today’s young people not only about what happened during the Holocaust but about how and why it happened and how to ensure it never happens again.
All this is heavier than the fight program, but undoubtedly more important in the grand scheme of things. And in the years since I first attended that fight, I’ve expanded my collection from Holocaust- and WWII-centric artifacts to include Jewish artists, athletes, entertainers and so much more. Artifacts spanning centuries and industries and emotions—every facet of the Jewish cultural experience.
But in January of this year, something distracted me momentarily from the core of my collecting and brought me right back to that ringside seat in 1975. The USPS released a Muhammad Ali stamp on January 15, and there was no way I was going to miss those stamps and their first-day-of-issue covers.
I’m excited anytime I add a new item to my collection, but picking up those Muhammad Ali stamps brought back a very specific joy: The joy of a twenty-two-year-old kid, his whole life ahead of him, witnessing a moment in history and finding a way to keep its story alive long after the knockout.