Sonny had thrown more punches in the first half of the round than he normally threw in two or three, and now his lack of conditioning showed. For Sonny, the bell that ended the round came as a relief, even though it ended his best opportunity to win the fight. Nothing was working. Cassius Clay had weathered Liston’s stare, intimidation tactics, bull rushes, juiced gloves, and best punches. The arm-weary, mouth-breathing champion had nothing left—no plan B, no second wind, no chance.
Cassius had everything the champion lacked. As the result of hard conditioning and the advantages of youth, he felt the rise of a second wind as his eyes cleared and his confidence grew. “Get mad, baby!” Dundee told him. He said to go for the knockout. “No,” Clay answered. “I ain’t in a hurry. Maybe I’ll carry him for the 15.”41
Taking his last deep breaths before round six, Cassius knew, “I was going to make Liston look terrible.”42
He did. Closing the distance to the champion, boxing at a slower, more deliberate pace, he started to punish Sonny. Steve Ellis described the action for the closed-circuit viewers: “We note that Sonny stands flat-footed most of the time. Easy target. EASY!” His voice rose on the second “easy” as Clay landed a punishing jab and a powerful right cross. Although Clay held his hands low, his boxing was classic. Every attack followed from his perfectly timed jab, always aimed at the cuts below Sonny’s eyes. As Liston moved sluggishly forward, Clay jabbed, sometimes softly, as if he was just toying with Sonny, other times with jolting force. Depending on how Liston reacted to the jab, Clay might throw a right cross or a right-left-right combination of hooks. Then he backed away before Liston could set himself to counterpunch. “Sonny can’t seem to slip or knock down that jab effectively,” Ellis said. “Cassius throws it from all angles. Very tricky left lead.”43
It was a textbook round. Clay knew that Liston had entered the pain zone, and there was nothing he could do about it. “He was gone,” Clay realized.
Between rounds Cassius twisted around and called to the reporters, “I’m gonna upset the world!” “I never will forget how their faces was looking up at me like they couldn’t believe it,” he said later. But sitting close to the reporters was Malcolm X, and he believed it. He had prophesied it. Throughout the fight he never lost faith, not even when Cassius fought blind in the fifth. Although inwardly Malcolm rejoiced, outwardly he was the picture of tranquility. “I folded my arms and tried to appear the coolest man in the place,” he wrote, “because a television camera can show you looking like a fool yelling at a prizefight.”44
While Clay’s confidence swelled, Liston’s deflated like a pinpricked balloon. Willie Reddish had to convince him to sit down at the end of the sixth, and while Joe Polino labored to mend the fighter’s cuts, the normally silent and undemonstrative Sonny jabbered about something. He stayed on his stool after the warning buzzer, and at the bell Reddish turned to referee Barney Felix and made a slight, low gesture with his hands, the signal that his fighter was through, the match was over. Liston remained immobile on his stool, tears mingling with the blood below his eyes.
On his feet at the buzzer, Cassius saw what was happening before Reddish’s capitulation. “I happened to be looking right at Liston when the warning buzzer sounded, and I didn’t believe it when he spat out his mouthpiece. . . . And then someone just told me he wasn’t coming out! . . . It’s a funny thing, but I wasn’t even thinking about Liston—I was thinking about nothing but that hypocrite press. All of them down there had written so much about me bound to get killed by the big fists.”
As Clay looked toward Liston’s corner, he raised both arms high and broke into a jig, floating effortlessly in the center of the ring, before Bundini embraced him in a bear hug. Then, his mouth wide open, he wriggled loose from Bundini’s arms and made a mad dash toward the reporters.
For the record, everyone in Liston’s corner—and later a team of eight doctors from St. Francis Hospital in Miami—insisted Sonny had torn a tendon in his left arm early in the fight. The blood had drained into his bicep and deadened his arm, they said. Sonny had wanted to continue, his manager, Jack Nilon, claimed. “I made the decision. Before Sonny could protest, Willie and I stepped in front of him and waved the referee off. Sonny spit out his mouthpiece and cursed me and cursed Clay.” “I can beat the bastard one-handed,” Liston supposedly said. And perhaps, as unlikely as it seems, he did not play any role in the decision to end the fight while slumped on his stool. Still, the fact that Clay was willing to fight blind and Liston refused to continue because of a sore shoulder tells much about both boxers.45