Muhammad Ali transcended boxing like no other fighter ever has. A cultural icon even to those who have never watched so much as a single round of a prizefight. But his accomplishments in the squared circle are what set him on the road to immortality. Even within his sport, Ali did things that have become part of the fabric of the sport. On this day in 1966, he did something that will live on in pugilism long after any of us are gone. The Ali shuffle.
It is a move so ingrained in boxing, so deeply canonised and so often imitated that it is hard to think of it having a beginning. It is a monolith that feels like it has stood for the duration of time itself. Sugar Ray Leonard did it. Roy Jones Jr did it. Prince Naseem Hamed did it. To this day, Ali’s grandson Nico Ali Walsh does it. But nobody did it better than ‘The Greatest’.
The move is the ultimate showboat. A lightning-fast shifting of the legs that looked like a blur on those old black and white television sets that transmitted Ali into homes across the world. The move first saw the light of day as part of perhaps Ali’s greatest performance of all time: the night he destroyed Cleveland Williams in three majestic rounds of ring perfection in 1966.
Ali exists in a curious hinterland where his greatest victories and greatest performances don’t always intersect. He is remembered for his fleet-footed, evasive ring style. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”. But Ali’s most iconic wins, particularly the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ and ‘Thrilla in Manila’ came when he was an altogether different fighter. By the mid-1970s, when he beat George Foreman and Joe Frazier, this was no dancing destroyer. Ali was not the stick-and-move fighter of old and instead relied on a granite chin, ring acumen and pure determination to see him through.
The Williams fight, though, came during the height of his powers. The butterfly was floating and the bee was stinging. The great Sonny Liston had felt both sensations in losing a pair of fights to the future ‘Greatest’ for the heavyweight title. Greats like George Chuvalo, Floyd Patterson and Henry Cooper had fallen too. But Williams was expected to challenge Ali in a way nobody had yet managed.
With good reason too. ‘Big Cat’ had built a fearsome reputation as one of the best heavyweights never to hold the world title. A man that authorities like Liston and Chuvalo called the hardest puncher they ever fought, Williams had done his share of battling outside the ropes too. Cleveland was shot by a police officer in 1964 during a traffic stop. Williams needed extensive surgery which led to 10 feet of his small intestine being removed, paralysis of the hip and nerve damage to his leg.
Inconceivably, Williams returned to the ring. Spectacularly, he won four from four after the shooting. His efforts were enough to secure a shot at Ali for the heavyweight championship of the world. From the brink of death, with Williams himself recounting that he stopped breathing on the operating table, to the precipice of glory.
Ali was not in a sentimental mood when the bell sounded at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. Williams had done something incredible in fighting his way to a title shot post-shooting. But Ali had something incredible in store. What followed was the best demonstration of his otherworldly skill ever committed to film.
Ali was punch-perfect. The fighter people have talked about in hushed tones since, the one immortalised in song and in Hollywood movies, turned up that night in Texas. Lightning-fast hands, faster feet, impenetrable defence. There isn’t much use being the hardest puncher the best heavies ever faced if your opponent won’t let you land a punch. And about that shuffle.
The blur of feet took Williams’ eye off the ball for the follow-up punches. They came at a speed and clip too instantaneous to avoid. In microcosm, the moment underlined that Williams was in a fight he couldn’t win. He wouldn’t. Ali closed the show via third-round TKO, bringing the curtain down on the most astonishing performance of his career.
‘Big Cat’ was a true warrior, but in there with Ali it looked like they were participating in two different sports. Boxing changed forever that night. A direct through-line through the greats mentioned earlier, the Leonards, Jones’ and Hameds, can be drawn from this lesson in showbiz destruction.
Ali would beat Ernie Terrell and Zora Folley before his rejection of the Vietnam draft saw him banned from the ring for three years. When he returned, the spring in his step was gone even if the grit that replaced it would carry him to his most famous victories. Williams would retire in the aftermath, but was back in the ring two years later. He fought on and off until 1973 but never again troubled the upper echelons of the sport.
Two warriors stepped through the ropes on this day in 1966. One would walk out with their greatest victory. The other had already achieved his simply by being there. The legacy of the fight they shared would end up outliving them both.
