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Clay destroyed Liston in the sixth round. Incredibly, the champion didn’t come out for round seven. Liston claimed that he had an injured shoulder. The question remains: What blinded Clay in that fifth round? The most probable answer is that when Ali opened up a cut on Liston’s face in the third round, the champ’s corner men put medicine on the cut, and some of this medicine must have gotten on Clay’s gloves when he hit Liston in the fourth round. When Clay wiped his forehead, the medicine came off his glove and ran into his eyes. The heavily-favored Liston, needing to lose the fight (possibly to save his life) reacted in bewilderment when Clay was temporarily blinded, and pushed out for the fifth round. He “let up,” until Clay’s eyes had cleared, and the challenger was able to take control of the fight. At that point, Liston stayed in his corner, unwilling to risk any more fluky outcomes in which he would find himself winning the fight.

Of course, it could certainly be argued that someone paid Liston to put a foreign substance in his glove with the intention of temporarily blinding the challenger.

The next day—the very next day, February 26, 1964, the first day that Cassius Clay spent as Heavyweight Champion—he announced that he had become a member of the Black Muslims, and wanted to become known as Muhammad Ali. At the time, the Black Muslims were an intransigent order of militant, anti-white blacks calling themselves the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X, one of the more visible members of Elijah Muhammad’s group, had been a constant presence around Clay’s training camp. It’s not hard to see why Liston could have been afraid of Malcolm X. (Ali would later reject Malcolm X′s offer to join a Muslim splinter group, and instead opted to stay with his guru, Elijah Muhammad. Within a year, Malcolm X was assassinated. No one was ever charged with the crime and Ali never commented on it.)

Assuming that Liston wasn’t a quitter (unlikely), what were some of the reasons that could explain the fight’s outcome? First, of course, Sonny could have owed his life to underworld figures who needed him to dump the fight in the middle rounds for a big payoff. Liston could have also feared the Black Muslims.

One theory that goes against a conspiracy goes like this: According to the late sportswriter Jim Murray’s 1993 autobiography, Ali told him that “That weigh-in won my fight.... That man [Liston] is spooked. I learnt that from fighting Archie Moore. . . . Liston in the first round, I put it to him and he back off and get the fear in his eyes.”

So maybe Liston didn’t lay down and throw the first fight. When Ali came in to the weigh-in like a crazy man, full of rage, it was possibly a great act meant to pysch out the champion. But even if Liston didn’t throw the first fight, how does one possibly explain the rematch?

It was hard enough to get Ali and Liston in the ring together for another bout. According to boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar, in his book The Sweet Science Goes Sour: How Scandal Brought Boxing to its Knees, there were problems getting the World Boxing Association to recognize the fight. Many states wouldn’t stage the return match because they had banned Liston due to his underworld connections. There were hints of a grand jury investigation after it was revealed that before the fight the previous year, the same promoters had paid Ali $50,000 as an advance on his first title defense. One of the main stockholders in the company was Liston. Once all this had been straightened out, the thirty-one-year-old Liston trained like a madman to regain the title. But just three days before the fight, Ali was rushed to the hospital for a hernia operation.

The two parties agreed to reschedule the rematch for May 25, 1965, in Lewiston, Maine. It’s possible that if Liston had been able to fight Ali in November, he would have regained the championship. Imagine training for the fight of your life, only to have the whole thing put on hold, and to be told to gear