Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  “This is what we always feared about Cooper,” said Carpenter, the worried English TV announcer. “There’s no telling how long he’s got to go with that eye.”

  Clay grew more confident as Cooper began to look like a man who’d swan-dived into an empty pool. Hands low, Clay peered in at Cooper’s red-streaked face, stalking his prey. He began teasing Cooper, opening his mouth, coaxing his opponent to throw a punch. But Clay wasn’t throwing many punches of his own — he landed only eleven the entire round — perhaps because he had predicted a fifth-round knockout and this was only round three. By now Clay knew the press loved to talk about his knack for fulfilling predictions.

  “Cut out the funny business,” screamed Bill Faversham, head of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, from a ringside seat.

  In the fourth, Cooper swung away with more lefts. Cooper’s only chance was a knockout, and he needed one fast, before too much of his own blood spilled. With about five seconds left in the round, Cooper uncoiled a perfect left hook —’enry’s ’ammer! — that caught Clay full on the jaw. Clay fell hard into the ropes, his gaze gone blank, his mouth agape. He sprang quickly to his feet, but he was dazed. He looked uncertain of where he was and what he had been doing five seconds earlier. The noise from the crowd obscured the clang of the bell signaling the round’s end as Clay stumbled to his corner, sat on his stool, and then tried to get up again before his trainer, Angelo Dundee, shoved him back down.

  In almost any other walk of life, the sight of a man bludgeoned senseless would have inspired concern for the man’s health and immediate examination by a physician. Not in boxing. In Clay’s corner, the panicked question was how to keep him in the fight. If their man didn’t gather his senses in sixty seconds and come back to win, they were in deep trouble. Liston would fight another top contender, possibly Henry Cooper. Clay would likely have to wait years for a shot at the title. His earning power would fall. Jobs and fortunes could be lost.

  “You OK?” Dundee asked as Clay slumped.

  “Yeah,” said Cassius, not skipping a beat, “but Cooper’s getting tired.”

  Dundee, skeptical, mopped the fighter’s brow and broke smelling salts under his nose. Then came a moment of inspiration for the trainer. Before the fight, Dundee had noticed a small split along the seam of one of Clay’s gloves. He didn’t think it was a problem. But now, with his fighter dumbstruck and on the verge of defeat, Dundee acted quickly. “I stuck my finger in the split, helping it along until it was a bigger split,” Dundee wrote in his book, My View from the Corner, in 2009. “I then yelled at the ref . . . to come over and examine the glove.”

  While Dundee stalled, Chickie Ferrara, another of Clay’s corner men, broke more vials of smelling salts under Clay’s nose and dropped ice cubes down the front of his pants, a commonly used technique to jolt a fighter out of a stupor. In years to come, boxing lore would say that Dundee’s glove trick provided Clay with three minutes to recover rather than the usual one-minute break between rounds. Film of the fight, however, suggests that Clay’s extra recovery time amounted to no more than five seconds. “But even those few seconds,” Dundee wrote, “were vital.”

  The extra five seconds benefited Cooper’s corner too, where trainers worked to stanch the blood flow from their fighter’s eye. Yet when the referee signaled for the fight to resume, Clay emerged the more energetic man. He moved toward his target like a tornado, wild, furious, punishing everything within reach. Pounding, pounding, Clay punched so hard and fast that Cooper could neither brace himself nor respond. Cooper tried to hold on to Clay, but Clay was too fast, too strong, and still punching. Soon the blood poured from Cooper’s left eye like water from a broken main. Clay kept swinging. After about a minute and a quarter, the referee stopped the fight.

  Rudy Clay jumped in the ring after the referee’s signal, carrying his brother’s crown. But Clay declined it. He was victorious, and he had won it in the fifth round, as predicted. But he had been humbled.

  In the dressing room after the fight, a small, slender man in a carefully tailored suit approached Clay. He was Jack Nilon, manager for Sonny Liston.

  “We want you bad in September, Cassius,” he said. “I’ve come 3,500 miles to get your O.K.”

  The men discussed the possibility of having Clay fight Liston on September 30 at Philadelphia’s 100,000-seat Municipal Stadium, assuming, of course, that Liston knocked off Floyd Patterson again in their upcoming bout.

  Back in the United States, summer exploded. In June 1963, Medgar Evers, the field director for the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home. In Alabama, federal troops forced Governor George Wallace to admit black students at the University of Alabama. In the North, black men and women marched to protest police brutality, unfair wages, and discrimination in housing. Four years after closing its schools to avoid integration, officials in Prince Edward County, Virginia, finally gave in and agreed to allow black students to resume their educations. On August 10, Clay attended a rally in Harlem in which Malcolm X explained why he had no plans to join the upcoming March on Washington. Eighteen days later, Martin Luther King Jr. and a crowd of more than 200,000 people came together in Washington in what would prove to be one of the most powerful moments of the civil rights movement. “I have a dream,” King chanted, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

  That was not the dream of Elijah Muhammad. Nor was it the dream of Malcolm X, who called King’s march a “farce,” an invention of black men with white hearts, subsidized by white liberals, and orchestrated by President Kennedy. Eighteen days after the great March on Washington, white supremacists used fifteen sticks of dynamite to blow apart a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black schoolgirls and injuring twenty others, a brutal reminder that not every American was ready for a seat at the table of brotherhood, not by a long shot.

  In September, Cassius Clay attended a conference in Oakland on “The Mind of the Ghetto,” organized by a black-nationalist group called the Afro-American Association. But even there, he preferred to play the clown rather than the rebel. “I don’t stand for anything,” he said. “I’m not a politician. I don’t talk against anything. I’m a peaceful man. You know, Catholics, Protestants, KKKs, and NAACP members come to see me fight. I don’t debate issues. I just fight.” When a writer asked specifically about his interest in the Nation of Islam, he said, “I don’t identify myself with anybody — anybody except Cassius Clay.”

  From Oakland, he traveled to Philadelphia to attend a lecture by Elijah Muhammad, leaping to his feet at times to cheer as the Messenger warned that black people would continue to die if they failed to separate themselves from white society.

  “Separation is absolutely necessary,” Muhammad told the audience. White people, he said, “are our enemies. The end of their time is at the door.”

  He went on to say black men and women had been fooled into worshiping a Christian God, “one that does not exist.” But it was not too late to embrace Allah, said the man who considered himself Allah’s divine messenger. “The old story of Jesus dying on the cross and going up to heaven is one of the worst falsehoods you could believe in,” he continued. “I am here with the truth. I am asking for complete separation. There is no hope for a good future for the so-called Negro under the American flag.”

  Clay wore “an expensive silk mohair suit and a sullen expression on his face,” the Philadelphia Tribune reported, and when reporters approached, he brushed them aside, telling them to talk to Malcolm X. “He’s really got something important to say,” Clay said.

  Although Clay continued to deny that he had joined the Nation of Islam, members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group grew more concerned by the day. These wealthy white businessmen expressed worry that Clay’s association with a radical group that opposed integration and labeled white people devils would damage his career and their investment. />
  Was Clay lying about his connections to the Nation of Islam to avoid controversy? Was he buying himself more time to think? It’s not clear. Clay was acting like a young man who thought he could have everything he wanted, do whatever he wanted, and say anything he wanted. So far, the facts of his life had supported that notion. How else to explain a man attending a Nation of Islam rally one day and playing the clown another day on a talk show hosted by the white comedian Jerry Lewis? How else to explain Clay’s appearance on the Jack Paar Show, where he recited poems while Liberace in a beaded jacket plinked the piano beside a glittering candelabra? “For a change,” Liberace joked with Clay as he prepared to recite a poem, “do the one about you.”

  If Clay believed black nationalism offered the only path out of oppression for his people, how else to explain his willingness in the summer of 1963 to record a comedy album?

  The comedy album was hatched by the Louisville Sponsoring Group as part of their contingency plans in case Clay lost to Sonny Liston or otherwise found his boxing career abbreviated. Clay seemed like a born entertainer, one who gabbed and joked almost as well as he boxed. An album consisting of jokes and poems would send a message to television and film producers that Clay had another marketable talent.

  Until then, the boxer’s poetry had been juvenile stuff:

  This guy’s a bum.

  He’ll fall in one.

  But for his album, I Am the Greatest!, Clay upgraded his material, employing more sophisticated humor and subtler rhymes while still displaying the cockiness that fans and critics had come to expect. The album was recorded August 8 in front of a live audience at Columbia Records in New York. Clay recited this refrain:

  Clay comes out to meet Liston

  And Liston starts to retreat

  But if he goes back an inch farther

  He’ll end up in a ringside seat.

  Clay swings with his left,

  Clay swings with his right,

  Look at young Cassius Carry the fight.

  Liston keeps backing

  But there’s not enough room.

  It’s a matter of time.

  There, Clay lowers the boom.

  Now Clay lands a right,

  What a beautiful swing,

  The punch raises Liston

  Clear out of the ring.

  Liston is still rising

  And the ref wears a frown,

  For he can’t start counting,

  Till Sonny comes down.

  Now Liston disappears from view.

  The crowd is getting frantic,

  But our radar stations have picked him up.

  He’s somewhere over the Atlantic.

  Who would have thought

  When they came to the fight

  That they’d witness the launching

  Of a human satellite?

  Yes, the crowd did not dream

  When they put down their money

  That they would see

  A total eclipse of the Sonny!

  In addition to poems, the album contained an assortment of corny gags, including references to those inferior wordsmiths Keats and Shelley, fat jokes about Sonny Liston, and a riff on President Kennedy: “I don’t ask what boxing can do for me but what I can do for boxing.”

  Clay’s material improved for one reason: he didn’t write most of it. The man responsible was Gary Belkin, a comedy industry veteran who was listed as producer on the album’s liner notes but received no writing credit. While Clay may not have written the verses, he was more than clever enough to memorize Belkin’s poems. As he recited them on TV and in press conferences, his popularity grew. He was becoming boxing’s first made-for-TV hero, tough but playful, rebellious but not frightening.

  “Cassius,” said the New York Times, “is a delightful young man.”

  Only a handful of writers — most of them black — sensed something deeper stirring beneath the playful personality.

  “For when Cassius Clay declares, ‘I am the greatest,’ he is not just thinking about boxing,” wrote Alex Poinsett in Ebony. “Lingering behind those words is the bitter sarcasm of Dick Gregory, the shrill defiance of Miles Davis, the utter contempt of Malcolm X. He smiles easily, but, behind it all . . . is a blast furnace of race pride.”

  12

  The Ugly Bear

  Look at that big, ugly bear. He can’t even shoot craps.” More than half a century earlier, an argument over a craps game had led to murder and sent his grandfather to prison, but Cassius Clay probably didn’t know that.

  “Look at the big, ugly bear,” he called out.

  Clay had traveled to Las Vegas to see Sonny Liston fight Floyd Patterson, and now, Clay eyed Liston across the floor of a casino and jumped at the opportunity to provoke his rival.

  Liston threw the dice. Craps. Down four hundred dollars, he glared as Clay chirped again: “What’s the matter with you? You can’t even shoot dice.”

  Clay wasn’t done.

  “Look at that big, ugly bear. He can’t do nothin’ right.”

  The other gamblers at the table were silent, possibly afraid. Liston dropped the dice and walked to Clay.

  “Listen, you nigger faggot,” Liston said. “If you don’t get out of here in ten seconds I’m gonna pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.”

  Clay would reenact the story of the casino confrontation countless times in the weeks ahead, acting it out for friends and journalists as if he were performing a scene from his favorite Western, describing how the crowd in the casino hushed and parted, how they whispered, “It’s Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay . . .”

  With each telling, his courage would grow in proportion to Liston’s threat.

  In truth, his response to Liston was not so brave: he got away as fast as he could.

  Patterson versus Liston was a classic conflict between Good and Evil, with Evil winning in a first-round knockout. Patterson was so afraid of repeating his first disaster that he kept his hands low and charged straight at his man. He might as well have charged a wrecking ball. Liston knocked him down three times in the first round and ended the fight after two minutes and ten seconds.

  “I felt good until I got hit,” said Patterson, which is like saying the glass was half full before you dropped it.

  When it was over, Clay climbed into the ring, slithered out of the grasp of three members of the Nevada sheriff’s guard, and made a beeline not for Liston but for the nearest TV camera.

  “The fight was a disgrace!” Clay shouted. “Liston is a tramp! I’m the champ!”

  He flashed a fake newspaper — “Clay Has a Very Big Lip That Sonny Will Sure Zip,” the headline read — and made a big show of tearing the paper to shreds.

  “I want that big, ugly bear,” Clay said. “I want that big, ugly bum as soon as I can get him.”

  Liston threw up his hands in mock terror, this time happy to go along with Clay’s act.

  Jack Nilon wanted Liston to fight Clay quickly. No one else in the heavyweight division had Clay’s charisma. No one else had his name recognition. Clay was, as Sports Illustrated put it, “widely acclaimed as the savior of boxing,” which was a veiled way of saying the sport needed saving from the monster currently in possession of the heavyweight crown. “Everything [Clay] does is exciting,” reported a British journalist. “This unbelievably handsome youngster, a Harry Belafonte with muscles, has thrown the tradition of two-and-a-half centuries of boxing out of the window — without even bothering to open the window first.”

  But before Nilon could cut a deal with Clay and the Louisville Sponsoring Group, business troubles interfered. A few days after the second Liston-Patterson fight, Nilon announced the establishment of Inter-Continental Promotions, Inc., a new company to promote all of Liston’s fights. Sonny was to be president, and Nilon and his two brothers were to be principal officers. Given that the Nilon brothers were long rumored to have connections to the mob, newspaper reporters greeted the formation of the new company skeptically,
assuming some kind of skullduggery. On July 28, Estes Kefauver, chairman of a special U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime, announced that he intended to scrutinize Inter-Continental Promotions. Three days later, Pennsylvania boxing officials refused to grant the new company a promoter’s license, saying that it was illegal for Liston to own stock in the company promoting his fights.

  That meant there would be no fight in Pennsylvania. But other states were eager to have the money and publicity that would come with hosting a championship bout. After a short period of negotiation, the Louisville Sponsoring Group and the Nilons reached agreement: the fight would be held February 25 in Miami Beach.

  Although they were still new to the fight business and unaccustomed to dealing with unsavory characters like the Nilon brothers, and though they were uncomfortable with some of the agreement’s terms, members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group secured a good deal for Clay, one that promised him 22.5 percent of ticket sales and concession revenues, as well as 22.5 percent of the lucrative closed-circuit TV receipts. Reporters covering the announcement said Clay would probably gross nearly $1 million.

  Huston Horn, writing for Sports Illustrated, said Clay was wise to make the deal quickly. Horn questioned the young fighter’s skill, saying that if not for Henry Cooper’s tender facial tissue, Clay might have lost his last fight. What’s more, the journalist said, Clay’s jokes were getting old and his personality was beginning to grate. His character had come into question, too. “He has gained nothing, for example . . . by attending meetings of the Black Muslims — about whom he understands virtually nothing,” wrote Horn. “Equally unbecoming has been his recent criticism of his long-suffering trainer, Angelo Dundee, whom he childishly calls a ‘bum.’ ”