Who was involved in the Fight of the Year five times running? Was it Muhammad Ali? asked Bob Burrell
I think you must be talking about the annual award made by The Ring magazine. They started naming a Fight of the Year in 1945, and eventually backdated their list to 1922, the year the magazine was founded.
Muhammad Ali actually featured a record six times in the magazine's selection, but they weren't consecutive years. His bouts that won the accolade were against Doug Jones in 1963 [a non-title fight], Sonny Liston in 1964 [when he first claimed the title], Joe Frazier in 1971 [generally considered the best fight of the 20th century], George Foreman in 1974 [when Ali regained the title in the "Rumble in the Jungle"], the rematch with Frazier in 1975 [the "Thrilla in Manila"], and his surprise defeat to Leon Spinks in 1978.
But the man who featured in The Ring's Fight of the Year five years running was Carmen Basilio -- the so-called "Upstate Onion Farmer" -- who took the world welterweight title off Tony De Marco in what the magazine voted their best bout of 1955.
In 1956 the award went to Basilio's defeat of Johnny Saxton, and in 1957 it went to his upset victory over Sugar Ray Robinson to claim the world middleweight title. Robinson reclaimed that belt by beating Basilio in what became the Fight of the Year in 1958, then in 1959 the accolade went to Basilio's defeat by Gene Fullmer, for the title vacated by Sugar Ray.
Frazier, Gene Tunney (a previous world heavyweight champion) and the Italian-born Canadian welterweight Arturo Gatti featured in the magazine's Fight of the Century on four separate occasions. The 2015 award went to the bout in Las Vegas in November, in which Francisco Vargas of Mexico relieved Japan's Takashi Miura of the WBC super-featherweight title.