King of the World

by David Remnick

  The columnists may not have liked Liston, but they respected him as a fighter. They figured him an easy winner over Clay. Lester Bromberg of the New York World-Telegram said the fight would “follow the pattern” of the two Liston-Patterson fights, the only difference being that this would last longer: “It will last almost the entire first round.” Nearly all the columnists were middle-aged, raised on Joe Louis, and they were inclined to like Clay even less than Liston. Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times predicted that the Liston-Clay matchup would be “the most popular fight since Hitler and Stalin—180 million Americans rooting for a double knockout. The only thing at which Clay can beat Liston is reading the dictionary.… His public utterances have all the modesty of a German ultimatum to Poland but his public performances run more to Mussolini’s navy.”

  At the Fifth Street Gym, of course, Clay was exerting considerable energy in his post-training-session press conferences. Day after day he described how he would spend the first five rounds circling “the big ugly bear,” tiring him out, and then tear him apart with hooks and uppercuts until finally Liston would drop to all fours in submission. “I’m gonna put that ugly bear on the floor, and after the fight I’m gonna build myself a pretty home and use him as a bearskin rug. Liston even smells like a bear. I’m gonna give him to the local zoo after I whup him. People think I’m joking. I’m not joking. I’m serious. This will be the easiest fight of my life.” He told the visiting reporters that now was their chance to “jump on the bandwagon.” He was taking names, he said, keeping track of all the naysayers, and when he won “I’m going to have a little ceremony and some eating is going on—eating of words.” Day after day he would replay his homage to Gorgeous George when describing what he’d do in case of a Liston win: “You tell this to your camera, your newspaper, your TV man, your radio man, you tell this to the world: If Sonny Liston whups me, I’ll kiss his feet in the ring, crawl out of the ring on my knees, tell him he’s the greatest, and catch the next jet out of the country.” Most spectacularly, he composed in honor of the occasion what was surely his best poem. Over the years, Clay would farm out some of his poetical work. “We all wrote lines here and there,” Dundee said. But this one was all Clay. Ostensibly, it was a prophetic vision of the eighth round, and no poem, before or after, could beat it for narrative drive, precise scansion, and wit. It was his “Song of Myself”;

  Clay comes out to meet Liston

  And Liston starts to retreat

  If Liston goes back any further

  He’ll end up in a ringside seat.

  Clay swings with a left,

  Clay swings with a right,

  Look at young Cassius

  Carry the fight.

  Liston keeps backing

  But there’s not enough room

  It’s a matter of time.

  There, Clay lowers the boom.

  Now Clay swings with a right,

  What a beautiful swing,

  And the punch raises the bear,

  Clear out of the ring.

  Liston is still rising

  And the ref wears a frown,

  For he can’t start counting,

  Till Sonny comes down.

  Now Liston disappears from view.

  The crowd is getting frantic,

  But our radar stations have picked him up

  He’s somewhere over the Atlantic.

  Who would have thought

  When they came to the fight

  That they’d witness the launching

  Of a human satellite?

  Yes, the crowd did not dream

  When they laid down their money

  That they would see

  A total eclipse of the Sonny!

  I am the greatest!

  Nearly all the writers regarded Clay’s bombast, in prose and verse, as the ravings of a lunatic. But not only did Clay have a sense of how to fill a reporter’s notebook and, thus, a promoter’s arena, he had a sense of self. The truth (and it was a truth he shared with almost no one) was that Cassius Clay knew that for all his ability, for all his speed and cunning, he had never met a fighter like Sonny Liston. In Liston, he was up against a man who did not merely beat his opponents, but hurt them, damage them, shame them in humiliatingly fast knockouts. Liston could put a man away with his jab; he was not much for dancing, but then neither was Joe Louis. Liston was the prototype of what a heavyweight champion should be: he threw bomb after unforgiving bomb. When he hit a man in the solar plexus the glove seemed lost up to the cuff; he was too powerful to grab and clinch; nothing hurt him. Clay was too smart, he had watched too many films, not to know that. “That’s why I always knew that all of Clay’s bragging was a way to convince himself that he could do what he said he’d do,” Floyd Patterson told me many years later. “I never liked all his bragging. It took me a long time to understand who Clay was talking to. Clay was talking to Clay.”

  Very few people would ever know how true that was and how much Clay feared Liston. One evening, just before signing the contracts for the fight, he visited Sports Illustrated’s offices on the twentieth floor of the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan. It was seven-thirty and Clay stood at the window looking out at the lights blinking along Sixth Avenue and beyond. He was quiet for a long time.

  Finally, the writer Mort Sharnik said, “Cassius, all these things you’re saying about Liston, do you really mean them? Do you really think you’re going to beat this guy?”

  “I’m Christopher Columbus,” he said slowly. “I believe I’ll win. I’ve never been in there with him, but I believe the world is round and they all believe the world is flat. Maybe I’ll fall off the world at the horizon but I believe the world is round.”

  Clay had doubts, but he used those doubts the way a black belt in judo uses the weight of his assailant. Weeks before the fight, he approached Liston’s manager, Jack Nilon, and said, “You know, I shot my mouth off to make this fight a success. My day of reckoning is about to come. If the worst happens I want to get out of there quick. I’d like to provision my bus and get out of there quick.” Then he asked Jack Nilon for ten thousand dollars for the provisioning.

  “No one could read this kid,” Sharnik would say. “It was hard to know if he was the craziest kid you ever saw or the smartest.”

  BILL MACDONALD NEVER HOPED TO CONVINCE THE PUBLIC that Clay was a modest fellow in the Louis mold, but he had hoped that the writers would think he could fight. They did not. According to one poll, 93 percent of the writers accredited to cover the fight predicted Liston would win. What the poll did not register was the firmness of the predictions. Arthur Daley, the New York Times columnist, seemed to object morally to the fight, as if the bout were a terrible crime against children and puppies: “The loudmouth from Louisville is likely to have a lot of vainglorious boasts jammed down his throat by a hamlike fist belonging to Sonny Liston.…”

  In the later acts of his career, Muhammad Ali would take his place in the television firmament and his Boswell would be Howard Cosell. But in the days preceding his fight with Sonny Liston in Miami, Cassius Clay was not yet Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell was a bald, nasal guy on the radio who annoyed his colleagues with his portentous questions and his bulky tape recorder, which he was forever bashing into someone’s giblets. Newspapers were still the dominant force in sports; columnists—white columnists—were the dominant voices; and Jimmy Cannon, late of the New York Post and, since 1959, of the New York Journal-American, was the king of the columnists. Cannon was the first thousand-dollar-a-week man, Hemingway’s favorite, Joe DiMaggio’s buddy, and Joe Louis’s iconographer. Red Smith, who wrote for the Herald Tribune, employed an elegant restraint in his prose that put him ahead of the game with more high-minded readers, but Cannon was the popular favorite: a world-weary voice of the city. Cannon was king, and Cannon had no sympathy for Cassius Clay. He did not even think he could fight.

  One afternoon shortly before the fight, Cannon was sitting with George Plimpton at the Fifth Street Gym
watching Clay spar. Clay glided around the ring, a feather in the slipstream, and every so often he popped a jab into his sparring partner’s face. Plimpton was completely taken with Clay’s movement, his ease, but Cannon could not bear to watch.

  “Look at that!” Cannon said. “I mean, that’s terrible. He can’t get away with that. Not possibly.” It was just unthinkable that Clay could beat Liston by running, carrying his hands at his hips, and defending himself simply by leaning away.

  “Perhaps his speed will make up for it,” Plimpton put in hopefully.

  “He’s the fifth Beatle,” Cannon said. “Except that’s not right. The Beatles have no hokum to them.”

  “It’s a good name,” Plimpton said. “The fifth Beatle.”

  “Not accurate,” Cannon said. “He’s all pretense and gas, that fellow.… No honesty.”

  Clay offended Cannon’s sense of rightness the way flying machines offended his father’s generation. It threw his universe off kilter.

  “In a way, Clay is a freak,” he wrote before the fight. “He is a bantamweight who weighs more than two hundred pounds.”

  Cannon’s objections went beyond the ring. His hero was Joe Louis, and for Joe Louis he composed the immortal line that he was a “credit to his race—the human race.” He admired Louis’s “barbaric majesty,” his quiet in suffering, his silent satisfaction in victory. And when Louis finally went on too long and, way past his peak, fought Rocky Marciano, he eulogized the broken-down old fighter as the metaphysical poets would a slain mistress: “The heart, beating inside the body like a fierce bird, blinded and caged, seemed incapable of moving the cold blood through the arteries of Joe Louis’s rebellious body. His thirty-seven years were a disease which paralyzed him.”

  Cannon was born in 1910 in what he called “the unfreaky part of Greenwich Village.” His father was a minor, if kindly, servant of Tammany Hall. The family lived in cold-water flats in the Village, and Cannon got to know the neighborhood and its workmen, the icemen, the coal delivery boys. Cannon dropped out of school after the ninth grade and caught on as a copy boy at the Daily News and never left the newspaper business. As a young reporter he caught the eye of Damon Runyon when he wrote dispatches on the Lindbergh kidnapping trial for the International News Service.

  “The best way to be a bum and earn a living is to write sports,” Runyon told Cannon and then helped him get a job at a Hearst paper, The New York American. Like his heroes, Runyon and the Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger, Cannon gravitated to the world of the “delicatessen nobility,” to the bookmakers and touts, the horse players and talent agents, who hung out at Toots Shor’s and Lindy’s, the Stork Club and El Morocco. When Cannon went off to Europe to write battle dispatches for The Stars and Stripes, he developed what would become his signature style: florid, sentimental prose with an underpinning of hard-bitten wisdom, an urban style that he had picked up in candy stores and nightclubs and from Runyon, Ben Hecht, and Westbrook Pegler. After having been attached to George Patton’s Third Army, Cannon came home newly attached to the Post. His sports column, which would be the city’s most popular for a quarter century, began in 1946 and was dubbed “Jimmy Cannon Says.”

  Cannon was an obsessive worker, a former boozer who drank more coffee than Balzac. He lived alone—first at the Edison Hotel, then on Central Park West, and finally on Fifty-fifth Street. He was a cranky egomaniac whose ego only grew with age. He sweated every column. When he wasn’t at a ball game or at his desk, he was out all night, wandering from nightclub to nightclub, listening always for tips, for stray bits of talk that could make their way into his column. “His column is his whole life,” said one of his colleagues, W. C. Heinz of the New York Sun. “He has no family, no games he plays, no other activities. When he writes it’s the concentration of his whole being. He goes through the emotional wringer. I have no idea what Jimmy would do if he weren’t writing that column, he’d be so lonesome.”

  For his time, Cannon was considered enlightened on the subject of race. That is to say that unlike many other columnists he did not make fun of the black athletes he covered, he did not transform their speech into Amos ’n’ Andy routines. He gave them their due. As much as he adored DiMaggio, a fighter like Archie Moore captured his schmaltz-clogged heart just as easily:

  “Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds. I don’t mean big composers such as Harold Arlen or Duke Ellington. It should be a song that comes out of the backroom of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns. The guy who writes this one must be a piano player who can be dignified when he picks a quarter out of the marsh of a sawdust floor. They’re dead, most of those piano players, their mouths full of dust instead of songs. But I’ll bet Archie could dig one up in any town he ever made.”

  Cannon was also a master of the barstool non sequitur. Very often he would title his column “Nobody Asked Me, But …” and then line up a few dozen choice thoughts:

  “I have more faith in brusque doctors than oily-mannered ones.”

  “You’re middle-aged if you remember Larry Semon, the comic.”

  “El Morocco is still the most exciting nightclub in the country.”

  “Doesn’t Marty Glickman, the sports announcer, sound like an Atlantic City boardwalk auctioneer?”

  “Guys who use other people’s coffee saucers as ashtrays should be banned from public places.…”

  He would begin other columns by putting the reader inside the skull and uniform of a ballplayer (“You’re Eddie Stanky. You ran slower than the other guy …”), and elsewhere, in that voice of El Morocco at three in the morning, he would dispense wisdom on the subject he seemed to know the least about—women: “Any man is in difficulty if he falls in love with a woman he can’t knock down with the first punch.” Or, “You can tell when a broad starts in managing a fighter. What makes a dumb broad smart all of a sudden? They don’t even let broads in a joint like Yale. But they’re all wised up once a fighter starts making a few.”

  There are not many writers of any sort who do not date quickly, and journalistic writing, with rare exceptions, dates as quickly as the newsprint it’s written on. Even some of Mencken dates, and Cannon was no Mencken. The wised-up one-liners and the world-weary sentiment were of a time and a place, and as Cannon aged he gruffly resisted the new trends in sportswriting and athletic behavior. In the press box, he encountered a new generation of beat writers and columnists, men such as Maury Allen and Leonard Schecter on the Post. He didn’t much like the sound of them. Cannon called the younger men “Chipmunks” because they were always chattering away in the press box. He hated their impudence, their irreverence, their striving to get outside the game and into the heads of the people they covered. Cannon had always said that his intention as a sportswriter was to bring the “world in over the bleacher wall,” but he failed to see that this generation was trying to do much the same thing. He could not bear their lack of respect for the old verities. “They go up and challenge guys with rude questions,” Cannon once said of the Chipmunks. “They think they’re big if they walk up to an athlete and insult him with a question. They regard this as a sort of bravery.”

  Part of Cannon’s anxiety was sheer competitiveness. There were seven newspapers in those days in New York, and there was terrific competition to stay on top, to be original, to get a scoop, an extra detail. But the Chipmunks knew they were in competition now not so much with one another as with the growing power of television. Unlike Cannon, who was almost entirely self-educated, these were young men (and they were all men) who had gone to college in the age of Freud. They became interested in the psychology of an athlete (“The Hidden Fears of Kenny Sears” was one of Milton Gross’s longer pieces). In time, this, too, would no longer seem especially voguish—soon just about every schnook with a microphone would be asking the day’s goat, “What were you thinking when you missed that ball?”—but for the moment, the Chipmunks were
the coming wave and Cannon’s purple sentences, once so pleasurable, were beginning to feel less vibrant, a little antique.

  Part of Cannon’s generational anxiety was that he wrote about ballplayers in an elegiac voice. He had plenty of scorn for the scoundrels of sport—Jim Norris, Frankie Carbo, Fat Tony Salerno—but you would never learn from Cannon that DiMaggio was perhaps the most imperious personality in sport or that Joe Louis, in retirement, was going slowly mad with drugs, that to guard himself against imagined predators from the IRS and the CIA he clogged the air-conditioning vents with cotton and smeared his windows with Vaseline.

  The new generation, men like Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, Jerry Izenberg and Gay Talese, all admired Cannon’s immediacy, but Cannon begrudged them their new outlook, their education, their youth. In the late fifties, Talese wrote countless elegant features for the Times and then, even more impressively, a series of profiles in the sixties for Esquire on Patterson, Louis, DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, and the theater director Joshua Logan. None of the pieces were what writers would call “trash jobs”—they were filled with affection for the person and admiration for craft—but they also delved into Patterson’s fears, Louis’s terrible decline, DiMaggio’s loneliness, Sinatra’s nastiness, and Logan’s mental breakdowns. Talese combined the techniques of reporting and fiction; he filled his notebooks with facts, interviews, and observations, but structured his pieces like short stories.

  When Talese was still at the Times and writing about his favorite subjects, Patterson and Cus D’Amato, he was considered an eccentric. In the newsroom, Talese wore immaculate hand-tailored suits; he was, in the words of one colleague, “blindingly handsome.” But for all his outward polish and youth, he approached his work like a reporter, seeking out ballplayers, getting to know them. In those days, this was un-Times-like for the sports department. Daley, who was the dominant columnist since the forties, derived his prestige from the paper itself; when he won the Pulitzer Prize, many of his colleagues grumbled and said that it should have gone to Red Smith at the Herald Tribune or Cannon at the Post. Daley’s prose was flat, but it was the prose that the Pulitzer committee read, if they read sports at all. Most of the other sportswriters on the Times were no less imperial: they carried themselves as if they were The New York Times’s ambassador to the court of baseball or the court of basketball. When Allison Danzig covered the U.S. Open at Forest Hills he did not deign to seek out a tennis player for an interview; the player sought out Allison Danzig. Not a few of the deskmen and reporters were appalled by the unorthodox presence of Gay Talese, and they could never figure out why the managing editor, Turner Catledge, had set him loose on the sporting world.