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C hoosing Cassius Clay’s/Muhammad Ali’s bout with Archie Moore as his most significant fight is like picking Dwight Eisenhower as the most important American president. Sure, interstate highways were necessary, but haven’t far bigger things come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over the years? While Cassius Clay versus Archie Moore was an interesting contest, it doesn’t enjoy even a hint of recognition from boxing connoisseurs or the general public as an essential Ali bout. That honor is usually reserved for his matches with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman. These fights have become freighted with near-mythological importance, generating lasting cultural significance and even vocabularies of their own. They have become reference points in sports history and have gained standing as landmark moments of the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement, and the globalization of American popular culture. We know where these bouts took place and what happened: the Thrilla in Manila, the Rumble in the Jungle, the Rope-a-Dope, and the Phantom Punch are recognizable even to those who don’t really care about boxing. It seems unlikely that a relatively unknown contest like Clay-Moore could possibly equal in significance such superfights , yet that is exactly what I’m claiming. It was Clay-Moore, more than any other single fight, that turned a relatively powerless, intriguing-but-unproven boxer named Cassius Clay, whose primary value was as an entertaining sideshow, into the most potent boxoffice draw to come along in boxing in years. After fighting Moore, he began to be perceived not only as a serious contender for the heavyweight title but Clay vs. Moore The Seminal Text Clay vs. Moore 41 also as a special person whose life would ultimately be measured by standards beyond boxing. His name would not become Muhammad Ali until fifteen months later, and all of the sociopolitical import attendant upon his renaming as Ali would not begin to circulate widely in the culture until then, but the Clay-Moore bout was a tour de force that ushered in a new phase of Clay’s public meaning. In retrospect, a unique tangle of professional, financial , and cultural significance can already be discerned around Clay’s persona at the time he fought Moore, but it wasn’t obvious to his contemporaries, which is why this fight is not held in the same regard as his first bout with Liston. Although the latter match was the moment of his being recognized formally as World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali, it is clear in retrospect that the event was merely the public unveiling of a process that had come to fruition a year earlier. Individually, the elements of Clay’s becoming Ali existed before the Moore fight. Their coalescence at that instant, though, is what made the bout extraordinary. Appraisals of Ali’s worth as a boxer that fail to consider his cultural significance are incomplete. His meanings as a cultural figure are by-products of their commercial consequences. His boxing career has been the narrative basis of his meaning beyond the ring. You cannot understand one without the other. Alone they meant little; together they produced one of the most important popular cultural figures of the past seventy-five years. The legendary status of Ali’s bouts with Liston, Frazier, and Foreman is built upon their making these linkages obvious, but it was the Moore fight where they first came together. The November 15, 1962, bout with Moore confirmed Clay as the biggest gate attraction in boxing and demonstrated his potential to become one of the sport’s all-time generators of revenue. During the early buildup, however, this was not apparent to Clay and the Louisville Sponsoring Group, much less the fight’s promoters. As a result, the original contracts excluded any broadcast of the bout. The reasons for this were obvious. The promoters, the fighters, and their managers felt that the best way to protect their investment was to make as many people as possible pay top dollar to see the event live at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Putting the bout on television or radio would keep people at home, and everyone involved believed that doing so would stifle gate receipts. The bout just wasn’t interesting enough, they felt, to justify such a move. They believed that the money earned from television and radio would not compensate for the corresponding loss in ticket sales. It did not appear to be a fight that people...

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