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ROUND FIVE

More than a few Cassius Clay watchers suggested that because he moved around the ring so much, the sleek twenty-year-old might not trust his chin.

Due mostly to his locomotion, it’s true, the attention-grabbing fighter hadn’t been hurt during his first sixteen months as pro. The man’s legs, so long as they were strong underneath him, were his first line of defense in that they got him to where he wanted to be faster than he could get touched. And yet this is where some critics conjured questions regarding Ali’s potential.

Ali breezed to a 10–0 record and received more than enough press to justify a debut at the old Madison Square Garden to begin his 1962 campaign—but that wasn’t successful or quick enough. A hold-the-reins development plan buffered against the Olympic champion’s heavy competitive drive. On the subject of his tenth opponent, Munich-born Willi Besmanoff, Ali declared shame at having fought an “unrated duck.” While Ali talked up champions Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston he got in rounds with pugs like the squat Besmanoff, who finished his fifteen-year career with ninety-three bouts and a ledger of 51-34-8. The fight with Ali in Louisville was the German’s seventy-ninth, and it marked one of eleven times he was stopped.

No one besides the six-foot-three kid himself—“a golden-brown young man,” A.J. Liebling observed in the March 1962 edition of the New Yorker, “big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles”—was eager to approach deep waters. Trainer Angelo Dundee knew superior talent could get a person by in some fields, but not boxing, not even for a specimen like Ali.

There was much to learn on the arduous road ahead.

The purpose of boxing is to inflict damage with your fists while avoiding strikes in return. During a career in prizefighting that’s nearly impossible. Boxers are expected to be stout because almost all of them get caught. The game ones respond to trouble and fight on. The great ones do that then win.

For Ali’s doubters it boiled down to, yeah, sure, the fancy-footed dancer’s talent was obvious, but what kind of fighter was he really?

New York matchmaker Teddy Brenner lived up to his reputation by testing Ali’s doggedness in the boxer’s Garden debut, and Sonny Banks, a twenty-one-year-old converted southpaw puncher from Detroit, got the nod. Midway through the opening round, Banks snapped off a left hook that put Ali on the canvas and turned the Miami-based Dundee from tan to pale. Ali, a 5-to-1 favorite, needed only the count of two to regroup, shake off the cobwebs, and get to his feet.

“That was my first time knocked down as a professional,” Ali told the press on a twelve-degree February night in Manhattan. “I had to get up to take care of things after that because it was rather embarrassing, me on the floor. As you know, I think that I’m the greatest and I’m not supposed to be on the floor, so I had to get up and put him on out, in four as I predicted.”

Suckered by the illusion of landing a second money punch, a fight finisher, Banks became a predictable headhunter with that left hook. As he crumbled under Ali’s angular fighting and incessant, buzzing jab, Banks, penned Liebling, “was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.”

Unsure of Ali’s recuperative powers until Banks touched his charge’s off button, Dundee was encouraged to see the type of pugilist he was dealing with. Critics, meanwhile, had new information to critique regarding the quality of Ali’s chin.