BOXING: George Kimball recounts the story of the seminal Sonny Liston-Cassius Clay fight of February 1964 that changed boxing.
'Has it really been 40 years?" Angelo Dundee said from his Florida home last week. "And here I thought we were all getting younger."
The fight that would forever alter the face of boxing took place at Convention Hall in Miami Beach 40 years ago this Wednesday, but a confluence of the combatants had brought them into geographical proximity several months earlier. In the summer of 1963, Sonny Liston, the heavyweight champion of the world, was in Miami, training for his second bout against Floyd Patterson. Young Cassius Clay, who would fight Henry Cooper in London that June, was preparing for that bout, as he always did, at the old Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach.
The late Chris Dundee, whose brother trained Clay, was the promoter for Liston-Patterson II, and one day he ran into Sonny, who inquired about Clay.
"How about getting this bigmouth in the ring to spar with me?" asked Liston. "I'll pay him a hundred dollars a day."
"What, are you crazy?" replied the ever-prescient Dundee. "And ruin a 10-million dollar gate?"
In the ensuing months Clay continued to prime the pump. He drove across the country in his custom-made bus and arrived at Liston's Denver home at one o'clock in the morning. He had dubbed Liston "a big, ugly bear", and when Sonny opened his door it was to discover a bear-trap set on his front lawn and Clay screaming at him to come out and fight.
They didn't fight that night, but Liston eventually did sign to fight Clay.
Clay was the reigning Olympic light-heavyweight champion and unbeaten in 19 pro fights, but his brash approach managed to alienate many of the old-timers among the press corps. Red Smith dubbed him "Gaseous Cassius", and Jimmy Cannon, at the time one of the nation's most respected sportswriters, could not conceal his disdain. When the Beatles, on their first American tour, visited the challenger's training site for what would become a celebrated photo op, the crusty scribe took the occasion to spew venom at both entities.
"Clay," wrote Cannon, "is part of the Beatle Movement. He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and Batman and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from Dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young."
Robert Lipsyte, a young sportswriter for the New York Times, happened to be in the Fifth Street Gym the day of the Beatles' visit, and recalled sitting around the dressing-room with John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they fidgeted about awaiting the arrival of Clay, who was, as usual, late. Then the door burst open and with a smile that immediately disarmed the visitors, Clay exclaimed "Hey, Beatles! Let's make some money!"
At one point Clay acknowledged something John Lennon had said by nodding and exclaiming, "You ain't as dumb as you look." It was a line he had used many times before and since, including, at least once, on me. This time Lennon was ready with a rejoinder.
"No," he said. "But you are."
There followed a nervous moment, but then everyone in the room began to chuckle. Including Clay.
In truth, the Beatles had asked to meet Liston, not Clay, but the champion wanted no part of them. When the photo of Clay and the Beatles appeared throughout the world, Liston moved to distance himself further from the Fab Four.
"Are these motherfuckers what all the people are screaming about?" sniffed Liston. "My dog plays drums better than that kid with the big nose."
For all of its colourful build-up, the Liston-Clay match-up was considered a classic mismatch. Sports Illustrated wrote that Clay was "crazy to consider entering the ring against a virtually indestructible and demonstrably deadly fighting machine", and the retired champion Rocky Marciano said, "I don't consider Clay's decision to fight Sonny Liston very smart."
Liston had utterly demolished the popular Patterson in two fights, and was regarded as the most fearsome creature on the planet, more indestructible than Tyson in his heyday, more savage than Foreman before the 1974 fight in Zaire. Liston was a prohibitive 7 to 1 betting choice, and a Miami News headline advancing the bout read, "The Money's on Sonny to Put Clay Away."
The challenger seized upon that as inspiration for another poem: "If you want to lose your money/ Be a fool and bet on Sonny./ If you want a good pay-day/ Bet it all on Cassius Clay."
At a final press conference on the eve of the fight, Clay lectured the Fourth Estate.
"This is your last chance to get on the bandwagon," he warned. "I'm keeping a list of all you people. After the fight is done, we're going to have a roll-call up there in the ring, and when I see that so-and-so called this fight a mismatch, we're going to have a ceremony up there - an eating-of-words ceremony."
For all of Clay's playful antics, a gathering storm grew over the February 25th fight date, stemming from the challenger's refusal to distance himself from the Nation of Islam.
"One thing I learned a long time ago was never to mess with a kid's personal life or his religion," said Angelo Dundee. "I didn't even know what a 'Muslim' was; I thought it was a bolt of cloth. The way I saw it, the kid never asked me what religion I am - and I'm a Catholic - and I never asked him about his.
"But once word got out that he had visited Elijah Muhammad in Chicago people started getting nervous. The Black Muslims were very intimidating to some people, because nobody knew what they were all about. My brother Chris and his partner Bill McDonald, who were promoting the fight, brought Muhammad in for a meeting, and when he came out he said, 'Angelo, there's no fight. They want me to say I'm not a Muslim, but I am a Muslim.' "
Clay's embracing of his new faith turned the promotion upside down. A fight he had been ready to market as Good Guy vs Bad Guy suddenly had no good guy.
"It went from a fight between a tough guy and a nice kid to one between Liston and a Muslim," said Angelo Dundee. Or, as the late publicist Harold Conrad put it, "it looked like there'd be two black hats fighting."
"I only saw Malcolm X once before the Liston fight," recalled Angelo Dundee. "When he showed up at the gym one day, Ed Pope, Pat Putnam and some other newspaper guys were there, and I knew there'd be trouble if they recognised him. I told Rudy (the challenger's brother, Rudolph Valentino Clay, who would later become Rahman Ali) to get him out before somebody spotted him.
"Rudy looked at me and said 'You tell him,' " remembered Dundee.
Malcolm stayed that day, but was eventually persuaded by Conrad that his continued presence might torpedo the promotion. He agreed to leave Miami.
"But I'm coming back for the fight," he vowed, and he did.
Having survived the scare over the Black Muslims, the fight nearly disintegrated again at the weigh-in, where Clay burst into the room wearing a blue denim jacket with "Bear Huntin' " inscribed on the back, accompanied by Angelo Dundee, Drew "Bundini" Brown and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Clay, carrying an African walking stick, and Bundini were chanting in unison "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee", and Clay further inflamed the scene when he flung himself at Liston on the scale. His demeanour was that of a madman as he screamed "I'm the champ and you're the tramp!"
Liston feared no mortal, but he wasn't sure what to make of what Jerry Izenberg, covering the fight for the Newark Star-Ledger, recalled as "an absolute lunatic".
A subsequent physical exam by the local commission revealed Clay's blood pressure to be 200/100. An hour later it was re-measured by his personal physician and cornerman, Ferdie Pacheco. Clay had returned to a perfectly normal 120/80. Clay was fined $2,500 for disrupting the weigh-in, but the fight was allowed to proceed.
Almost from the opening bell, Clay took the fight to Liston. The champion's stock in trade was a jab that Dundee once described as "like a battering ram", but as the evening unfolded, Cassius was consistently out-jabbing Sonny.
In the third, Clay unloaded a one-two combination, spearing him with a jab followed by a chopping right that opened a gash on Liston's left cheekbone.
Then, toward the end of the fourth, Clay began pawing at his eyes. When he returned to his corner after the round he pleaded with Dundee to cut his gloves off.
"I can't see," he complained. "We're going home."
"People said Liston had put liniment on his gloves to blind Ali, but that was a crock," Angelo Dundee recalled a few days ago. "It was either Moncil solution (the now-banned iron-based coagulant was legal at the time) they'd put into the cut, or else it was the stuff they kept rubbing on Sonny's shoulder between rounds. Either way, it got on my kid's gloves and then into both of his eyes. I stuck my pinkie in his eye and put some of the stuff in my eye, and I'll tell you, it burned like hell, but I washed his eyes out with water, threw the sponge away and then I threw the towel away, too.
"You can imagine how hysterical he was, though," said Dundee. "One minute he's beating the hell out of the guy, and the next he's blinded."
What took place in that corner in those 60 seconds may have been the single most pivotal minute in boxing history. Dundee somehow managed to staunch his fighter's panic and almost literally threw Clay back into the ring.
"I didn't exactly push him back into the ring, but I did make him stand up," recalled Dundee. "The referee (Barney Felix) was coming over toward our corner, and if he'd heard some of the stuff I was hearing, the son of a bitch might have waved it off, so I made him stand up. Then I sent Drew Brown over to Liston's corner to look at his gloves, just trying to kill some time. I can still remember Bundini shuffling across the ring, muttering 'Dirty work. Dirty work'."
As the bell rang, Dundee patted his fighter on the hindquarters with the words, "Uh-uh, this is the big one, Daddy. Stay away from him and run."
"Beethoven wrote some of his greatest symphonies when he was deaf," Ferdie Pacheco later recalled the scene to Ali biographer Thomas Hauser. "Why couldn't Cassius Clay fight when he was blind?"
Clay spent the next three minutes taking evasive action as he blinked his eyes. The tactic worked. By the end of the round the burning sensation had departed and his vision cleared.
By the sixth he was again pummelling Liston at will, and when the bell rang to signal the seventh, the champion retired on his stool, citing the shoulder injury.
Whether the battered Liston, who wound up in a Miami hospital that night, was genuinely impaired, or whether he recognised that he was likely be knocked out as early as the next round, remains a subject of debate after 40 years. Ali himself isn't sure to this day, and Sonny took the answer to his grave six years later.
When he realised Liston had quit, Clay sprang into the air and pranced about the ring, shouting "I shook up the world! I shook up the world!" The Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver would later call him "The Fidel Castro of Boxing", but on that night he didn't even become Muhammad Ali. At the post-fight press conference he did confirm his new religion, and renounced his "slave name". Henceforth, he ordered, he would be known as Cassius X.
When the distinguished author Budd Schulberg spoke with Cassius X the following morning, he asked about his plans.
"As the champion of the whole world, I plan to travel all over the world and meet with the great leaders of the world," the man who would become Muhammad Ali replied.
He could not have been more prophetic.
