“The Sixties” Arrived in the Sports World Sixty Years Ago Tonight
The stunning victory of Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston was among the many markers of cultural change in 1964
“I don’t have to be what you want me to be.
I’m free to be what I want.”
– Cassius Clay (February 26, 1964)
Simultaneously with the explosion of Beatlemania in early 1964, another act in a different sector of the entertainment world was gaining increasing attention. Just over two weeks after the Beatles’ first Sullivan appearance, before the short—even in a leap year—month of February was over, a brash, self-promoting young boxer with the melodious name Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., shocked the sports world by defeating Sonny Liston to win the World Heavyweight Championship.
NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of essays, “The Long 1964 at Sixty,” I plan to write on what was happening in 1964, “The Year ‘The Sixties’ Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn,” as I put it in the subtitle of my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin’. Portions of them will be taken straight from the book, but other parts of the essays will be new commentary.
I had already taken to Clay’s new style when he won the light heavyweight title at the Rome Olympics in 1960. (There’s a funny story about that later in this essay.) I followed his fights, stunts, and boasts through the next few years and when he got his title bout with Sonny Liston in Miami and was given no chance of winning, I made a few bets with high school friends. One gave me 40-to-1 odds. He never paid, but I was happy just to have been right about Clay’s abilities and to see the new triumph over the evil Liston.
Younger sports writers, as David Remnick has written, “really did see Clay as a fifth Beatle, parallel players in the great social and generational shift in American society.” An “earthquake” was shaking America in 1964, “and this fighter from Louisville and