61 years ago, 22-year-old Cassius Clay shook the world. His victory over Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, marked the birth of Muhammad Ali, the greatest of all time.
Cassius Clay is unstoppable, no chance. He screams, his sentences come fast and hard like his jabs before on the body of Sonny Liston, who sits powerless in his corner, hit hard, severely humiliated.
“I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived. I don’t have a scratch on my face, and I beat Sonny Liston, and I just turned 22 years old, I gotta be the greatest!!!” Clay screams, screaming at the reporter holding a microphone under his nose, and he ends his shouting with the words, ”I shook the world, I know God, I know the real God.”
It is February 25, 1964. Sonny Liston, world heavyweight champion, has given up before the seventh round, beaten up by a supposedly hapless loudmouth, a 22-year-old underdog who was the Olympic champion in Rome four years earlier – and who has converted to Islam and is now calling himself Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad Ali: With a big mouth to victory over Sonny Liston
The world already knew at the time that he considered himself the greatest. Even before the first gong, before the fight in Miami Beach, Clay, blessed with an unshakable self-confidence and an incredibly big mouth, loudly proclaimed himself the “most beautiful” and the “greatest”.
Clay – in his fearlessly offensive self-marketing inspired by the wrestling star Gorgeous George of the time – taunts and insults the 31-year-old Liston, the “Black Bear”, who has a criminal past and maintains contacts with the Mafia, for weeks. At the weigh-in, Clay appears wearing a jacket with the inscription “Bear Hunting”.
When the gong sounds, Clay dominates the fight, which he says he will end in the eighth round at the latest. He taunts, drops his guard, and easily dodges the blows of the seemingly ponderous, obviously out-of-shape favorite. In the fourth round, the fight seems to be tipping, Clay can’t see anything – Liston’s gloves have been treated with a cleaning agent. Clay wants to give up, his coach Angelo Dundee sends him back out of the corner.
In round six, Liston is beaten up. After that, he’s had enough.
“The biggest sensation in boxing history”
Clay has shaken the world, he, the 7:1 underdog, about whom one of the journalists wrote the legendary sentence, Clay could at best defeat the illiterate Liston in a spelling bee. “This is the biggest sensation in boxing history,” mumbles the great Joe Louis, who is there up close as a TV expert.
Clay is the greatest – but as soon as he leaves the ring, he switches off. At the side of civil rights activist Malcolm X and famous football star Jim Brown, he can be seen peacefully enjoying a vanilla ice cream. The rematch takes place on May 25 of the following year.
Muhammad Ali knocks Sonny Liston down in the first round, resulting in this iconic photo of Ali shouting at the downed Liston.
