King of the World

by David Remnick

  Clay’s experience in the ring was no less blissful. He marched easily through his first three bouts and then, in the finals against a stubby coffeehouse manager from Poland named Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, he came back from a clumsy first round to win a unanimous decision and the gold medal. By the end of the bout, the Pole was bleeding all over Clay’s white satin shorts.

  In Rome, Clay had fulfilled his mission, but he had done it with a style that offended the sensibilities of some of the older writers. Big men were supposed to fight like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, they were supposed to wade in and flatten their opponent. A. J. Liebling’s boxing memory encompassed Pierce Egan’s eighteenth-century ring compendium Boxiana and the fourteenth-century Tunisian chronicler Ibn Khaldun, and he found Clay interesting but wanting, in the historical sense. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker that Clay, while amusing to watch, lacked the requisite menace of a true big man. Liebling was not offended by Clay’s poetic pretensions—he was quick to remind his readers of Bob Gregson, the Lancashire Giant, who used to write such fistic couplets as “The British lads that’s here/Quite strangers are to fear.” It was Clay’s boxing manner that left Liebling in doubt. “I watched Clay’s performance in Rome and considered it attractive but not probative,” he wrote. “Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water. He was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact. It is true that the Pole finished the three-round bout helpless and out on his feet, but I thought he had just run out of puff chasing Clay, who had then cut him to pieces.… A boxer who uses his legs as much as Clay used his in Rome risks deceleration in a longer bout.”

  Whatever Liebling’s reservations, Clay was awarded his gold medal with the word PUGILATO emblazoned across it. “I can still see him strutting around the Olympic Village with his gold medal on,” Wilma Rudolph said. “He slept with it. He went to the cafeteria with it. He never took it off. No one else cherished it the way he did.” He would wear the medal for weeks to come, even to bed. “First time in my life I ever slept on my back,” Clay said. “Had to, or that medal would have cut my chest.”

  After the award ceremonies, a reporter from the Soviet Union asked Clay, in essence, how it felt to win glory for a country that did not give him the right to eat at Woolworth’s in Louisville.

  “Tell your readers we’ve got qualified people working on that problem, and I’m not worried about the outcome,” Clay said. “To me, the U.S.A. is still the best country in the world, counting yours. It may be hard to get something to eat sometimes, but anyhow I ain’t fighting alligators and living in a mud hut.” That remark was printed in dozens of American papers as evidence of Clay’s good citizenship. More than a decade later, the author of The Greatest made sure to tell the reader that it had been a mistake. And yet Clay did say it; it was not so much a mistake as it was a reflection of his youth, of how far he would travel in the next few years.

  The next morning, as Clay wandered the Olympic Village, he noticed that the crowds were suddenly drifting from him to an older man.

  “Who’s that?” Clay asked a friend.

  “That’s Floyd Patterson,” the friend said. “Champion of the world.”

  “Well, I wanna meet him.”

  Clay approached Patterson and introduced himself.

  Afterward, Clay said he had been slighted. “Floyd congratulated me with a milquetoast handshake,” he said. “It hurt me. That cat insulted me and someday he’ll have to pay for it.”

  CLAY FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK, WHERE DICK SCHAAP WAS waiting for him at Idlewild. Schaap had been thrilled by Clay’s performance on television and was now more certain than ever that if boxing had a future Clay was it. All night until early the next morning, Schaap and Clay went on a Manhattan hegira, beginning at a Times Square arcade where they ordered up a fake newspaper with the headline CASSIUS SIGNS FOR PATTERSON FIGHT.

  “Back home they’ll think it’s real,” Clay said. “They won’t know the difference.”

  They ate dinner at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, where Clay had a roast beef sandwich and a piece of cheesecake and marveled at the “huge” bill ($2.50). Then they walked across the street to drink at Birdland—Clay’s first drink: a Coke with a drop, literally one drop, of whiskey. All the while, Clay was delighted whenever he was recognized and congratulated in the restaurant or on the street (“They know me! They know me!”). He made sure they did by wearing his official Olympic jacket and the gold medal around his neck. After a postprandial run up to Harlem, the night ended at Clay’s room at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he was staying in a suite courtesy of a Louisville aluminum grandee named William (“Call me Billy”) Reynolds. Reynolds was intent on putting together a package for Clay’s career as a pro in which Joe Martin would be the trainer and Reynolds would provide financial backing and management. Toward the end of Clay’s time in high school Reynolds had given him an easy summer job as a yardworker at his estate outside Louisville. Now, in New York, Reynolds gave him free accommodations and a roll of cash to spend at Tiffany’s, where Clay was happy to buy watches for his mother, father, and brother. “You’ve never seen anyone in heaven the way Cassius Clay was in heaven after coming home with that medal around his neck,” Schaap said. “He was so wired he could have stayed up a week straight.” At around two in the morning, when Schaap was thinking hard about going home to bed, Clay insisted they go back to the Waldorf.

  “C’mon,” he said, “We can go up to my room and look through my scrapbook.” And so they did.

  CLAY FINALLY FLEW HOME TO LOUISVILLE AND A HERO’S WELCOME at Standiford Field Airport. This was the biggest boxing news in Louisville since 1905, when homeboy Marvin Hart beat Jack Root to win the heavyweight title. Mayor Bruce Hoblitzell, six cheerleaders, and three hundred fans cheered him on the tarmac, and the city provided a twenty-five-car motorcade. Clay provided poetry.

  To make America the greatest is my goal.

  So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole

  And for the USA won the Medal of Gold.

  Italians said ‘You’re greater than the Cassius of old.’ …

  Terrible stuff, but no one much cared. A string of police cars escorted the caravan, which ended at Central High School. A band of cheerleaders greeted the homecoming hero with a huge banner, “Welcome Home Champ!” Atwood Wilson, the principal who had saved Cassius from embarrassment and failure so many times, stepped to the microphone and said, “When we consider all the efforts that are being made to undermine the prestige of America we can be grateful we had such a fine ambassador as Cassius to send over to Italy.” Mayor Hoblitzell was no less enthusiastic. “You are a credit to Louisville and the profession,” he said, and the crowd of more than a thousand students and teachers and townspeople cheered. “You are an inspiration to the young people of this city.”

  Back at the house on Grand Avenue, Clay senior sang “God Bless America” and showed off his newly decorated front steps: he had painted them red, white, and blue. Odessa Clay declared an early Thanksgiving and the family had roast turkey for supper.

  For a while, life was a parade for Cassius. A few weeks after his homecoming, he took it upon himself to ride through the streets of the city once more. He stood up in the backseat of a pink Cadillac and declared, “I am Cassius Clay! I am the greatest!” Then he turned to Wilma Rudolph, who had come from Tennessee to visit, and proclaimed, “And this is Wilma Rudolph. She is the greatest!”

  “Sit down,” Rudolph said, cringing in her seat.

  “Come on, Wilma. Stand up, Wilma!”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  After Clay declared Rudolph the co-greatest a few more times, she warily got up, waved, and sat back down, but, of course, it was Cassius who enjoyed the attention.

  The celebrations masked an underlying ambivalence about Clay in Louisville that would deepen with time. The Louisville Chamber of Commerce gave Clay a citation but declined to sponsor a dinner for him. “We just haven’t time right now,” executive secretary K. P. Vinse
l explained. Later on, many Louisville residents—especially white residents—would scorn the fighter’s decisions to convert to Islam and change his name, to refuse the draft, to speak out so fiercely and often on politics. In 1978, at the zenith of his fame, the city council approved a proposal to change the name of Walnut Street to Muhammad Ali Boulevard, but by the narrowest of margins, six to five.

  Although he had sounded defensive about race for the benefit of the Soviet reporter in Rome, Clay was already mightily aware that his gold medal changed nothing about Louisville. The same old Jim Crow attitudes still prevailed. Not long after coming home, he walked into a luncheonette and ordered a glass of juice.

  “Can’t serve you,” the boss said.

  “But he’s the Olympic champion!” one of the waiters told him.

  “I don’t give a damn who he is,” the proprietor said. “Get him out of here!”

  Inevitably, Clay declared himself ready to become a professional. What he needed was a manager and financial backing, and, having won the Olympic title and national publicity, he was a hot commercial property. A few years earlier, Clay would almost surely have landed in the soft palm of the Mafia; he would hardly have left Rome before one of Frankie Carbo’s lieutenants had him out to dinner, making splendid offers. As it happened, the usual mob suspects were now in disarray, and for perhaps the first time since the early part of the century, a boxer as promising as Cassius Clay could choose who would manage him, who would back him. As a convict, Liston had been fairly delivered into the arms of the Cosa Nostra; from the start, Clay was blessed with more resources, internal and external.

  The Clay family hired a lawyer from the West End named Alberta Jones and at first tried to put together a deal with William Reynolds’s lawyer, Gordon Davidson. “Billy Reynolds had all the money he’d ever need and his real motivation was to have some fun and get behind this local kid,” Davidson said. “We drew up a contract that included a salary for Cassius, which was unheard-of in those days, and a trust. Finally, we reached an agreement. But then Alberta called me to tell me the deal was off. I was absolutely stunned. I couldn’t understand why.”

  The main obstacle was Clay’s father, who objected to the presence of Joe Martin as chief cornerman in the deal. Ostensibly he rejected Martin because he had never trained a professional fighter before; but more important, Clay senior saw Martin as the embodiment of the police, the white Louisville police who had arrested him more than once. The entire deal quickly dissolved into bad feeling. Martin, for his part, thought that Clay senior was taking credit for his son where no credit was due. “All of a sudden you’d think the old man did all the work,” Martin said bitterly. “The old man never did care about what the kid was doing until Clay got all of that publicity. He’s something, he is. He’s got all the brains God gives a goose—about a half a teaspoonful.”

  Soon everyone in Louisville knew that Martin was out of a job, and within a few days William Faversham, Jr., a former investment counselor, former actor, and son of an English-born matinee idol, filled the vacuum. (Reynolds, for his part, was loyal to Martin and was not prepared to woo Clay without Martin as part of the package.) Faversham was vice-president at one of the biggest businesses in the area, Brown-Forman Distillers (makers of Old Forester and Early Times), and he and a few of his friends in the Louisville business world invited the Clays to a meeting. Faversham offered to back Clay with a syndicate made up of eleven of the richest men in the state; the deal itself was almost an exact copy of the contract originally drawn up by William Reynolds.

  The members of the syndicate were, in fact, the city’s oligarchs: Patrick Calhoun, Jr., a horse breeder and a retired chairman of the American Commercial Barge Line, who admitted, “What I know about boxing you can put in your eye”; William Sol Cutchins, grandson of a Confederate soldier and president of Brown & Williamson Tobacco; Vertner DeGarmo Smith, former sales manager for Brown-Forman and a salesman of everything from bonds to fraternity pins, whiskey to table salt; William Lee Lyons Brown, chairman of the board of Brown-Forman and a near-caricature of the Southern gentleman (“Ah wonder if you realize that Cassius Clay’s aunt cooks for my double first cousin?”); Elbert Gary Sutcliffe, a retired farmer with enormous interests in U.S. Steel; George Washington “Possum” Norton IV, a secretary-treasurer of WAVE-TV, the local NBC affiliate, which broadcast Tomorrow’s Champions; Robert Worth Bingham, scion of the Bingham publishing and broadcasting empire, which then included the local CBS affiliate, The Courier-Journal, and the Louisville Times; J. D. Stetson Coleman, chairman of a Florida bus company, a Georgia drug firm, an Illinois candy company, and an Oklahoma oil company; James Ross Todd, the youngest of the group at twenty-six, and the descendant of an old-line Kentucky family that made its money, he said frankly, in “wheeling and dealing”; and Archibald McGhee Foster, senior vice-president of a New York–based advertising agency, Ted Bates, which handled the Brown & Williamson account. Faversham also hired Gordon Davidson to “dust off” the original Reynolds contract and use it for the new arrangement.

  The Louisville Sponsoring Group was all-white, of course, and represented a group of old-line families who tended to send their boys off for polishing to boarding schools and Ivy League colleges before they came home to pick up where Daddy left off. In all, the members of the group represented the major businesses of the city: cigarettes, whiskey, transportation, banking. Most of them belonged to the all-white Pendennis Club on Walnut Street and played golf at all-white country clubs. (When Bill Cutchins brought Clay to the Pendennis Club he was rewarded with an official letter of reprimand.) These men lived in fine Louisville houses, wintered in Florida and Nassau, talked about business and horses, and rarely met the citizens of the. West End except as employees, cooks, and domestics. In the majority, the Louisville Group was resistant to the civil rights movement. The Binghams, however, were the city’s leading white liberals. They paid for their integrationist editorials with racist pickets and rocks hurled through their windows. As sportsmen, they were partial to golf and hunting. Boxing was not their element, generally speaking. Faversham had some slight acquaintance with boxing; when he was working on Broadway he kept in shape working out at Philadelphia Jack O’Brien’s gym, where he sparred with another actor, Spencer Tracy. William Lee Lyons Brown fought at Annapolis as a heavyweight on the plebe team. But the rest knew very little or nothing at all of the prize ring. Their real asset, besides cash, was that in men like Possum Norton and Robert Bingham, they had access to the main avenues of publicity in Louisville.

  For these men Cassius Clay was an amusement, a sign of social belonging, a minor investment, a lark. Each partner contributed $2,800—tax-deductible. The total cost of launching the fighter, in their estimate, would be $25,000 to $30,000. They really had nothing to lose. One of the less idealistic members of the Louisville Group, waxing candid, told a reporter for Sports Illustrated that the collective motivation for taking on Clay was, at best, part civic, part mercenary. “Let me give you the official line—we are behind Cassius Clay to improve the breed of boxing, to do something nice for a deserving, well-behaved Louisville boy, and finally to save him from the jaws of the hoodlum jackals,” he said. “I think it’s fifty percent true, but also fifty percent hokum. What I want to do, like a few others, is to make a bundle of money. Why, do you know a Clay-Liston fight might gross a winner’s share of three million dollars? Split that up and it comes out one and a half million for Cassius and one and a half million for the syndicate. Best of all, it comes out a hundred and fifty thousand for me.”

  And yet no matter how cynical that surely was, it was nothing compared to the cynicism of the usual fight crowd. Next to the mobbed-up managers of Sonny Liston and hundreds of boxers before him, the Louisville Sponsoring Group was a missionary venture, an adventure in Jim Crow paternalism. In accepting the deal, Clay immediately received a $10,000 signing bonus (more than enough to buy a Cadillac for his parents), a guarantee of $4,800 for each of the first two years of the contra
ct, and a $6,000 draw against earnings for the following four years until the contract expired in 1966. The syndicate and Clay agreed to split all gross earnings evenly, while the group underwrote training and travel expenses. Fifteen percent of Clay’s profits would go into a pension fund, not to be touched until he was thirty-five. That final provision, which was meant to prevent Clay from becoming yet another fighter with nothing left at the end of his career except his injuries and his clouded memories, would sometimes prove irritating to him.

  “I don’t want money in no bank,” Clay said later on.” I want it in real estate where I can point to a lot with an apartment on it and say, “There, that’s mine.’ I want to be able to see it. The bank might burn down or something. I don’t want to have to worry about no stocks, or have a lot of investments and have to spend all my time checkin’ up on them.” Considering the way he spent his money and his generosity toward family, friends, and hangers-on through the years, the pension plan was probably the most sensible part of the package.

  For the first two years of the contract, losses ran ahead of earnings, and as promising as Clay may have seemed on some nights, the members of the Louisville Group did not think of their fighter as a potential champion, much less as the most celebrated man of his era. As late as 1963, Cutchins said, “If anyone had told me a year ago that Cassius would develop into an international figure, I would have said he was smoking marijuana.” Gordon Davidson said, “There’s no way to view the whole experience as a financial killing, or even a financial venture. These were millionaires who ended up investing, over six years, more than ten thousand dollars each—and a lot of that was deductible—and came out with twenty-five thousand, in dribs and drabs.”