In the summer of 1955, while Archie Moore was training for his championship fight with Bobo Olson at the Polo Grounds, he took off 23 pounds, the last few at Ehsan's Training Camp, a dreary, unpainted sweat pit in Summit, New Jersey. His trainers closed the doors and windows of the gymnasium early every afternoon, quickly transforming it into a steam cabinet, and in this suffocating atmosphere Moore, swaddled in a skintight rubber costume, went through his ritual of shadowboxing, sparring, bag-punching, and rope-skipping, giving off sprays of water like a revolving lawn sprinkler. The close air was almost unbearable, but he drove himself furiously, and during the last 24 hours before the weigh-in had nothing to eat or drink except half a lemon. The method seemed extreme, particularly for a middle-aged athlete, but it was effective. Moore made the weight by two pounds and knocked out Olson in three rounds.

('New Yorker' magazine - Nov, 1961)

After the fight he visited Clay. "I'm tired," he said. "I'm done. Never show up other fighters, son. You may be coming down yourself one day."

Clay shrugged him off and laughed.

He pitched to Willie Mays, played golf with Sam Snead, fought a bull in Spain and played bridge with Jacoby. Now he wanted to see how it felt to fight Archie Moore...

(Jan. 1959)

"A few weeks before the return bout, he had dropped into Jack Dempsey's restaurant in New York to entertain a group of well-wishers with his prevision of the fight. He was seething at Durelle, who was saying absurd things about long counts and other vain tricks that, Durelle professed, cheated him of victory in their first fight. But Archie chose to speak of revenge only in parables. He recalled to his listeners Aesop's fable of the wolf and the lamb, in which the lamb sought with simple logic to establish that he was innocent of wrongdoing to the wolf and, therefore, should not be eaten.
"I was drinking in the stream," the wolf snarled, as Archie remembers the quotes, "and you muddied it."
"But you were drinking upstream," the lamb replied so shrewdly.
"Well, I'm about to eat you anyway," the wolf quipped back at him.
Archie pondered a moment and then made his pronouncement.
"It doesn't matter what Durelle says," he proclaimed. "I'll eat him anyway." "