Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Johnson held the title nearly seven years, and the more he won, the more boldly he behaved, as if being heavyweight champion of the world actually proved his superiority. He wore expensive jewels and long fur coats. He performed in vaudeville routines. He sassed his critics. He openly consorted with white women, from prostitutes to well-off married women, and he would eventually marry three. Johnson became the most celebrated and most despised Negro of his time. He was hounded out of the country, and when he returned he was jailed on trumped up charges of transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.”

  Jack Johnson showed that the boxing ring existed in a special place in American society — as an altar of sorts, where normal rules and beliefs did not always hold. In a boxing ring, during a regulated match, a black man in 1910 could pound in the skull of a white man and not go to jail or get lynched for it. In a boxing ring, one man could kill another and not face a murder charge. And it was in that space that Jack Johnson flashed America’s future.

  In the years to come, black Americans would grow more openly militant in their opposition to southern segregation and northern discrimination and the seemingly endless insults and hypocrisies contained in the American credo that all men are created equal. It would take roughly half a century, though, for another black boxer to boldly challenge America’s racial codes. When his time finally came, that fighter, too, would be criticized for his disrespectful behavior and lack of humility. That fighter, too, would face punishment from his government and an outpouring of rage from his white countrymen.

  “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image,” Cassius Clay would say. “I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like.”

  4

  “Every Day Was Heaven”

  One hot August night in the summer of 1957, Officer Charles Kalbfleisch of the Louisville police department responded to a domestic disturbance at 3302 Grand Avenue in the West End neighborhood of Louisville. When Kalbfleisch arrived, he found Cassius Clay Jr. with blood dripping from his leg. The lanky fifteen-year-old said his father had cut him with a knife. His mother confirmed the boy’s account.

  When interviewed years later about the domestic disturbance, Kalbfleisch did not say what had provoked the attack. He couldn’t remember if the cut was to the calf or thigh, the left leg or right, only that it was a minor wound, not requiring stitches. Given that domestic violence cases almost never resulted in convictions when black families were involved, the white police officer decided that arresting Cassius Clay Sr. would be a waste of time. “They’ll kill each other,” Kalbfleisch said, referring to black men and women involved in domestic disputes, “and when you go to court two or three months later, they’ve forgotten.”

  Louisville police knew Cash Clay well by that time. Over the years, they’d responded to several complaints from Odessa that her husband had struck her, usually after he’d been drinking. They had arrested Cash a number of times for drunk driving and disorderly conduct after nights of revelry at the Dreamland or Club 36. He never did jail time, thanks largely to the work of his lawyer, a white man named Henry Sadlo, who also happened to be the state’s boxing commissioner. There were other brushes with the police that stopped short of arrest, and further signs of troubling behavior that escaped attention altogether. But most of all Cash Clay was a heavy drinker and a wolf. “He used to go with my aunt,” said Howard Breckenridge, who grew up in the Little Africa neighborhood of Louisville. “Matter of fact, he went with two of my aunts.” Cash Clay liked to hit on the plumpest woman in the bar, but all too often he wound up brawling with the biggest, strongest man.

  For three days after suffering the gash on his leg, young Cassius failed to show up at the boxing gym where he trained. His instructor, Joe Martin, grew concerned. “Finally,” Martin said, “he came in and he was all patched up where he’d been cut. I asked him how he hurt himself, and he said he fell on a milk bottle.” That didn’t fool Martin, the cop. Later that year, Clay told Martin the truth: he’d been cut by his father while trying to break up a fight between his parents. “It wasn’t long before I knew the kid was scared to death of his old man,” Martin said.

  In later years, Cassius and Rudy would tell interviewers that they had been happy children in a happy home, not rich but never hungry, all too aware of their father’s unpredictable outbursts but not afraid of him. They would say their parents had fought at times, and that their father had taken them into the bathroom and “strapped” them for assorted misdeeds, but that they didn’t consider such spankings out of the ordinary. Rudy would also admit that their father had sired at least two children out of wedlock and that Odessa had known about the children. Rudy said the most violent act he’d ever witnessed at home was Odessa striking Cash after she had discovered one of his sexual affairs; he said he didn’t remember his father ever striking his mother.

  “Every day was heaven,” Rudy Clay said years later. “Heaven!”

  Brother Cassius, who would talk about almost everything else with reporters throughout his life, would never go into detail about his relationship with his father. Did he stay away from alcohol because his father drank? Did boxing appeal to him because he felt threatened at home? He never discussed such things.

  “I just know I had a nice time as a kid,” he said, and left it at that.

  The Centralian, Central High School’s yearbook, did not select Cassius Clay as the school’s best athlete in 1959. That honor went to Cassius’s friend Vic Bender, star of the basketball team. That was fine with Clay. Although he was taller and faster afoot than most of his classmates, he showed little interest in team sports, joining none of the popular squads at Central. As he explained it years later, “About the onliest other sport I ever thought about was football, but I didn’t like it because there was no personal publicity in it: you have to wear too much equipment and people can’t see you.” Boxing had become his life, his religion, his reason to get up in the morning. He shadowboxed in the halls between classes, throwing punches that stopped inches shy of the lockers that lined the hallways. As his teachers lectured, he doodled pictures of boxing rings and boxing gloves and jackets like the ones the football players at Central High wore — only the jackets he drew were emblazoned with the words “National Golden Gloves Champion” or “World Heavyweight Champ.” He offered classmates autographs and signed them “Cassius Clay, World Heavyweight Champion.”

  One day, when Cassius was daydreaming, his teacher called on him to answer a question he hadn’t heard.

  “Cassius,” she said, “are you listening to what’s going on in class?”

  He lied and said he was.

  “Then answer the question,” the teacher said.

  Nothing.

  “Cassius, what are you going to do with your life?” the teacher asked.

  Cassius still had no reply. But three boys in the class raised their hands and one of them blurted out: “Teacher, Cassius can fight!”

  After the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, governors in some southern states declared that they would avoid or subvert the integration of public schools. The rebellion grew stronger as President Dwight Eisenhower stood silent on the issue. With local white leaders controlling the process, integration stalled, tensions mounted, protests erupted, and violence exploded in many communities.

  But Louisville was not one of them.

  In the fall of 1956, the year before Cassius Clay entered Central High, Louisville’s schools were integrated without violent protest. The superintendent ordered that the city’s 46,000 public school students (27% of whom were black) should attend the schools closest to their homes, regardless of whether the school had previously been all black or all white. That meant most schools would remain segregated because most neighborhoods were segregated. The rules also contained an escape clause: if parents didn’t want their children attending schools where the children would be in the minority, the parents were permitted to request a transfer. In oth
er words, no one would be forced to attend a school populated predominantly by another race. Black leaders objected to the transfer option, but the superintendent refused to budge, and no serious protest emerged from the black community. The integration process moved on, imperfectly, but as smoothly as could have been expected.

  After the first day of school in September 1956, a day that saw fifty-four of the city’s seventy-three schools integrated, the New York Times reported from Louisville: “White and Negro children walked through the school corridors together. They solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance in unison. Pupils sat side by side in the classroom. And they rushed gaily down the steps together when the first day had ended. Color differences seemed forgotten.”

  A year later, in the fall of 1957 at the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, members of the Arkansas National Guard drew bayonets to turn away a fifteen-year-old black girl who sought to attend classes, motioning her in the direction of an angry mob of white men threatening to kill her. After a three-week standoff, heavily armed federal troops arrived to escort the girl and eight other black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, to their classes. The crisis made international headlines. Still, calm prevailed in Louisville.

  Louisville’s early efforts at integration were not perfect. While white parents didn’t seem to mind sending their children to school with black children, they didn’t want their children educated by black teachers. Black community leaders protested, but the superintendent held the line, insisting that being taught by Negroes would likely prove harmful to white children. One of Cassius Clay’s history teachers, a black man named Lyman Johnson, launched a campaign to pressure the school district to change its policy and integrate school faculties. After two years of protest, the district agreed to choose ten black teachers who possessed “good poise” and who were not “too aggressive on the race question” to begin working in predominantly white schools.

  Even in Louisville, white civic leaders recognized that they could no longer count on black men and women remaining submissive or indifferent. The victims of slavery and Jim Crow were growing more confident now that they had the law on their side. In 1955, the NAACP filed petitions for desegregation with 170 school boards in seventeen states. In some communities, white resistance hardened and relations between the races cracked. Openly racist white Citizens’ Councils gained in popularity. Black men and women used boycotts as weapons to push for equal rights. Still, Cassius Clay’s junior high and high school remained all black and would remain predominantly black for decades to come.

  Since its creation in 1882, when it was known as Central Colored High School, the school had been a source of pride in Louisville’s black community. The building Cassius attended was new, completed and opened in 1952 at a cost of almost $4 million. The massive red brick structure — with 111 rooms, including a swimming pool, radio station, and twelve-thousand-book library — would not have looked out of place on a college campus. In addition to math, science, and English, students could take classes in dry-cleaning, sheet-metal work, radio, electrical repair, plumbing, upholstery, cosmetology, tearoom service, commercial food preparation, and cafeteria management.

  None of those subjects interested Cassius Clay.

  “He was dumb as a box of rocks,” Marjorie Mimmes, one of his classmates, recalled years later. Mimmes was one year behind Cassius in school and dated him briefly.

  “Not the sharpest tack,” said his friend Owen Sitgraves.

  “I sat next to the skinny kid with glasses in school and copied his answers,” Cassius himself acknowledged years later, explaining his approach to academic work.

  In January 1957, while enrolled at DuValle Junior High School, Cassius took the Standard California Intelligence Quotient Test and scored a below-average eighty-three. In his first year at Central, he earned a sixty-five in English, a sixty-five in American history, a seventy in biology, and a seventy in general art. On March 31, 1958, before completing his tenth-grade classes, Clay left school. His academic records don’t indicate a reason, although poor grades and a busy boxing schedule were likely factors. A grade of seventy was required to pass a class at Central, which meant he was failing two and barely passing two others. He enrolled again the following fall. The poor grades might have been explained in part by his active boxing schedule. In 1957, Cassius fought at least twelve amateur bouts. Although he lost three fights that year, it was becoming clear to everyone who followed the sport in Louisville that he possessed great potential as a boxer.

  While his spelling and punctuation were better than his parents’, Cassius was a slow reader and hesitant writer. The written word frustrated him and would for much of his life. Years later, family members would say that Cassius was dyslexic — “very dyslexic,” according to his fourth wife, Lonnie — but the diagnosis was little known and infrequently applied when he was young. Even getting through a simple article in a newspaper’s sports section proved a chore, taking him two or three times longer than it should have. Math problems befuddled him too, especially if they contained words and numbers. The only thing about school he seemed to like was the audience it provided. Attention was what he craved most, and he earned it with irrepressible exuberance as well as with boxing.

  Boxing, he said, “made me feel like something different. The kids used to make fun of me. ‘He thinks he’s gonna be a fighter. He ain’t never gonna be nothin’.’ But I always liked attention and publicity . . . Attracting attention, showmanship, I liked that the most. And pretty soon I was the popularest kid in school.”

  He arrived at Central High in lipstick one day and pretended he was a girl. He pretended to bash a friend’s head into a locker, over and over, until the other kids in the hall realized it was a stunt and no one was getting hurt. He carried his money in a change purse, the bills folded up tidily, at a time when no boy in his right mind would carry any kind of purse. He referred to himself as pretty, a word boys almost never used to describe themselves. When he wasn’t running alongside the bus to get to school, he rode his motorized scooter, and if there were girls watching him when he arrived in the driveway, he would take the final turns at speeds designed to make them scream and cover their eyes in anticipation of crashes that never came. It was immature behavior, perhaps, but not inconsequential to Clay, who cared about winning his fellow students’ esteem more than his teachers’ praise.

  “I don’t know anybody who didn’t like Cassius Clay,” said his classmate Vic Bender.

  Ali’s attention-getting ploys may have been compensation for his deficiencies with the written word. In addition to playing for laughs, he learned to listen well, to read people’s moods, to charm, to defuse difficult situations with humor, and, when all else failed, to fight. Scientists don’t fully understand the reasons, but dyslexia can be an advantage for some people. Studies show that learning to read rewires the brain. Reading teaches us to block out the world, and in the process certain kinds of visual processing skills get lost. That may be why some dyslexics exhibit exceptional visual talents, helping them to understand shapes and movements in faster and more nuanced ways than others. It may be why Cassius Clay had a gift for anticipating a punch and backing or sliding out of its way. His brain didn’t focus well on words and sentences that needed to be processed in precise order, but he was extraordinarily good at the opposite: being alert to all things at once and spotting things that looked odd or out of place. A raised eyebrow, a shift in the angle of a fighter’s shoulder, a twitch of a muscle — these were all potential clues as he faced another boxer, mind racing to help him keep a safe distance away. Dyslexics might make lousy bookkeepers but excellent security guards; they can read the mood of a crowded room even if they struggle to concentrate on what the person in front of them is saying. They assimilate patterns and see opportunities others can’t detect. Scientists believe dyslexia is relatively common among entrepreneurs and other leaders — especially people who show a knack for creative thinking, for veering from the ma
instream, and for seeing the big picture.

  In July 1958, when he was sixteen, Cassius began boasting of his intention to fight the toughest young man in all of the West End, perhaps the toughest in all of Louisville. His name was Corky Baker. While Cassius was already a well-established amateur boxer, Baker was a legend — the strongest, meanest young man around. His was a name to be whispered, in case he happened to be nearby and looking for a fight. Corky Baker wore leather jackets and snarled and made even grown men step off the sidewalk to get out of his way. “He was inhuman,” recalled Howard Breckenridge, a neighbor of roughly the same age as Baker. “I seen him pick up a car once.”

  Cassius Clay knew how to box, but Corky Baker knew how to fight, and he outweighed Cassius by at least twenty pounds.

  “You’re crazy if you get in the ring with him,” Cassius’s friend John Powell Jr. told the teenaged boxer in 1958.

  “I’m gonna whip him,” Cassius replied.

  The buildup to the fight was tremendous. The West End was abuzz. “It created as much stir in the little town as a big fight did years later between Joe Frazier and me,” Clay said years later, “and in its way it was just as important to me.”

  When the bout began, Baker set out like a man bent on murder, swinging wildly and bulling forward with his head down. Cassius pounded him with long left jabs and skipped away from punches until Baker was exhausted, his nose bloodied and one eye blackened. “This ain’t fair!” Baker shouted in the middle of the second round before staggering out of the ring and out of the gym.

  “Man,” John Powell told Cassius after the fight, “you are the baddest dude I know, now.”

  Between November 1954, when he had his first amateur bout, and the summer of 1960, from ages twelve to eighteen, Cassius Clay would fight 106 times as an amateur, according to the records kept by Joe Martin. Some researchers have disputed those numbers. Years later, in his autobiography, the boxer said he fought 167 amateur bouts. The best estimate compiled in recent years found the boxer had a record of 82–8, with twenty-five knockouts, although it’s likely that at least a few bouts were missed in that count.