I Shook Up the World

He was twenty-two years old, a 7-to-1 underdog, and forty-three of the forty-six sportswriters at ringside had picked him to lose. Then Cassius Clay went out and shook up the world.

On February 25, 1964, at the Miami Beach Convention Hall, Clay challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was the most feared man in boxing — a brooding ex-convict with sledgehammer fists who had knocked out Floyd Patterson in the first round, not once but twice. Clay was a loud, pretty kid from Louisville, Kentucky: 19 wins, no losses, and a mouth that never stopped moving. "I will float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!" he told anyone who would listen.

The weigh-in the morning of the fight was pandemonium. Clay worked himself into a screaming frenzy, shouting that Liston would fall in eight rounds, until officials had to restore order. Seasoned observers whispered that the kid was terrified. His doctor checked him over and declared him perfectly fine.

The fight told a very different story from the predictions. Clay boxed circles around the champion, dancing out of range and snapping Liston's head back with his jab. In the third round he opened a cut over Liston's eye. Then, in the fourth, disaster: something — his trainer Angelo Dundee believed it was liniment from Liston's gloves — got into Clay's eyes, and the burning was blinding. He fought the entire fifth round barely able to see, begging Dundee in his corner to cut his gloves off. Dundee washed his fighter's eyes out and ordered him back in. By the sixth, Clay's vision had cleared, and he spent the round punishing a weary, swelling Liston.

Then, before the seventh round, Liston stayed on his stool. His corner told the referee a shoulder injury made it impossible to continue. Just like that — without a final punch thrown — the 22-year-old was heavyweight champion of the world. Clay sprinted around the ring, pointing at the press tables and shouting the words that would define him: "I shook up the world! I am the greatest!"

Within days, the new champion made another announcement that stunned America: he had joined the Nation of Islam, and he was leaving behind what he called his slave name. From then on, he would be known as Muhammad Ali.

Why it matters: that night in Miami Beach created the most famous athlete of the twentieth century — a boxer who became a global voice on race, war, and conscience. He spent the rest of his life insisting he was the greatest. He was right.

Photo: The Miami News staff photographers, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).