Against the Greatest
Ken Burns’ film ‘Muhammad Ali’ offers glimpse into a Houston legend
On paper, things looked promising for Cleveland Williams.
The “Big Cat” stood 6 feet 2 inches, weighed between 212 and 216 pounds and had a reputation as a boxer who could punch through brick walls. Also he was on his home turf for a heavyweight championship fight against a divisive figure in Muhammad Ali on Nov. 14, 1966, in Houston’s Astrodome, the structural wonder that had opened a little more than a year earlier. Williams was the more seasoned fighter, with nearly triple Ali’s professional experience: 71 fights to 26. Still, the door was ajar for concern: Williams was 33; Ali 24.
Then there was the shooting to consider — an incident two years earlier that could’ve ended Williams’ life, and probably should’ve ended his career as a boxer. But Williams was a fighter, which is how he found himself inside the Dome with a crowd largely on his side. Hours earlier he’d met with the person who shot him, an awkward interaction of two assailants, whose violent intersection sounds like a 21st-century incident in which a traffic stop goes sideways.
Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose eight-hour “Muhammad Ali” begins airing Sunday, says the Williams-Ali fight is “widely considered one of Ali’s masterpieces.
“It was after he changed his name and before Vietnam and the time where he was gone from boxing. He wasn’t yet the legend we know. But if you talk to people about that fight, they think it was one where he was nearly perfect.”
Which makes the Ali-Williams fight part of Ali’s grand and often triumphant narrative, which cycled through promise, struggle, recalibration, perfection and struggle again. For Williams, life was more complicated. Despite winning 80 fights out of 94 in a career that spanned a quarter century, Williams’ tale was informed by struggles deeper and more American than Ali’s strained story of success.
Fists of fury
The fight is difficult to watch today. Football great Jim Brown, a friend of Ali’s, served as commentator. “The crowd realizes Williams can win, and win big,” he said. The crowd of 40,000 roared for the local and booed the Louisville Lip.
At this point, Ali had been Ali for three years, having announced a name change from Cassius Clay after defeating Sonny Liston the first of two times, declaring that he’d “shook up the world” and was “the prettiest thing that ever lived.” The Big Cat had fought Liston twice also, though not successfully as Ali had. Twice, Williams went down early against Liston, but he managed to break the champ’s nose and rise multiple times after taking punishing blows.
Brown declared it would be “power against speed, speed at its greatest.”
From the opening bell, Ali danced around the ring, allowing Williams to throw the first punches, none of them landing. They were a study in contrasts: Williams’ paws vertical and aligned with his jaw, a defensive stance. The dancing Ali’s hands around his waist. A minute and a half into the first round, Ali popped his fists together as if ringing an alternate bell. Here the fight really began , as the champion engaged with his opponent, including a jab that
snapped back Williams’ head and disrupted his coiffed hair. Before the first round was done, the fight appeared over.
Ali’s jabs pecked at his opponent. Williams’ nose began to bleed in the second round. As that round came to a close, Williams fell to his knees. Ali was no longer dancing: His feet set to launch devastating punches for which the Big Cat had no response.
A championship fight, this bout had no three-knockdown rule. Williams went down a third time in the second round but was saved by the bell. He wasn’t carried to his corner but certainly required guidance. Smelling salts. Swabs crammed into his nostrils. Across the ring, Ali took out his mouthpiece as though tearing into a steak. Within 10 seconds into the next round, Williams’ head snapped back two, three times as jabs gave way to three- and fourpunch combinations.
When the fight was stopped in the third round, Williams had visited the canvas four times. Moments before the fourth knockdown, a punch from Ali twisted Williams around nearly 180 degrees. That he was on his feet was testament to something they usually refer to as “heart.” Whatever it was, Cleveland Williams sustained formidable punishment — a post-fight photo reveals grotesque alterations in the topography of his face. Artistic descriptions like “painting” often sound absurd when applied to an activity as brutal as boxing, a sport that makes use of preparation but also requires improvisation and reaction. Boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
If Ali was punched in the mouth here, evidence is scant. He escaped nearly unscathed, having executed a vision on the canvas that felt void of mistakes.
Run-in with the police
Age wasn’t Williams’ only struggle during the Ali fight. He’d been fighting his entire life. A Georgia native, Williams dropped out of school after seventh grade, taking a variety of low-paying jobs trying to provide for his mother. He scooted down to Florida, where he was introduced to boxing and developed an affinity for it.
Williams took a break from fighting when he enlisted in the Army in the 1950s. By 1958, he was in Houston. His matches suggest talent that could have flourished further with other trainers. In 1962, he defeated Ernie Terrell, who would later assume the heavyweight title before a famous fight with Ali during which Ali taunted Terrell, who refused to acknowledge his new name.
Superficial evidence suggests Williams found a comfortable place in Texas. When he signed the contract for the Ali fight, Williams was dressed in a cowboy hat and Western shirt while Ali wore a suit. They were a study in contrasts: spiritual, sartorial, vocational. Unlike Ali — who earned, squandered and earned back millions — Williams frequently worked outside the ring to make ends meet.
The bout with Ali almost didn’t happen. Two years prior to the fight, Williams was pulled over for driving erratically on Texas 149 far north of Houston and arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. Williams and a friend were pulled over by Texas State Highway patrolman Dale Witten. A skirmish inside the trooper’s vehicle ensued, and Witten discharged his .357. Williams was in surgery for more than five hours at Ben Taub Hospital, the first of several procedures that saved his life. The shooting cost him a kidney and damaged intestines and nerves. The bullet took up permanent residence in his hip.
Photos of Witten certainly confirm he was assaulted. The patrolman shows significant bruising and cuts that course along the left side of his face: one from the corner of his mouth, the other from the corner of his eye.
Williams was assured his surgery was covered: Bud Adams — the one who owned the Oilers — owned part of Williams’ boxing contract, so he fronted the funds to save Williams’ life.
Williams’ recovery was slow, but he resumed fighting. And in 1966, he got a chance at a championship bout. To most viewers, his labored history was invisible. So the Ali fight matched two fighters of similar stature but a formidable
age difference.
He received two visitors shortly before the Ali fight. One was Witten, photographed receiving tickets to the fight from Williams. Whether the two made amends or created a smiling photo op is difficult to discern.
Witten died in the early 1970s. The second guest showed up the day of the fight. The process server offered notice that Williams’ earnings for this fight — perhaps the biggest of his career — were owed to Adams. The punishment Williams endured that day ended up payment for a debt he didn’t know he owed.
Roy Foreman, boxing promoter and brother of champion George Foreman, got to know Williams years later.
“The one thing he said to me,” Foreman said, “was even though he would have liked to have been 100 percent against Ali, he was
the fastest man with gloves he had ever seen.”
The beginning of the end
While Ali had been Ali for a few years by the time he fought Williams at the Astrodome, recognition of his spiritual transformation wasn’t yet accepted. “Muhammad Ali, as he prefers to be called,” a ringside commentator said before the fight began.
More than 50 years later, we still struggle to allow public figures leeway with identity and beliefs. To Williams’ credit, he didn’t engage in such debate the way Terrell did. Some fight analysts believe Ali could have dismantled Terrell quickly but instead chose to torment him. “What’s my name?” he yelled throughout the fight, answering his own question with his fists.
Of course, Ali wasn’t always the most reliable narrator. Talking to reporters immediately after the Williams fight, he said, “I believe I’d have beaten him anyway, but I think the Ali shuffle confused him” — a ridiculous observation.
Foot movement is crucial but also tertiary, not entirely outside the field of vision during a fight. But if a boxer follows his opponent’s feet, he’ll meet that opponent’s fists more quickly.
“He had a reputation for hitting hard,” Ali said, “he just couldn’t find anything to hit.”
There the Greatest offered a more astute observation. During a decade of changing trends — social, musical, patriotic — Williams arrived traditionally with a peek-aboo approach. Ali bucked years of tradition, danced around him, peppered him until that moment of activation, at which point a mauling occurred.
Williams was slowed by time and by life as a Black man in America. By the time he fought Ali, he’d spent years supporting his mother and grandmother. He worked difficult jobs for no pay and found some promise and release in boxing, a punishing pursuit for even its best practitioners. Perhaps nobody boxed better than Ali, who — Burns’ film attests — still took far too many blows to the dome, especially when he grew older.
Good days and bad days followed for “Big Cat” Williams. The Ali fight was the beginning of the end of his career as a boxer, though he’d fight for nearly another decade. He married a year before the fight and started a family. He and his wife, Irene, left Houston at some point in the 1970s and then returned to the city. A Houston Press story from years ago suggested strained ties to his son Reuben were later restored in the 1990s. They made a meaningful connection that lasted until Williams’ death.
Roy Foreman says when he’d promote boxing matches in the mid-1990s, the Big Cat would surface regularly. “He was a fixture at all of them,” Foreman said.
“The Big Cat was loved by Houston fans, believe me.”
In 1997, he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame. Williams had never been the heavyweight champion, but he’d fought several of the best that the sport offered across several years.
Early in the morning on Sept. 3, 1999, Williams was leaving for kidney treatment — a lingering result of the shooting — when he was hit by a car while crossing a street. He died that afternoon at Ben Taub Hospital. He was 66.
So much of Williams’ life had been spent fighting, in the ring and outside. But his family spoke of quieter moments.
Irene told the Houston Chronicle, “He was loved by a lot of people. Children and old people were his thing.”
Reuben pointed out that his father died without much money, but he “gave a lot to Houston.”
“Loved people,” Williams’ son said. “Loved children and loved to fish. And loved the sport of boxing.”
“He was a fixture at all of them. The Big Cat was loved by Houston fans, believe me.” Promoter Roy Foreman, on Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams’ later appearances at fights