King of the World

by David Remnick

  “Watch out,” some of the other Muslims had told him, “Dundee’s Mafia. You can’t trust him, you can’t trust Pacheco, and the other white guys around you.”

  Now Clay sat in the locker room fidgeting. “The plan was to go in, lock the door, and not let anyone in,” Pacheco said. “One of the craziest rumors going around was that the Mafia was going to poison our water. The whole thing was ridiculous, but Muhammad was worried. So what we did was fill a bottle of water and then tape it shut. Muhammad had the Muslims fill the water bottle, not us. We were in there for more than an hour. There was just Luis Sarria and Bundini, both black, Angelo and me, both white, and Rudy. And if we took our eyes off the water, Muhammad would say, ‘Pour out all the water and put new water in.’ That happened three or Four times. Finally, I said, ‘Who’s gonna poison you, Angelo or me? I’m your doctor. If I was gonna poison you I would’ve done it with some shot.’ And with Angelo, he never got over the fact that the Muslims kept telling him that Angelo was Italian, with ties to Frankie Carbo, the same people who were around Liston. You can build paranoia in a fighter faster than you can in anybody. Just with a hint. The fact was that everyone in boxing had had relations with Frankie Carbo in the forties and fifties. If you knew boxing, you knew at least that much. But the Muslims were just guys from Chicago who knew nothing about boxing. They didn’t even think sports were any good, until Ali furnished them with a good living. So the water bottle got emptied again and again.”

  As the fight drew closer, Cassius and Rudy tried to figure out which direction was east, and when they did, they got on their knees and, together with Malcolm X, prayed to Allah. In years to come, as Muhammad Ali, he would pray in his corner before the opening bell, his head bowed, his gloves up near his face, but tonight he was still Cassius Clay and what little remained of his secret he tried to keep that way.

  In Liston’s dressing room, the feeling was of confidence, calm. “As much as Clay got under Sonny’s skin, we all believed the night would turn out okay,” said one of Liston’s cornermen. Willie Reddish and Joe Pollino put on T-shirts advertising Ash Resnik’s Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. Liston pulled on a pair of white satin shorts with black trim and allowed his handlers to drape towels all over his shoulders and chest, wrapping him like a mummy. Then he put on his robe and pulled up the hood—the “executioner’s robe,” as Willie Reddish put it.

  AT TEN O’CLOCK, THE FIGHTERS ENTERED THE RING: FIRST CLAY, then the champion. Clay bounced and jabbed in his corner and Liston stretched, waking slowly to the task. The referee, a squared-off man named Barney Felix, stood in a neutral corner, his stubby arms stretched out along the ropes. With a Q-Tip tucked above his ear, Dundee kept his back to Liston’s corner and watched only Clay, all the while reminding him that when he went to the center of the ring to hear Felix’s instructions he should stand up straight and tall.

  “He’s gonna be staring at you, looking to intimidate you,” Dundee said. “Show him you’re bigger than he is.”

  At ringside, Steve Ellis and Joe Louis began their national closed-circuit broadcast.

  The ring announcer, Frank Waymon, drew the microphone down from the ceiling.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Miami Beach, Florida! Miami Beach Convention Hall! While we’re here, may I introduce you to a couple of boxers you have seen in the past and will probably see again in the … fyuuu-cha!” And out they came: Clay’s old friends, the former welterweight champion Luis Rodriguez, and the light heavyweight champion—“the dancing master!”—Willie Pastrano. Then Sugar Ray Robinson, in a sharp check jacket. Clay bowed twice in the direction of his earthly mentor.

  “And now … the challenger, from Louisville, Kentucky, wearing white trunks with red stripes, and weighing two hundred and ten and one half pounds, the former Olympic light heavyweight champion … Cassius Clay!”

  The crowd, small as it was, whipped up an impressive chorus of booing and jeering. Clay was impassive, fiddling with his mouthpiece and bouncing, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  “… And his opponent, from Denver, Colorado, weighing two hundred and eighteen pounds, wearing the white trunks with the black trim, the heavyweight champion of the world, Charles … Sonny … Liston!”

  Barney Felix summoned the two fighters to the center of the ring for the ritual recitation of the “instructions.” In a title fight the referee’s restatement of the injunctions against hitting after the bell or attacking the groin is rather like telling the top lawyers in the country that they will now hear a review of the rules of evidence; the ritual is purely psychological. Liston fixed his stare on Clay, and no matter how lax Liston had been in training, it was clear now that he meant to do only harm. The stare could not be mistaken for anything but high seriousness. Clay’s fear was still in him—“Tell you the truth, I was scared!”—but he betrayed nothing. He stared back and looked down on Liston. That was critical. He looked down on Liston and established a physical point of information: he was fast, but he was big, too. Just before the litany of instructions was finished (“Do you understand, gentlemen?”), Clay opened his mouth for the first time that night to Liston.

  He said, “I’ve got you now, sucker!”

  BACK IN THE CORNER, WILLIE REDDISH TOLD LISTON TO TAKE his time. Don’t rush the knockout. You’ll catch him sooner or later.

  But if Liston knew one thing at that moment it was that he did not have unlimited time to get rid of Clay. He had to do it sooner, not later. He had trained for six, seven rounds, at the very most; after that, Liston would feel worse, he’d feel the heaviness in his legs and shoulders, he’d taste the acid bile in his throat, he’d feel, above all, his age—whatever it was.

  The bell sounded for round one.

  Clay went out intending to score points, but one point in particular. He wanted to show Liston that he could not be hit, or, at least, not easily. He wanted to show Liston right away just how long a night it would be. He wanted him to feel, in advance, a whisper of the fatigue to come.

  Clay started moving clockwise around the ring, a kind of numbing canter that he interrupted periodically by stopping and then wagging his upper body side to side, a quick windshield-wiper move that complicated an opponent’s attempt to ready an attack. Liston trudged after him and within moments had to have seen how much faster it all was up close, how hard it would be to hit him. Liston tried a right lead—maybe he could end it right now!—but Clay was gone before the punch had straightened out. Then Liston missed with a jab, then another. He was missing by a foot, two feet.

  “I just kept running, watching his eyes,” Clay said later. “Liston’s eyes tip you when he is about to throw a heavy punch. Some kind of way, they just flicker.”

  Liston finally hit Clay with a decent body shot, a left to the meat under the rib cage. The glove seemed to disappear, a painful blow, and yet Liston could not follow up. Clay spun out of Liston’s grasp and made him look awkward as no one else ever had. “Sonny was finding out just how amazing Clay’s reflexes were,” said Jack McKinney. “He was slipping Sonny and moving backwards, or sometimes his feet were in place but he’d lean back so the jab would be a millimeter short. Sonny had the most devastating jab in history, a rising jab that was like a shotgun—he lifted people off the ground with that jab—and Clay was avoiding it. Liston was a superb athlete with superb reflexes and great foot control, quick feet, but when you look at that first round you had to laugh and be amazed. Clay is retreating and Liston is shuffling in, delivering the jab—and each jab is just short of touching Clay.” Liston had fought quick fighters before—Marty Marshall, Eddie Machen, Zora Folley—but who had ever seen anything like this?

  Then, with about a minute left in the first, Clay began adding his own punches to the mix. He started flicking his left jab against Liston’s brows—first one jab at a time, and then jabs in flurries, two, three, four at a clip, and then jabs followed up with an overhand right or a left hook. It was as if Clay were revealing one weapon at a time, the b
etter to demoralize Liston gradually, to make him see that there was no end to Clay’s arsenal and guile.

  With about forty seconds left in the round, Liston found himself covering up, stunned as much by the idea that Clay was beating him to the punch as by the punches themselves. At the very end of the round, Clay hit Liston with eight consecutive jabs, and by the time Liston straightened out of his crouch looking for something to hit, Clay was gone.

  The bell sounded, ending the first, but the two men continued to fight until, finally, Felix moved in to end it.

  “I remember I came to my corner thinking, ‘He was supposed to kill me. Well, I’m still alive,’ ” Clay told Alex Haley in a Playboy interview a few days after the fight. “Angelo Dundee was working over me, talking a mile a minute. I just watched Liston, so mad he didn’t even sit down. I thought to myself, ‘You gonna wish you had rested all you could when we get past this next round.’ I could hear some radio or television expert, all excited, you know the way they chatter. The big news was that I hadn’t been counted out yet.”

  At ringside, Joe Louis, who was in Liston’s corner spiritually and financially, could barely believe what he had seen. His tendency was to discount a slow start for a champion and assume he would come on stronger with time, but Louis did not withhold his praise for Clay. He knew that something significant was happening in the ring, something he had never witnessed before, not as a fighter or as an announcer. “I think we’ve just seen one of the greatest rounds we’ve seen from anybody in a long time,” he told the closed-circuit viewers. “I think Clay completely outclassed Sonny Liston in this round.…”

  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  “Who won that round?” Clay asked his corner. “You did!” Bundini shouted.

  “You won the round,” Dundee said, “and you’re gonna win the whole thing.”

  The fear was lifting. Now Clay opened his mouth wide, improbably wide, a dark oval mug, and he looked down at the writers at ringside. Shut my mouth? You can’t!

  LISTON CAME OUT FOR THE SECOND WITH DESPERATION, throwing big punches, one at a time. He missed badly. He tried bullying Clay against the ropes, where he could cut off all the dizzying motion, take aim, and fire. For a moment, it seemed that the strategy might work, but then Clay, after absorbing a few blows, deflecting a few others off his gloves, danced off the ropes and kept up his circling, that clockwise canter that was beginning to disorient Liston. He was like a man with a six-pack in him trying to survive a trip on the Screamer, the Gut-Tumbler, the Cyclone, the biggest nausea-inducing ride the funpark has to offer. At one point, Liston missed so badly with a left hook that he ended up punching a rope instead. The rope bounced around, a jangling mockery, and Liston was embarrassed. What could he do? What were the odds that Clay, so young and fit, would slow down? What odds were there that Liston would get better as the rounds wore on?

  Now Clay started to stick his left jab at the fleshy pads under Liston’s eyes, and suddenly, to the shock of everyone close enough to see it, a welt began to rise under Liston’s left eye. The swelling gave the champion an exaggerated look not of pain but of age, of weariness. Clay was not escaping every blow, but now it was clear that the first round had not been a freak, not the result of some coltish hyperdrive from a hopped-up challenger. “He hit me some, but I weaved and ducked away from most of his shots,” Clay told Playboy. “I remember one time feeling his arm grazing the back of my neck and thinking—it was like I shouted to myself—‘All I got to do is keep this up.’ And I got out from under and I caught him with some lefts and rights. Then I saw that first cut, high up on his cheekbone. When a man’s first cut, it usually looks a bright pink. Then I saw the blood, and I knew that eye was my target from then on. It was my concentrating on that cut that let me get caught with the hardest punch I took, that long left. It rocked me back. But he either didn’t realize how good I was hit or he was already getting tired, and he didn’t press his chance. I sure heard the bell that time. I needed to get to my corner to get my head clear.”

  “In the second,” Dundee said, “Liston was trying to load up on shots, but my guy wasn’t there to be loaded up on. I’m telling you that Liston would’ve beaten Tyson at his best. He was a big strong guy, he had shoulders that reached across the ring, he was faster than Tyson. But he was in there with an intricate guy. Muhammad was even outstronging him, pushing him around in the clinches, then he kept moving around, popping him.”

  “My doubts vanished in the first and second rounds when I watched how Ali handled Liston,” Pacheco said. “Bab bap and he was gone. Liston had no solution. After the first it was obvious he went back to the corner thinking, ‘Now what the fuck do I do?’ Sonny was a one-two jab fighter, like Joe Louis. But Sonny had nothing to hit, he was hitting open air.”

  In Liston’s corner, Joe Pollino worked on his man’s bruise, but by the third round it was a full-fledged cut. Clay came out flat-footed, the better to leverage his harder punches, and within thirty seconds, like a sculptor attacking marble, he started working at the eye. Nearly every time he threw the jab he followed with a chopping right that bounced off the top of Liston’s head—the same sort of punch that Archie Moore had said “clouded my thoughts.” After one combination, Liston’s knees wobbled and he very nearly went down. Liston managed to hold on, to grasp at the ropes and steady himself, but now there could not have been a soul inside the arena or watching in the theaters who did not allow himself to think that Clay was completely in control of the fight.

  “Come on, you bum!” Clay shouted through the muffling mouthpiece.

  The audacity! Seconds after the taunt, Liston went straight at Clay, but Clay caught every body punch on his elbows and gloves, just as he had trained himself to do against “Shotgun” Sheldon in the gym for weeks. The blood now came from Liston’s nose as well as the cut under his eye.

  “Starting in the third round, I saw his expression, how shook he was that we were still out there and he was the one cut and bleeding,” Clay said later. “He didn’t know what to do. But I wasn’t about to get careless, like Conn did that time against Joe Louis. This was supposed to be one of my coasting, resting rounds, but I couldn’t waste no time. I needed one more good shot, for some more insurance with that eye. So when the bell rang, I just tested him to see if he was tiring, and he was, and then I got him into the ropes. It didn’t take but one good combination. My left was square on his right eye and a right under his left eye opened a deep gash. I knew it was deep, the way the blood spurted right out. I saw his face up close when he wiped his glove at that cut and saw the blood. At that moment, let me tell you, he looked like he’s going to look twenty years from now.”

  The bell ending the third round sounded, and Liston plodded back to his corner. He walked like a man lost in a wilderness of snowdrifts. The blood trickled down his face. He was worn out, not just from trying to chase Clay, but from all the punches he had thrown, all the punches that had ended up going nowhere.

  “The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out,” Dundee said. “You miss enough and it begins to wear at your head and your body.” Jack Nilon peeked through the ropes at Liston. Liston sat on his stool breathing so hard he could not say more than a couple of words at a time. His lungs were pumping like a bellows. He looked up into the lights. Joe Pollino went to work on him. The two men exchanged words. No one at ringside could hear them.

  THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO GET AN EDGE IN A FIGHT, AND TRAINERS know them all. One of the great boxing myths, never proven, is that Jack Dempsey’s corner had wrapped his hands in plaster of Paris and told him to form a fist; they
soaked the hands in water, let them dry, and then put on the gloves. Thus equipped, Dempsey shattered half the bones in Jess Willard’s face. Other trainers, in less extreme moods, try to push the padding of the glove down off the knuckles and toward the wrist, so that the punch will be all the harder.

  As it happened, after the brutal and frustrating third round, Liston told his main cornerman, Pollino, to call on their own special advantage. The evidence is hearsay (Liston, Pollino, and Reddish are all dead) but as close to reliable as it gets in boxing. “It’s very simple,” said Jack McKinney, the Philadelphia Daily News reporter who was so close to Liston and Pollino. “Immediately after the fight, Joe, who was very close to me, unburdened himself to me. He told me that Sonny had told him to juice the gloves, and he went ahead and did it. Not only that, he said that they always were ready to do that in case of danger, and that they’d done it in fights against Eddie Machen and Cleveland Williams.” Pollino never told McKinney what substance he rubbed on Liston’s gloves—a linimentlike oil of wintergreen, or ferric chloride, which was used to seal cuts—but he did say it was a stinging solution that was intended to blind Clay long enough for Liston to find his range and knock him out. “Pollino told me that he put the stuff on the gloves at Sonny’s express instructions and then threw the stuff under the ring apron as far as he could,” McKinney said. “Joe himself felt so conflicted over this. He’d been sucked into it, but he knew if he ever came clean he would never work again.”

  In the fourth round, Clay went back to his original plan. He coasted. He moved around the ring, but more slowly, easily, just enough to force Liston to keep moving and missing. He did not do much damage in the round, but he did enough to keep Liston on the run, to wear him down still further. What he had in mind was to keep tiring him out until it was time, once more, to go on the attack. But toward the very end of the round, Clay’s eyes began to sting, and by the time the round was over and he was on his stool, it felt as if there were needles in his eyes. Clay had been hit before in the ring—Banks and Cooper had knocked him down, Jones had confused him—but this was a pain he could not identify. And suddenly, as the pain grew worse, Clay was almost blind. He was pawing at his face, trying to shake the pain out of his eyes. He was in a panic.