Muhammad Ali Made Media Mastery Part of the Fight Itself
Composer and conductor Teddy Abrams argues that Muhammad Ali’s first fight against Sonny Liston became an American cultural event before Ali entered the ring. In the Aspen Institute Arts Program’s Art of America series, Abrams frames Ali’s media campaign against the favored Liston as psychological theater that turned sport, news, performance, and public identity into one event. For Abrams, Ali’s significance lies in how he used attention itself as a medium, becoming a figure that American culture both made possible and needed.
Ali made the fight larger than boxing before he entered the ring
Teddy Abrams frames Muhammad Ali’s first fight against Sonny Liston as more than a sporting upset. For Abrams, the lasting significance is that Ali understood, unusually early, how national media and public platforms could collapse categories that had previously seemed separate: celebrity, public figure, influence, performance, and art.
Abrams calls the example personal, but his argument is not sentimental. Ali, he says, “transcended media” by recognizing the direction technology and platforms were moving and using them to make himself legible as something larger than an athlete. In Abrams’s account, Ali did not merely benefit from attention; he shaped the terms of attention and “set the mold” for a kind of American public figure whose identity could not be contained by a single profession.
This is one that's personal. I think it's one of the earliest examples of a person transcending media and understanding the direction that both technology and platforms on a national level could offer somebody to blur the lines between being a celebrity, a public figure, an influential person, and an artist.
Abrams’s reflection appears as part of the Aspen Institute Arts Program’s “Art of America: Iconic Works Defining and Shaping the United States.” That frame matters because he is not treating Ali versus Liston simply as a famous fight. He is treating the public drama around the fight as part of the country’s cultural record: staged, watched, repeated, and absorbed beyond sport.
Archival boxing footage attributed on screen to “Legends of Boxing in Color, via YouTube” shows Ali and Liston in the ring, surrounded by the crowd. The caption identifies the footage as from “Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) vs. Sonny Liston I (25.02.1964) - Colorized” and “‘I Shook Up The World!!’” The footage supplies the physical record of the event Abrams is describing: a real bout whose meaning depended on everything Ali had already performed before the bell.
The psychological campaign was part of the work
Abrams’s central example is the period leading up to Ali’s first fight with Sonny Liston, when Ali was still Cassius Clay. He describes that lead-up as “almost like theater” because of how public, stylized, and excessive it became: “so scripted and ridiculous over the top” that it seemed like something that could only happen in a movie, even though it was happening in public life.
Liston, in Abrams’s telling, was “by far the favorite,” and Ali “should not have had any chance.” That imbalance is crucial. Ali’s achievement began in the months before the bout, when he conducted what Abrams calls a “psychological theatrical attack” on Liston. The phrase carries both halves of Abrams’s interpretation: psychological, because it targeted Liston’s confidence and comprehension; theatrical, because it unfolded publicly, as a performance for audiences and media.
Ali figured out how to dominate the media and either depressed, scared, or annoyed Sonny Liston into not understanding how to fight this guy, and Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, gets into the ring and wins.
By the time Clay entered the ring, the bout already had a dramatic structure: the overwhelming favorite, the impossible challenger, the months of provocation, and the audience watching to see whether the performance could become fact. Abrams’s conclusion is plain: Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, got into the ring and won. The win did not reduce the preceding performance to hype. It made the provocation, psychological pressure, spectacle, and athletic result one event.
The event was art, news, reality, and sport at once
Abrams calls the fight “a world changing event” because it occupied several public forms simultaneously. It was sport, because it was a boxing match with a winner and loser. It was news, because the public followed it as a real event unfolding in national life. It was theater, because Ali knowingly heightened the roles, conflict, and spectacle around it. And Abrams calls it art because the total event carried expressive force beyond the formal boundaries of boxing.
It was a really a world changing event, and I love that it's art, it's theater, it's also reality, and news at the same time as sport.
The visual archive shown alongside Abrams’s argument moves between the first Liston fight and later Ali-Liston imagery. The archival footage is labeled as the 1964 Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston I fight. The still photographs are labeled “Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston, 1965” and “Ali vs. Liston II, 1965,” including the famous image of Ali standing over Liston and gesturing for him to get up. Abrams’s spoken focus remains the first fight; the later public-domain images function as part of the broader Ali-Liston iconography surrounding the rivalry.
That distinction matters because Abrams’s subject is not only the result of a bout. It is the way Ali appeared, staged himself, and circulated as an image. The photographs help explain why Abrams can speak of the event as sport and news, but also as theater and art: Ali’s body, gesture, victory, and command of the frame become part of the meaning.
America both permits and produces a figure like Ali
Teddy Abrams makes an explicitly national claim: “Ali could only have been made in America.” He grounds that in two related ideas: Ali was a product of the nation’s history, and he was a product of the nation’s cultural approach. Ali’s emergence, in this reading, required a culture able to invite and need a figure who exceeded fixed classifications.
Our culture invites the possibility of an Ali, and then our country forges people like Ali to fill those roles that we need.
That claim leads to Abrams’s broader view of public identity. He argues that it is “actually okay” not to classify someone as sports person, artist, newsmaker, or entertainer. In Ali’s case, Abrams says, one need not first announce that he is theatrical or politically active. The more important cultural fact is that society wants “interesting people” who captivate audiences through whatever expressive means they can imagine.
The final image shown — Ali raising his arms in victory, surrounded by his corner — is the conventional picture of athletic triumph. Abrams’s reading insists that Ali’s public force cannot be limited to that frame, even when the frame is victory.