LEWISTON – It has happened to virtually anyone who has lived or worked in Lewiston if they’ve traveled around the country, or even around the world. They’ve been asked the same question now for the last 40 years.
“People find out that I’m from Lewiston,” said Dr. Mike Boulanger, “and that’s the question they will ask me, How about the fight? Do you know anybody that went to the fight?'”
As a matter of fact, he knows a couple of people who went. His father, Francis “Bill” Boulanger shelled out $50 for two tickets and took Mike to the second Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight for his 12th birthday.
Mike has the ticket stubs framed, along with autographs from the two combatants and a photo Mike took of Ali arriving at the Holiday Inn in Auburn.
Father and son, both avid sports fans, have since seen the World Series, the Army-Navy football game and other events in person, but nothing has left them with the memories that a roughly 60-second bout in their own hometown did.
The Boulangers got their first close-up look at Liston as he was training at the Poland Spring Inn. The former champion was just climbing out of the ring after a sparring session. Mike grabbed one of the inn’s postcards from a nearby table and approached the former convict for his signature.
“He looked at me and scowled like he was going to chew me up, and then signed it and gave it to me,” Mike said. “It scared the dickens out of me.”
Boulanger’s encounter with Ali two days before the fight wasn’t as intimidating.
“He was 6-3, 6-4. I was looking up at this man with my little Brownie camera,” he said. “He was probably one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen. Physically imposing, but not scary like Liston was.”
As he’d done with the challenger, Boulanger approached the champion for his autograph.
“I was hoping for Cassius Clay, but he signed it M. Ali,'” he said.
Mike would see the two pugilists again later that day at a pre-fight press conference, thanks again to his father, an accountant at the time, who knew the Auburn police officer guarding the door and posed as one of the dozens of reporters covering the fight.
“We got in there and I grabbed a piece of Western Union paper, like everyone else was doing, but I didn’t have a pencil,” Bill said.
Bill didn’t need to take notes to remember the show Ali put on at the press conference.
“He was a real comical man,” he said. “This guy was a showman.”
Back at school, Mike was the only kid in his sixth grade class with tickets to the fight. He couldn’t get enough of the hype leading up to it, but quickly found the national media’s portrayal of the community he had become so proud of less than flattering.
“They were really negative about Lewiston-Auburn as a community. That part I found really disappointing,” Mike said. “I remember specifically (it being referred to as a) one stoplight town, a cultural wasteland. They didn’t mention anything about Bates College, Bates Bedspreads, the high-end shoe manufacturing in the community at that time. They were just kind of knocking the community, as if they were blaming us because the fight ended up in Lewiston.”
Unlike dozens of other spectators, father and son were in their seats at the start of the fight. They sat in the second-to-last row at Central Maine Youth Center and made friends with a group of African-Americans sitting nearby who were big Ali fans. They invited Bill to the Holiday Inn after the fight for a drink.
The electricity in the arena rose as the main event approached. Both fighters were introduced and Liston was the clear favorite with the crowd, but not for long.
Neither Boulangers saw the punch that sent Liston to the canvas.
“For about a minute, there was a stunned silence,” Mike said. “Nobody knew what the hell was going on, because (referee) Jersey Joe (Walcott) missed the count, pulled them back together to fight and then the timekeeper stepped in and called the fight. So we’re all kind of stunned.”
“And this guy,” Bill said, pointing to his son, “is standing up in his chair yelling Fix! Fix!”
According to Mike, a rumor started around the crowd that the black Muslims in attendance to support Ali would open fire if the crowd didn’t stop booing.
“So all of a sudden, everybody stopped booing. I got down from my chair and we kind of walked out very quietly,” he said.
Mike has seen film footage of the fight since. He’s read the accounts from those who have vouched for the legitimacy of the outcome. Yet he can’t dismiss what his eyes and his gut, which were three days shy of 12 at the time, told him that night.
“If you ask me, I truly think that the fight was rigged. Liston was going to take a dive and he made it obvious that he was taking a dive, I think,” Mike said. “He was supposedly owned by the mob and had something to gain by taking a dive.”
The debate over whether Liston took a dive rages to this day, giving the Ali-Liston II a more mythical quality, especially locally, than if it had gone the full 15 rounds.
That may be why the fight is to Lewiston what Ted Williams’ final at bat is to Boston.
“If you talk to people around here, it’s like everybody in town was at the fight,” Mike said. “There must have been 400,000 people at that fight.”
“They had to bring in people from downtown to fill up the seats,” added Bill, “but everybody was there.”
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