🥊 Y! Sports AM: Was Ali’s most famous photo a lie?

⚽️ Gunners advance to final: Arsenal are heading to the Champions League final for the first time since 2006 after beating Atlético Madrid, 1-0, on Tuesday (2-1 on aggregate) thanks to Bukayo Saka’s 44th-minute goal.

🏒 Leafs win lottery: The Maple Leafs will pick first in the 2026 NHL Draft after winning Tuesday’s lottery, jumping from the fifth-best odds to their first No. 1 pick since 2016. The Sharks, Canucks, Blackhawks and Rangers round out the top five.

🏀 Record viewership: The 76ers’ series-clinching victory over the Celtics averaged 11 million viewers, making it the most-watched first-round Game 7 in NBA history. Games across the entire first round averaged four million viewers, making it the most-watched opening round in 33 years.

🏈 Mahomes ahead of schedule: Patrick Mahomes is “way ahead of schedule” after tearing his ACL in December, per the Chiefs. The two-time MVP is “in a good position” to participate in OTAs later this month and could potentially return by Week 1.

🏀 WNBA great retires: Eight-time WNBA All-Star Tina Charles announced her retirement after 14 seasons. The former No. 1 overall pick leaves as the league’s all-time leader in rebounds (4,262) and second-leading scorer (8,396 points).

See what else is trending on Yahoo Sports.

Sonny Liston was a champion, enforcer and enigma — a Hall of Fame heavyweight who became relegated by history as the fallen giant beneath a glowering Muhammad Ali. Yet more than 40 years later, the questions surrounding Liston and his fateful night against “The Greatest” refuse to die.

Ben Fowlkes, Uncrowned:

Over 60 years later and you still keep running into that photograph. You see it in dorm rooms and strip mall gyms. It’s on the wall in bars, restaurants and waiting rooms.

It’s a great moment in sports photography, the way Ali is captured at the exact peak of his dominance. The fact that it was, in all likelihood, an ugly and ignominious day for boxing has been smoothed down to almost nothing by the sands of time.

If you start to ask questions — even just a few basic ones — about the iconic scene from the heavyweight title rematch between Ali and Liston on May 25, 1965, that’s when the picture comes into better focus.

Q: Where did this fight take place?

A: In a small civic center in Lewiston, Maine.

Q: Wait, didn’t their first fight take place at a much larger arena in Miami Beach?

A: Yes it did. And organizers had originally targeted Las Vegas for the rematch, but there were enough suspicions about the legitimacy of the fight that Art Laurie, then the chairman of the Nevada commission, later told [author Nick] Tosches that he’d been warned away from it by U.S. Senators who told him “not to have anything to do with that fight, because our industry here was gaming, and that fight was going to stink out the place.”

Q: At what point of the fight was that picture snapped?

A: Slightly past midway of the first round.

Q: How many other heavyweight title fights did Ali win via first-round knockout?

A: Zero. He had only one other first-round knockout win in his entire pro career, and it came in his fourth professional fight, against Jim Robinson, a man who finished his career 8-25, with 16 losses by way of knockout.

Q: How many other fights did Liston lose via first-round knockout?

A: Zero. Liston was knocked out only one other time, in his second-to-last fight against Leotis Martin, just one year before his death. Prior to that, he’d withstood punishment from the hardest hitters in the division, such as Cleveland Williams, who finished his career with 62 knockout wins but went 0-2 against Liston.

The post-fight recap in The New York Times described Liston collapsing “slowly, like a falling building, piece by piece, rolling onto his back, then flat on his stomach, his face pressed against the canvas.” Multiple ringside observers reported that fans in the small civic center almost immediately began chanting “Fix!”

The blow that supposedly felled Liston was dubbed “the phantom punch.” While Ali stood over his foe, yelling and gesturing in that moment immortalized on film, what some at ringside later reported hearing was Ali berating Liston, demanding he get up, telling him no one would believe this.

The video footage from the fight shows Ali even interrupting the referee’s count as he continued yelling at Liston, seemingly in no hurry to see the fight ended.

Later, Ali would do his best to explain and justify the strangeness of that finish. It was just that his hands were so fast, he said. As fast as the human eye can blink, that’s how fast he could punch.

“The minute I hit Sonny Liston, all of those people blinked at that moment. That’s why they didn’t see the punch,” Ali said later, playing the moment for laughs. One got the impression, hearing the comedic faux-sincerity in his voice, that he was doing the best with the material he had.

According to Foneda Cox, one of Liston’s longtime friends and sparring partners, Liston always knew this day was coming. He knew what kind of people were backing him. He was indebted to them in a million little ways.

“He told me, he said, ‘Foneda, I’m gonna tell you. I’ve got to lose one, and when I do, I’m gonna tell you.” Cox never got any such advanced warning. He later said it was the only thing that he still held against Liston.

Keep reading:The many mysteries of Sonny Liston, boxing’s menacing, mob-affiliated sledgehammer

College football coaches are swinging their support behind a remade postseason that would include a 24-team playoff and the elimination of league title games, sources tell Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.

What we’re hearing: The most-discussed 24-team model is an all at-large field determined through the CFP rankings, with an automatic spot for the Group of Six leagues.

• The format adds one playoff round and 12 additional games. The top eight ranked teams would receive a first-round bye, while seeds No. 9-24 play in the first round on campus.
• Conference championship games would be eliminated and the playoff, presumably, would start immediately after the regular season, opening a path for the national title game to return to the second week of January.

One potential hurdle? The Army-Navy game, traditionally played in a standalone window on the second Saturday in December, would conflict with the first or second round of a 24-team playoff. However, officials from both academies are at least exploring moving the game — potentially to Thanksgiving week.

The Shohei Ohtani experience is changing before our eyes.

Pitching, not hitting: The Dodgers’ two-way superstar started on the mound against the Astros on Tuesday. But for the third time in his last four pitching starts, he did not hit as the team tries to manage his workload.

• “Just kind of seeing how things are going, I think it’s best for everyone,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday while explaining the decision. “Definitely not [based on] results. It’s a little bit more body language and just watching the player.”
• “It doesn’t make sense for him to go wire-to-wire [as both a] pitcher and hitter, playing every day and pitching every week. That’s hard,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said last weekend.

By the numbers: Ohtani took the loss on Tuesday despite another stellar outing on the mound, where he is having a Cy Young-caliber season (2-2, 0.97 ERA, 0.81 WHIP). Things aren’t going as smoothly at the plate (.240 BA, 6 HR), which makes the decision to occasionally sit him a tad bit easier.

Jake Mintz, Yahoo Sports:

During Ohtani’s six seasons in Anaheim, he was the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. He dictated his schedule to the club, who ceded to Ohtani’s preferences more often than not.

But things are playing out differently in DodgerTown, where the two-time defending champs are focused on the long game. Ensuring Ohtani is at full strength for October is priority No. 1.

Given the club’s threepeat-or-bust mentality, it’s a rational course of action, even if it means the game’s most unique player will be incrementally less unique.

Still, it’s unusual to think about Ohtani as restricted, in any way, shape or form. He has always been, except for the occasional torn elbow ligament, completely limitless.

That’s what makes this recent, seemingly minuscule development feel notable. Whatever the real reason — age, underperformance, Dodger-Think, a combination — Ohtani is being restrained.

It’s a reminder, too, that he can’t do this forever. Time always wins. As such, concessions will need to be made. In fact, they’re already being made.

Bottom line: Ohtani remains the most remarkable character in the sport. That he is seriously in contention for the Cy Young a season after clobbering 55 home runs is astonishing. Nobody else in baseball is in his hemisphere of superstardom. And yet, even the limitless have limits.

Oklahoma City — LeBron James (game-high 27 pts) and the Lakers kept it close for a while, but Chet Holmgren (24 pts, 12 reb) and the Thunder poured it on late for a 108-90 victory in Game 1.

Courtside chess: Inside the Lakers’ defensive plans to slow Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — and give themselves a puncher’s chance (Kelly Iko, Yahoo Sports)

Detroit — The Pistons capitalized against the sloppy Cavaliers (19 turnovers) to win the series opener, 111-101, and snap a 12-game postseason losing streak against Cleveland dating back to 2007.

Coughing it up: James Harden tallied more turnovers (7) than made field goals (6), marking the third time he’s done that this postseason and the 29th time he’s done it in his playoff career.

Denver — The Avalanche beat the Wild, 5-2, to take a 2-0 series lead behind a goal and two assists from Nathan MacKinnon, who became just the sixth player in the past 40 years to register three consecutive three-point games in the playoffs.

Total domination: The best team from the regular season doesn’t appear to be slowing down in the playoffs, as Colorado is now 6-0 with an aggregate score of 27-13 in the postseason, including 14 goals scored in the last two games alone.

• ⚾️ MLB: Rangers at Yankees (7:05pm, Prime) … Will Warren (4-0, 2.39 ERA) is one of three Yankees starters with a sub-2.50 ERA. The rest of the AL has four total.
• ⚽️ CONCACAF Champions Cup: Toluca (down 2-1) vs. LAFC (9:30pm, FS1) … Winner faces Tigres UANL in the final.