San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ali shook world 60 years ago; he had just begun
The first tremors were felt in Miami, late in the night of Feb. 25, 1964, but early in the fight.
Late in the first round, the challenger, a kid with a big mouth, began tagging the champ, who was as feared and powerful as any fighter of any era, with flurry after flurry of punches.
The tremors, the subtle shifting of the Earth, continued in the second round when the kid cut the champ, causing a welt to rise under his left eye in proportion to the slow fall of his invincibility.
This wasn’t how the fight was supposed to go. By now, Charles “Sonny” Liston, the 33-year-old heavyweight champion of the world, was supposed to have destroyed 22-year-old Cassius Clay, the boastful Olympic champion who had taunted and goaded Liston into taking this fight.
By the second round, it had been assumed, Liston would have caught the fast-moving Clay and punished him into unconsciousness. Liston was favored by 7-1 odds, and only three of 46 sports writers covering the fight picked Clay to win.
So imminent was Clay’s destruction that a young New York Times sports writer, Robert Lipsyte, was told by his editors to find out the route from the arena to the nearest hospital to which Clay would be taken.
But the tremors grew stronger in the third round as the welt under Liston’s eye began to bleed. Clay danced and peppered Liston’s face with left jabs. When Liston was able to connect, Clay took the punch and kept dancing. Clay wasn’t only faster than Liston, he was bigger.
After Clay buckled Liston’s legs with a combination, forcing the champ to grab the ring ropes to keep from falling, Clay shouted, “Come on, you bum!”
But in the fifth round, Clay was forced to run for his life. A substance from Liston’s gloves had gotten into his eyes. Blinking wildly, his eyes burning and vision blurred, Clay danced and juked to avoid Liston until he was able to see.
In the sixth round, he resumed battering Liston, who was bruised, bloodied and beaten. In his corner, waiting for the seventh round, Clay shouted to the disbelieving press corps,
“I’m gonna upset the world.”
Watching film of the match, it’s always amazing to see that Clay knows the fight was over before anyone outside Liston’s corner. Seeing that Liston has spat out his mouthpiece, Clay rises from his stool, dance-shuffles in place while staring at Liston’s corner, raises his arms in victory right before the seventh-round bell and danceshuffles to the center of the ring.
This is when the crowd realizes the fight is over — just as Liston’s corner signals that it is. Clay lowers his arms, speeds up his dance shuffle and is in the arms of assistant trainer Drew “Bundini” Brown when the referee raises Clay’s right arm, declaring him the victor.
It was during that whiteshoed dance shuffle that the Earth began to shake with the birth of a new phenomenon. One who knew he was unlike anyone this world had ever seen.
Immediately after the fight, Clay shouted, “I am the greatest! I shook up the world! I am the greatest thing that ever lived! I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned 22 years old. I must be the greatest! I showed the world! I talk to God every day! I’m the king of the world!”
Had he remained Cassius
Clay, a boxer of rare physical gifts who transformed a brutal sport into art, he’d have been a
memorable athlete. One who was mythologized.
But he became Muhammad Ali, who would suffer and be reviled for the courage of his convictions.
No athlete of any time or era occupied a larger cultural presence, consumed more attention, stirred larger controversies, and evoked more love and hate than Ali. Yet by the time of his death
in 2016, he may have been the most beloved person on Earth.
Ali once said, “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me: Black, confident, cocky. My name, not yours. My religion, not yours. My goals, my own. Get used to me.”
We did.