WBC Countdown to #FuryWhyte Greatest Heavyweight Fights by OPUS: #AliListon I

The first fight between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay, changed the landscape of the heavyweight division and boxing right across the board, forever. Brash, brilliant, astute and erudite, 22 year Cassius, nicknamed the Louisville lip, was given very little chance against the glowering Sonny, who claimed to be thirty-two, but was closer to forty.

Cassius who soon re-named himself Muhammad Ali, unmercifully teased Sonny, who menacingly promised to flatten him in two rounds. But… as the Ali poem lilted: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee…he cannot hit what he cannot see.” Sonny who liked to pummel opponents at toe to toe range, simply couldn´t cope, with the dazzling speed, fancy footwork and whiplash jabs plus pinpoint combinations of quicksilver Clay.

But then, Ali came back to the corner after the fourth, complaining that his eyes were burning and he couldn`t see properly. Coach Angelo Dundee sponged those irritated eyes, and for the next round he evaded. By the sixth Ali´s eyes had cleared. Liston had a swelling under his right eye and a gash under his left. He was getting peppered plus battered and quit on his stool before round seven, complaining of shoulder pain. The new young champion declared: “I´ve shook up the World!”  A new era in boxing was underway.