King of the World

by David Remnick

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Anchor Punch

  MAY 25, 1965

  THE CROWDS, SUCH AS THEY WERE, STARTED GATHERING AT ST. Dominic’s at twilight. The announced attendance was 4,280, but it was clear to anyone in the arena that night that the real total was around three thousand at most. The citizens of Lewiston and the surrounding towns were more interested in the drum and bugle corps competition. The promoters were practically offering to give away the tickets, but no one was taking. This fight was for the cameras and the press. Technicians had erected a set of transmitting towers in the parking lot to beam a heavyweight title fight for the first time to Africa and the Soviet Union. Western Union set up a string of trailers to transmit copy. UPI hired the four fastest sprinters at Bates College to run copy from ringside to the trailers; tonight they would have to run fast, but it would be an early night.

  The paranoia in Lewiston had increased. Security men sifted through handbags, briefcases, and pockets. As Red Smith’s wife, Kate, entered the arena, an officer of the law checked her pocketbook.

  “You won’t find anything in there,” she said. “I’ve got the tommy gun in my garter belt.”

  Jimmy Cannon, still in high-crisis mode, reported breathlessly that two officers of the New York homicide bureau were still sifting St. Dominic’s on fight night for explosives. “They were searching for poison gas bombs, which … a leg-breaker for the Boston mosque who has a police sheet claimed were planted among the steel bars and spokes,” Cannon wrote. “They didn’t find them but they stationed themselves at the main entrance afterwards to pick up any black nationalist they made. They know them all.”

  Cannon went on, “The cement-block building was infiltrated by two hundred Maine policemen from every echelon. They were beat-walkers from Lewiston and county deputies and troopers of the state highway patrols and moving quietly among them were agents of the FBI. Even state liquor inspectors were issued handguns which they wore at their hips in holsters. The purse of every woman who entered the joint was frisked and all bags and packages and bundles and briefcases and satchels had to be opened for perusal. They were assisted in their surveillance by the strong-arm bravos of the Black Muslims who allied themselves with the forces of law enforcement to shield the only famous Negro to support publicly their crusade of black supremacy.” Cannon failed to mention that one reason why all the police and special agents were there in the first place was that local officials were reacting to his reporting—and, thus, Harold Conrad’s sly rumor-mongering.

  Ali waited until around nine to leave his hotel and drive to the arena. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt. Mort Sharnik of Sports Illustrated, who rode along with him, found Ali in a somber mood.

  “Give me your scenario for the fight,” Sharnik asked him.

  Usually Ali would go into a three-act performance, complete with mimicry of his opponent and the ring announcers. But now, quiet and serious, he said that it would be a strange fight. “It may start out with me not even throwing a punch. I’m just gonna go backwards and Liston will pursue and then, finally, bam!—I’ll hit him with the right hand and it’s gonna be over.”

  “That’s a short fight,” Sharnik said.

  “It will be a short fight,” Ali said. “That’s the way fights are. There’s no plan. It’s like no other sport. But I think I can take him. I would’ve knocked him out last time in the rounds I predicted.”

  Ali was not merely improvising with Sharnik. Three weeks earlier he had told a reporter about a recurring dream in which he rushed across the ring at the opening bell and hit Liston with a quick right hand. “That’s a psychological trick old Archie Moore taught me,” he’d said, “and it lets the bear know right now who’s in charge. I don’t see in the dream if it knocks him out, but he never recovers and I go on to win in an early knockout.”

  Back in his dressing room, Liston got a short visit from José Torres, the light heavyweight champion, who was in Lewiston to do the Spanish-language broadcast. Torres asked Liston if he had seen his victorious fight against Willie Pastrano for the title. Liston said he had.

  “Well, you gotta do the same thing,” Torres said. “Cut off the ring. You gotta cut off the ring on Ali.”

  Maine’s boxing officials did not assemble an especially distinguished cast to coordinate the fight. The referee, Jersey Joe Walcott, had, of course, been heavyweight champion in his time, but now in his new role could not offer much expertise. He was a “celebrity referee,” hired on the assumption that it does not require a genius to wave two heavyweights together and, eventually, count to ten. The knockdown timekeeper was Francis McDonough, a sixty-three-year-old retired printer. The referee always coordinates his count with the knockdown timer, and yet Walcott never found out where McDonough was sitting. The official timer was a fifty-five-year-old schoolteacher named Russell Carroll, who had been timing fights for thirty-odd years, including the fastest fight in boxing history, a ten-and-a-half-second extravaganza in which a boxer named Al Couture ran across the ring a split second before the opening bell and clubbed his opponent just as he was turning to face him. There is usually a clock somewhere near the ring, if not above it; there was not in Lewiston. All questions of time would be determined by the stopwatches in the hands of McDonough and Carroll.

  The honor of singing the national anthem went to Robert Goulet, a slick hearthrob singer made for Las Vegas and fight nights. But this would not be his finest night in the ring. As Goulet walked from his dressing room, he fumbled around in his pockets and discovered that he had lost his “palm notes,” the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “What am I going to do?” Goulet murmured to himself as he stepped through the ropes and into the ring. Then it turned out that he could barely hear the organ music accompanying him. He flubbed the lyrics and had a hard time keeping pace with the tune; it was as if he were a small child struggling to keep step with a parent in a rush. There were smiles along press row and in the celebrity seats: Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra were there.

  In his corner, Ali looked more confident than he had in Miami. There was nothing nervous in his bounce or in his gaze. Would he ever look more magnificent? He wore white trunks with black trim. He weighed 206 pounds and looked stronger now in his chest and arms.

  Liston, on the other hand, looked faraway, spacey. He took off his robe and stretched his torso, back and forth, side to side. Liston weighed 215 pounds and wore black trunks with white trim.

  At the sound of the opening bell, a reporter for UPI handed a bulletin over to one of the Bates College runners that read, “The Clay-Liston fight has begun and the following is a round-by-round report.…”

  By the time the boy from Bates made it to the transmitter trailer outside with his news, the Western Union man, who was watching the fight on a monitor, had news for him.

  BOXING AFICIONADOS HAVE STUDIED THE FILMS OF THE ENSUING minute or so of action with the same fanatical attention Kennedy assassination scholars have given the Zapruder film. But unlike the Zapruder film, with its bleeding colors and blood clouds, the films of the Ali-Liston fight actually erase some of the mystery that supposedly enveloped the event as it happened.

  The film is best seen, of course, in slow motion:

  As in his dream, Ali crosses the ring, and opens the fight with a right lead. But Liston absorbs the blow easily, and thus begins a minute’s worth of dancing, or rather Ali dancing clockwise, his gloves at his hip points, and Liston plodding along after him. Twenty seconds of ring time go by without a blow being struck or even attempted. Then Liston decides he must fight and strikes out with four lefts. All of them land, but glancingly, their force erased as Ali keeps moving backward and muffles the punches with his gloves and forearms. Liston jabs and jabs and not once does he hit Ali cleanly.

  Then comes the moment that would bewilder so many in the arena. With Ali skimming along the ropes, Liston lunges forward with a left. Ali yanks back his chin just enough to avoid any damage, and then, as he pivots forwa
rd, throws a short, chopping overhand right to Liston’s temple. Liston’s head snaps to the side and he goes straight down to the canvas. It is possible that later in the fight, the punch might not have been enough on its own to floor Liston, but Liston is off-balance from missing the jab, frustrated, and, since it is still just a minute into the fight, cold.

  Now all this, of course, is with the benefit of a projector that slows the two fighters the way the photographer Eadweard Muybridge reduced the gallop of racehorses to discreet, comprehensible still images. Replayed in real time, in “fast motion,” there is a minute or so of uneventful dancing and pawing followed by a moment in which Ali obviously does something—his arm suddenly becomes a whipping blur—but it is not completely clear what has occurred except that it profoundly affects Sonny Liston, who is now flat on the floor. So confusing is the moment, and so quick is Liston’s drop, that one imagines there might have been a few people at St. Dominic’s who were suddenly terrified that Liston had been shot from ringside. Yet some observers who were there and were without the benefit, at least for a while, of slow-motion replay said they saw the punch clearly.

  “It was just like Ali had envisioned it on the bus,” said Mort Sharnik, who had a prime press seat. “Liston overloaded on the left, threw it, Ali rode the punch back and away, and Liston fell in toward him, and Ali rose up and brought his right hand up and dropped it as Liston was falling forward. Liston never saw the punch to his cheekbone, and it’s the punch you never see that causes you the problem. People say it was a ‘phantom punch.’ You started hearing that phrase right away. Well, I was sitting with Floyd Patterson and Cus D’Amato. And there was an old Maine state trooper in what looked like a Smokey the Bear hat screaming, ‘Dammit, he hit him right smack on the chin!’ And the bunch of us saw what happened. There was no question in our minds. Not later, but right away.”

  In slow motion, one can see that the downward force of the blow not only snaps Liston’s neck, it also makes him lift his left foot off the ground before he finally tumbles onto the canvas. “I teach that punch,” said Angelo Dundee, as he watched the tape thirty-odd years later. “Stick, slide right, drop the right hand over. Liston just didn’t see it—and that’s the punch that gets you out of there.” As Liston was falling, Ali tried to follow up with a left hook but he missed. Liston was already down.

  “That shot shivered Liston,” Chicky Ferrara said at the time. Ferrara was an experienced trainer whom Dundee had placed near Liston’s corner to discourage a repeat of the blinding incident in the last fight. “He blinked his eyes three times, like he was trying to clear his head, and I looked at Willie Reddish. I could see Reddish looked sick because he knew his fighter was in trouble.”

  LISTON WENT DOWN AND ROLLED TO HIS BACK, HIS ARMS stretched over his head. The rules of the game demand that the upright fighter retreat immediately before the referee starts his count, but Ali would not retreat. Jersey Joe Walcott was too deferential. He didn’t force Ali away but should have.

  Instead, Ali stood directly above Liston. He kept his right hand cocked and started shouting down at Liston:

  “Get up and fight, you bum! You’re supposed to be so bad! Nobody will believe this!”

  At that moment, a young photographer for Sports Illustrated named Neil Leifer clicked his shutter. The photograph—Ali above Liston, Ali fierce and beautiful—was the lasting image of the fight; it may even be the most lasting image of Ali in the ring, period. Leifer had idolized the great sports photographers of the previous generation: Mark Kaufman, John Zimmerman, and Hy Peskin at Sports Illustrated and George Silk at Life. By the early sixties the photographers were no longer using the boxy Speed Graphics favored by WeeGee; they were using twin-lens reflex cameras or 35-millimeters. “Boxing, for the photographer, was a matter of anticipation,” Leifer said. “With the Rolleiflex and strobe lights you had one shot and then you wind and wait three to five seconds for the light to recycle. You didn’t have the supertechnology yet, but even in the early Ali days it was better for a photographer than it would be years later. There were three ropes, not four. There were fewer lights, so you got a black background. There was no advertising for the MGM Grand or Bud Lite on the ring apron. People smoked and so you got a dramatic haze. And this was before TV got rid of the strobe lights so you could light more dramatically. The images were more poetic then.”

  Leifer had the advantage of both poetry and luck. “I was just in the right place,” Leifer said. “A clear shot, no referee blocking the way. We’d spent three days lighting the ring and greasing the local electricians. We borrowed the lights from Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island—forty condensers at eighty pounds each—and had them trucked up to Maine and used that for a fish-eye of the whole arena at the moment of the knockdown. So everything was perfect. The instant I took the picture I knew the spot was perfect. Except one thing. They used one of George Silk’s punching pictures for the cover and mine with the article inside.”

  Ali finally backed away from the fallen Liston and allowed Walcott to shove him toward a neutral corner. But by now, everything was out of kilter. The crowd was screaming, “Fix! Fix!” Liston was lolling around on the canvas and Walcott was utterly confused. “The reason I stayed with Clay and kept pushing him away was because I was afraid he was going to kick Liston in his head,” Walcott told reporters. “Clay was like a wild man. He was running around the ring and shouting for Sonny to get up. Can you imagine what they would have said about me if Clay had kicked Liston in the head? And you know he might have hit Sonny as he was getting up.… Like all referees I was in there to protect the fighter on the floor. Liston was a whipped man. I could see by that glassy look in his eyes. It didn’t make any difference if I counted or not, I could have counted to twenty-four, Liston was in a dream world, and the only thing that could have happened was that he’d be seriously hurt.” Walcott never counted over Liston, he said, because Ali never gave him the chance to start. Nor could he get the count from the knockdown timekeeper. “They should have had a loudspeaker,” Walcott complained.

  Those with the presence of mind to think historically thought immediately of the 1927 Tunney-Dempsey fight in which Dempsey neglected to go to his neutral corner when Tunney was down; Tunney got up at what would have been “fourteen” and went on to win.

  Francis McDonough, the knockdown timer, would be persecuted for years by doubting reporters until he finally stopped talking to them. He died in 1968. “If anyone was to blame for the fiasco it was that bum Clay,” he said. “If that bum Clay had gone to a neutral corner instead of running around like a maniac, all the trouble would have been avoided. I started my stopwatch when I saw Liston hit the canvas and banged off the count until the watch showed twelve seconds elapsed, and I shut it off. When the referee came over to me I told him I had stopped the watch at twelve seconds and that Liston by that time had been on the canvas for at least twenty seconds.”

  And yet after Ali was safely in a neutral corner, Liston finally got to his feet. Walcott cleaned off Liston’s gloves against his shirt and then called the fighters back in to resume fighting. Ali moved in on Liston, eager to finish him off. He immediately started hitting Liston without much thought to choreography or self-defense. He was looking for a knockout.

  But at the same time, just as the two fighters engaged, Walcott started walking away from the action and toward the ring apron. He was responding to the summons of the grand elder of the boxing press, Nat Fleischer, the editor of Ring magazine, who was shouting his name.

  “Joe! Joe, the fight’s over! The fight’s over!”

  “What?”

  “The fight’s over!” Fleischer was sitting next to McDonough, and he told Walcott that Liston had been on the floor for well over ten seconds. Thus instructed, Walcott turned around and waved off the fighters. It’s over, he told them, and he declared Ali winner and still heavyweight champion.

  Liston was confused and groggy. Willie Reddish had to steer him by the elbow to the stool.


  Dundee crossed the ring to console Liston and his corner.

  “I looked at Sonny and said, ‘Tough fight, Sonny,’ and Sonny just looked right through me,” Dundee said.

  “The whole thing was a disaster,” said Ferdie Pacheco. “We were in a state where they knew nothing about boxing. It was a comedy of errors. But don’t think for a minute the result would have been any different. Liston had trained himself like old fighters do, to a fine point. But more than that, old fighters can’t take it. It’s like your gas tank is filled and you can’t put more in. After Ali had the hernia, Sonny couldn’t maintain his edge. As an old man your muscles can’t take it. They’re not young muscles anymore. You overtrain and you’re dead. In the meantime, Ali had a nice rest. It was the same thing in Zaire a decade later. Ali wasn’t quite ready, Foreman got cut in camp, they postponed the thing, Ali got really ready, and won. When you think about Ali’s career, one factor you should never discount is good fortune. At least until he went on too long and paid for it, he was truly blessed.”

  But it wasn’t only Ali’s cornermen who could see that Liston had been stunned. Liston went back to the locker room and softly asked his cut man, Milt Bailey, for smelling salts. “Smelling salts is nasty—you don’t ask for smelling salts if you haven’t been hit and hit hard,” Bailey said. “I felt so bad for him. The shame of it is that Sonny really was ready when the fight was supposed to go off in Boston, but the next time around he wasn’t in shape. He’d just lost it.”

  Floyd Patterson, who knew something about losing and about shame, went to Liston’s dressing room, an incredible gesture considering how humiliating his losses to Liston had been. Patterson was stunned that Liston had lost so quickly. He had seen Liston in the ring against some tough fighters—Machen, Williams, lots of them—and he had never seemed to mind getting hit. And now he’d gone down on a flash overhand right. Liston was alone now and sat on a rubbing table.