This Week In National Press Club History: Heavyweight champions

August 11, 1971: Joe Frazier, world heavyweight champion, delights a National Press Club luncheon, five months after his successful defense of the title by defeating Muhammad Ali in the “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden. On August 27, 1976, now the world heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, and challenger Ken Norton sparred briefly for the cameras before their joint luncheon appearance. Ali successfully defends his title in 15 rounds a month later in Yankee Stadium. Years before in 1909, James Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion, made one of the earliest guest appearances at the NPC, and a year later, called by some “the Great White Hope,” he unsuccessfully challenged the current title holder, Jack Johnson, an African-American.

August 14, 1945: Japan agrees to surrender to the Allied Forces, bringing an end to World War ll. National Press Club members Joe Laitin and Edgar A. Poe a few weeks later witnessed the formal surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Harbor. On the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, General Paul Tibbetts, who flew the B-29 Enola Gay on its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. spoke at a Club luncheon. Pacific theatre veterans Don Larrabee, Frank Holeman, Warren Rogers Jr, John Cosgrove, former Club presidents, and Shirley Povich and Ed Prina were honored by a standing ovation.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s rich history through lobby displays, events, panel discussions and its oral history project, which now contains two hundred interviews which are available to researchers in the Club’s Archives.

And check the Club’s newly updated 100-year TimeLine at our website at About/History.