Can anyone explain this in a linguistic point of view?

"I was afraid of Ali's powerful PUNCH, especially since it had already laid out many tougher men who had bragged they could handle that much alcohol."

What would happen to the mind of native English speakers when they try to understand what 'punch' may refer to, given the sentence above?

Seeing the name 'Ali' with the word 'punch' many people would immediately make the boxing association. Nothing detracts from this until the last word - 'alcohol', when we re-run and realise that it's a different 'punch' than we had assumed.
This works only because the sentence is presented in isolation. I wonder if there's a name for these out-of-context tricks of double meaning. I'm sure there are other great examples out there.

Garden path sentence?

I read the book once a long time ago so I'm not sure if the version I read was translated very well into proper english. All the kids in my secondary/level 1 or 2 class had to read the book and it's possible that parts of her diary may have been altered or omitted from the book we read. Unfortunately "The diary of... Anne Frank" is a true story which took place during the war, so for Anne to see death all around her was the reality. It's a boring read for some people but as I read on, it had become more interesting.

That's "from" a linguistic point of view.