Sixty-two years ago tonight, a 22-year-old loudmouth from Louisville did the impossible. He walked into the ring against the most terrifying heavyweight since Jack Dempsey, a man who had destroyed two opponents in a combined total of four minutes, and he made him quit on his stool. When it was over, Cassius Clay screamed at the press section: “I shook up the world! I am the greatest!”
He was right on both counts.
The fight on February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach didn’t just crown a new heavyweight champion. It introduced the world to Muhammad Ali—though he wouldn’t take that name until the next morning. Everything that followed—the exile, the comeback, the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manila, the transformation into a global icon—began on this night.
This is the story of how it happened.
The Monster
Charles “Sonny” Liston was born into poverty in Arkansas, one of 25 children fathered by a sharecropper who beat him regularly. He was illiterate, institutionalized as a youth, and served time in the Missouri State Penitentiary for armed robbery. In prison, he learned to box.
Liston turned professional in 1953 and spent the next decade establishing himself as the most feared man in boxing. He was 6’1″ with an 84-inch reach—the longest of any heavyweight champion in history at that point. His jab was a weapon, thrown with the force of most fighters’ power punches. His left hook had ended fights and careers. His dead-eyed stare unnerved opponents before a punch was thrown.
By 1962, Liston was the number-one contender and had been for years. The problem was Floyd Patterson, the reigning champion, who refused to fight him. Patterson’s manager, Cus D’Amato, knew what everyone knew: Liston would destroy Patterson. The champion ducked the challenger for as long as possible.
When they finally met on September 25, 1962, in Chicago, Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round—two minutes and six seconds. The rematch in Las Vegas lasted four seconds longer. Patterson never landed a meaningful punch in either fight.
Liston was the heavyweight champion, and no one wanted to fight him. He was associated with organized crime, despised by the media, and seemingly unbeatable. Sports Illustrated would later rank him among the greatest heavyweights ever, while acknowledging the dark cloud that followed his career. The NAACP wished he would lose.
Then along came a kid who called himself “The Greatest” and wasn’t afraid of anyone.
The Louisville Lip
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father painted signs and murals; his mother was a domestic worker. He started boxing at 12 after someone stole his bicycle, and he told a police officer—who happened to run a boxing gym—that he wanted to find the thief and beat him up.
By 18, Clay had won 100 of 108 amateur fights, two national Golden Gloves titles, and the 1960 Olympic light heavyweight gold medal in Rome. He turned professional immediately, backed by a group of Louisville businessmen called the Louisville Sponsoring Group, who provided financial security and careful career management.
Clay was unlike any heavyweight before him. He was fast—blindingly fast—with feet that danced and hands that flicked jabs faster than observers could count. He held his hands low, pulled his head back from punches instead of blocking them, and talked constantly before, during, and after fights. He predicted rounds, insulted opponents, and declared himself pretty enough to be in movies.
The boxing establishment didn’t know what to make of him. A.J. Liebling, the great boxing writer, dismissed him as a “freak.” Old-timers said his style would get him killed against a real puncher. But Clay kept winning—19 straight fights, 15 by knockout—and kept talking.
By late 1963, he was the top contender. He started calling Liston out publicly, showing up at Liston’s home in Denver, driving through the neighborhood at 3 a.m. honking his horn, shouting challenges from his car window. Liston, who had never been mocked before, seethed.
The fight was made for February 25, 1964, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The betting odds opened at 7-1 against Clay and drifted as high as 8-1 in some places. According to the History Channel, forty-three of forty-six boxing writers polled picked Liston. Many predicted Clay wouldn’t survive three rounds.
The Weigh-In
The morning of the fight, Clay arrived at the weigh-in and appeared to have lost his mind.
He screamed at Liston. He lunged toward him. He had to be physically restrained by his cornermen while shouting “I’m gonna eat you alive!” His pulse was measured at 120 beats per minute—double the normal rate. The Miami Beach Boxing Commission doctor expressed concern that Clay was too emotionally unstable to fight and fined him $2,500 for his behavior.
The performance—and it was a performance—reinforced the narrative that Clay was terrified. The odds moved further in Liston’s favor. Smart money said the kid had cracked before the fight even started.
Years later, Clay’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, revealed that Clay’s pulse was normal within minutes of leaving the weigh-in. The entire display had been calculated to get inside Liston’s head—to make the champion think he was facing a crazy man who couldn’t be intimidated.
“I wanted him thinking about me, not himself,” Ali said later. “I wanted to be in his mind.”
The Fight
The Miami Beach Convention Center held about 8,300 people that night, but fewer than 8,300 showed up. The announced attendance was around 8,300, but the actual crowd was noticeably smaller—the threat of a Liston slaughter had depressed ticket sales. The gate was disappointing: just over $600,000.
Clay entered the ring first, bouncing on his toes, eyes wide. Liston followed, wearing his usual scowl. Referee Barney Felix gave instructions. The bell rang.
Rounds 1–3: The Education of Sonny Liston
From the opening seconds, Clay did what no one believed was possible: he made Liston miss.
Liston threw his jab—the jab that had controlled every opponent he’d ever faced—and Clay pulled his head back just enough to let it graze past. Liston threw hooks, and Clay danced away. Liston tried to cut off the ring, and Clay circled out of trouble, peppering the champion with jabs that snapped his head back.
By the end of the first round, Liston’s face showed red marks. By the end of the third, there was a cut under Liston’s left eye—the first time he had been cut as a professional.
As Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule wrote in his post-fight coverage: “Clay not only made Liston miss, he also repeatedly stung the champion with a long, lacing jab and sharp overhand rights. Liston had never before been hit so readily.”
Clay was doing exactly what his critics said was impossible: outboxing a bigger, stronger, more experienced champion through pure speed and skill. Between rounds, he taunted Liston from across the ring.
Round 4: The Crisis
Something was wrong with Clay’s eyes.
Between the fourth and fifth rounds, Clay returned to his corner blinking furiously, tears streaming down his face. He told Dundee he couldn’t see—that something was burning his eyes. He wanted to quit.
To this day, no one knows exactly what happened. The most common theory is that a coagulant used to close Liston’s cut transferred to Clay’s gloves and then to his eyes when Clay rubbed his face. Some suspected Liston’s corner of deliberate sabotage. Others thought it was an accident.
Dundee didn’t care about the cause. He sponged Clay’s eyes, told him to stay away from Liston and keep moving, and shoved him back into the ring when the bell sounded. “This is the big one, daddy,” Dundee said. “We’re not quitting now.”
Clay survived the fifth round nearly blind, backpedaling and clinching while his vision slowly cleared. Liston, sensing the opportunity, pressed forward—but couldn’t land the finishing blow. By the sixth round, Clay could see again.
Rounds 5–6: The Tide Turns
With his vision restored, Clay went to work. He danced, jabbed, and landed combinations that Liston couldn’t avoid. The champion was slowing, his punches losing steam. The younger man’s conditioning was proving decisive.
By the end of the sixth round, Liston looked exhausted. His corner worked frantically between rounds. Across the ring, Clay was fresh, bouncing, shouting at reporters: “I’m gonna show you!”
Round 7: The Ending No One Expected
The bell rang for the seventh round. Clay came out of his corner.
Liston didn’t.
He sat on his stool, mouthpiece out, and told his corner he couldn’t continue. He cited a shoulder injury—a torn tendon in his left shoulder, it was later claimed. Referee Barney Felix walked across the ring and raised Clay’s hand.
Cassius Clay was the heavyweight champion of the world.
Sports Illustrated reported that a team of eight doctors at St. Francis Hospital in Miami Beach examined Liston’s arm and agreed it was too badly damaged for him to continue. But questions lingered. As author David Remnick detailed in his book King of the World, one of Liston’s cornermen later admitted the shoulder story was fabricated to justify a rematch clause.
“I Shook Up the World!”
What happened next became one of sports’ most iconic moments.
Clay leaped onto the ropes facing the press section and screamed: “I shook up the world! I shook up the world! I am the greatest! I’m the king of the world!”
Then, pointing at the writers who had dismissed him, who had predicted his destruction, who had called him a clown and a fraud: “Eat your words! Eat your words! I am the greatest!”
The post-fight press conference was chaos. Clay alternated between gloating and philosophy, between bragging and genuine insight. “I don’t have a mark on my face,” he noted. “I’m too pretty to be a fighter.”
When asked about the odds against him, he said: “I’m so great I don’t have any idea how great I am.”
Former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, according to the History Channel, called it “the biggest upset in the history of boxing.”
The Morning After
The next morning, February 26, 1964, Cassius Clay held another press conference and dropped a bomb bigger than any punch he’d thrown.
He confirmed that he had been attending meetings of the Nation of Islam, the Black separatist religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad. He had been close to Malcolm X, who was ringside for the fight. And he was changing his name.
“Cassius Clay is a slave name,” he said. “I didn’t choose it. It was given to my ancestors by their slave masters. I am Muhammad Ali.”
White America recoiled. The Nation of Islam was considered radical and dangerous. Its theology—that white people were devils, that Black Americans should separate rather than integrate—terrified mainstream society. The new heavyweight champion had allied himself with what many considered a hate group.
Most newspapers refused to call him Muhammad Ali for years. Other boxers, notably Ernie Terrell, called him “Clay” as a deliberate insult. Ali made Terrell pay for it in the ring, battering him for 15 rounds while shouting “What’s my name?”
But the conversion was genuine, and Ali never wavered. He remained a Muslim for the rest of his life, eventually transitioning to mainstream Sunni Islam after the Nation of Islam fractured in the 1970s.
The Rematch
Ali and Liston met again on May 25, 1965, in Lewiston, Maine—a bizarre venue chosen because no major city wanted the fight. According to the Muhammad Ali Center, just 2,434 spectators filled the 4,900-seat Central Maine Youth Center—the lowest attendance ever for a heavyweight title fight.
The rematch was even stranger than the first bout.
In the first round, Ali threw a short right hand—later called the “phantom punch” because many at ringside didn’t see it—and Liston went down. He rolled on his back, got to one knee, and stayed there while referee Jersey Joe Walcott, a former heavyweight champion himself, lost control of the count. Eventually, Walcott stopped the fight on instructions from the knockdown timekeeper.
The whole sequence took about two minutes and generated decades of conspiracy theories. Did Ali’s punch actually land flush? Was Liston knocked out or did he take a dive? Was the fix in?
The moment was captured by ringside photographer Neil Leifer in what became one of the most iconic images in sport. Sports Illustrated later chose the image as the cover of its special issue ranking the century’s greatest sports photos.
Boxing writer Larry Merchant, who was ringside, later wrote that he saw the punch land cleanly. “It was a quick right hand that caught Liston as he was coming forward,” Merchant recalled. World Light Heavyweight Champion José Torres said, “It was a perfect punch.”
The most likely explanation is also the simplest: Liston, a 34-year-old (at least—his birth year was uncertain) with bad shoulders and declining skills, got caught with a punch he didn’t see and couldn’t recover. The first fight had proven Ali was faster and better. The rematch confirmed it.
Liston fought on for five more years, winning 15 straight before dying under mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas in late 1970. The official cause was heart failure; the Clark County coroner ruled it natural causes. But as investigative journalist Shaun Assael documented in his book The Murder of Sonny Liston, persistent rumors suggested a heroin overdose or murder connected to organized crime. Police found heroin at the scene but no syringes or needles. Friends insisted Liston was terrified of needles and never would have injected drugs. He was found dead in his home, possibly having been there for nearly a week. The mystery has never been solved.
What It Meant
The first Ali-Liston fight changed boxing in ways that are still felt today.
Speed Over Power
Ali proved that a heavyweight could win—could dominate—through speed, movement, and ring intelligence rather than brute force. Every fast heavyweight since, from Larry Holmes to Tyson Fury, owes something to what Ali demonstrated that night in Miami.
The Athlete as Voice
Before Ali, athletes were expected to be apolitical—grateful for their success, deferential to white America, silent on matters outside their sport. Ali refused. His conversion to Islam, his opposition to the Vietnam War, his insistence on being called by his chosen name—all of it established a template for the athlete as activist that continues through Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, and countless others.
The Beginning of the Golden Age
Ali’s reign as champion—interrupted by his exile from 1967 to 1970—created the conditions for the greatest era in heavyweight history. His fights with Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and Ken Norton would define the 1970s. None of it happens without the night in Miami when a 22-year-old kid proved everyone wrong.
Sixty-Two Years Later
Muhammad Ali died on June 3, 2016, at 74, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. According to ESPN, more than 100,000 people lined the 19-mile funeral procession route through Louisville, and 15,000 filled the KFC Yum! Center for the memorial service. Former President Bill Clinton, Billy Crystal, and Bryant Gumbel delivered eulogies. He is remembered as one of the most significant Americans of the 20th century—an assessment that would have seemed absurd on the morning of February 25, 1964, when he was just a brash kid about to get destroyed.
Sonny Liston’s legacy is more complicated. The Ring magazine ranks him as the tenth greatest heavyweight of all time. He was a great fighter—perhaps a truly great one—who arrived too late, aged out too quickly, and ran into the one opponent he couldn’t intimidate or overpower. His death at approximately 38 years old (birth year disputed) was as troubled as his life.
But the fight itself endures: the moment when everything changed, when the loudmouth backed up every word, when the impossible happened on live television.
Sixty-two years ago tonight, Cassius Clay shook up the world.
He was still shaking it when he left.
Fight Facts
| Date | February 25, 1964 |
| Location | Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach, Florida |
| Result | Cassius Clay TKO 7 (Liston retired on stool) |
| Clay Record Before | 19-0 (15 KOs) |
| Liston Record Before | 35-1 (23 KOs) |
| Attendance | 8,297 |
| Referee | Barney Felix |
Further Reading and Resources
- Sports Illustrated – Ali vs. Liston retrospective
- Sports Illustrated Vault – Original 1964 fight coverage by Tex Maule
- History Channel – This Day in History: Clay Knocks Out Liston
- Muhammad Ali Center – Ali vs. Liston II: A Controversial Encore
- ESPN – Muhammad Ali funeral coverage
- The Ring Magazine
- Muhammad Ali career record – BoxRec
