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The Greatest, Part 2

Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali stands over fallen challenger Sonny Liston on May 25, 1965, in Lewiston, Maine. The bout lasted only one minute into the first round. Ali is the only man ever to win the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship three times.
John Rooney/AP

Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali stands over fallen challenger Sonny Liston on May 25, 1965, in Lewiston, Maine. The bout lasted only one minute into the first round. Ali is the only man ever to win the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship three times.

Last time, we were talking about Muhammad Ali … before he was actually Muhammad Ali, just starting out as a professional fighter and winning the seventh bout of his career when he fought for the first time in Las Vegas.

By his second fight in Las Vegas, on November 22, 1965, a lot had changed. Cassius Clay had converted to Islam and become Muhammad Ali. He had beaten Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship and defended the title—and to this day, Liston is suspected of taking a dive in at least one and possibly both of the fights.  Ali’s opponent was a former champion, Floyd Patterson—who lost to Liston in a first-round knockout in the first heavyweight championship fight ever held in Las Vegas. Patterson kept calling Ali “Cassius Clay,” and attacked Black Muslims. Ali won in the twelfth round on a technical knockout. But it was ugly. The crowd at the Convention Center booed Ali and cheered Patterson. Throughout the fight, Ali taunted Patterson. Many boxing experts felt Ali could have knocked him out sooner but wanted to punish him for as long as possible.

Ali didn’t fight again in Nevada for seven years. The Nevada Athletic Commission took away his title when he refused to be drafted on religious grounds and he was sentenced to prison. After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction, Ali fought again in Las Vegas in 1972. He knocked out Jerry Quarry, then Bob Foster at Stateline, near Lake Tahoe. Back in Las Vegas, he won a unanimous decision over Joe Bugner at the Convention Center in early 1973. Two years later, he scored a TKO over Ron Lyle to retain his title.

But three years later, when Ali next fought in Las Vegas, he was thirty-six years old. Age and the years of doing the rope-a-dope were catching up with him. So was another of his techniques: absorbing punches from his opponent until the other fighter wore himself out. In February 1978, Ali faced Leon Spinks, the light heavyweight gold medalist at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Ali didn’t take Spinks seriously and paid for it: Spinks won a split decision before a crowd of about five thousand at the Las Vegas Hilton. Ali won back the title a few months later and announced his retirement. But he came back, unfortunately. He faced Larry Holmes at Caesars Palace in October 1980 before nearly 25,000 spectators. Ali was thirty-eight years old. He said he had taught Holmes, a onetime sparring partner, “everything he knows, but not everything I know.” But Ali’s longtime doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, knew he didn’t belong in the ring; when Ali and his entourage wouldn’t listen, Pacheco quit rather than be associated with what he knew to be wrong. It was a big night for Las Vegas tourism, but a terrible night for Ali, who absorbed a pounding; when trainer Angelo Dundee wouldn’t let him come out for the eleventh round, it marked the only time Ali lost on a knockout. He would fight once more, lose, and retire. He would suffer for the rest of his life from Parkinson’s Syndrome, because of the beatings he took in the ring.

It was a sad end in many ways, and a heroic one in others as he remained a cultural and historical icon. Muhammad Ali also did more than any other fighter to establish Las Vegas as THE place for championship boxing.  And he did it with beauty, verve, style, and, yes, a lot of noise and self-promotion. Kind of like Las Vegas.

Nevada Yesterdays is written by Associate Professor Michael Green of UNLV, and narrated by former Senator Richard Bryan. Supported by Nevada Humanities