Dundee was not about to cut off Clay’s gloves, not in a heavyweight championship contest. He quickly examined his fighter. “I put my pinky in his eyes and then mine,” he recalled. “It burned like hell.” While Cassius complained, Dundee tried another test. He dried Clay’s eyes with a towel, sniffing and tasting it when he finished. “There was something wrong. I tasted a strange substance.” Maybe it was from Liston’s gloves; perhaps it was something else that had been put on Sonny’s body.
Unconcerned with the cause, Dundee focused on the problem. He sponged Clay’s eyes, trying to flush out whatever substance was in them. He tried to reassure him, telling Cassius that the pain would pass and that he would be fine. “If you can’t see, keep away from him until your eyes clear. This is the big one. Nobody walks away from a heavyweight championship.”
While Dundee was earning his wages in Clay’s corner, Black Muslims at ringside had reached their own conclusions about the cause of the problem. Izenberg remembered that Captain Sam and Archie Robinson were out of their seats, watching Dundee wipe Clay’s eyes while he convulsed in pain. They clearly believed that Dundee was the culprit. Seeing the rising anger of the Muslims, Chris Dundee signaled to his brother Angelo to wipe his own face with the sponge, which the trainer soon did, telling Archie and Sam, “Look! Look! Look!”
But before that demonstration, he had a fighter to motivate. When the bell rang for round five, Cassius said Angelo pushed him forward and shouted, “This is the big one, daddy. We aren’t going to quit now! . . . Run until your eyes clear! RUN!”
As Clay moved forward, half blind and confused, Bundini Brown offered a piece of tactical advice: “Yardstick ’im, champ! Yardstick ’im!”36
It was the perfect strategy. Often in previous fights, Clay had used his left, held straight out from his shoulder, as a yardstick for measuring distance and punches, and occasionally for taunting opponents. Now he could use his straight yardstick left as a seeing-eye device. As long as Liston remained an arm’s length away from him, Cassius was in safe territory.
Liston eyed Clay at the start of the fifth round “like a kid looks at a new bike on Christmas.” Seeing Cassius’s condition, he rushed forward with cruel intentions. Instead of maneuvering to cut off the ring and force Clay into a corner, he moved directly toward him like an aggressive street brawler stalking a frightened victim. Cassius moved backward, unable to completely avoid Sonny’s bull rushes. But he could grab and hold, thereby denying Liston leverage for his most lethal punches. But in the clinches Clay absorbed frightful punishment. Liston pounded his sides and stomach with combinations. At one point, early in the fifth, Clay grabbed the back of Liston’s neck and Sonny landed sixteen consecutives body blows before the referee broke the clinch.37
Clay had no plans for fighting blind. More than other fighters, he boxed in a head-high, wide-eyed style. At times he looked like a painter, stepping back to inspect his work before adding a final dab of color. But now he was robbed of his vision, glimpsing Liston imperfectly through “tear-fogged” eyes.
“Man, in that round, my plans were gone. I was just trying to keep alive, hoping the tears would wash out my eyes. I could open them just enough to get a good glimpse of Liston, and then it hurt so bad I blinked them closed again. . . . He was trying to hit me square . . . it could be over right there.”38
There is a widely accepted myth that during the fifth, Clay’s speed kept him out of harm’s way. In truth, during the first ninety seconds of the round, Liston landed scores of punches, to the head as well as the body. Rather than his speed, Clay’s ability to take a punch kept him in the fight. Soon after the match, Clay reflected, “He shook me with a left to the head and a lot of shots to the body. Now, I ain’t too sorry it happened, because it proved I could take Liston’s punching.”39
Liston “was snorting like a horse” during his onslaught, Cassius remembered, but by the middle of the round he was breathing heavily through his mouth. Arm-weary and bone-tired, he began to slow, throwing fewer punches, and those were mostly slow, lazy, and purposeless. In the clinches, he rested rather than pulling his arms free and banging Clay’s body. Now, Cassius began yardsticking him and, as his eyes cleared, stung him with sharp jabs. He began to talk. “You ain’t nothing!” And to prove the point, he yardsticked Liston and then slapped him lightly five or six times in the face, almost like a teenage boy play-boxing with a five-year-old, or, wrote Tex Maule, “like a man knocking on a door.”40