There are but a handful of venues in the world that feel like an appropriate host for a megafight. Boxing remains one of the few entertainment mediums that can fill up a stadium for a one-off event, and the spectacle of dozens of thousands of fans peering down at two combatants in a 20x20 ring in the middle of, say, a football stadium, serves to boost the magnitude of the event to the millions watching at home.

But there is no place that instantly conveys grandeur the way Madison Square Garden does. The final boss of big fight locations, a building that becomes a character itself in the telling of the bout.

It's the place where Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta’s bloody odyssey began. The same spot where Rocky Marciano took the torch from Joe Louis, the same concrete upon which the country stood together as Bernard Hopkins and Felix Trinidad battled days after 9/11, and where the crowd divided to start its own fight in support of Riddick Bowe or Andrew Golota. The place where even Frank Sinatra, at the height of his fame, had to allegedly backdoor a photography pass to get ringside.

Sinatra, of course, wanted to be there for the biggest fight, and maybe the biggest event ever staged inside the walls of MSG, Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier I. The Fight of the Century, the violence it produced, the drama it elicited and the atmosphere it created became the measuring stick and reference point for what a truly great sporting event looked and felt like. Three years later, on this very day (Jan. 28, 1974), Frazier and Ali met for a second time, with the latter exacting revenge.

The same doors at the entrance 7th and 31st, where fans filed in to see Ali and Frazier battle 52 years this week, will open for fans to see Teofimo Lopez and Shakur Stevenson headlining Ring VI this Saturday.

Much has changed in the sport in the 52 years since Ali and Frazier met for the second time. Fans not in attendance this weekend will be able to watch the fight on virtually any device that connects to the internet anywhere in the world via DAZN. In 1974, if you weren’t one of the lucky 20,748 to get a ticket at MSG itself, your other option was to watch at one of the 392 closed circuit locations in the United States and Canada. Ali and Frazier together helped revolutionize closed circuit broadcasts, setting viewership and profit records that would take another era to break.

It was part of a seismic shift in how boxing was consumed, and as a result, how much boxers would be paid. Boxing was still grappling with the invention of the television, and the new reality that fans could simply watch fights at home rather than buying a ticket to attend live.

One of the men who rued this change the loudest was also the man who made the fights at Madison Square Garden and the St. Nicholas Arena which it operated, Teddy Brenner, who presided over boxing at the world’s most famous arena for the better part of three decades between the mid-1950s and '70s. Brenner reminisced to the New York Times two years after Ali-Frazier, “remember after World War II when boxing was on the networks at prime time on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights? When I started making the Wednesday night shows for Jim Norris we paid the main event fighters $185 each and for Fridays it was $212."

But much like Brenner pivoted to accommodate television audiences, he did so again to survive in a world of closed circuit, television rights fees and sponsorships. Through the rapidly changing fight landscape, Brenner kept the same three rules about making fights, regardless of how much money was at stake:

As he revealed in his autobiography When Only The Ring Was Square: “Will it be a good action fight, does the winner go on to something important, and would I pay to see it?”

That rubric for making a great fight remains an astute one to follow. Regardless of how fights are cooked up and served in any given era, the ingredients that go into the pot never change. And fittingly, neither has at least one of its head chefs.

Just as he was the first time Ali and Frazier fought, and the second time, Bob Arum and his Top Rank Inc. will be part of the promotional helm. That rematch would be the last Ali fight that Arum would promote at the Garden, but far from his last. Nine years later, with Brenner on his Top Rank staff as an in-house matchmaker, he brought Roberto Duran to the Garden to face Davey Moore, an incredible bounce-back for the Panamanian that lengthened the story of the Four Kings significantly. Arum would go on to say that Duran-Moore was the best fight, and liveliest crowd, he’d ever assembled at MSG.

The second bout between Ali and Frazier is often overlooked, engulfed in the massive shadow of The Fight of the Century and the eventual Thrilla In Manila, two of the best fights to have ever taken place. Only because of the greatness of those two bouts — and that Ali knocked out George Foreman the same year to capture Ring Magazine’s Fight of the Year as well — is the fight often forgotten.

However, its build-up, as unsavory as it was in many ways, set a precedent for how animosity between fighters would be utilized and trafficked in fight promotion.

"They each were seen, and quite correctly, as not the same fighters who engaged in March 1971 in the Garden," Arum told USA Today's Bob Velin in 2016. "But it created a lot of attention, when each of them, with their brothers in attendance [Tom Frazier and Rahman Ali] during a made-for-TV interview with [Howard] Cosell, all got into a spat, rolling around on the floor and everything, and Cosell had the cameras going. That went viral around the world, and it turned out to make the second fight, as far as closed-circuit revenue, even bigger than the first."

Evoking the names of Ali and Frazier in boxing comparison can be instantly derived as sacrilegious, and indeed, no matter what modern belt totals, viewership numbers and gate receipts might say, the greatness and magnitude of sports’ most epic rivals and their battles are nearly untouchable when placed in their time and context. They are titanic figures, like Jordan in basketball or Ruth in baseball, names who the public and industry have decided shall not be surpassed.

Nonetheless, fighters today can still take the very same stage as The Greatest, and in some cases, fight for the very same man. More than half a century later, the fight game is still in the blood of some of the most fervent fight fans in the world, New Yorkers, and it continues to flow to its beating heart in Madison Square Garden.