Boxing: To mark Muhammad Ali's 60th birthday today, we publish Alistair Cooke's report of his win over Sonny Liston in 1964
Cassius Marcellus Clay, by his own admission the greatest man in the history of the human race, could not have surprised the world more if last night God had parted the skies and ridden down on a thunderbolt to present him in person with the title of heavyweight champion of the world.
At five past eleven last night he (Cassius, not God) stood before the cowering press with his long, long arms raised in a great V, like Moses or Hitler. Below him, in every sense of the word, were at least 46 boxing experts.
They had been culled from Tokyo, Zurich, Stockholm, San Francisco and Glasgow, among other sophisticated places, and 43 of them were ready to form a club, if it would have helped, to stop the fight before it began, so that Liston the Invincible might not have a capital charge on his hands, so that Cassius Clay, the insufferable young blabbermouth from Louisville, Kentucky, might be safely returned to the Blue Grass country and put out to pasture with the other mindless colts.
There was little enmity and no pride of knowledge in this expert group. They had come a long way to report an obscenity: the deliberate mismatching of a 22-year-old grasshopper with an armadillo, of a butterfly with an elephant, of a maniacal youngster with a brutal pro. It had all been done for vast amounts of money. It would be over in one round or two, three at the most, so that up to a minute or so before the two appeared, the 43 consoled each other with forlorn little jokes: "The Miami Beach police department will take Cassius into protective custody at the sound of the bell."
Now he stood over them, his eyes flaring like gas jets and foam at his mouth. "Hypocrites!" he yelled. "Whatcha gonna say now? Huh? Huh? It won't last one round. He'll be out in two. You know somep'n? Nobody but a fool would wanna fight me. I'm too fast.
"Liston's a powerful man, and I just chopped him up. He couldn't even hurt me. He was so bad he had to go to the hospital, and I'm still pretty. How about that, huh? Whatcha gonna say now? What about you newspaper men? Let's hear it: who's the greatest?"
Through the tumult of seconds trotting and trainers and the jostle of swearing men in shirt sleeves some of the reporters snickered very quietly and a few clapped. Cassius roared and jutted his immaculate chin towards them. "Huh? Let's really hear it: who's the greatest? All you writers. I'll give you one more chance. Who's the greatest?" Mr Squeers never got a more heartfelt response from petrified pupils. "You are, you are, Cassius," the experts chanted.
How had this humiliation and this impossible triumph come about? Granted that the rules exist to be violated by the latest genius, that experts can be fooled by an alarming or novel style, by a Cezanne or a Stravinsky, but there was no proof till last night that Clay could box at all, in any style conservative or outrageous. They had watched him pounded by hack sparring partners. Even a punching-bag had floored him. They agreed with the cool judgment of Joe Louis: "He just can't be that bad." It turned out he couldn't and wasn't.
The writers who had seen him in his last half-dozen bouts were bewildered to confess that they were seeing an entirely new man, a clever dancing boxer who weaved through zig-zag feints while the lumbering giant delivered hooks and uppercuts and jabs to the empty air, where Clay should have been.
It began in the first round, which all the wise money said was to be the last. Clay stood a head above the burrowing Liston and rarely bothered to keep his gloves higher than his hips, a bit of nonchalance that sent his admirers into frenzies of solicitude at one and two thousand miles, screaming in the blackness of theatres in Toronto and Chicago: "Keep your guard up, stay away from him, get your hands up, Cassius. Cassius, he'll murder you."
Amazingly there was never any premonition of murder, except in the sixth round, when Liston was stumbling around like a blinded ox and Clay kept measuring him, with his left arm extended, for little whirlwinds of artillery to his broken head and neck.
From the first round to this sixth and last Cassius seemed to be able to decide at will when he would hold Liston's head for easy contemplation, like Yorick's skull, and then chastise it with these double-fisted tattoos.
When the champion sat bent and brooding in his corner and failed to come out at the bell for the seventh round, and Cassius stood there and went into a Morris dance, it was very plain that the champ had been put away. It was, his doctor explained, because he had put his shoulder out of joint in the first round. A trainer said it was in the fifth. It took a team of doctors and X-rays to confirm that Liston had indeed suffered a shoulder injury.
There is, the morning after, no place to go for consolation or the retrieve of one's dignity. Even Cassius's account of the fight is exactly correct. A powerful man was "chopped up" by a faster man. It was, said Cassius, in a burst of telepathy, "Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake La Motta over again; I watched the movie of that fight over and over for eight months. That's what I've been doing. I'm too quick for any heavyweight alive."
It was also Sugar Ray and Randy Turpin all over again: quicksilver against concrete. Mercury v the Dragon, a live contemptuous picador planting the flags at will in the neck of a tottering old bull.
There was no escape from Cassius's needling. He even offered a child's advice to men who had been weighing odds before he was born: "You newspaper men made it tough on Liston. Don't ever make a seven-to-one favourite. Just let me go in even money."
Yes, Cassius, yes sir, Massa Clay, anything you say, Massa, you're the boss and no mistake.
