How Cassius Clay Conquered the World

The ringside seats at the Miami Convention Hall were crowded on February 25, 1964, but the rest of the auditorium was sparsely filled. Celebrities like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Sammy Davis, Jr., were there to see and be seen at the heavyweight championship bout. Fight fans stayed home. The match in question held little promise of fistic fireworks.

Charles “Sonny” Liston, the champion, was an 11-year veteran of the pro ranks, a powerful bull of a man who had twice demolished the former champ Floyd Patterson in first-round knockouts. Liston was an awesome puncher, quick on his feet and well-versed in boxing tactics. “A demonstrably deadly fighting machine,” one sportswriter called him.

Cassius Clay, the young challenger, was almost universally dismissed by pugilistic wise men. He had earned the title shot at age 22 by winning an Olympic gold medal in 1960 and by handling himself respectably in the heavyweight division since turning professional that same year. But only a paucity of strong contenders, it was thought, had allowed him a crack at the champion. Savvy bettors were laying money on Liston at odds of eight to one.

Boxing had been in the doldrums since the retirement of Rocky Marciano in 1956. Always slightly redolent of the gutter, pugilism in the late fifties and early sixties had acquired a particularly bad odor. Mob guys controlled the venues and many of the fighters. Liston himself was an ex-con and a sometime enforcer for gangsters.

In one poll 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win, and 3 favored Clay. The writers despised the challenger for two reasons. First, he was a fast-talking, arrogant loudmouth. When it came to the heavyweight championship, the chroniclers expected a certain reverence and respect for tradition. Liston was only the twenty-second man to hold the title in a line that stretched back to John L. Sullivan in 1882. The ultimate contest for boxing supremacy demanded decorum.

Clay, an instinctive showman, had belittled and mocked Liston during training. His antics peaked at the weigh-in that morning, where he acted the madman, heaping scorn on the “ugly bear” he was about to fight. Most interpreted his ranting as a frightened young man’s extreme case of nerves. He would be lucky to get out of the ring without serious injury, they thought. His own doctor had scouted the fastest route to a hospital emergency room.

The other reason for the antipathy toward the challenger had nothing to do with the ring. While he trained for the fight, Clay spent his leisure hours with Malcolm X, a prominent lieutenant in the Nation of Islam, known to the press as the Black Muslims. Rumor had it that Clay himself might have joined this avowedly anti-white, militant group.

The issue of race had dogged American boxing since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. John L. Sullivan vowed never to meet a black man in the ring. The African-American Jack Johnson, who won the belt in 1908, enraged white America by flaunting his power and sexuality. When the former champ Jim Jeffries emerged from retirement in 1910 to take back the title for the white race, and Johnson knocked him out, race riots swept the country.

No black boxer had received a title shot for the next 20 years. When Joe Louis won the championship in 1937, he presented a mild image to the world that eased white anxiety. The handsome and eloquent Clay was likewise a natural for the role of “good” Negro. But his disdainful boasting and his association with the Muslims seriously rankled the white establishment.

The moment of truth came when the fighters finally faced each other in the ring. The meager crowd booed and jeered when Clay was introduced. Liston glowered. “I won’t lie,” Clay said later, “I was scared.”

But as Clay’s trainer Angelo Dundee said, “Styles make fights.” Clay’s style—moving, backpedaling, circling, stopping to throw lightning-quick punches—neutralized much of Liston’s advantage from the start. Sonny lunged. He launched devastating punches that hit only air. He wore himself out. After the first three minutes, Joe Louis, a Liston supporter who was commenting on the fight for the closed-circuit television audience, admitted, “I think we’ve just seen one of the greatest rounds we’ve seen from anybody in a long time.”

Three more rounds of similar battling left Liston’s face bruised and cut and the champion frustrated. But at the end of the fourth Clay’s eyes began to sting so badly he was blinded. Liston’s handlers most likely “juiced” his gloves with liniment in an effort to gain an edge, though nothing was ever proved about the incident. In his corner, between rounds, Clay was so distressed he wanted to concede. “This is the big one, Daddy!” Dundee told him. “. . . We’re not quitting now.” Clay danced and backpedaled an entire round, trying to clear his vision.

At the end of the fifth, his eyes did clear, and Liston’s chances of winning evaporated. In the next round Clay returned to the attack, hammering Liston with sharp blows. The champion was out of gas and out of options. Back in his corner, he said, “That’s it.” The fight was over.

Liston was the first champion to give up his title sitting in his corner since Jess Willard had lost to Jack Dempsey in 1919. But Willard, many pointed out, had suffered a broken jaw, cracked ribs, and dislodged teeth. Liston made only the much-doubted claim of a dislocated shoulder.

“Eat your words!” Clay screamed at the sportswriters. One of them, Red Smith, a Clay detractor before the fight, did. “In a mouth still dry from the excitement of the most astounding upset in many roaring years,” he wrote, “the words don’t taste good.”

At a post-fight press conference, Cassius Clay declared that he was indeed a Muslim. The announcement angered whites and perplexed blacks. The sporting establishment now knew that Clay would be no docile Joe Louis. African-Americans saw him turn his back on a decade of hard-won desegregation gains and embrace a radical fringe group. Within a month the group’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, had honored him with the name Muhammad Ali.

Ali set off on a grand and tumultuous career as both athlete and world-renowned public figure. Liston, after losing to the new champ again in May 1965, continued to knock out opponents through the 1960s but never again became a contender. He died of mysterious causes in January 1971.

Having watched fighters like Floyd Patterson and Ali himself succumb to brain injury, many in the sporting world now feel that the brutal and intricate “sweet science” has entered its twilight days. It may be, as David Remnick wrote in King of the World, his account of Ali’s early career, that “boxing, a sport designed to stun the brain, is finally indefensible.” If so, that February night in Miami was the opening chapter in boxing’s last and greatest epic.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World.