King of the World

by David Remnick

  AS A FIGHTER, ALI WAS SUDDENLY ALONE. THE HEAVYWEIGHT division was not quite barren, but damn close. Liston had been thoroughly demystified. There were no calls for a third fight. Who had the stomach for that? And who else was there to challenge Ali? Cleveland Williams? Eddie Machen? Liston had destroyed them. Ali joked that he was dying to find a Great White Hope to fight; a strong white contender, he said, would jack up the purse as no black opponent could. In fact, in 1966, he would fight, and defeat, four white wannabes: George Chuvalo (the toughest of the lot), Henry Cooper, Brian London, and Karl Mildenberger.

  Ali, however, had a more serious challenger to deal with first, one who had genuinely angered him—Floyd Patterson. After enduring his humiliating losses to Liston and then Ali’s victories, Patterson had appointed himself the avenger, all in the good name of boxing and Christendom. The antagonism had been brewing for more than a year. When Ali had his interview with Alex Haley for Playboy just a few days after the first Liston fight, he let his good humor lapse just once. “It’s going to be the first time I ever trained to develop in myself a brutal killer instinct,” Ali said. “I’ve never felt that way about nobody else. Fighting is just a sport, a game, to me. But Patterson I would want to beat to the floor for the way he rushed out of hiding after his last whipping, announcing that he wanted to fight me because no Muslim deserved to be champ. I never had no concern about his having the Catholic religion. But he was going to jump up to fight me to be the white man’s champion.”

  To Ali, who had learned from Malcolm X, Patterson represented the toadying posture of old-style Negro politics. Patterson was the integrationist, the accommodationist, the symbol of sit-ins and interracial marriage. This was late 1965, not long after the riots in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles—an event that signaled the deep dissatisfaction with integrationist, reform politics, an event that seemed to endorse Malcolm’s call to seize power “by any means necessary.” To many young blacks, especially, the Patterson model was an object of pity. Ali mocked Patterson for buying a house in a white neighborhood only to move after discovering that his neighbors didn’t want him. “I ain’t never read nothing no more pitiful than how Patterson told the newspapers, ‘I tried to integrate—it just didn’t work,’ ” he said.

  While Ali was recuperating from his hernia surgery and waiting for the second fight with Liston, he dropped by Patterson’s training camp in upstate New York with an armful of lettuce and carrots, shouting that he wanted nothing more than to drive “the rabbit” back into his hole. “You’re nothing but an Uncle Tom Negro, a white man’s Negro, a yellow Negro,” Ali taunted. “You quit twice to Liston. Get into the ring and I’ll lick you now.”

  As always with Ali his undertone of humor saved his taunts from sounding vicious. Ali repeated this sort of performance many times. In order to promote a fight and psych himself up, he would customarily gin up some sort of seriocomic animosity against his opponent and find a way to cast him as the dupe of the white establishment. The performances became ritual: the “surprise” visit to the opponent’s gym; the nicknames; the taunts; the hold-me-back let’s-get-it-on-right-now melee; the imagined vendetta. Some, like Joe Frazier, would resent these performances for many years to come; Frazier, especially, took it to heart when Ali called him an ignorant Tom and made him out to be the fighter of the “white power structure.” Others, who were more self-assured, or who were pleased simply to be on the same card with the most famous athlete on the planet, went along with the joke; they were happy and well paid for having played the foil.

  But Ali’s anger at Patterson, even when it took humorous shape, was genuine, even visceral. Patterson really had begun to see himself as the Christian savior of boxing. Ali scheduled a fight with Patterson for November 22, 1965, in Las Vegas, but well in advance of that Patterson had showed himself eager to play the part of redeemer. In the October 19, 1964, issue of Sports Illustrated, he collaborated with his close friend Milton Gross of the New York Post in the first of three articles staking out his position. He wrote:

  I am a Negro and I’m proud to be one, but I’m also an American. I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that Negroes don’t have all the rights and privileges that all Americans should have. I know that someday we will get them. God made us all, and whatever He made is good. All people—white, black, and yellow—are brothers and sisters. That will be acknowledged. It will just take time, but it will never come if we think the way the Black Muslims think. They preach hate and separation instead of love and integration. They preach mistrust when there must be understanding. Clay is so young and has been so misled by the wrong people that he doesn’t appreciate how far we have come and how much harm he has done by joining the Black Muslims. He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.…

  One letter I’ll always remember, because it showed me how evil can be turned into good and misunderstanding into understanding by living properly. It was from a man who owned a restaurant in the South. He wrote me that he never liked Negroes, but after reading about the way I conducted myself as the champion, he had changed his mind. He said I could come into his restaurant with anybody I chose to and sit down for a cup of coffee and he would sit down with us. From that point, he said, he would serve any person. Sure, it’s a small thing, and it may sound condescending on his part, but I think it’s important.… Would this man write to Clay as a member of the Black Muslims? I don’t think so.

  Patterson’s yearning for acceptance by his inferiors seemed pathetic to Ali. It was as if Patterson were grateful for the most patronizing treatment imaginable. Patterson was the troubled boy from Bedford-Stuyvesant who had been saved and endorsed by kindly white liberals: by Eleanor Roosevelt’s Wiltwyck school, by Cus D’Amato, by President Kennedy. Ali’s refusal to beg for acceptance reflected the new attitude popularized by Malcolm X. But at the same time, it would be worse than condescending to dismiss Patterson. His impulse, like Bundini’s at the restaurant in Yulee, Florida, was to insist on his humanity, to demand service and voice his grievance when refused. To dismiss Patterson as nothing more than sniveling would be to dismiss the civil rights movement as it was conceived by King. In the end, nonviolent resistance was far more effective than anything tried by the Nation of Islam and other nationalist groups—and no less dangerous. Part of the brilliance of James Baldwin’s 1962 book The Fire Next Time was to identify the Nation not as a particularly effective political group, but as a symptom of continued oppression and as a warning that limited change in society would lead to conflagration—to what was to come, in fact, soon enough.

  And yet what was remarkable about Patterson was the degree to which he felt he was on a mission to beat Ali, not simply to prove his boxing superiority to a dubious public, but to prove the superiority of a religion and the liberal rhetoric of equal opportunity. Certainly Patterson yearned to rid himself of the embarrassment of losing twice to Liston in less than five minutes of ring time. He could do that only by regaining the title, or at least by fighting valiantly in that quest. Usually, boxing writers try to squeeze some greater meaning out of an athletic contest, if only to enlarge the focus of their attention. But Patterson had made that task easy and real. Patterson even offered to fight Ali for nothing and turn his purse over to the NAACP. One had the feeling that his offer was only half in jest. Patterson actually said that beating Ali—beating Clay, as he insisted on calling him—“would be my contribution to civil rights.”

  Patterson never doubted that Liston had been hit solidly in Lewiston; what he could not fathom was how so powerful a fighter could have quit—and to a non-Christian!—in Miami. “It was almost as much a blow to me as being knocked out by him,” Patterson wrote. “He, of all people! The unbeatable man, the press called him, quitting on his stool.… If Liston couldn’t punch with one arm, what was wrong with the other?… I can’t leave things that way. I can’t leave people remembering that I lost to a man who quit cold to another man who’s taken the championship that belongs to the whole world and given it t
o the Black Muslims, who don’t want to be a part of our world.”

  Six weeks before the fight, in the October 11 edition of Sports Illustrated, Patterson launched an even more self-dramatizing assault in the magazine. The article opened with a photocopy of a kind of declaration of intent handwritten and signed by Patterson:

  “I love boxing. The image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation. Therefore, CASSIUS CLAY MUST BE BEATEN by Floyd Patterson.”

  Patterson began modestly, but soon turned shrill:

  You could get the idea that the entire sport depends on me and that if I, as some sort of homemade Sir Galahad, do not defeat the villain, Clay, boxing will most certainly die. That is nonsense. On the other hand, and I feel very strongly about this, boxing most certainly could use a new image right now. I say it, and I say it flatly, that the image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation. Cassius Clay must be beaten and the Black Muslims’ scourge removed from boxing.

  By calling me a “Black White Hope” and by several other ill-advised and intemperate remarks, he has continually damaged the image of American Negroes and the civil rights groups working on their behalf. No decent person can look up to a champion whose credo is “hate whites.” I have nothing but contempt for the Black Muslims and that for which they stand.… I am a Roman Catholic. I do not believe God put us here to hate one another. I believe the Muslim preaching of segregation, hatred, rebellion, and violence is wrong. What religion teaches that? By preaching such propaganda and not flatly condemning the murder of Malcolm X, who quit the Muslims, Cassius Clay is disgracing himself and the Negro race.

  There was no limit to Patterson’s righteousness. But unlike Ali, who would always undercut his taunts with a smile and a quip, Patterson never let on that he was engaged in some sort of political dozens, a rhetorical so’s-your-mama face-off. He meant every word, from the reasonable attack on Ali’s treatment of Malcolm X to his bizarre vision of what could happen in the ring.

  “To be perfectly frank,” Patterson went on, “I have even thought about an assassination attempt on Clay while our fight is in progress. If the late President Kennedy can be assassinated, it should not be too difficult to kill Clay, for he is nowhere near as important as our late president. Suppose someone did try to kill Clay while we were fighting. I’m not joking. Two fighters move around quickly, and if a bullet is fired I might move right into the range and get killed instead of Clay. If the possibility of assassination has occurred to me, I guess Clay has thought about it, too.”

  Patterson gave himself an excellent chance to win because he considered Ali inexperienced, a poor in-fighter, a light puncher (“I am sure I punch harder than he does”).

  “This is both a personal goal and a moral crusade,” Patterson declared. “I am convinced, now that he wants to get rid of his wife because she will not embrace the Muslim faith, that Clay is really a dedicated Black Muslim and has no intention of quitting them.” But while Ali had the right to choose his own religion, “I have rights, too. I have the right to call the Black Muslims a menace to the United States and a menace to the Negro race. I have the right to say the Black Muslims stink. If I were to support Black Muslims, I might just as well support the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Ali read these stories in Sports Illustrated and answered in a rage. “I want to see him cut, bruised, his ribs caved in, and then knocked out,” he said. “I’m American, but he’s a deaf, dumb, and blind so-called Negro who needs a spanking. You can play up that the fight is going to be a good one. I plan to make him an example to the world. I’m going to punish him for the things he’s said about me in magazines.”

  IF ALI WAS PLAYING THE DEFIANT ROLE OF JACK JOHNSON, PATTERSON was summoning the memory of Peter Jackson. When John L. Sullivan was champion he drew the color line against Jackson, who was acknowledged as one of the greatest fighters of his time. He was born in the West Indies and moved with his family to Australia, winning the national heavyweight title in 1880. Observers at the time believed Jackson surely would have won the world heavyweight title had he not been denied the opportunity to fight for it. One of his most valiant efforts came in 1891, when, at the age of thirty, he fought “Gentleman Jim” Corbett to a sixty-one-round draw. To make money Jackson even played Uncle Tom in a theatrical production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel; when the performance was over, Jackson would strip to the waist and fight three-round exhibitions as an “extra added attraction.”

  Frederick Douglass and, later, the writer James Weldon Johnson were among the black leaders who admired Peter Jackson for his forbearance, for the dignity with which he bore the racism of his era. “Peter Jackson was the first example in the United States of a man acting upon the assumption that he could be a prizefighter and at the same time a cultured gentleman,” Johnson wrote in his book Black Manhattan. “His chivalry in the ring was so great that sportswriters down to today apply to him the doubtful compliment ‘a white colored man.’ He was very popular in New York. If Jack Johnson had been in demeanor a Peter Jackson, the subsequent story of the Negro in the prize ring would have been somewhat different.”

  By 1965, however, black intellectuals were far from unanimous in endorsing the cultured gentleman as a model. “There were to be no more Peter Jacksons, no more tragic black gentlemen whom whites found to be spiritual mulattoes (‘black skin, white heart’),” wrote Gerald Early. “This is ultimately why both [Eldridge] Cleaver and [Amiri] Baraka so vehemently condemn Floyd Patterson, for he seems to be someone who yearned to be, finally, the modern Peter Jackson. The sixties was the age of the reacceptance of Jack Johnson (in the guise of Muhammad Ali), who was, of course, the inevitable historical revision of Jackson.” Patterson yearned to prove himself worthy of integration; the white man, in Ali’s rhetoric, did not deserve integration after all he had done to blacks. With the Patterson-Ali matchup, the issue of Good Negro–Bad Negro may have been clear once more to much of the white public, but it was far different for blacks.

  Perhaps what infuriated Ali most was Patterson’s implication that as a Muslim he was somehow not an American. And while it was true that Ali had been inspired by his trip to Africa, while it was true that when he was there he called Africans “my people” and talked about the pleasures of coming “home,” he was a thoroughly American man fast on the road to becoming a thoroughly American folk hero. Ali may not have read W.E.B. Du Bois, but he was a living example of the “two-ness,” the “double-consciousness,” described in The Souls of Black Folk.

  “Patterson says he’s gonna bring the title back to America,” Ali told the journalist and biographer John Cottrell. “If you don’t believe the title already is in America, just see who I pay taxes to. I’m American. But he’s a deaf dumb so-called Negro who needs a spanking. I plan to punish him for the things he’s said, cause him pain. The man picked the wrong time to start talking to the wrong man. When Floyd talks about me, he puts himself on a universal spot. We don’t consider the Muslims have the title any more than the Baptists thought they had it when Joe Louis was champ. Does he think I’m going to be ignorant enough to attack his religion? I got so many Catholic friends of all races. And who’s me to be an authority on the Catholic religion? Why should I act like a fool? He says he’s going to bring the title back to America. I act like I belong to America more than he do. Why should I let one old Negro make a fool of me?”

  Ali was extremely confident that he would be able to handle Patterson in the ring. He was younger than Patterson, stronger than Patterson. He had an enormous eight-inch reach advantage. In all the ways that Patterson was strong—his hand speed, his footwork—Ali was far stronger.

  In preparation for the fight, Ali stayed at the El Morocco Hotel in Las Vegas and trained harder than he had to. He had not yet reached that stage of his career when he would parcel out his time and energy carefully; what was more, he really did want to destroy Patterson. He had one of his sparring partners, Cody
Jones, ape Patterson’s signature moves: the peekaboo defense, the kangaroo punch. Sometimes, just for fun, Ali reversed the roles, imitating Patterson’s stance and leaping hook. Ali’s brother Rahaman then came in to pound away at the champion’s body even though Patterson was not likely to do so.

  Meanwhile, Bundini and Ali were having one of their fights. The Muslims in Ali’s camp frowned on Bundini’s drinking and his penchant for white women, and when Bundini admitted pawning Ali’s championship belt, dismissal became inevitable. He would not return to Ali’s corner until Ali himself had returned from exile. And so Ali was without his principal cheerleader. He didn’t seem to need him this time. Five days before the fight, Ali took the day off and visited Elijah Muhammad in Arizona, where he’d bought a house to help ease his bronchial ailments.

  Since losing to Liston, Patterson had beaten an Italian coffee merchant named Sante Amonti, Machen, Charlie Powell, George Chuvalo, and Tod Herring. He was especially emboldened by the win over Chuvalo, a hard puncher from Toronto. He felt he had straightened out his style, and his head, since the two Liston fights. He felt ready. “I wasn’t really ready for Liston,” Patterson said. “I was ready for Clay.”

  Usually, Patterson was the most available of men for reporters, but as fight week approached he became shut off, aloof. Rumors circulated around town that Patterson had once more brought his old disguises to the arena. Patterson denied it.

  “I had such high hopes for this fight, so much riding on it, so many people cheering for me,” Patterson told Gay Talese later. “I remember how, on the morning of the fight, Frank Sinatra had asked to see me, and I was escorted over to his suite in the Sands Hotel by Al Silvani, a friend of Sinatra’s who was one of my trainers. I really did not know Silvani very well before the fight, but Sinatra had called me up earlier in the year after the death of my trainer, Dan Florio, and said that if I wanted Al Silvani to help me I could have him. I did not say yes at first. I thought it over, and decided to wait. Then Sinatra called again and said I could have Silvani, who was then working in Sinatra’s film company, and finally I said okay, and Silvani, two days before the fight, arrived in Las Vegas to help train me for Cassius Clay, and on the morning of the fight Silvani escorted me to Sinatra’s suite, and Sinatra was very nice that morning, very encouraging. He told me I could win, how many people in America were counting on me to win back the championship from Clay.”