Chuck Wepner
The 83-year-old Chuck Wepner stands 6ft 5in tall, with broad shoulders and heavily knuckled hands; bone calluses serve as reminders of a life spent punching.
His vocation as a fighter scarred other parts of his body, too.
"I was a big bleeder. I had 328 stitches in my career. My nose was broken nine times in 16 years. And, uh, it never fazed me, you know?" Wepner tells BBC Sport, with a shrug.
In fact, so likely was his face to suffer injury in the ring that he eventually adopted the nickname others gave him as an insult.
The Bayonne Bleeder - Bayonne being the New Jersey town that Wepner still calls home - was a fighter who lived up to his billing.
So maybe it was fitting that the most famous bout of his career came soaked in claret.
"Tony Perez was the referee for my fight with Muhammad Ali," remembers Wepner of their 1975 meeting.
"After I got knocked down. he says to me: 'Chuck, you're bleeding too much.'
"I said, 'No way, give me this round. Let me finish the fight, I'm all right.' So Tony says: 'OK Chuck, how many fingers do I have up?'
"I look at his hand and say: 'How many guesses do I get?'"
Despite Wepner's protests and to the dismay of the febrile, 15,000-strong crowd inside Ohio's Richfield Coliseum, the referee stopped the fight just 19 seconds shy of the end of round 15.
He needed 23 stitches after the bout and took home a mere 15th of Ali's purse but, as with much of Wepner's life, to focus on his injuries was to miss the greatness of his achievement.
As a 36-year-old part-time heavyweight from 'nowhere' New Jersey, Wepner was a 10-1 outsider prior to the Ali fight. He had never before trained under a dedicated coach. But he confounded expectations with his performance.
Not only did he last nearly the full distance with the reigning world champion and one of the greatest to have ever laced up gloves, Wepner also became only the fourth person in history to knock Ali, who had destroyed George Foreman just 10 months prior, to the canvas.
Do not let success go to your head and do not let failure get to your heart.
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