Sixty years ago this year, a glib boxer named Cassius Clay came to Lewiston to defend his world heavyweight crown against former champion Sonny Liston.

It didn’t take Clay long to win. In the first round of the 1965 bout at the Central Maine Youth Center arena, his “phantom punch” sent Liston to the canvas. The sassy victor hollered at him from above: “Get up and fight, sucker!”

Liston stayed down.

Muhammad Ali gestures and shouts May 25, 1965, while standing over challenger Sonny Liston in Lewiston. John Rooney/Associated Press

If it hadn’t been for photographers John Rooney of the Associated Press and Neil Leifer of Sports Illustrated, that scene might have been forgotten.

Instead, their pictures, routinely cited among the best sports photographs, would go on to define a fighter who became known around the world as Muhammad Ali.

When Ali first claimed his new name in public, it was in Maine — in bright red thread across the back of the white Everlast robe he wore to the ring on that memorable night.

A Lewiston native, Charlie Hewitt, whose “Hopeful” signs light up his hometown, Portland, Bangor and a growing number of faraway cities, said the Ali-Liston fight should be recalled for more than the pictures. And Hewitt’s doing something to make sure it is.

On May 25, the anniversary of the fight, he and others will unveil a 10-foot bronze statue of Ali in front of Bates Mill No. 5 on Main Street that promises to become one of Maine’s most recognized works of public art.

“Let’s have something people can talk about,” Hewitt said of the $285,000 project spearheaded by fundraiser Tom Platz, a developer. Platz has been eyeing a new art trail in Lewiston that would begin with the Ali statue.

As a first step, Hewitt said over a recent lunch in Portland, the Pennsylvania-based sculptor Zenos Frudakis was commissioned to capture the moment Ali told Liston to get up. But they decided that wasn’t quite the right approach.

Hewitt, the executive producer of the project, said he wanted the statue “to represent the spirit of this community: the discipline, the strength, the resilience.”

“So, Lewiston’s Ali has his arms down. He’s 23. He’s handsome. And in his eyes, you know you don’t want to mess with him,” Hewitt said. “This is Ali before he becomes Ali.”

Frudakis said the pose honors Ali’s fighting style.

“He was so fast. He could bring his arms up, or he could back up on his heel and just have the fighter miss him by a split inch or a fraction of an inch,” the sculptor said.

Hewitt said he wants a statue that captures the pent-up energy and the threat of a man who might lose a round but would never give up the fight.

For Hewitt, that’s Ali. It’s also Lewiston.

Hewitt said that when his grandparents were struggling to make a living in Lewiston a century ago, the Ku Klux Klan targeted their French-speaking community, burning a cross one night atop Mount David in 1924 to highlight its racist agenda.

Now, he said, a new generation faces its own challenges.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that Lewiston and other hardscrabble Maine communities must continue to rise to meet those challenges, Hewitt said.

A bronze Ali standing not far from Hewitt’s own “Hopeful” sign embodies that message.

“It’s going to be spectacular,” Hewitt promised me. “It signifies everything we have to be to survive this contemporary wilderness.”