Malcolm’s wife later recalled the regular late-night pep talks her husband gave to the young fighter. “Cassius was just about hysterical with apprehension of Sonny Liston….They talked continuously about how David slew Goliath, and how God would not allow someone who believed in him to fail, regardless of how powerful the opponent was….”
But if Clay was afraid of his opponent, nobody would have guessed by his public behavior. At the weigh-in ceremony, he and his assistant trainer Bundini Brown stormed up to Liston screaming “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. We’re ready to rumble, you big ugly bear! Let’s get it on right now!”
Meanwhile, Chicago headquarters continued to admonish the suspended minister for associating the Nation with a losing cause. Muhammad forbade him from speaking to the huge media contingent assembled in Miami for the fight. Malcolm, who was being referred to as Clay’s “spiritual advisor,” told most reporters nothing beyond the fact that he believed he would be reinstated at the end of ninety days, even though he knew otherwise.
But despite the prohibition against Malcolm speaking to the media, writer George Plimpton, who was doing a profile on Clay for Harper’s magazine, was granted an extensive interview by the renegade Black Muslim.
“The atmosphere was very bizarre,” recalls Plimpton thirty-five years later. “Like most people there, I was puzzled why Clay would associate with a man like Malcolm X and was flirting with the Black Muslims, who we saw as this hate organization. I interviewed Malcolm and came away very impressed by this man. His words were still scary but his mind was fascinating. And as impressed as I was with him, he seemed equally impressed by Clay.”
FBI eavesdropping reports overheard Elijah Muhammad telling his associates that week that Malcolm was trying to usurp his power and was spreading rumors of his adultery to discredit him. In his autobiography, Malcolm reports that it was at around this time that he received his first death threats from within the Nation and heard rumors of a plan to “eliminate” him.
On January 21, Clay suddenly disappeared from his fight camp. Without telling his managers, he flew to New York with Malcolm to address a Muslim rally. Because of his suspension, Malcolm himself could not speak but he stage-managed Clay’s appearance—his first official function as a Muslim—for maximum effect.
Rallying support for his upcoming title bout against Liston, Clay told the crowd of 1,600, “I’m training on lamb chops and that big ugly bear is training on pork chops.” He regularly praised his mentor, saying, “I’m proud to walk the streets of Miami with Malcolm X.” An FBI informant, one of many who had infiltrated the movement at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, immediately alerted the media of Clay’s presence at the rally. The next day, it was all over the papers.
When Clay arrived back in Miami the following day, he was besieged by questions. Asked whether he was a card-carrying member of the Nation of Islam, he deftly avoided answering the question. “Card-carrying, what does that mean? I’m a race man and every time I go to a meeting, I get inspired.” This evasive answer inspired Pat Putnam to track down Cassius Sr., whose sensational claim about his son being brainwashed finally caused the country to take notice.
Plimpton recalls the commotion. “It was chaos around the fight camp,” he says. “Everybody wanted Clay to disavow the Muslims, there were rumors the fight would be called off, ticket sales ground to a halt. The only person who seemed oblivious to all the fuss was Clay himself. He just went on calmly preparing for the fight.”
To deflect some of the attention from the controversy, the fight publicist Harold Conrad arranged for the Beatles, who had arrived in America that week, to show up at the Clay gym for some publicity shots. The fighter clowned around with the four young British musicians, pretending to knock them down like dominoes. “You’re not as stupid as you look,” Clay said to John Lennon after they were introduced. “No, but you are,” Lennon replied jokingly.
The resulting media coverage of the Beatles’ visit was perhaps the last time Cassius Clay was ever looked upon as the lovable clown in the eyes of America. Ironically, years later, Ali’s longtime nemesis Jimmy Cannon would disparagingly label the boxer “the fifth Beatle,” comparing him to the “students who get a check from dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young.”
The day after he returned from preaching in New York, lost amidst the furor over whether he was a Muslim, Clay received a notice to report to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Coral Gables, Florida, to take a military qualifying examination.
Four years earlier, shortly after turning eighteen, Cassius Clay Jr. had routinely registered with Selective Services at his local draft board in Louisville. He was classified 1-A, available for the draft.
“I never thought much of it at the time,” he remembers. “There was no war on.”
As he reported to the Coral Gables induction center, Clay had more important things on his mind than the possibility of being drafted. Such as Liston. He sailed through the army physical, probably the best conditioned recruit the army doctors had ever seen. Then he was ushered into a room along with twenty other potential recruits and given a “mental aptitude test.” When the fifty-minute exam ended, he exited the center and promptly turned his attention back to the upcoming fight, unaware that a chain of events had been set in motion that would alter the course of his career.
Miami Herald sportswriter Pat Putnam was with Clay in Coral Gables. He remembers the boxer’s attitude before the exam: “He had no problem at that time with the idea of going into the army. He was in a good mood and joking around. There was certainly no talk about not going in.”
Halfway across the world, fifteen thousand U.S. army “advisers” had been dispatched to Southeast Asia by President Kennedy to help contain the communist threat in a place called Vietnam. Like most Americans, Cassius Clay had never heard of it.
A few days later, fight promoter Bill McDonald confronted Clay and told him the Muslim rumors had sparked a boycott of the fight among Miami’s sizable Jewish community. More than half the seats remained unsold. Unless Clay publicly denied the rumors, McDonald threatened to cancel the fight.
Since the age of twelve, Cassius Clay had dreamed of the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight title. To him at the time, the Liston fight might have seemed his only chance to realize the dream. Still, and not for the last time, he summoned up a principle rarely seen in the usually amoral world of boxing.
“My religion’s more important to me than any fight,” he told the stunned promoter. “Do what you have to do.” With that, Clay returned to his hotel and told his entourage the fight was off. He was packing his bags.
But fight publicist Harold Conrad had invested too much time and money in the bout to let everything fall apart. He quickly moved to salvage the situation, approaching McDonald with a last-minute appeal.
“I said to him, ‘Bill, you’re gonna go down in history as the guy who denied a fighter a title shot because of his religion.’ And McDonald told me, ‘Don’t start hitting me with the Constitution. This is the South. I can’t operate here with these people.’”
Conrad suggested a compromise. If Malcolm X agreed to leave town, he asked, would McDonald proceed with the bout? The promoter agreed and the fight was back on. Clay returned to training camp while Malcolm quietly flew back to New York.
He’d be back.
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Making of Muhammad Ali
WHEN, ON FEBRUARY 25, 1964, a beaten and battered Sonny Liston failed to get up off his stool for the eighth round, it was clear a new era had begun in heavyweight boxing. Less obvious was the fact that a new chapter was about to be written in America’s political and social history.
While Clay was pounding the supposedly invincible champion into submission, Malcolm X—who had slipped quietly back into town the night before—sat in a ringside seat, vindicated by his faith in
his disciple. With a week to go until his suspension was due to end, Malcolm had already made a decision about his future. The new heavyweight champion of the world was to be an integral part of that decision.
The morning after his victory, Clay arrived at a Miami Beach press conference where hundreds of journalists awaited his verdict on the fight’s shocking outcome—shocking, at least, to everyone but himself and Malcolm X. Before he would agree to answer any questions, Clay looked out on the assembled throng—none of whom had given him any chance of winning the title—and asked, “Who’s the Greatest?” Silence filled the hall. Again, he asked, “Who’s the Greatest of them all?” No response. Finally, he repeated the question and this time the reporters meekly answered en masse, “You are.”
Satisfied, he told the media he had won the fight because he was the better boxer. But the sportswriters didn’t want to talk about boxing. “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” came the first question.
He had still not received official word from Chicago headquarters whether it was okay to publicly proclaim his conversion. He responded with his standard nondenial answer to such a question, but this time he went a little further than he had previously. “Card-carrying; what does that mean? I believe in Allah and in peace. I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I go to a Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see that there’s no smoking and no drinking and no fornicating and their women wear dresses down to the floor. And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn’t be in there. Well, there must be something in there if you don’t want me to go in there. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian anymore. I know where I’m going and I know the truth.”
Then he uttered the words that would become his personal anthem, the defining philosophy for the rest of his life: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”
In Chicago, the Messenger and his associates were as stunned as the boxing establishment at Clay’s victory. The Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks was perhaps the only paper in the country that didn’t cover the Liston bout. Elijah Muhammad’s advisers quickly updated him on the boxer’s commitment to the Nation and his close allegiance to Malcolm X. Despite the strict prohibition against following sports, a number of Nation of Islam officials had grown up following boxing and were well aware of the influential platform that came with the heavyweight title, not to mention the vast quantities of money to be made.
For some time, Elijah Muhammad was troubled by reports that Malcolm was planning to break away and form his own movement. By some accounts, this was enough of a threat to prompt the Messenger to consider having his former disciple assassinated. Now, the thought of Malcolm leaving and taking Cassius Clay with him sent alarm bells through the organization. The combination of two charismatic forces with the media platform accorded the heavyweight champion would have enormous appeal to young blacks throughout the country. Elijah Muhammad knew it, Malcolm X knew it, and one other person knew it—J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI wiretaps were keeping him well informed of the situation.
The only key player who didn’t know that Cassius Clay was about to become a pawn in a giant power struggle was Cassius Clay, who that evening received a congratulatory phone call from the man he had revered from afar for more than five years, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The long-standing taboo on sports, it seems, was temporarily lifted.
The next morning, bolstered by the call officially welcoming him into the movement, Clay called a second press conference, at which he finally laid to rest any lingering doubt about his religious affiliation:
Islam is a religion and there are 750 million people all over the world who believe in it, and I’m one of them. I ain’t no Christian. I can’t be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed by dogs, and they blow up a Negro church and don’t find the killers. I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They tell me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood. I don’t want to be blown up. I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind.
I’m the heavyweight champion, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can’t move into. I know how to dodge booby-traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I’m no troublemaker. I don’t believe in forced integration. I know where I belong. I’m not going to force myself into anybody’s house. I’m not joining no forced integration movement, because it don’t work. A man has got to know where he belongs.
People brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we’re Communists. That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don’t carry knives. They don’t tote weapons. They pray five times a day. The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don’t commit adultery. All they want to do is live in peace. They don’t want to stir up any kind of trouble. All the meetings are held in secret, without any fuss or hate-mongering.
I’m a good boy. I have never done anything wrong. I have never been in jail. I have never been in court. I don’t join any integration marches. I don’t pay any attention to all those white women who wink at me. I don’t carry signs. I don’t impose myself on people who don’t want me. If I go in somebody’s house where I’m not welcome, I’m uncomfortable, so I stay away. I like white people. I like my own people. They can live together without infringing on each other. You can’t condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself. A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I am crowing.
Reaction to his declaration was swift and furious. New York Times reporter Robert Lipsyte, who was in Miami covering the fight, recalls the uproar. “Before the Liston fight,” he says, “even the old-line columnists, the ones like Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young who were hostile to him, didn’t feel threatened by Clay because they thought he was going to lose. If anything, Clay gave them a chance to fulminate about how boxing was taking yet another bad turn. First you had the criminal element, and now you had the encroachment of a show-business clown. They took boxing totally seriously, way out of proportion to its true worth. They were saying, ‘This is the worst thing that ever happened to boxing.’ And soon, that escalated to,’ This might be the worst thing that ever happened to the youth of America, which needs a proper role model.’ Basically, what they were talking about was the heavyweight champion, usually black, always poor, being a safe role model for the underclass. When he said ‘I don’t have to be what you want me to be,’ among the things he didn’t have to be were Christian, a good soldier of American democracy in the mold of Joe Louis, or the kind of athlete-prince white America wanted.”
Under normal circumstances, Clay’s conversion to Islam may have been dismissed as just more foolishness from a blowhard athlete instead of sparking a national fury. But the old guard of the sports-writing fraternity were determined to elevate his Muslim ties to the level of a catastrophe for America. These were the same writers who could be seen drinking every evening with the mobsters who controlled Sonny Liston—murderers, gamblers, and pimps. But Clay’s association with clean-living Muslims could not be tolerated.
The dean of boxing writers, Jimmy Cannon, fired the first salvo in the New York Journal American. “The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports,” he wrote. “But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of mass hate. It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, as one of Elijah Muhammad’s missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sec
t that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”
The day after the second press conference, Elijah Muhammad publicly ushered Clay into the Muslim fold, telling five thousand followers gathered for the movement’s holiday, Savior’s Day, “I’m so glad that Cassius Clay admits he’s a Muslim. He was able, by confessing that Allah was the God and by following Muhammad, to whip a much tougher man. Clay has confidence in Allah, and in me as his only messenger.”
Malcolm X understood what was happening. He was engaged in a tug-of-war with the Messenger for the allegiance of Clay. The prize? A very important national forum, a loud media platform, and the hearts and minds of millions of young black boxing fans. He told reporters, “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. The white press wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But the prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”
Indeed, few had noted the blinding speed and dazzling footwork, nor the innate ability to think on his feet—what pundits later called “ring genius”—that had enabled the new champion to prevail against his supposedly invincible opponent.
“Before the first Liston fight, I wasn’t terribly impressed by Ali’s boxing skills,” recalls syndicated sports columnist Jerry Izenberg. “When Liston failed to get up off that stool, I knew that I was witnessing the real deal. This kid was good.”
Behind the scenes, after the fight, Malcolm confided in Clay for the first time his plan to start a new black nationalist movement and urged his young protégé to come with him. Clay was noncommittal.
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