August 2014 - Page 2 of 2

Ali vs. Liston II: The ‘Phantom Punch’ Title Bout, May 25, 1965

February 27, 2020August 10, 2014 by

When Muhammad Ali floored Sonny Liston in their title-bout rematch in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, a legend was born. Or, perhaps more accurately, a legendary boxing controversy was born. Ali (the former Cassius Clay, who had taken his now-famous Muslim name after defeating Liston in their first title bout in 1964) knocked out Liston with a first-round right hand to the head that, all these years later, is still known as the “phantom punch.”

In fact, an awful lot of people who were at the fight never saw, or later claimed they never saw, the punch that floored Liston. Others, including Sports Illustrated‘s Tex Maule, were adamant that the punch was hardly a phantom, but instead was a perfectly timed blow that legitimately rocked the former champ.

In the years after the fight, various theories have been floated in order to explain what some fight fans simply can’t or don’t want to accept namely, that Ali beat Liston, period.

But Liston was in debt to the Mafia and threw the fight to pay it off, some have said, among other theories. All fascinating enough. Yet sportswriters such as Maule, Lou Eisen and others are just as sure that the punch in question was enough to rattle the older and out-of-shape Liston.

In his cover story in the June 7, 1965, issue of SI, Maule wrote that “the knockout punch itself was thrown with the amazing speed that differentiates Clay [as he was still called then by most in the media] from any other heavyweight. He leaned away from one of Liston’s ponderous, pawing left jabs, planted his left foot solidly and whipped his right hand over Liston’s left arm and into the side of Liston’s jaw. The blow had so much force it lifted Liston’s left foot, upon which most of his weight was resting, well off the canvas.”

“He knocked out big Sonny Liston,” the magazine asserted elsewhere in the same issue, “with a punch so marvelously fast that almost no one believed in it but it was hard and true.”

Maule also noted that “about 30 seconds before the end, [Ali] hit Liston with another strong right that may have started Sonny’s downfall.” A picture of that earlier punch was the cover photo for the June 7 issue of Sports Illustrated. George Silk took that photo. The rest of the pictures in this gallery, none of which ran in LIFE magazine, are by Silk’s colleague, John Dominis. In Silk’s picture, Dominis (wearing a dark blue shirt) can be seen resting his own camera on the canvas, just to the right of the ring post.

Muhammad Ali, before his fight with Sonny Liston, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali vs. Liston, 1965

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali dodging a left jab from Liston.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali landing a right cross on Liston.

George Silk; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ali vs. Liston, 1965

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Muhammad Ali, after the fight, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965.

John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski: Rare Photos, London, 1968

January 24, 2022August 9, 2014 by

On the night of Aug. 9, 1969, in Los Angeles, four members of Charles Manson’s “family” savagely murdered 26-year-old actress and Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate; her friend and former lover, Jay Sebring; Polish writer Wojciech Frykowski; coffee-empire heiress Abigail Folger; and 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting the Polanski-Tate house in Benedict Canyon that evening to try and sell a clock radio to the property’s caretaker, and was shot to death by Manson follower Tex Watson. (A married couple in Los Feliz, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were murdered by Manson family members the next night.)

The grisly details of the Manson murders and their nightmarish aftermath the circus-like trials, the enduring fascination Manson and his band of sociopaths hold for countless people, and so on are well-known. Most people with even a passing knowledge of the slaughter are aware, for example, that Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, begged her killers to spare her unborn child. Instead, she was stabbed to death while pleading with her murderers, after which Manson follower Susan Atkins dipped a towel in Tate’s blood and used it to write “PIG” on the front door of the house. All of the other victims of the Manson followers’ depravity suffered equally horrifying deaths.

For more than a few people, the Sixties came to a bloody end during those two summer nights in ’69.

Here, LIFE.com recalls the living, vibrant Sharon Tate with a series of photos of her, Polanski and their friends, made by LIFE’s Bill Ray in Swinging London in 1968.

“When I look back,” Bill Ray recently told LIFE.com, “what I remember is that [writer] Tommy Thompson and I worked hard every day during that assignment, and every night we were out partying with Sharon and Roman. Jay Sebring was there. Brian Jones soon to be dead himself, drowned in his pool was there. Mia Farrow and Harold Pinter. Oh, it was a great time to be in London.”

Asked about working with Tate, Ray said he “thought she was a dream. Really, just wonderful. In fact, years later, that whole time spent with her and Roman sort of feels like a dream sequence from a movie Sharon was always beautiful, and she was never fussy. She didn’t care what angle I was shooting from, never demanded that I get this side or that side of her. Ingrid Bergman, when I photographed her around that same time, had a similar ease about her. She and Sharon had this incredible, natural beauty, and they didn’t worry about the wind blowing their hair around or looking less than perfect. And that, of course, just made them that much more appealing.”

As for Polanski, Ray recalls not only that he and Tate appeared to be deeply, genuinely in love, but that the filmmaker’s intensity and his dark humor were innate aspects of his talent, inseparable from his life experiences. Polanski, after all, had suffered more terrors as a boy in Nazi-occupied Poland (his mother was killed in Auschwitz; his father survived Mauthausen; Polanski himself, often on his own, was in constant peril) than most people witness in their entire lives. But in London, with his gorgeous wife by his side, close friends nearby and two acknowledged cinematic classics, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, to his name, Polanski was a charming, if often introspective, subject.

All these years later, Ray’s pictures of Tate, Polanski and their friends in 1968 London feel like portraits of a lost world, while the knowledge we have of the horrors to come adds a dark, foreboding edge to what, at the time, must have felt like an era of endless light.

117339777.jpg

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Brutal Pageantry: The Third Reich’s Myth-Making Machinery, in Color

January 16, 2020August 5, 2014 by

A powerful insignia alone, Adolf Hitler once noted, “can spark interest in a political movement.” What Hitler did not say, but what is evident to anyone with even a tenuous grasp of 20th-century history, is that such an emblem can also provide a movement and a movement’s followers with an immediate communal identity.

The swastika, sometimes with its arms pointing to the left, sometimes to the right, has been around for thousands of years. It is one of the most ancient and prevalent of all sacred symbols, bearing vastly different meanings from culture to culture and context to context, from Hinduism to Greco-Roman architecture to Ireland’s great 8th-century illuminated Book of Kells. Today, it’s of course impossible for most people to see any swastika without associating it immediately with the Third Reich, Nazi Germany and, by extension, World War II and the Holocaust. The reason for this is disturbingly simple: Hitler and those who embraced his toxic vision as early as the 1920s were aware that a symbol with the resonance perhaps the subconscious resonance of a swastika, combined with the red, white and black of what Hitler called the “revered colors” of the old German Imperial flag, would not only be graphically striking: for countless Germans and Austrians, it would be spiritually striking.

In this gallery, LIFE.com takes a long, hard look at the aesthetics of the Reich’s propaganda machinery, from the single swastika to the epic torchlit celebrations that marked Hitler’s 50th birthday. Here are the Nuremberg rallies, where individuals are subsumed into a single worshipful organism. Here are the gargantuan Nazi banners, towering above a sea of human faces that fade into insignificance. Here are thousands of tanned, near-naked youth, re-enacting a manufactured, cobbled-together and thoroughly mythical past when “Aryans” gamboled beneath a Teutonic sun.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Third Reich’s deeply manipulative and seductive propaganda and especially the sense of invincibility and inevitable triumph that it sparked in the hearts of true believers is how ludicrous and, in the end, how perfectly mistaken it all was. Yes, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goering and the other genocidal gangsters did unleash a murderous nightmare in Europe, and for a few years a very few years it might have seemed as if the Nazi drive for domination was, in fact, unstoppable.

But then something happened that the Reich did not intend. Free people stood up. Britain resisted, mightily. America (finally) entered the war in December 1941 and along with the Soviet Union, the British, the Free French and so many other Allies, set about systematically demolishing the “invincible” German forces. Whatever the power of its symbols, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lasted a little more than a decade, and when it was destroyed, its architect killed himself in a squalid underground bunker.

Adolf Hitler saluted troops of the Condor Legion who fought alongside Spanish Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, during a rally upon their return to Germany, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nazi rally, 1937.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nazi and Italian flags draped from balconies welcomed Adolf Hitler during his state visit to Italy, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Volkswagen Works cornerstone ceremony, near Wolfsburg, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nuremberg, Germany, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Crowds cheered Adolf Hitler’s campaign to unite Austria and Germany, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The scene along the roadway to the Fallersleben Volkswagen Works cornerstone ceremony, Germany, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nazi officials on their way to Fallersleben Volkswagen Works cornerstone ceremony, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler at the swearing-in of SS standard bearers at the Reich Party Congress, Nuremberg.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reich Party Congress, Nuremburg, Germany, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

1937 Reich Party Congress, Nuremberg, Germany.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The League of German Girls danced during the 1938 Reich Party Congress, Nuremberg, Germany.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reich Veterans Day, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Berlin was illuminated at midnight in honor of Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels (in box) at the Charlottenburg Theatre, Berlin, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The annual midnight swearing-in of SS troops at Feldherrnhalle, Munich, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler made the keynote address at Reichstag session, Kroll Opera House, Berlin, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels spoke at the Lustgarten in Berlin, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Volkswagen Works cornerstone ceremony, near Wolfsburg, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler spoke at the Lustgarten, Berlin, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reich Party Congress, Nuremberg, Germany, 1938.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Boy and His Dog

December 9, 2019August 4, 2014 by

In the late summer of 1945, as the Second World War was finally coming to a close, LIFE magazine published a series of pictures by photographer Myron Davis including the first one in this gallery, which has since become a classic chronicling the fast friendship between a 12-year-old Iowan named Larry and his 18-month-old dog, Dunk.

Summer is the time [wrote LIFE] when Larry Jim Holm and Dunk can be together all day long. Larry is 12 years old and lives on a farm near Oskaloosa, Iowa. Dunk is 18 months old and is part spaniel, part collie. Sometimes there are chores to do but most of their time is for fun. Larry and Dunk know every foot of the 16-acre farm. They keep close tabs on the ripening blackberries, although Dunk really prefers field. mice. Sometimes they hunt gophers or dam the brook in the back lot. Sometimes they catch a turtle so Larry can carve his initials on it.

The best fun is fishing, when Dunk helps dig fat angleworms and goes off with Larry through the meadow, across the pasture (keeping away from the bull) and over the hill to the creek. They always jump into the creek for a swim. Then they go home for a quiet evening, most of it spent on the living room floor. “A guy’s almost an orphan without a dog,” says Larry.

We get the feeling there are plenty of boys and girls everywhere who have a hard time imagining life without a furry friend close at hand and know what Larry means.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Tired and dirty from a hard day’s play, Dunk padded along the roadbed while Larry practiced the art of walking on rails.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dunk learned how to open door with his nose.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Holding on to Dunk, Larry waved at a train engineer.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mowing the lawn, with Dunk alongside.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

It doesn’t look it, but Dunk enjoyed the water.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dunk waited while Larry fed the calves.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Turtles can be wonderful discoveries.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

They went to Oskaloosa to see the circus come in.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Larry waited while Dunk ate supper.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

All tired out, they rested against an oat shock.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fishing was a favorite summer pastime. They rarely caught much and the fish were usually pretty small, but Dunk always showed an interest in a wet, wiggly catch.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Off for home, Larry and Dunk trudged down the country road with their fish. ‘Jeepers,’ Larry said, ‘I wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for Dunk.'”

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the end of the day Larry sprawled out with the funnies and Dunk collapsed on the floor, heaved a sigh and wiggled up close to Larry.

Myron Davis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock