The Champ's Camp: A Closer Look at Fighter's Heaven
Sonny Liston's rock at Fighter's Heaven.
Photograph courtesy of Jeff Julian.
A Few Finishing Touches
As construction carried on for the buildings of the camp, Harvey Moyer and Muhammad Ali had a few ideas for how to decorate. Moyer, head of the construction crew, suggested bringing a few large boulders from a nearby work site and setting them up around the camp, and paint the names of other great boxers on them. Ali liked the suggestion, as he had seen something similar at Archie Moore's Salt Mine in California when he had trained there for a short time in 1960.
With 29 boulders now placed around the camp, Ali had his father, Cassius Clay Sr., paint the names of several champion fighters onto specific rocks. Some were boxers he admired, like Rocky Marciano, Jack Johnson, and Joe Louis, while others were boxers he had faced before, like Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and Floyd Patterson. There was only one boulder that had a name that was not that of a boxer, but the name of his trainer, Angelo Dundee.
