Woroner offered Ali $9,999 to film a fantasy fight against Marciano and he accepted. This being boxing, an accommodation was reached. The NCR 315's circuit boards had calculated that Ali would have lost in the quarter-finals to Jim Jeffries – a fighter Ali dismissed as 'history's clumsiest, most slow-footed heavyweight.' The government had stolen his title, he fumed, and now Woroner was taking his good name. Wars! Hitler's Germany against the Roman Empire! Napoleon versus Alexander the Great! How about election campaigns? George Washington versus Franklin Roosevelt! Abraham Lincoln against George Wallace! And debates? Socrates takes on Karl Marx! Thoreau against Jean-Paul Sartre! Why not? Why not?'īut before Woroner could solve every pub argument in history, Ali hit him with a $1m lawsuit for defamation. 'We could do more than sports,' he told Sports Illustrated. Woroner, incidentally, was not someone acquainted with hubris. From the computer readouts, he produced breathless blow-by-blow broadcasts, peddled the tapes to 380 stations the world around and, after 15 elimination bouts, let it be known last December that Computer Fighter No.004 (Rocky Marciano) had knocked out Computer Fighter No.002 (Jack Dempsey) in the 13th round of the finals.' Sullivan to Muhammad Ali) to keypunch perforations, fed them into a National Cash Register 315 computer and let them fight: the bareknucklers v the gloved sluggers, the rigid standers v the dodging dancers, the quick v the dead. He reduced 16 magnificent fighters (from John L.

Woroner, it added, 'brought to our wondering ears, via radio and computer, the All-Time Heavyweight Tournament and Championship Fight. NCR 315', hailed the tournament as 'one of the most astonishing marketing successes in radio history'. Soon it had 12 million listeners.Ī flattering 1968 Sports Illustrated piece, entitled 'And In This Corner. A fantasy radio boxing tournament to determine the best heavyweight of all time with a twist: the results would be calculated by a second-generation NCR 315 computer, packed with 5k of handmade core memory and the icy dispassion of an implacable neutral. While Ali's career was being parked in a pallid wasteland for nearly four years, the best years of his fighting life, Woroner's was accelerating from first to fifth. It was Murry Woroner, a short, chunky, balding advertising executive from Miami, who was among the first to grasp that marrying fantasy with nascent computer technology was a licence to print money.

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