Interesting piece about Ali-Liston II. Ali KD in sparring, cutting down from 240 lb

Clay is also a new man. While Liston seems to have become almost wizened, Clay has grown half an inch since February—he now stands 6 feet 3—and has put on six pounds. He weighed 216� a week before the fight. More significantly, Clay's biceps measure 17 inches, his thighs 27 inches, a two-inch increment in both places, and, at 13� inches, his forearm is an inch bigger than it was prior to the Miami fight. His waist remains the same, however—34 inches. When Clay returned from his African pilgrimage last June, he was 240 but, as he said the other day after trying on a sweater in a shop on Boston's Massachusetts Avenue, " Jackie Gleason is gone. I have lost my big stomach. I never drink or smoke, so none of that was bad flesh. It was health fat, that's what it was, health fat. I'm so beautiful I should be chiseled in gold. Look at that build. It's pretty. I mean, it's ready to dance. Right now!"

Clay truly is in marvelous shape. "I had to get unfit before I learned to stay in condition," he says ruefully. In July, when he was still keeping company with Gleason, Chip Johnson, a sparring partner, put him down with a short right hand. "I froze on the spot," Johnson recalls. " 'Chip Johnson,' I said to myself, 'you know you just dropped the champ. Get up, get up,' I cried. 'Stop jiving.' He said to me, 'Chip Johnson, you hit me with the true thing.' Liston better not knock him down. I don't want to lose my prestige with the champ."
"He wants to work," Dundee says. "That's his biggest asset—he wants to train. No one has to push him. This is everything he wants." "I'm filling up his tank," says Bundini. "I got him running with a pound-and-a-half weight in each hand. I got him running with heavy boots on. [Clay says the boots weigh five pounds apiece, whereas the ones he wore before the first fight only weighed half that much, and that they are 13�, although he wears a size 12 shoe.] Makes his ankles feel like he had two pair of wings on. If you clip his wings, he be dead, he be dead."


http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1076605/2/index.htm