Then Cassius opened up, throwing left and right hooks. While a nearly electric shock jolted the spectators to their feet, the blow-by-blow announcer reacted excitedly. “Sonny wobbled! Sonny wobbled! Cassius has him hurt! . . . Sonny has a big mouse below the left eye! Sonny’s cut below the eye! And he’s getting hit with all the punches in the book!”
Cassius watched as Sonny pawed at his eye. A cut under the eye, as Jerry Izenberg commented, “doesn’t mean shit. But it did to Liston when he was the one who had been cut.” Seeing blood on his glove he rushed forward, throwing all of his weight into wild, wide punches. A few crashed painfully into Clay’s body, but most missed, visibly tiring the champion. Jim Murray commented, “The old champ was as clumsy as a guy groping for a light switch in the dark with a hangover.” But several of the punches that missed whooshed just inches past Cassius’s jaw. The thought of what might have been kept the spectators on their feet roaring.31
From his press row seat, Maule watched Clay dismantle the Liston legend. The champion had no answer for Cassius’s speed and tactics. At one point in the third round, Maule noticed Liston “leaning heavily against the rope, peering between raised gloves. His expression was puzzled and shocked and almost frightened.” His “arrogant self-confidence,” the cornerstone of his awesome reputation, had vanished. And six feet away, Clay was screaming at him. “Come on! Come on, you bum!” At that moment it was clear to Maule that “Sonny Liston was no longer the heavyweight champion of the world.”32 But the fight wasn’t over yet.
SONNY TRUDGED TO his corner like an aged sparring partner, collapsing hard onto his stool. His trainer, Willie Reddish, and cut man, Joe Polino, crowded in front of him. Polino immediately went to work on Liston’s eye, sponging it clean and smearing Monsel’s solution, a thick, caustic substance that’s now illegal in boxing, on the wound. Monsel’s dries quickly, leaves a black residue, and can be blinding if it gets into a fighter’s eyes.
Quite possibly another blinding substance was put on Sonny’s gloves. According to Jack McKinney, a Philadelphia sportswriter sitting near Liston and Polino, when Sonny returned to his corner he ordered Polino to “juice the gloves”—that is, smear some illegal substance on the them. In several previous fights Liston’s opponents had complained that a painful astringent, perhaps from Sonny’s gloves, had gotten into their eyes. McKinney claimed that Liston’s corner men had a history of juicing his gloves and did it once again in the Clay fight. “If you look at a film of what went on in Liston’s corner between the third and fourth rounds of that fight,” McKinney told writer Thomas Hauser, “you’ll see Polino in the ring with Willie Reddish standing behind him, blocking everyone’s view. And Polino is at Sonny’s knees, rubbing something on his glove.”33
Round four belonged to Clay from start to finish. No longer was he moving in jerky, pogo-stick bursts. Still circling Liston, he maneuvered more slowly, confidently, snapping out jabs that seemed to explode in Sonny’s face. Soon Liston’s right eye had an angry welt under it, and his nose and lips looked like he was having an allergic reaction to multiple bee stings. Sonny tried to respond, but his jabs consistently missed their target and his hooks mostly punished the air around Cassius’s head. Once, however, Liston forced a clinch, and although he could not punish Clay with punches, he rubbed his glove across Cassius’s eyes. If his gloves were juiced, this is when he did the damage.
Several sportswriters thought that Cassius’s jabs connected with the Monsel’s on Sonny’s left eye and that then he transferred the substance to his forehead as he wiped off sweat. The “thin skin of the caustic on his forehead,” wrote Maule, “washed down into his eyes between rounds when his trainer, Angelo Dundee, swabbed him with a wet sponge.” The trouble with this view is that Cassius did not brush his forehead with his left, his primary punching hand, during the round. The only hand that swept across Clay’s eyes and forehead was Liston’s.34
Nor did Dundee contribute to the problem. By the time Clay reached his corner, his face was already contorted with pain. He felt like “some acid” was in his eyes. “I could just see blurry . . . it felt like fire.” Blinking as if he were trying to clear grit out of his eyes, he told Dundee that something was wrong. Removing his mouthpiece, he screamed at Dundee, “Cut off the gloves. Cut off the gloves.” At the time Cassius believed that someone was trying to fix the fight. “Dirty work afoot!” he told Dundee. “Dirty work afoot,” he repeated to his other corner men.35