The second memory I still have of my experience in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, before class, while we were all waiting for Mr. Posten to eventually appear in the classroom to lead the mostly sophomore students (who were mostly not very interested in singing and music), there was a lot of discussion about the initial Sonny Liston vs. "Cassius Clay" heavyweight champion boxing match of early 1964. Both before the professional fight and after "Cassius Clay"'s 7th-round upset victory.
Living in New York City in the 1950's and early 1960's, while attending elementary school and junior high school in Queens, I was--like most of the other guys in school--a TV addict who watched a lot of television professional boxing matches each week that were then on either network television or the local New York City television stations. On shows like the Gillette Friday night "Fight of the Week" and a local TV show that televised professional boxing matches from St. Nicholas Arena in New York City.
My parents weren't as into watching the Friday night shows or the St. Nicholas Arena boxing matches on television as I was in the late 1950's and early 1960's. But our family had two black and white television sets, one with a 24-inch screen in the living room, that my parents would watch, and one, with a 12-inch television screen in my room, which I could watch when I wasn't interested in what my parents were watching in the living room. So I was generally able to go into my own room and watch the televised boxing matches whenever I wanted to, when at home.
In addition, when I was in elementary school and junior high school in the 1950's and early 1960's, I was heavily into reading current and back issues of Sport magazine and reading the sports pages of two or three daily and Sunday newspapers of New York City, on a regular basis. In addition, I was also into reading many public library book biographies or autobiographies of sports figures, like professional boxing champions or historical books about sports like professional boxing, fictional books for teenage readers with sports themes written by writers like John Tunis and book anthologies of "The Best Sports Stories" from a particular year, that had previously been published in different U.S. magazines or U.S. newspaper sports sections.
So, although I had never had any interest in, personally, spending any portion of my time outside of public school learning to box (so I could compete in amateur contests like the Golden Gloves, etc.) as a teenager before I was in high school, in 1964 I probably still knew as much about the past and current professional boxers and professional boxing history as most other professional boxing fans.
And, despite having read in the newspapers about how Benny "Kid" Paret and Davey Moore were killed in the boxing ring in the early 1960's, it wasn't until after I entered college that I came to feel that professional boxing should be legally banned in the United States. Although before Muhammad Ali retired in the late 1970's, I retained some interest in watching matches in which he participated on television, whenever I lived in an apartment in which there was a television set.
Prior to his first fight with Liston, all the guys in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class, including me, didn't think "Cassius Clay" had a chance to win. Yet most of the other guys in the class spoke about the upcoming Liston-"Clay" boxing match with exciting anticipation. Mainly because, in the years between the time he won his gold medal in boxing for representing the USA in the 1960 Olympics and early 1964, "Cassius Clay" had been seen on television interview shows a lot, rapping and claiming that he was "the greatest," in a poetic, bragging way; at the same time he seemed to be defeating all the other heavyweight boxing opponents he had been matched up with, prior to facing Sonny Liston.
What I, myself, did not realize, before Muhammad Ali fought Liston for the first time in early 1964, was that--besides being a skillful boxer and athlete who also seemed to be, somewhat, like an entertaining clown--Muhammad Ali was apparently, even then, more intellectually hip than he had let on to being, despite probably not being much of a reader at that time. And he had, shrewdly, apparently realized that, if he imitated the braggart personality of some of the 1950's professional white wrestlers like "Gorgeous George," that he had watched on TV as a child and acted, somewhat like a clown, the promoters of professional championship boxing matches would consider him a more "colorful" and entertaining personality than the other potential challengers for Sonny Liston's title.
And, therefore, they would likely then more quickly give him a chance to fight Liston in a professional heavyweight championship title bout.
Having rooted for "Cassius Clay" more because he was the underdog (rather than because I had been particularly impressed with "Cassius Clay"'s pre-publicly-announced conversion to Islam's "rap poetry" and braggart, pre-1964 persona), I was happy that he defeated Liston in 7 rounds in early 1964. At first, though, I didn't understand in 1964 why he had decided to become a Nation of Islam religious adherent.
But after he refused to serve in the U.S. military a few years later, during the Vietnam War Era, I did come to agree that Muhammad Ali was, indeed, "the greatest person," morally, politically and athletically, to ever win the world heavyweight professional boxing championship in 20th-century professional boxing history.
