by Jonathan Eig
Clay said he was worried about the weather keeping fans away, and he was aware that some of the proceeds for the fight were going to help the families of thirty-seven miners who had died the month prior in a disaster in Greene County. “I heard all about that mine explosion,” he said. “I’d like to draw a big crowd for that reason. And that’s another reason that I’ll let it go five. I don’t want anyone to miss the fight, so it will not be an early knockout.”
A cake and ice cream were presented. Clay blew out the candles.
“They come to see Cassius fall,” he continued, referring to himself now in the third person, perhaps a sign of narcissism or merely a suggestion that Clay thought of himself as a product to be shilled. “But Cassius won’t fall ’cause boxing needs him.” He was right. Or at least the members of the press corps had reason to hope he was right. The boxing game had grown dull since the retirement of Rocky Marciano, the hairy-chested, hard-punching all-American. Mobsters ran the sport, and too many fighters seemed like hoods, not heroes. Liston had the great misfortune of being both a hood and a black man, which made him the most unpopular heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson. His biography, published in 1963, had the title The Champ Nobody Wanted.
Clay had youth, personality, and a million-dollar smile on his side. He was a gust of fresh air in a dank, sweaty room. His success had raised an already impressive high spirit. With any high spirit, there is always a danger of inconsistency. But there were not obvious contradictions in Clay. He was what he appeared — fresh and natural, always eager for more, more of everything. The boxing writers would have liked him better if he had been white, of course, but he was still far and away the most interesting and entertaining figure to grace the sport in years. Some reporters started calling him “Cassius the Gaseous,” and some considered him lacking in grace, but almost everyone who covered the sport admitted that he was making boxing more interesting. As the former champ Jack Dempsey put it: “I don’t care if this kid can fight a lick. I’m for him. Things are live again.”
Among the celebrities taking in Clay’s Pittsburgh performance were Len Dawson, quarterback of the Dallas Texans; Pie Traynor, the retired baseball player; and TV actor Sebastian Cabot. Clay doodled and jotted notes on napkins and handed them to anyone who wanted one.
A week later, on the morning of the fight, Clay revised his prediction, saying he was sorry but he really didn’t think he could let Charlie Powell last five rounds. He would end it in three, he said. “I got a headline for you,” he said. “ ‘Beauty Beats Beast.’ ”
Powell was a grown man, age thirty, and he’d spent most of his adult life among professional athletes, where younger men usually showed respect for their elders, and where smaller men, if they were smart, didn’t start trouble. At the weigh-in, Powell, not clowning, clenched a fist and shoved it under Clay’s nose. Then Powell’s brother, Art, also a pro football player, taunted Clay: “Fight me, boy! Fight me and I’ll kill you!”
Clay stormed out of the room.
The fight set a Pittsburgh record, with revenue of about $56,000 on 11,000 tickets sold. The crowd pulled for Powell, roaring wildly in the second round when he sunk a gloved fist deep into Clay’s ribs. Powell followed the body blow by pushing Clay to the ropes and rocking him with a right to the chin. Clay, hurt, had to grab Powell to get his bearings, but he quickly straightened up and launched a counterattack that “had Charlie’s head bouncing to and fro like a punchball,” as one writer put it.
The bell rang and Powell glared at Clay: “C’mon sissy, pretty boy. Is that as hard as you can hit?”
To open the third round, Clay didn’t necessarily hit harder, but he hit more often, bashing Powell’s head with forty unanswered punches. Powell looked like a man caught in a nightmare that had him spinning and opening his mouth to scream. Blood gushed from his left eye and drained into his mouth. Finally, from the cumulative effect more than from any one punch, Powell slid slowly to the canvas, eyes closed, crawling on all fours, as the referee counted ten.
Later, Powell would offer this assessment: “When he first hit me, I thought to myself, I can take two of those to get in one of my own. But in a little while I was getting dizzier and dizzier every time he hit me, and he hurt. Clay throws punches so easily you don’t realize how much they shock you until it’s too late.”
In the dressing room after the fight, Clay, surrounded by reporters, slid out of warrior mode and back to entertainer.
“I’m so pretty,” he said. “Let me get dressed. I have so many pretty girls waiting for me outside.”
Had he been an ordinary fighter with a record of seventeen wins and no losses against less than top competition, Clay would not have been in contention for a shot at the title. His lip helped, as did his accurate predictions and good looks. He evoked a sense of merriment and mystery, an irresistible combination for the media. He figured it out by himself, it seems, and he became a sophisticated pitchman during a new age in marketing, when advertising agencies on Madison Avenue found stylish new ways to build brands, boost celebrities, and generate wealth. The sales pitch was no longer just a means to an end — it was a work of art, a product of its own, and a reflection of the nation’s consumer-oriented society. No athlete in American history had ever been so conscious of the power of brand building as this young boxer, and Clay was doing it without the help of one of those Madison Avenue agencies or even a promoter or full-time business manager. The image he fashioned was both romantic and thrilling: a young man who believed that if he worked hard enough he could become the world’s heavyweight champ, that he could have it all, the wealth, the fame, the women, the cars — all without compromise, without getting bloodied, without getting hurt.
While lying in bed one day, Clay explained his media strategy to a reporter from the Miami News. “Now take those Associated Press reporters,” he said. “I always talk to them. I don’t let them get away. Some of them send to thirty-eight papers. Ebony and Jet come around; I see them. Negroes want to know about me . . . Now take Time . . . that magazine goes to intelligent people. People who don’t go to fights much. They read about me and want to go to fights. They talk about me. And your paper. Cover all of Miami and Florida. Lots of people down there . . . Networks come around, I’m glad to see them. Millions of people watching. Only ones I had to send away is those little radio stations that put you on at 4:30 in the afternoon and nobody’s listening.” He even began the process of building his own mythology: “I was marked,” he told one reporter. “I had a big head and I looked like Joe Louis in the cradle. People said so. One day I threw my first punch and hit my mother right in the teeth and knocked one out.”
In another interview, a reporter asked just how much of his bragging was genuine and how much was hype? How much of his “I-am-the-greatest-and-gee-ain’t-I-pretty” routine did he believe?
He answered precisely and without hesitation: “Seventy-five percent.”
It must have been refreshing for the public to know that there were limits to his self-love. Was it possible he possessed a trace of humility?
Before going out to greet the pretty girls in Pittsburgh, Clay sat in his dressing room with William Faversham, the leader of the Louisville Sponsoring Group. Faversham told Clay his next fight might be against Doug Jones — ranked third among heavyweight contenders — at Madison Square Garden in March.
“What are we gonna get?” Clay asked.
Faversham said they’d probably get $35,000 guaranteed, or 25 percent of the gross from ticket sales, whichever was the larger amount.
When Clay asked how much of the $35,000 would be his, Faversham was surprised. Clay knew that his contract called for him to receive 50 percent. Then it hit him: “He couldn’t divide 35,000 by two,” Faversham said in an interview several years later. “This went on all the time,” he continued. “What month is this? How many months away is February? And you take a column in a newspaper, like Red Smith’s. You and I can read it in four, five minutes. He’ll take twenty
minutes, half an hour. In my opinion he has no formal education regardless of what the Louisville school system says.”
Clay also had a strange relationship with money. He would stop at a gas station and put fifty cents’ worth of gas in the tank, apparently convinced he was saving money, and untroubled an hour or two later when the needle on his gas gauge touched E again and he had to buy fifty cents more.
Fortunately, the members of Louisville Sponsoring Group weren’t counting on Clay for spelling bees or math tests. They invested in a boxer, and so far they had reason to be pleased.
At the end of 1962, the financial ledger for the group looked like this:
Gross revenues: $88,855.76.
Clay compensation: $44,933.
Business expenses: $2,287.14
Legal expenses: $1,867.16
Manager’s compensation: $950.00
Transportation: $970.60
Telephone: $1,319.83
Training: $17,989.76
Bad debt expenses: $250.00
That left a net profit of $18,287.77, or 20.7 percent of income, which meant that each member of the Louisville group earned $1,828.78. At that rate, members of the group would probably see their initial investment repaid before the end of 1963, according to an internal memo. In a private meeting, the investors discussed renewing the boxer’s contract and purchasing insurance in case Clay was injured or killed. Everyone in the group agreed that their investment had been a wise one, and no one had anything unkind to say about Clay. He’d piled up a few speeding tickets and lost his driver’s license, and he’d occasionally asked for cash advances on his salary, but such behavior was to be expected of a twenty-one-year-old, the men agreed.
Members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group had modest expectations when they initially backed Clay, but now they recognized that if he beat Jones, he might start earning significant sums of money. They were already discussing the possibility that they could supplement Clay’s fight income by arranging for TV and movie appearances. Clay was less than three years out of high school and still hadn’t fought for a championship, but he was easily the most exciting young boxer in the country, and if there was any doubt about his growing celebrity, it was erased on March 22, 1963, when Time magazine, circulation 10 million, put the young fighter on its cover. Boris Chaliapin painted Clay’s portrait for the magazine and showed him with his head cocked and mouth open; over Clay’s head, a pair of boxing gloves clutched a book of poetry. The article inside, written by Nick Thimmesch, declared, “Cassius Clay is Hercules, struggling through the twelve labors. He is Jason chasing the Golden Fleece. He is Galahad, Cyrano, D’Artagnan. When he scowls, strong men shudder, and when he smiles, women swoon. The mysteries of the universe are his Tinker Toys. He rattles the thunder and looses the lightning.”
In the early 1960s, magazine journalism was soaring to new heights of creativity. Feature writers borrowed from the novelist’s toolbox, immersing themselves in their subjects, using dramatic dialogue and elaborate descriptions to bring their characters and stories to life. But this wasn’t one of those stories. Either Thimmesch failed to get beneath the surface of Clay’s personality or else got there and found it dull stuff. In this profile, which stretched for four densely packed pages of type, Clay had nothing to say about race, almost nothing to say about women, and little to say about what motivated him beyond the obvious quest for fame and fortune. Clay recited his usual clunky poems, boasted of his intention to buy a “tomato-red Cadillac” with white leather upholstery after his fight with Jones, and offered the usual mockery of his opponents’ looks. Of Sonny Liston, he said, “That big, ugly bear. I hate him because he’s so ugly.” Of Jones: “That ugly little man! I’ll annihilate him!”
In Esquire soon after, Tom Wolfe fared better, but only because Wolfe seemed to conclude that Clay’s superficiality was the story, that outside the ring this boxer was nothing but an actor putting on a performance. Clay told him as much. “I don’t feel like I’m in boxing anymore,” he said. “It’s show business.” With that in mind, Wolfe produced an artful series of vignettes that showed the young celebrity in action: Clay dazzled by the view out the window of his room on the forty-second floor of the Americana Hotel in New York; Clay rehearsing new poems for a session at Columbia Records studio; Clay leading a parade of foxes to the Metropole Café; Clay taunting a man in the nightclub who asked for an autograph but failed to produce a pen; Clay predicting an eight-round victory over Sonny Liston but adding, “If he gives me any jive, he goes in five”; Clay mimicking white southern accents; Clay growing jealous upon spotting a trio of street musicians attracting attention that should have been his; and Clay finally stealing the spotlight from the trio by going into another one of his routines about the big, ugly bear.
Years later, Wolfe said he felt like he “never got through” to Clay. But that was likely because Clay wasn’t letting him. At the Metropole, when a white man with a southern accent asked for an autograph and referred to Clay as “boy” (“Here you are, boy, put your name right there”), Clay let it go. He certainly wasn’t behaving like a man already fallen under the spell of Elijah Muhammad.
There were many subjects Clay could have discussed, had he been interested, or had journalists asked him. In April 1962, a police officer in Los Angeles had shot and killed an unarmed member of the Nation of Islam even as the man raised his hands in compliance with the officer’s direction. The shooting set off huge waves of protests and earned nationwide headlines for the Nation of Islam, whose leaders raised angry voices in rallying the city’s black population. Nation of Islam officials called Martin Luther King Jr. a “traitor to the Negro people” for insisting on a nonviolent approach to the fight for equality, saying a movement based on sit-ins and Freedom Rides would never suffice. Real action was required — perhaps even violent action, they insisted.
The writer James Baldwin made no threats, but he too warned that black men and women would have to fight for justice. “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power,” Baldwin wrote in The New Yorker, “but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.”
Clay, publicly, offered no comment on any of it. And the writers spending time with him, almost all of them white, seldom pressed. To those reporters, Clay seemed to be following in the footsteps of Sugar Ray Robinson. The young boxer loved his fine cars and fine clothes and spoke of a future filled with even finer cars and clothes. His biggest gripe with the American system of government seemed to be with the Louisville Department of Safety for taking away his driver’s license. He made a rare statement on race when a photographer tried to take his picture with a young white woman. Clay objected, reminding the photographer of the trouble that befell Jack Johnson for cavorting with white women.
In the buildup to the Jones fight at Madison Square Garden, Clay had to work overtime to generate publicity. Printers had gone on strike, shutting down seven New York newspapers (and eventually helping to kill four of them). Boxing, with no fixed schedules, relied more than most sports on newspaper coverage. But Clay didn’t mind. Driving through Manhattan, he would stop his car at random and get out and talk to his fans. He joshed and joked with Johnny Carson on NBC’s Tonight Show, no doubt shocking television viewers who expected boxers to be big, grunting, crooked-nosed thugs, not slick and Hollywood-handsome like Clay. He wandered down to Greenwich Village and recited poetry — an ode to himself, of course — at the Bitter End, a beatnik coffeehouse where folk singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez usually commanded the stage.
“How tall are you?” he asked Jones one day as they came together to promote their bout.
“Why do you ask that?” said Jones.
“So’s I can know in advance how far to step back when you fall in four,” Clay said.
His material was improving, thanks to steady practice, and he was growing more confident in his give-and-take with interviewers.
“The Garden is too small
for me,” he complained. “Where are the big places? That’s what I need. Maybe the Los Angeles Coliseum . . . You know what this fight means to me? A tomato-red Cadillac Eldorado convertible with white leather upholstery, air-conditioning and hi-fi. That’s what the [Louisville Sponsoring Group] is giving me for a victory present. Can you picture me losing to this ugly bum Jones with that kind of swinging car waiting for me?”
This was his finest performance in salesmanship to date. In thirty-eight years of boxing at Madison Square Garden, there had never been a sellout in advance of a fight, and there had been no sellouts of any kind for six years . . . until Clay v. Jones, March 13, 1963. The top ticket price for the event was twelve dollars, but scalpers outside the Garden were getting one hundred dollars and more. Almost 19,000 fans crowded the arena, thousands more were turned away, and 150,000 watched on TV in thirty-three cities.
“I can’t believe it,” said Harry Markson, the Garden’s boxing director. Given the newspaper strike, given that the fight was not for the championship, and given that Jones, with a record of 21–3–1, was hardly Joe Louis, there was only one explanation for this kind of demand; Clay offered it in verse:
People come to see me from all around
