That, anyway, was the plan.
Waiting in his corner for the opening bell, Cassius danced, gracefully shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Sonny scraped his feet against the canvas like a bull digging into the dirt before charging. At the clang of the bell he attacked, moving toward Clay in a straight line as if they were fighting on a tightrope. Yet while Sonny’s assault was linear, Cassius’s defense was rococo. His hands at his side, he bounced tantalizing just beyond the champion’s reach, slipping, ducking, sidestepping, and pulling back from punches. All the while Cassius circled left, making it difficult for Sonny to land a left jab and impossible to connect with a left hook. Liston lunged like an amateur, missing hooks by several feet. When he got too close, Clay briefly clinched and then quickly pushed him back to a safe distance.30
For the first half of the round Clay hardly threw a punch. He dominated simply by the artistry of his movement. Forward, backward, side to side, feinting up and down—the complexity of his defense baffled Liston. Cassius, wrote Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald, moved “like a kid on a pogo stick.” He backed into corners and then slithered out of them so adroitly that Liston was still moving forward when Clay was already brushing by. The harder the champion tried, the more awkward he looked. Then Clay began to jab.
At first he threw snake-tongue jabs designed to gauge his distance from his prey and get a sense of Liston’s reaction. Feeling safe, he tried a few harder jabs, mixing in a couple of cruel, flat-footed lead rights and left hooks that stopped Liston’s forward movement. Angered, the champion charged, fighting wildly even after the bell.
Although most of the spectators reacted with a communal exhale to Liston’s thunderous misses, the more discerning fight fans watched as Clay dominated the action. Between rounds color commentator Joe Louis was characteristically stingy with his observations—but also perfectly accurate. “I think this is one of the greatest rounds that we have seen in a long time. I think Clay completely outclassed Sonny Liston,” he told his ringside colleague Steve Ellis. But, the Brown Bomber concluded, if Clay got too confident, Liston would knock him out.
Sonny pressed hard in the second. He threw more body punches, hoping to take some of the speed out of Cassius’s legs. But he had no better luck reaching Clay’s body than he had hitting his head. Cassius remained at a safe distance. “Liston came at me throwing everything,” he later recalled. “He was going to make up for looking so bad that I had lasted one round.”
While Clay moved, he watched Sonny’s eyes, seeing in them his opponent’s thoughts. “Liston eyes you up when he’s about to throw a heavy punch,” he said. “Some kind of way they just flicker.” So Cassius watched, looking for the flicker, the warning to move out of range. But he saw something else—a soft red mouse high on Liston’s left cheekbone. He knew that one or two sharp punches would split the bump wide open, proving to the experts, the spectators, and, most important, Liston himself that the champion could bleed like any other fighter. And if he could bleed, he could be defeated.
Cassius threw and landed the first punches of the third. He had planned to coast that round but saw that Liston was hurt and confused. He later explained, “I couldn’t waste no time. I needed one more good shot, for some insurance with that eye.” His left jabs angled off Sonny’s left eye. Then a right-left combination landed with tom-tom precision. Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated thought Cassius worked as methodically as a bullfighter placing banderillas.
Suddenly it happened. A right hand split Sonny’s cheek “from dark to red as cleanly as a sharp knife cutting through the rind of a watermelon.”
“It didn’t take but one good combination,” Cassius recalled. “My left was square on his right eye, and a right under his left eye opened a deep gash. I knew it was deep, the way the blood spurted right out.”