Muhammad Ali and the Invisible Punch.

[Tomconroy]

Last edited Sat Sep 25, 2021, 08:36 AM - Edit history (1)

All my life I have heard the story that the second Muhammad Ali - Sonny Liston fight ended with an invisible punch, leading to all sorts of speculation as to what really happened to end the fight in the first round. Inspired by Ken Burns' documentary on Ali, I decided to see what I could find out.
The fight had been agreed to in the contract for the first Ali- Liston fight. However such a clause was illegal under WBA rules so it was difficult to find a venue to stage the fight. It ended up being held in the small city of Lewiston, ME. The fight lasted only about a minute and 40 seconds. Liston comes out and tries to stalk Ali. He follows him around the ring throwing many punches, few of which land, none with any effect. This fight, brief though it is, shows Ali at his very best: beautiful footwork, great speed when he chooses to throw a punch, the astonishing ability not to duck a punch but simply to lean away from them. His hands are at his waist, daring Liston to try to hit him. Liston just can't do it. After a minute, Ali lands a really solid right counter punch. Although Liston doesn't slow down his pursuit the punch must have had some effect. It was very solid.
At about a minute forty we come to 'the punch'. Liston moves in, misses with a punch and Ali throws a right. Liston goes down and lies flat on the mat. This is the point where I always thought the fight ended with the iconic photo of Ali standing over a prone Liston..Only it didn't happen that way. Here it becomes truly bizarre.
With Liston down, Ali refuses to go to a neutral corner. The referee Jersey Joe Walcott, after some time, is able to eventually guide Ali to a corner. Meanwhile Liston rises to one knee, collapses again, but then almost immediately gets to his feet. Walcott comes over, checks on Liston and allows the fight to continue. However, just as boxing resumes Walcott is distracted by something. He leaves the fighters, goes to the side of the ring and then quickly comes back and stops the fight.
What actually happened is this: Under the rules of the fight as recited in Wikipedia, only the referee could count a fighter out. Once Liston went down and Ali was in his corner Wolcott had a choice: He could have consulted the timer who had the job of counting how long Liston was down and picked up the timer's count, or he himself could have started a new count. He did neither. He simply allowed the fight to resume. The timer apparently was a little fellow named McDonough, couldn't be seen from the ring and his voice couldn't be heard over the crowd but he was keeping a count when Liston went down. What distracted Wolcott when the fight resumed was the editor of Ring magazine, Nat Fleischer, who was sitting next to the timer, screaming that the fight was over because the timer had counted Liston out. Wolcott consulted with the timer and then improperly ended the bout.
So what to make of it all? First, the invisible punch. Did it actually land? I've watched the tape a dozen times. I'm pretty sure it lands. It's not a knockout punch though.
The one that came 30 seconds earlier was a more devastating blow. I've included the video below in particular though because at the end the broadcaster goes over a slow motion video of the fight with Ali. Ali clearly has no idea at the beginning if he landed a punch and if so with what hand. I've read several accounts of Liston's version of the fight. In all of them Liston concedes he was hit. He says he was never actually out but was confused because he couldn't hear a count and wasn't sure at what point to get up.
What actually happened? We can only guess. There is a theory that Liston threw the fight and another that he just gave up for whatever reason (Fear of the Black Muslims? He just didn't want to go on trying to hit someone and not succeeding?). The problem with both those ideas to my mind is that Liston got up and continued the fight. If the fix was in or if he just wanted 'no mas' it would only make sense that he would stay on the canvas. As I said, I'm reasonably certain Ali's punch landed and it was an honest knock down. The great boxerJames Braddock, the Cinderella Man, was at ringside. He had a theory that the first right Ali landed 30 seconds before had a devastating effect and the second right just completed the job. For want of any better explanation I'll go along with an experienced fighter's opinion.
What would have happened if the fight had continued? I don't think there is any doubt.
Liston was in real trouble. The round had a minute to go. Ali was intent on ending it. If it didn't end then this was the Ali of the mid 60s. There has been no one as fast, as tough and as elegant as Ali in his prime. This was a good fighter against an immortal one. Liston stood no chance.
There was nothing like Ali in the 60s. Boxing is a brutal sport which I can't watch any more. But seeing The Greatest then was a pure joy. He was a great fighter in the early 70s when he returned the ring from exile but not the same fighter as when he was young:
Float like a butterfly, Sting like a bee! Rumble, young man, rumble! Yes indeed!

Just the punch and it's aftermath:

[gopiscrap]

1. I watched that special too

it `was fascinating...more so for the politics and history surrounding it.

[keithbvadu2]

2. I remember that one of them heard 'hit that ni__er' from the audience and wondered which fighter was

I remember that one of them heard 'hit that ni__er' from the audience and wondered which fighter was being encouraged.

[H2O Man]

3. The "anchor punch."

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.

[Tomconroy]

4. Great stuff! I did read of the story Ali told about being taught

The 'anchor' punch by the actor Steppin Fetchit who learned of it from Jack Johnson. That's clearly one of Ali's tall stories. You can tell from the post fight interview at ringside Ali at first had no idea what happened.

[H2O Man]

5. Both before

and after the second Liston fight, Ali decked other big, strong heavyweights with the exact same punch. Another example would be when Ali stopped on a dime and decked Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams with that short, chopping punch. Clearly, Ali had a lot of adrenaline flowing when he was demandin that Sonny get up and fight.

There is a bit more than a grain of truth to the Fetchit-Johnson story, but not a lot. (smile) The anchor punch is simply that quick stop, with the movement having grounded your weight onto your right foot briefly, then shifting it forward while throwing the right cross. It is far more likely to simply stun, eeven deck the opponent. But the others that Ali had & would hit with it got up, and took a further beating.

A sort story: before my last amateur fight, while heading to the gym for my final sparring, I told my brother-in-law that I planned to deck my older brother, then a professional fighter. My brother had annoyed me the day before, likely a combination of my getting the pre-fight grumpiness, and being Irish brothers. Anyhow, I had extraordinary footwork, and in the second round, caught him with an anchored punch, sending him sprawling. I did an Ali shuffle as others in the gym watched, thus making my brother mad. Shortly after getting up and continueing, he thumbed me in the eye. I still think that was on purpose. It made that fight against a rangey southpaw a bit more difficult, but I won.

[Tomconroy]

6. So how good a boxer was Ali?

[H2O Man]

7. He was at the

elite, all-time great level. Ali had the perfect build for a heavyweight. He had uncanny speed for the division, was physically very strong, and as Liston said after the first fight, he hit much harder than people realized. Part of that had to do with catching an opponent coming into his strength -- which always results in the opponent being hurt. And he had as high of "ring intelligence" as anyone who ever competed.

It's a shame that he wasn't allowed to fight for 3.5 years, when his physical skills would have peaked. But he proved his greatness in the second half of his career, adding to his legend. In my opinion, he was the greatest heavyweight champion in ring history.

Watching his fights with Liston, especially the first one, I'm still amazed that he fought with his hands at his sides. Sonny was a scary man in the ring. Safe to say he scared a lot of people outside of the ring, too.

[Tomconroy]

8. Here's a woman's perspective on the punch:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2009/09/28/barbara-long-the-lady-saw-the-big-punch/

[H2O Man]

10. Right.

Very good! That was first published in the June 3, 1965 edition, shortly after the May 25 fight, at a time when some among the audience saw the punch, and others didn't. One didn't need to look away for more than a fraction of a second to miss an Ali punch. A while after this, Sports Illustrated carried an 8-page article, almost exclusively filled with photos, documenting Ali's speed. For example, his ability to throw a jab that breaks a voard, and return his hand, in 3/8ths of a second.

In boxing, form plus speed equals power. Ali was bigger than Liston. When he threw the fast counter-punch, it hurt Liston, besides knocking him down. Sonny Liston was a heck of a fighter, but Ali was better in both of their fights.

This article is interesting. You can see that the talk of Liston being older are taking root. Much of the public has any grasp of how great Ali was. So they search for a reason Ali won.

[Tomconroy]

9. I sure wouldn't have wanted to get on Sonny Liston's wrong side!

[H2O Man]

11. Right.

Rubin told me that when he sparred Liston in the gym in Philly the last time, when he took his headgear off, it was bloody. His ear was bleeding. He knew that Sonny hadn't gone hard on him, but that his punches were all powerful. Rubin knew that it would be insane for him to spar Liston again. So even being on Sonny's good side could be risky!

[Tomconroy]

12. I just found this video. In slow motion you can see

Liston's head literally shake. A harder punch than I realized:

[H2O Man]

13. Yeah.

Ali could punch. He was not as hard a puncher as guys like Liston or Foreman, of course. But you can see that was a solid punch. You see how much he put into it by how far his right shoulder has come forward when it lands, That was a lot of upper body strength going into that punch.

[Tomconroy]

14. I really appreciate your writing in. I learned a lot.

[H2O Man]

15. I enjoy this.

I'm likely going to meet a teenager new to this area who is interested in boxing. He had started training himself on Long Island, before his family moved up here in the sticks. The head of the teachers union contacted me a week ago, as she knows my family -- she taught two of my daughters, one now living and boxing in Boston. Anyhow, I suggested my son train him, but his current schedule isn't really open. (Since he hasn't had any fights since covid started, he's competing in 32-mile races with 60 obstacles along the way.)

It's a beautiful but brutal sport. I wish my children didn't fight, but they are carrying on a tradition that goes back many generations. I train my son leading yp to his fights, but he's good at keeping in shape. Since the finals of the state Golden Gloves were cancelled in April of 2020, he's only taken 10 days off from training.

He's helped me with training others over the years, and is very good at it. I don't train many fighters these days, but every one I've trained since 1975 has won the Golden Gloves. I'm confident my son will carry that tradition on when he stops fighting. My daughter, a social worker, trains girls from low-income families in the summer, when they are out of school.

[StevieM]

16. A couple questions for you.

What is your prediction for Fury-Wilder III? Does Wilder have a decent chance of pulling off an upset? I am rooting for him, mainly because I didn't like the way Fury tried to cancel the rematch.

Also, are you familiar with a couple of young heavyweights named Efe Ajagba and Jared Anderson? I came across their names when I was reading an article about the Fury/Wilder fight. They sound interesting, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about either of them, and their prospects for the future.

[H2O Man]

17. Good questions.

I'll start with the first, and will get to the second later. I'm just taking a brief break from writing about the Liston vs Ali era, partly on the pure boxing aspects, partly in the cultural context. My previous breaks in the past 48 hours have been spent watching films of the first two Wilder vs Fury fights, and current films of them in training for this one.

I have great respect for both men as boxers and human beings. I used to communicate with Tyson when he was a young, relatively unknown professional. I immediately liked him, and recognized that this kid would have no trouble in promoting himself. I've watched Wilder throughout his career, find him easy to like, but I think he is one of the worst publicly promoted fighters I've ever seen. Early on, though inexperienced, he showed the potential to be a complete fighter.

Deontay used to throw a jab that snapped like a bull whip. It helped him to remain balanced and deliver his explosive right hand. As long as he remained focused, he had skills that although they required development, showed progress. There were, of course, plenty of times he went off balance, often throwing windmill punches, and still flattening opponents. When he fought Stiverne the first time, and hurt his right shoulder, he primarily used that left hand to win the decision. And Stiverne was a tough, talented opponent. But since that 2015 win, his ring skills haven't improved greatly.

Part of this is, in my opinion, because of his public promotions. The focus was almost exclusively on that dynamic right cross. It can be hard for a successful young champion to not believe his good press. I've heard he became head-strong in training, perhaps explaining why Mark Breland cut back to only doing two weeks of "finishing" training in recent years. Breland was a heck of a fighter, and understood all the benefits od being a tall, thin boxer. Now, Wilder's toughness and pure athletic ability was on full display in his two fights with Luis Ortiz. It seemed evident that Anthony Joshua was not interested in fighting him at that time, so Wilder decided to fight Fury.

Despite the knockdowns, I thought Fury won the first fight. But I respect the opinions of those who thought otherwise. Going into the re-match, Fury had switched to hiring the late Manny Stewart's top aide in training camps, to prepare to use his size to his advantage in the second fight. That would prove, of course, very important. Wilder seemed to concentrate on that right cross in training -- it had, after all, almost ended the first bout in the last round. But there was a concern that he wasn't adding to it. Considering how many rights he missed in the first fight, I think it's fair to say he needed the fast, hard jab to set everything else up ..... for one of the best techniques against an opponent who moves his head is to stabilize him with a jab to the upper chest -- a much larger target. But Deontay would only have Mark for his last two weeks of training.

Fury obviously won in impressive fashion. But in large part, this was -- in my opinion -- because when he decked Wilder the first time, in the second round, that punch to the ear popped Deontay's left eardrum. Thus, Wilder showed little to no balance. This was distinct from losing balance going forward with the big right hand. Instead, he was not steady in attempts to move away to the side. Worse, he began pulling his head back from Fury's punches, which alone isn't a good tactic for anyone but Ali. Fury was knocking him off-balance, even when his punches didn't land cleanly, or when he simply bumped into him. Without the ruptured eardrum, the fight would have been different, though Fury seemed prepared to win.

I was among the first to tell Tim Witherspoon that he should consider training Deontay after that fight. Tim knows the sport very well, is easy to get along with, but wouldn't allow Wilder to dictate his own training routine. He's a serious man. But Wilder opted for Scott, a good trainer, but who appears to lack the authority in the gym to fully run the camp. I do see him working on basic essentials, such as the jab, proper footwork, left hooks to the body, and spinning out to the side after throwing a combination. Wilder needs all of those tools to win. However, I have concerns. The jab is too frequently from a semi-squared up stance, which makes it slower, shorter, and with less snal than from a bladed stance. No double-jabs mixed in. And he almost exclusively spins out to his right, without the cover of a jab. All of these skills are what sets up that big right hand -- as would spinning out to his left and throwing the right.

Concerning Fury, I think it is hard to beat a skilled opponent three times in a row in any sport. Since their first fight was declared a draw, this isn't a "rubber match" to motivate him. Yet, all reports are that he respects Wilder's outrageous power, and is training hard for a siddicult fight. More, he knows that within 24 hours of the second bout, instead of speaking about the ear injury, Wilder began making excuses similar to Big George Foreman after Ali beat him. Both would at times express paranoid thoughts about being betrayed by their handlers. (The #1 reason I wanted Tim to train him.) So Fury is confident that he is stronger mentally, although no one understands an emotional breakdown better and Fury. (His, of course, followed his winning the title. Distinct, but all too similar, to losing stability after a first loss.)

In these cases, I often study how each man responds after being hurt in a fight. Both men have shown the ability to respond well in previous fights. Even in their second fight, Wilder proved himself to be tough by continueing as long as he did, and protesting when the fight was stopped. He wanted to go on, hoping Fury would tire from the pace, and he could deliver that big right. Thus, the only issue regarding fighting when hurt is that most fighters resort to earlier, unskilled tactics, almost like one expects an amateur to use in their first three or four fights. This would tend to favor Fury.

Anyone as big as these two hits hard enough to knock an opponent unconscious. Still, this clearly favors Wilder. His build is that of a heavyweight version of Tommy Hearns. He has the physical gifts to develop a Bob Foster-like left hook. Fury has surprising movement for a giant heavyweight, and knows not to load up on every shot. Not only is that tiring, but it can be easier to anticipate. Fury took advantage of that in both of their fights.

This is one of those few fights where I don't want either guy to lose -- though a draw would hardly be satisfying. I make cases for each winning in my head, as well as how each is at risk of losing. It seems like a fairly close fight on paper, maybe 51 to 49 for Fury. Or for Wilder. Let's hope for a good, clean fight -- no intentional fouls, no cuts from butts -- with a clear winner. And hopefully I have not put you to sleep with my long-winded response! Enjoy the fight!