Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  It rained all afternoon, and it was still pouring at around 7 p.m. when Cassius, Rudy, and their friend finally left the auditorium. But when they got outside, they discovered their bicycles gone. They ran up and down the block, searching for the thieves. Cassius began to cry, “frightened,” he said, “of what my father would do.”

  Cassius’s bicycle had been a Christmas present: a Schwinn Cruiser Deluxe, red and white, with chrome fenders, chrome rims, whitewall tires, and a big, red, rocket-shaped headlight. It retailed for sixty dollars, the equivalent of about five hundred today. The Clays couldn’t afford new bicycles for both their boys, so Cassius and Rudy were supposed to share this one, an agreement that Cassius did his best to ignore. For a boy who lived in one of the smallest houses on his block, who wore secondhand clothes, who received some of the lowest grades in his class, and who had thus far not established himself as one of his community’s brighter sports stars, the bicycle was a rare and wonderful gift: it was a status symbol, probably his only one.

  Someone told the distraught boys to report the stolen bicycle to the police officer who happened to be in the basement of the auditorium. They flew back into the building and down the stairs. There they met Joe Elsby Martin, a white-skinned, bald-headed, big-nosed Louisville patrolman and part-time boxing coach. Martin was off duty. He was in the basement training a group of amateur boxers, black and white, mostly teenagers. For young Cassius, the gymnasium opened a world and contented a need. The large, low room; the smell of heavy sweat; the pounding of gloves against bags, gloves against bodies; a place where young men could act out violently and under the approval of a caring adult, where the well-ordered and unjust structure of the outside world disappeared. These things mesmerized Cassius Clay. He became so overwhelmed, he recalled, “I almost forgot about the bike.”

  Cassius was angry — “hotter’n a firecracker,” as Joe Martin put it — saying he wanted to find the person who stole his bicycle and give him a good whupping.

  Martin listened calmly. He was an easygoing man who spent most of his time on the job emptying coins from parking meters. In jest, his fellow cops called him “Sergeant,” because, in twenty-five years on the job, Martin had never bothered to take the sergeant’s exam. He was content to walk his beat by day and train young fighters by night. Martin also produced a local television program for amateur boxers called Tomorrow’s Champions, which was broadcast Saturday afternoons on WAVE-TV in Louisville.

  Martin looked at Cassius, all eighty-nine pounds of him, and asked, “Do you know how to fight?”

  No, Cassius said. He’d fought with his brother and engaged in occasional scraps with kids on the street, but he’d never laced on a pair of boxing gloves.

  “Well,” Martin said, “Why don’t you come down here and start training?”

  Destiny is a function of chance and choice. Chance delivered young Cassius Clay to Joe Martin’s boxing gym, but choice would bring him back. It wasn’t just the sport that captivated Cassius. He had always been confident in his strength and in his good looks. He had always craved attention. He had already figured out that school was not going to propel him to wealth and fame. But boxing? Boxing had always been a sport that appealed to people looking to make a way out of no way.

  Cassius never recovered his bicycle, nor did he get another one. Instead, his parents bought him a motorized scooter, which he proceeded to ride everywhere at high speed, zipping in and out of traffic. With no pedaling required, it was better than a bike. Years later, when the story was told of how the young boxer got his start, the replacement scooter was a lost detail. The lost bike resonated most strongly, but the scooter told a story, too. The scooter meant young Cassius wasn’t punished for losing his bike, wasn’t made to get a job and earn money until he could purchase a replacement. Instead, his parents rewarded him with an upgrade, perhaps suggesting that accountability was not the most heavily stressed value in the Clay household.

  Soon after losing the bicycle, Cassius was at home watching TV when Joe Martin’s face flickered across the screen, standing in the corner with one of his amateur boxers on Tomorrow’s Champions. It was all the prompting Cassius needed to go back to the gym. On his second visit, he climbed into the ring “with some older boxer,” as he recalled in his 1975 autobiography, and got hammered. “In a minute my nose started bleeding. My mouth hurt. My head was dizzy. Finally someone pulled me out of the ring.”

  When his head cleared, Cassius went to work with Martin, learning how to set his feet, how to turn his body at an angle to his opponent, where to hold his hands to protect his head from damage, how to duck a punch, how to throw the left jab and the right cross, the uppercut, the hook.

  About a month later, on November 12, 1954, he stepped into the ring for his first amateur fight, a three-round bout, two minutes per round, against a white boy roughly his own age named Ronnie O’Keefe. The fight was televised on Tomorrow’s Champions. Each boy was paid three dollars. The boxers wore fourteen-ounce gloves and no headgear, “and those boys really went at it,” Joe Martin recalled. Cassius won by a split decision.

  Nothing in the young fighter’s performance suggested that a prodigy had stepped into the ring. “He was just ordinary,” Martin said. But soon after, Martin began to see things he liked, things a trainer can’t teach. Cassius was quick, for one thing, with fast hands and feet and excellent reflexes that helped him avoid punches. He never seemed to tire. When a shot to the head scrambled his senses, he recovered quickly. When he might have fled out of pain or panic, he fought back instead, exerting will over impulse.

  But boxing triggered something wholly new in Cassius: ambition. His father had taken him along on jobs, teaching his son how to mix paint and draw neat letters, making sure each word was spaced precisely, but the boy had no patience for such work, nor did he inherit from his father even the modest ability to render a landscape or portrait. Cassius Jr. was good at shooting marbles and dodging rocks in rock fights, but those were not skills likely to take him far. School had certainly never lit a fire in him. Now, for the first time, he had found something he wanted to do other than mischief-making, something for which he was willing to labor and sacrifice, something that would put him on TV for Lord knows how many people to see.

  The story of Cassius Clay’s lost bicycle would later be told as an indication of the boxer’s determination and the wonders of accidental encounters, but it carries broader meaning, too. If Cassius Clay had been a white boy, the theft of his bicycle and an introduction to Joe Martin might have led as easily to an interest in a career in law enforcement as boxing. But Cassius, who had already developed a keen understanding of America’s racial striation, knew that law enforcement wasn’t a promising option. This subject — what white America allowed and expected of black people — would intrigue him all his life.

  “At twelve years old I wanted to be a big celebrity,” he said years later. “I wanted to be world famous.” The interviewer pushed him: Why did he want to be famous? Upon reflection he answered from a more adult perspective: “So that I could rebel and be different from all the rest of them and show everyone behind me that you don’t have to Uncle Tom, you don’t have to kiss you-know-what to make it . . . I wanted to be free. I wanted to say what I wanna say . . . Go where I wanna go. Do what I wanna do.”

  For young Cassius, what mattered was that boxing was permitted, even encouraged, and that it gave him more or less equal status to the white boys who trained with him. Every day, on his way to the gym, Cassius passed a Cadillac dealership. Boxing wasn’t the only way for him to acquire one of those big, beautiful cars in the showroom window, but it might have seemed that way at the time. Boxing suggested a path to prosperity that did not require reading and writing. It came with the authorization of a white man in Joe Martin. It offered respect, visibility, power, and money.

  Boxing transcended race in ways that were highly unusual in the 1950s, when black Americans had limited control of their economic and political lives. Boxing mo
re than most other sports allowed black athletes to compete on level ground with white athletes, to openly display their strength and even superiority, and to earn money on a relatively equal scale. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, many black people of Clay’s generation believed that getting an education and saving money would never be enough to earn respect. “One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear,” Baldwin wrote. “It was absolutely clear the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else — housewives, taxi drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers — would never, by the operation of any generous feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for their frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.” A handle. A lever. A means of inspiring fear. For young Cassius Clay, boxing proved just the thing.

  He took up running for exercise. He could have run before school, or after, but he didn’t. He ran to school. In his autobiography years later, he described his routine as “racing the bus.” But he had a peculiar way of racing. First, he waited with the other children from his neighborhood for the Greenwood Avenue bus to arrive. Then, when the other children boarded and the bus started to grind its way east on Greenwood, Cassius, wearing his school clothes and school shoes, ran alongside, sun assaulting his eyes. When the bus stopped for a traffic light or to pick up passengers, Cassius stopped, too. He stopped again when his friends got off at 28th Street, where he waited with them for the Chestnut Street bus. When that bus arrived, he took off running again. He ran fast, over well-worn roads that buckled and cracked, past houses that looked like only the peeling paint held them together, until the promise of downtown Louisville came into sight, with its big banks and glittering car dealerships and neon-lit movie houses. By that time, Cassius was hot, his shirt suckered to his back. But the kids on the bus knew that Cassius ran for attention as well as exercise. He wasn’t running full speed, and he wasn’t really racing, because he could have won the race handily if he hadn’t stopped to entertain friends every time the bus stopped. “Sometimes he would hop on and hold on to the window and ride for free for a block or two,” Owen Sitgraves recalled. With his fingers clutching the window frame and his legs dangling inches off the road, Cassius would look up at his friends’ faces and smile. “You had to worry about the bus driver looking out the window and catching you though,” Sitgraves said, laughing.

  Cassius looked like a colt, long-limbed and knock-kneed, with a slender frame. But he was determined to get bigger and stronger. For breakfast he guzzled a quart of milk mixed with two raw eggs. Soda pop, he declared, was as bad as alcohol or cigarettes for an athlete, and he vowed never to touch them. Perhaps in his declaration of asceticism he was trying to prove his superiority to his father, who drank almost every day and had a reputation for laziness. Perhaps he recognized that discipline offered a source of power lacking in Cassius Sr. Or, perhaps, as his brother Rudy recalled, he simply liked looking in the mirror at his muscles.

  “It was almost impossible to discourage him,” Joe Martin said. “He was easily the hardest worker of any kid I ever taught.”

  Cassius enjoyed the attention that came with his pursuit of boxing. Suddenly, he had an identity. He had something to brag about. He was an athlete. He was the kid who raced the bus, the one gulping down garlic water because he said it would help him keep his blood pressure low, and it wasn’t long before he began telling strangers (because his friends already knew) that he intended to be not merely a professional boxer but the heavyweight champion of the world, an avowal that must have sounded as ridiculous as that of a child who said he intended to become president of the United States.

  He began knocking on doors before his Friday night fights to stir up interest and boost attendance. No one told him to do it, and it was completely unheard of at the time.

  “I’m Cassius Clay,” he’d say, “and I’m having a fight on television. I hope you’ll watch me.” Once, canvassing a neighborhood halfway across town, he knocked on a door only to be greeted by Joe Martin. The two laughed about it, but Martin also recognized it as a sign of the kid’s dedication.

  “It’s safe to say that Cassius believed in himself,” Martin said.

  In 1954, boxing was a central part of American culture. For sports fans, no single event mattered as much as a heavyweight championship fight, and no individual athlete earned the respect of the heavyweight division’s top boxer. Only boxing’s top competitors were referred to everywhere they went for the rest of their lives as “Champ.” Boxing’s heavyweight champ was godlike, fearsome, a figure of manliness and courage upon whom all the world gazed in admiration and respect — unless he was black, in which case the matter became more complicated.

  Rocky Marciano was the heavyweight champ at this moment in Cassius Clay’s youth. Marciano was flat-nosed, bull-necked, and broad-shouldered, with a face shaped as much by pugilistic demolition as DNA. Standing a shade over five-foot-ten and weighing 188 pounds, Marciano was not especially big. Nor was he especially quick. But he charged his opponents relentlessly and hit them hard, knocking out almost nine of every ten he faced. Marciano, born Rocco Francis Marchegiano, was the kind of boxer Americans loved to cheer, a son of Italian immigrants who had built his muscles digging ditches and hauling ice and had served his country for two years in the army during World War II.

  Before Marciano, black men had held the heavyweight title for fifteen years. Marciano took the championship by beating Jersey Joe Walcott, who had taken it from Ezzard Charles, who claimed it after the retirement of Joe Louis and cemented that claim by beating Louis when Louis had come out of retirement in 1950.

  Joe Louis had reigned as heavyweight champion for twelve years, longer than any champ in the history of the sport, and in that twelve years’ time he became the most popular black man in the history of America. When he first came to the attention of boxing fans in 1934 at the age of twenty, he was handsome, light-skinned, and quiet, and promoters went out of their way to present him as wholesome, the polite sort of Negro who evinced proper respect for whites. Louis loved his mother and loved the Bible: that’s what his publicists said, and that’s what white newspapermen wrote. To make sure that this mighty fighter maintained an unthreatening image outside the ring, Louis lived under strict rules imposed by his managers: he was never to be photographed with a white woman; he was never to enter a nightclub alone; he was never to gloat over a fallen opponent, never to raise his arms in victory or brag of his talent in interviews. He wasn’t Sambo, the smiling, shuffling, buffoon of minstrel shows, but he wasn’t fully a man of free will, either. He was Good Joe, the Negro who knew his place and appreciated the opportunities White America had granted him.

  The U.S. economy then had been deep in depression. Fascism was stirring in Europe. America needed a new boxing hero, and Louis had the strength and talent. His only sin was in his skin, to paraphrase the song made popular by Louis Armstrong, another black man who won the approval of white Americans in part because he appeared not to hate them. More than anything, that’s what white Americans expected of Joe Louis. They would let him fight, let him be champ, even let him knock white men bloody and senseless, so long as he remembered that whites were superior and always would be; so long as he remembered that his position as an American hero was provisional. Black men like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong were expected to be representatives of their people, although the role placed an impossible burden on them. What traits of blackness were they supposed to portray? Only the ones that white people wanted? How were they supposed to serve as symbols while maintaining their individuality and the freedom to speak their minds? Before Joe Louis, another black boxer, Jack Johnson, had failed as black ambassador to the white world. When Jack Johnson had begun fighting and win
ning in the late 1890s, there had never been a black heavyweight champion. The mere idea of it offended many whites. “Any fighter who’d get in the same ring with a nigger loses my respect,” said John L. Sullivan, the last heavyweight champion of the bare-knuckled era.

  As Jack Johnson and other black fighters emerged, they not only posed a threat to white champions; they posed a threat to firmly held attitudes about race. “We are in the midst of a growing menace,” Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, wrote in 1895. “The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.”

  Jack Johnson was the nightmare that woke white supremacists in a cold sweat. He was big, black, and belligerent. When taunted, he taunted back. He challenged the natural order, and he was smart enough to recognize how much that disturbed people in power. He predicted the outcomes of his fights. He mocked his opponents. Somehow, in spite of everything American history had taught to that point, Johnson concluded that his skin color and ancestry did not require him to kowtow and cringe before the white master. In 1908, after a string of convincing victories, Johnson earned the right to challenge the champion, a white German-Canadian named Tommy Burns. Johnson taunted Burns before knocking him out in the fourteenth round. Almost immediately, the search began for a white boxer who would restore the natural order. But Johnson was difficult to beat. In 1910, when he defeated Jim Jeffries, the so-called Great White Hope, celebrations erupted in black communities followed by reprisal attacks from white gangs.