Sports

I haven't seen the Burn's film yet. However, I am writing an article on the Ali vs Liston fights for a boxing forum run by a close family friend of Ali's, and thus might be able to shed some light on what happened that night in Maine. I am aided by my scrapbook of newspaper & magazine articles from the time, as well as the later analysis of the controversial fight. Add to that a 40+ year close friendship with Rubin Carter, a friend and sometimes sparring partner of Liston's. Rubin would fight more than a half-dozen of Ali's sparring partners, and Ali called Rubin "the Little Ugly Bear," and Sonny "the Big Ugly Bear." Years later, Ali would play a significant role in Carter's legal defense.

You have to start with their first fight. Boxing "experts" were convinced that Liston could not be beaten. Many were convinced he would have beat the great Joe Louis. A reporter asked him, while he was training to fight the young challenger, if he had improved since 1960? Liston asked, "What do you think?" The reporter said he wasn't sure, as he had knocked out his opposition so quickly since 1960. Sonny said that suggested he was improving.

Ali's last two fights had included a tough decision over Doug Jones, and a TKO over Henry Cooper, in which Henry decked Ali. While it looked to be impossible for Ali to survive long based on those two fights, the truth was that he was growing, and had learned a lot in those fights. So Liston trained for a one-to-three round fight, and Ali trained to move so that Sonny could not get his feet set to land his intensely powerful punches. Dundee knew that Liston would be winded after a few rounds of a fast-paced fight -- not unlike George Foreman would tire out a decade later. More, Angelo knew that Liston didn't know how to "cut the ting off," something he had never had to do before.

After the upset, Liston took a short time off, then began training harder for the rematch than he had ever trained. In his book "Cosell," Howard -- who despised Liston and loved Ali -- wrote that he was convinced that Sonny would win the fight. But Ali got a hernia on the Friday evening before the scheduled Monday night fight in Boston. It's important to note that Liston had gotten down to 208 pounds then, while Ali had been heavier than in the first fight. But we will never know what might have happened.

A few months later, Malcolm X was brutally murdered. The split between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm's followers would be one of the causes of moving the return match away from Boston. There were threats made to both Ali and Liston. It was a tense time, and control of the heavyweight title meant big money to those behind each of the fighters. And it presented America a choice between a man believed to be owned by the mob, and a Black Muslim.

Though Liston trained hard for the rematch, he could not recapture the form he had in the first preparation for this fight. This is referred to as "over-training," which actually translates to not getting enough rest and recovery in the last two weeks before a fight. He had prepared to go to Ali's body -- having hurt Ali with body shots in the first fight. Plus, the body is a much larger target than the head, and more stable as well. His plan was to throw more right hands to the body, as Ali would be expecting more left hooks. Plus, one has to be closer to land the hook, and Ali's movement made getting that close difficult. So the idea was to land rights in early rounds, to slow Ali down and make it possible to land the left hook.

To land that right hand, Liston needed to measure distance with his jab. Thus, we see Sonny throwing a jab to the bosy. But he gets over his skis, with his upper body leaning over the triangle (chest & feet), always a mistake. Ali's punch can be seen impacting not only Liston's head and neck, but vibrating through his shoulders. The force literally picks Liston's left foot off the canvas -- try leaning over your left foot as Liston was, and then lifting that left foot. It can't be done, unless you have been hit with significant force.

Jersey Jow Walcott (who worked for my grandfather before winning the title) should not have been the referee. He lost control in the ring. Could Liston have gotten up earlier than he did? Yes, but because Ali kept coming out of the neutral corner, he didn't want to get hit while rising. Yet when he did get up, the fight resumed, while Walcott was conversing with Nate Fleisher, who was the editor of The Ring magazine, but not an official. Sonny was still hurt, but certainly could have continued to fight, though Walcott stopped the fight.

It was after this fight that boxing's "experts" started saying that Liston was much older than he actually was. His arrest record documents his real age to be what Sonny and his mother knew it to be. Interestingly, there is only one article found in the years before the Ali fights that questioned his age -- after he beat u8p a police officer when he was 20, a local paper said he got off easy due to his age, and should be treated like he was older.