Fifty seconds, maybe 46, that's all the time trainer Angelo Dundee had between rounds to muffle the fear in Clay's voice, to sponge away whatever it was that was blinding his fighter, to stand him up and send him back out there against the ogre that was Sonny Liston.

"He said, 'Cut the gloves off,' " Dundee recalled the other day, still tack-sharp in his 80s. "I said, 'I can't do that. You need the gloves to fight.' "

First fight against Liston, Miami Beach, Feb. 25, 1964. You can watch it again tonight on WHYY at 10 o'clock, or buy the DVD starting tomorrow. The documentary is called "Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami," and footage from that incredibly dramatic fight is a huge part of the film.

Liston was an 8-to-1 favorite. And even the people who loved Clay, the handsome, charismatic, young fighter from Louisville, wouldn't bet a dime of their own money on him. Especially after he turned the weigh-in that morning into a four-ring circus, brandishing a twig, calling the champion "a big, ugly bear" and warning the gamblers, "If you want to lose your money, bet on Sonny."

Sugar Ray Robinson was designated to hold Clay back and the strenuous charade sent Clay's pulse racing and his blood pressure raging and you could have hidden nickels in the furrows on the commission doctor's forehead.

The fight began that night with Clay too swift, too unorthodox for the plodding Liston. In the third round, Clay opened a cut under Liston's left eye and that's when the intrigue started.

David Remnick, now editor of New Yorker magazine who must have been 5 or 6 when the fight took place, says, "Liston told his corner 'to juice the gloves.' "

"It wasn't the gloves," Dundee says bluntly. "I had the referee check the gloves and it wasn't the gloves. And some people say it might have been the alcohol they were rubbing on Liston's shoulders, but it wasn't that.

"What it was, was the Monsel's Solution the cut man, Joe Polino, used. It's very caustic, it burns the tissues, it closes the cut, turns the area black. It's banned now.

"I stuck my pinkie in my fighter's eye, stuck it in my eye and it burned like hell. That's what it was.

"The kid wanted to talk to the ref because he felt something bad was going on, but I didn't want that. So I grabbed him [by the wrists] and stood him up before the 10-second buzzer and I told him to run!"

Clay ran for the first 90 seconds of Round 5, blinking away the residue of pain. Once he could see clearly he held Liston at bay with his long left arm. It was over right then. Liston saw he couldn't beat this loud-mouthed crazy kid when he was half-blinded . . . Discouraged, deflated, Liston hardly threw a punch in the sixth.

"He was out of gas, mentally, physically," Dundee said.

Clay was the first to see that Liston was quitting in his corner, so he threw his arms up and shuffled and then bolted to a corner of the ring to harangue the press, yelling that he'd told us so, that he'd shocked the world, that he was indeed The Greatest.

Think for a moment what might have happened if Dundee had allowed Clay to quit in his corner. He would have changed the course of boxing history, he might have changed Clay's personal history, and he might have changed the nation's history.

The next day Clay announced he had embraced the Nation of Islam's beliefs and he preferred to be called "Cassius X." Was Dundee as surprised as many of us?

"I have learned, down through the years," Dundee said, "to never get involved with a fighter's personal life or his religion. Had a fighter once, he was complaining about his wife and I said, 'That's women.' He went back, told her Angelo sided with him and that was that. He split with his wife, split with me.

"And then I took Willie Pastrano to fight Chick Calder, in Scotland. We look it up, we go to a Catholic church to pray. He gets his picture taken with a Catholic priest. There's no way we get a decision unless I've got a gun. That was Protestant territory."

You want to watch Ali as a young, handsome, swift, skillful fighter, this is the film to watch. You want to learn more about the lethal Nation of Islam power struggle between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, with the handsome heavyweight champion as the pawn, you get that, too. *

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