Enigmatic Variations No. 1060: Change of Title by Oxymoron

An intriguing preamble: As ‘instructed’ by the grid, solvers must make a choice in the case of eleven clashes; and a further ten clues omit a letter in the subsidiary indications – these letters, in normal reading order, ‘setting the scene’…

As always, with the prospect of clashing letters, I printed an enlarged copy of the grid and entered answers, as I gradually solved them, with across letters in top right of the cell, down letters bottom left – to see if any clashes started to appear. And of course – beware of crossing letters – they won’t always help or confirm!

I am writing this on Friday evening, nearly three weeks since the puzzle appeared, and probably two weeks since I managed to finish it – and I am afraid to say I don’t have much recollection of the solving process, or when the penny particularly dropped. I think I spotted a few of the omitted letters first – 4 or 5 of them crowded up in the first two or three rows. Reading across and down, I had M I A M …

Then a few clashes appeared, and looked like they were going to be the NW-SE diagonal – minus the outer letters, hemmed in by the bars in those top-left and bottom-right corners.

Armed with this deduction, I was able to ‘trust’ a few more crossing letters away from the diagonal, and the grid filled up steadily. And the diagonal? Well I started to make out CASS…at the start, with U, C and L later on – and twigged that it could be CASSIUS CLAY. So presumably the ‘change of title’ will be to MUHAMMAD ALI? But no, the clashing letters revealed themselves as SONNY LISTON. And a little research (it was before my time – a little over three years before, to be precise!) revealed that these two heavyweights met at MIAMI BEACH on 25-Feb-1964. (Clay winning controversially by a ‘technical knockout’, when Liston remained in his corner and refused to come out for the 7th round…don’t blame him really!)

So the remaining omitted letters made MIAMI BEACH – as highlighted in the grid below – and the ‘choice’ was to enter CASSIUS CLAY (the winner), rather than SONNY LISTON, the loser. And presumably the ‘change of title’ was the fact that the title of ‘Heavyweight Champion of the Wooooorrrld’ transferred from Liston to Clay?

I say ‘presumably’, as I did dally with wondering if it referred to Clay’s subsequent change of name soon after the fight – and maybe it should be MUHAMMAD ALI in the completed grid after all? I didn’t find any obvious ‘instructions’ in the grid – happy to be enlightened…or will be on Sunday when the solution is published.

My time-diminshed memory notwithstanding, I thought this was a very interesting and educational puzzle – very cleverly constructed – and maybe medium-to-hard-ish on the EV scale in terms of clueing and denouement. Thank-you Oxymoron – I’m glad I didn’t have to throw in the towel!

(There may be other errors below, but I did have one clue I couldn’t quite parse when blogging it – 37A – not sure where the S of MILOS comes from?

Thanks to Twencelas for pointing out there is a missing bar…37A should be MILO, as per the enumeration.)

NB. There was eventually a re-match 15 months later, also controversially won by Ali – as he was by then called – when Liston went down from a ‘phantom punch’ halfway through the first round, before many of the crowd had even taken their seats. Will Oxymoron treat us to another variation on this theme in fifteen months’ time?!

STOP PRESS: I have just spotted ‘PICK LOSER’ rising up the other diagonal – if you leave LISTON in the completed grid – doh! Bang goes my chance of a prize for yet another week!