When Muhammad Ali Fought A Man With One Kidney JJ

That’s Cleveland Williams hitting the floor. The man who just put him there is Muhammad Ali, 24 years old, undefeated, and probably the fastest heavyweight who’s ever lived. [music] But this story isn’t really about Ali. It’s about the man Ali is fighting. The man with one kidney. The man carrying a .357 Magnum bullet in his right hip.

A bullet that’s been there for almost exactly [music] 2 years. The man doctors said would never fight again. Would maybe never walk right again. And who two summers earlier had said the words, “I died three times on that operating table.” His name was Cleveland Williams. They called him the Big Cat. >> [music] >> And what he did on this November night in 1966, getting up off the canvas over and over and over, is one of the strangest acts of courage in [music] the history of the sport. Cleveland Williams was born in

1933 in Griffin, Georgia, on a small farm. He started working at a pulpwood mill when he [music] was 13, hauling lumber for a few dollars a day. He started boxing the year after that. He was so big and so strong that he got away with fighting grown men in the local Georgia circuits until somebody figured out he was 14 years old and barred him from competing until he turned 18.

By the time he hit his prime fighting out of Houston, Williams had a left hook that scared the rest of the division. George Foreman asked decades later who the hardest punchers he’d ever sparred with were, named Cleveland Williams as one of three. So did George Chuvalo. He fought Sonny Liston twice, lost both times.

Liston was a different kind of monster, but he made Liston work. The man who would later destroy Floyd Patterson in 2 minutes, the man Ali himself once called the big ugly bear, Cleveland Williams hurt him [music] twice. Between 1949 and the fall of 1964, Williams won 65 fights. 51 of them were knockouts. 15 of those came in the first round.

The Ring magazine had him ranked the number two heavyweight [music] on the planet. The only man ahead of him was the champion. A title shot [music] wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when. Then, on a Sunday night in November, it stopped being a matter of when. November 29th, 1964, around 10:00 at night.

Cleveland Williams was driving back to Houston from a fishing trip. There were four people in the car, Williams behind the wheel, a friend of his named Ned Warner in the front passenger seat, two women in the back. All four had been drinking. [music] A Texas Highway Patrolman named Dale Whitten pulled the car over on State Highway 149, just outside of Houston.

He said Williams had been speeding and had nearly run him off the road. What happened in the next 10 [music] minutes, only two men in this world ever really knew. Whitten told one version, Williams told [music] another. The account we have today is built out of both. The Patrolman arrested Williams for driving while intoxicated.

He arrested Ned Warner, too, for public drunkenness. He put Williams in the front seat of the patrol car. Warner went in the back. The [music] two women, sober both of them, weren’t arrested. Williams thought going to jail meant the end of his boxing career. So, [music] as the car pulled away, he started begging the officer to let him go.

Years later, he would describe what he [music] said. These are his exact words. “Please don’t take me to jail.” The officer was driving pretty fast, and I said, “Please let me jump out of the car and kill myself.” Something happened in that car. There was a struggle. Whitten’s .357 magnum revolver went off. The bullet entered Williams’ stomach.

It tore through his colon. It destroyed his right kidney, and it lodged in his right hip, where it broke the joint clean. >> [music] >> He was taken to a Houston hospital. The first operation lasted hours. Surgeons couldn’t safely remove the bullet, so they left it where it was. Over the next 7 months, Williams would have three more surgeries.

In June of 1965, doctors finally removed what was left of his right kidney. That’s when Williams used to say, “I died three times on that operating table.” He lost 60 lb off his frame. The muscles around his right hip were partially paralyzed. He had to learn to walk again with a limp he would carry for the rest of his life.

But, here’s the part of this story that almost nobody knows. Cleveland Williams forgave the man who shot him. Dale Whitten came to visit him in the hospital. The two of them sat and talked. Whatever happened on that highway in November of 1964, they made [music] their peace with it. Two years later, the Associated Press would run a story ahead of the Ali fight with the headline, “Williams, Patrolman Meet Again as Pals.

” That’s not me dressing up the story. That’s a real wire headline you can find in the AP archive. Cleveland Williams should never have fought again. The doctors told him that. His doctors, his friends, [music] his own body, every morning when he tried to stand up. He couldn’t even do regular weight training because his abdominal wall had been cut open four separate times.

The scar tissue was too fresh. The muscles weren’t holding. So, his manager, a man named Hugh Benbow, took him out to a cattle ranch and put him to work throwing hay, 80-lb bales, all day, every day. For more than a year, his weight came back slowly. His strength followed it. The limp never fully left him, and the bullet never left him at all.

But, on February 8th, 1966, 14 months after he had been shot on the side of a highway, Cleveland Williams walked into a Houston arena for the first time as a fighter since the shooting. The crowd stood up before the bell rang. He knocked [music] Ben Black out in the first round. He fought three more times that year. Three more wins.

All of them knockouts. None of them lasting past the second round. That summer, the boxing world started doing the math. Williams could still punch. Williams was still ranked, and Muhammad Ali was looking for an opponent for the fall. The fight was made for the Houston Astrodome, the brand new arena that had opened the year before, the biggest indoor venue in the world.

November 14th, 1966. What almost nobody outside Williams’ inner circle understood was this. The big cat who would step into the Astrodome that night was not the same fighter who had been shot on Highway 149. He looked the same, he sounded the same, but the actual fighter, the one Sonny Liston had needed two fights to put away, had bled out on an operating table 18 months earlier.

He just hadn’t told anybody yet. 35,460 [music] people packed into the Astrodome, the biggest indoor boxing crowd in American history at that point. The fight beamed out to 125 closed-circuit theaters across America and 46 [music] international markets. Ali was a 5-to-1 favorite. >> Ali in the white trunks, Williams Ali in the white trunks, Williams in black.

>> The bell rings. Round one lasted 3 minutes that felt like 10. Williams came forward the way he always had, head down, jab out, hunting for the right hand that had ended 51 careers before. But Ali wasn’t where Williams was punching. Ali was already 6 ft away, circling, peppering him with jabs from angles a heavyweight wasn’t supposed to throw from.

The first solid punch of the entire fight was Ali’s, a right hand to the head, more than 2 minutes into the round. After that, Ali just started showing off. Williams survived the first round. He didn’t go down. Round two is the round you came here to watch. There’s the first one, right hook to the jaw. Williams gets up at the count of six.

Ali presses in. Second knockdown. That five-step dance Ali just did, he’s been practicing it in training for months. Tonight is the first time he has ever shown it to anyone. It will become one of the most famous things [music] any boxer has ever done in a ring. They will call it the Ali Shuffle. And the man he is doing it to right now is a fighter who already died three times on an operating table.

Third knockdown. Williams hits the canvas as the bell rings. Saved. [music] Round three lasts 68 seconds. Williams comes off his stool. >> [music] >> He tries to come forward one more time because that is the only thing he has ever known how to do. He has nothing left. Ali lands a combination.

Williams turns his head away from the punches, and that is all referee Harry Kessler needs to [music] see. He waves it off at 1 minute and 8 seconds of the third round. In three rounds, Muhammad Ali landed more than 100 punches. Cleveland Williams landed three. Mike Tyson would say decades later that this was the greatest [music] fight Muhammad Ali ever had.

The greatest performance of the greatest career in heavyweight history. Ali at his absolute peak [music] doing things in a boxing ring nobody had done before. That’s the version of this fight that goes in the highlight reels. That’s the version that gets played at every Ali [music] retrospective.

The other version is the one I just told you. Cleveland Williams kept boxing until 1972. He was never a contender again. After he retired, he worked as a forklift driver in Houston for the rest of his life. The bullet was still inside him. The hip never fully healed. He walked with a limp until the day he died. On September 3rd, 1999, walking across a street near his home in Houston, Texas, [music] Cleveland Williams was hit by a car.

The driver kept going. He died from his injuries 1 week later. He was 66 [music] years old. Muhammad Ali had a lot of great nights in a boxing ring. The history books call this one his greatest. The man across the ring from him that night had already survived worse.