Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Atwood Wilson, the principal who had so generously granted Clay his diploma, stepped to a microphone and said, “When we consider all the efforts that are being made to undermine the prestige of America, we can be grateful we had such a fine ambassador as Cassius to send over to Italy.” The mayor called him a “credit to Louisville” and “an inspiration to the young people of this city.” Clay addressed the students. He joked that along the way to winning the gold medal, he’d fought and defeated several fighters who were members of the U.S. military, and that if a high-school student could beat the nation’s toughest soldiers, “then Uncle Sam’s defenses are down and he had better do something.” His speech caught some old friends by surprise. “I thought, ‘Is that the same Cassius Clay I know?’ ” asked his classmate Vic Bender. “Where’d he get that confidence from? I think it came from the Olympics, being able to stand up to all those foreigners. Before that he was always kind of shy.”

  Back home on Grand Avenue, Odessa Clay baked a turkey for dinner, Cassius Clay Sr. sang “God Bless America,” and a steady stream of neighbors arrived at the house and walked up the front steps, which Cash had recently painted with red, white, and blue stripes.

  In the fall of 1960, boxing royalty lined up with offers to handle Clay’s career. Cus D’Amato, who managed the heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, expressed interest in nurturing the new gold medalist, as did the 1956 Olympic champion Pete Rademacher, former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, and light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore. But Billy Reynolds had the inside track, and he quickly offered Clay a ten-year contract containing terms far more generous than those usually extended to young fighters. The deal offered Clay 50 percent of all the money generated by his fights. His managers would cover all of his training and travel costs. Reynolds also said he would deposit 25 percent of Clay’s earnings in a trust that Clay would gain access to when he reached age thirty-five or retired from boxing.

  Gordon Davidson, Reynolds’s lawyer, drew up the contract. “I did some research and I found out most boxing contracts were very one-sided to the owners,” Davidson said. But Davidson was operating on orders from Reynolds that said the contract should be tilted strongly in Clay’s favor.

  That’s why Davidson was surprised when Alberta Jones, a lawyer representing the Clay family, called to say her client had decided to reject the deal. It turned out that Cassius Clay Sr. didn’t want Joe Martin as his son’s trainer. Cash said he wanted a more experienced trainer, someone who had worked with professional fighters, although the fact that Martin was a white police officer also may have been a factor.

  Cash Clay was enjoying his son’s success. Cash was a local celebrity in his own right now, with a remarkable new line of dialogue available in his pursuit of free drinks and fast women. His behavior, always somewhat erratic, now became unabashedly bizarre. He would wander the neighborhood in a sombrero, pretending to be a Mexican, showing up uninvited at backyard barbecues and helping himself to beer. If he wasn’t feeling Mexican that day, he would insist that he was an Arab sheik, pointing out that his dark color and wide, flat nose proved it. He would remove from his pockets ticket stubs from prizefights and newspaper articles and point out that the name on the tickets and in the newspapers — Cassius Clay — was his name. He would sing in nightclubs if the bandleaders would let him, and he would sing even louder as he stumbled home drunk.

  “Oh, my, he was so proud he could hardly stand it,” recalled one of the Clays’ neighbors, Dora Jean Malachi, who went by Dora Jean Phillips at the time. “You couldn’t do nothing but laugh.”

  With his sense of importance inflated, Cash Clay felt entitled to guide his son’s career, and that meant Joe Martin had to go. The rejection bruised the Louisville police officer. “The old man, he don’t care no more about that boy than the man in the moon,” Martin said.

  Once Martin was dumped, Reynolds quit too, out of loyalty to his friend. Almost immediately, though, Gordon Davidson received a call from another wealthy Louisville business executive, William Faversham Jr., a big, gravelly voiced man, vice president at one of Louisville’s biggest distilleries, Brown-Forman. Faversham, a former investment advisor, actor, college boxer, and son of a British-born matinee idol, put together a syndicate of eleven of Kentucky’s wealthiest men to back Cassius Clay. He asked Davidson if he would use the Reynolds contract as the basis of a new agreement, and that’s exactly what Davidson did. The contract was for six years, with an option for Clay to break the deal after three. The boxer would receive a $10,000 signing bonus, $4,800 a year in guaranteed income for the first two years, and $6,000 a year in guaranteed income for the remaining four, in addition to the same promise to pay the boxer 50 percent of the money generated from his activities in and out of the ring. Clay and the syndicate would split gross earnings evenly, and the group would underwrite all of Clay’s training expenses, including travel, housing, and food. Fifteen percent of Clay’s money would go into a trust fund until he turned thirty-five or retired from boxing. And to reduce the boxer’s tax liability, Clay was made an employee of the syndicate and paid a monthly salary and a year-end bonus based on his earnings. Clay and his father would both have a say in choosing the boxer’s next trainer.

  The members of Faversham’s syndicate were among the city’s mightiest business executives, men who played pool at the Pendennis Club and chewed mint leaves on the veranda at Churchill Downs. Seven were millionaires. All were white and male. They were William Lee Lyons Brown, chairman of the Brown-Forman distillery, where Faversham worked, and a great southern charmer (“Ah wonder if you realize,” he once told Sports Illustrated, “that Cassius Clay’s aunt cooks for my double-first cousin?”); James Ross Todd, the youngest member of the group at twenty-six and the descendent of an old-line Kentucky family, who said he got involved with Cassius Clay instead of his father “because Daddy had enough on his mind”; Vernter DeGarmo Smith, former sales manager for Brown-Forman and a former executive of the state’s horse-racing commission; Ross Worth Bingham, assistant to the publisher (the publisher being his father) at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times; George Washington Norton IV, known as Possum to his friends, a distant relative of Martha Washington and secretary-treasurer of WAVE-TV, the local NBC affiliate that broadcast Tomorrow’s Champions; Patrick Calhoun Jr., a horse breeder who admitted, “What I know about boxing you can put in your eye”; Elbert Gary Sutcliffe, grandson of the first chairman of U.S. Steel, who liked to call himself a “retired farmer”; J. D. Stetson Coleman, who had his hands in a Florida bus company, an Oklahoma oil operation, an Illinois candy firm, and a Georgia drug company; William Sol Cutchins, president of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, makers of Viceroy and Raleigh cigarettes; and Archibald McGhee Foster, senior vice president of a New York–based ad agency that handled the lucrative Brown & Williamson account.

  Most of the members of the group espoused the official line: they were in it to “to do something nice for a deserving, well-behaved Louisville boy,” as one put it, and to “improve the breed of boxing.” Each member of the Louisville Sponsoring Group invested $2,800, tax deductible. Although they hoped to see a return, they weren’t counting on it. In fact, the group’s treasurer warned members that in the first six months of 1961, he expected expenses of $9,015.86 with little or no income. Cassius Clay was the recipient of the greatest contract ever extended to a boxer with no professional experience, but to the men backing him, he was little more than an amusement. Such was the state of race relations in 1960. The white business leaders assumed that Cassius Clay would consider himself fortunate to have such privileged and unselfish white men guiding his career, and, at least for the time being, they were right.

  Clay’s dreams were coming true. First the gold medal, followed by a check for $10,000, followed soon after by the pink Cadillac, which cost $4,450 — paid with $1,100 down and installments of $120 a month.

  When people saw Clay driving his new car, rumors spread around the West End that he h
ad already spent his bonus, which prompted Clay to hand one reporter his bankbook, revealing a balance of $6,217.12. “I may be only eighteen years old,” he said. “But I’m not that silly.” After the car, he said, his only big expense had been his lawyer’s fees, which had come to $2,500.

  Clay told the reporter that the Cadillac was a gift for his parents, but he was the one who did most of the driving. With the Caddy, every day was a cavalcade, every trip a chance for a handsome young champion to soak up public adoration, every encounter with a neighbor an opportunity to revel in his marvelous accomplishments, past and future. No one seemed to mind that Clay had not yet bothered to get a driver’s license. When Wilma Rudolph visited from Tennessee, the two Olympic champions rolled slowly through the streets, with Clay shouting out the car window to announce their royal presence and Rudolph squirming in her seat, embarrassed by the attention. “The only difference between me and the Pied Piper,” Clay once said, “is he didn’t have no Cadillac.”

  According to some of Clay’s friends, the young boxer proposed marriage to Rudolph during that visit, only to be rejected. He also proposed a race, Clay v. Rudolph, the gold-medal boxer versus the gold-medal sprinter, running along a stretch of Grand Avenue. Men, women, boys, and girls lined the street to watch the contest. A great cheer went up as the two fine athletes took off sprinting, and a greater cheer rose as Rudolph pulled away to win by a more than comfortable distance.

  On October 29, 1960, Clay began his professional career with a thorough beating of Tunney Hunsaker, the thirty-one-year-old chief of police of Fayetteville, West Virginia, who had lost six fights in a row before facing Clay. When it was over, Hunsaker was impressed. The kid had potential. “He’s six-three, for one thing,” Hunsaker said. “He has long arms and is fast on his feet . . . He backpedals and counterpunches a lot like Willie Pastrano. He’s a very good boxer for a kid; best I’ve met for a boy just starting out.”

  Hunsaker’s only complaint was Clay’s attitude. “Perhaps spoiled,” he said, referring to Clay’s ten-thousand-dollar bonus and pink Cadillac. Clay would have to settle down and work hard if he wanted to be a champion. “I could have helped him with some good punches on the nose,” the police chief said, “but he was too tough to catch.”

  Although Clay had no trouble with Hunsaker, sportswriters were unimpressed with Clay’s debut, saying that if he intended to compete with the best heavyweights in the nation, he ought to be able to knock out a galoot like Hunsaker. A. J. Liebling, who wrote about boxing with florid language and cutting attention to detail in The New Yorker, described Clay’s early fights as “attractive but not probative,” adding that the Olympic champion had a “skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water. He was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact.”

  In preparation for his fight with Hunsaker, Clay had run through Chickasaw Park and sparred with his brother Rudy. He had also worked out with a trainer named Fred Stoner, whom Cash Clay preferred to Joe Martin largely because Stoner was black and not a police officer. That training regimen had been good enough to beat the Fayetteville chief of police, but members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group were still searching for a real trainer, one who would teach Clay what it took to battle legitimate heavyweight contenders, and one who would know how to choose the best opponents for Clay. One of a trainer’s most important jobs is to educate his fighter by exposing him to different challenges in the ring, building both his body and his body of experience, slowly, step by step, without getting his man killed. Ideally, the trainer chooses opponents his fighter can beat even as he absorbs his lessons. There’s a catch, of course. If the trainer overestimates his fighter’s readiness or underestimates an opponent, a young boxer’s career can crash to a halt. And that’s exactly what happens to all but a small handful of fighters. If he’s lucky, over the course of his career, a trainer might find one fighter whose flaws are never exposed, who fixes his mistakes and makes steady progress, racking up one win after another against increasingly difficult opponents on his way to a championship.

  Archie Moore, still the light-heavyweight champion at age forty-four, ran a training camp near San Diego. Moore had sent Clay a telegram after his victory in Rome offering his services as trainer. Clay and Moore seemed like a suitable match. Like Clay, Moore was a showoff. He was a native Mississippian who liked to speak in a fake British accent. Moore was also a smart fighter who relied on more than power, especially as he got older, to defeat stronger opponents. If any trainer was likely to appreciate Clay’s unorthodox style and unrestrained personality, it was Archie Moore.

  The Louisville Sponsoring Group had another reason to choose Moore as trainer. If Clay established residency in California, his contract with the group would be legally binding. California had a law, written to protect child actors, that said minors could sign contracts and have the state watch over their earnings until they reached majority age. The law was intended to prevent greedy parents from making off with their children’s money.

  Days after beating Hunsaker, Clay was on his way to Ramona, California. Moore called his training camp the Salt Mine, and it was an ideal place for a young boxer in need of discipline. The property was adorned with boulders painted with the names of great fighters of the past, including Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, and Ray Robinson. Fighters chopped wood, cooked their own meals, and washed their own dishes. They ran four or more miles a day and sparred under the watch of one of the greatest fighters of the era. Clay had no desire for such discipline, even though he may have needed it. He had his Cadillac, a gold medal, and a monthly base salary of $363.63 (at a time when a starting police patrolman would earn about the same).

  “Archie,” he said, “I didn’t come here to be a dishwasher. I ain’t gonna wash dishes like a woman.”

  After a few weeks, Moore telephoned Bill Faversham to say the arrangement wasn’t working. The Louisville Sponsoring Group was paying two hundred dollars a week for Clay’s training, but Moore couldn’t take their money if the boxer wasn’t going to cooperate.

  “I think the boy needs a good spanking,” Faversham said.

  “So do I,” said Moore, “but who’s going to give it to him?”

  In choosing a new trainer, Faversham turned to a man who might have been Archie Moore’s opposite. Angelo Dundee was soft-spoken. He had black hair, thick forearms, and a face that might have been called handsome were it not so heavily dominated by his nose. He was thirty-nine years old, Italian, the father of two, and when he wasn’t working he liked to fish or take his wife square dancing. During a big fight, Dundee would stand calmly in his boxer’s corner, his jaw chewing tirelessly on a wad of adhesive tape, his expression a blank.

  Dundee was the son of illiterate immigrants from Calabria, the fifth of seven children. The family name was originally Mirena, but one of his brothers changed his name to Joe Dundee in honor of an Italian featherweight champion, Johnny Dundee, from the 1920s, and brothers Angelo and Chris took the name, too. Angelo Dundee inspected planes during World War II and afterward took a job in a missile factory. In 1948, he went to work with his brother Chris, who managed a stable of fifteen boxers in New York. Soon the brothers relocated to Miami, where they operated the Fifth Street Gym, a rat- and termite-infested second-story space above a drug store at the corner of Washington Avenue and Fifth Street in Miami Beach.

  The gym was a dump. It wasn’t old but it looked old. It smelled of wood and leather. It smelled of rubbing alcohol and liniment and cigarette and cigar smoke. But mostly it smelled of perspiration, because boxers came to the gym to work themselves to the point of exhaustion under the watch of curmudgeonly trainers who looked at a sweat-soaked floor at the end of the day with the same satisfaction a grocer gazed upon empty shelves.

  The Fifth Street Gym had the nonchalance of having been decorated and designed by men who cared nothing for style. Busted chairs from an old movie theater surrounded the boxing ring. Speed bags, heavy bags, jump ropes, jock straps, rubdown tables, medicine
balls, punch mitts, headgear, and yellowed fight posters, all lit by a couple of bare bulbs, were the notable decor. The floor was splintered, with patches of plywood where the worn-out planks had given way. Sunlight slanted through grimy windows. On one of the windows, someone had painted a picture of a boxing glove and the word “GYM” in yellow letters stacked one atop another. It was the kind of place that made a man feel like a fighting man.

  While Angelo Dundee worked more closely with fighters, Chris Dundee was the man who built and managed the gym. He had a desk in the corner he never used because he was always on his feet, always hustling, always reaching into the pocket of his baggy pants to pull out a wad of business cards and bills wrapped in a rubber band, always making friends and making connections. The sportswriter Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald called Chris Dundee “the most engaging person” he ever met in sports. After starting his career as a candy butcher, a ten-year-old selling Baby Ruth bars on the trains running between Philadelphia and New York, Chris got into the fight business. He had a gift for functionality. He got things done. And he worked well with everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or criminal tendencies.

  In a file cabinet, Chris Dundee kept a record of every fight he’d ever worked and every payoff he’d made, from thirty to three hundred dollars. He used initials only — no names — to indicate the sportswriters and gossip columnists who’d been greased in exchange for good publicity. The larger payoffs to mafia bosses like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo, presumably, were not kept on file. Neither did Chris Dundee make a record of his routine acts of generosity. He welcomed men with no means of visible support — men like Mumblin’ Sam Sobel and Ben “Evil Eye” Finkel — to the Fifth Street Gym and found work for them. With the help of the great Cuban trainer Luis Sarria, he recruited some of the sport’s best Cuban fighters to the gym. Chris Dundee operated under the philosophy that drunks would be drunks, thieves would be thieves, idiots would be idiots, and they were all entitled to make a living.