Hysteria engulfed the buildup to the February 25, 1964, bout at Miami Beach Convention Hall. To agitate Liston, Clay purchased a bus, affixed the words LISTON MUST GO IN EIGHT on the side of it, and parked it at 3 A.M. outside the Denver house Sonny had purchased once he decamped from Philadelphia, which occasioned the legendary gibe by Liston: “I’d rather be a lamppost in Denver than the mayor of Philadelphia.” With the press in tow, Clay shouted, “Come on out here, I’m going to whip you now!” Clay told Liston he was going to drag him home and use him as a bearskin rug. “He drove Sonny crazy,” said Jimmy Ellis, who grew up with Clay in Louisville, worked as his sparring partner, and lost to him years later in their only bout. At the weigh-in on the morning of the event, Clay came bounding through the double doors into the room screaming, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! Tell Sonny I’m here!” Clay became so animated with chatter and bombast that his heart rate and blood pressure soared (to 120 and 200/100, respectively). To Dr. Alexander Robbins, the chief physician for the Miami Beach Boxing Commission, Clay appeared to be “scared to death.” The doc even talked of canceling the bout, in fear for Clay’s safety. Given the carnage that Liston seemed certain of wreaking, that seemed to be a prudent call in the eyes of the assembled press, some of whom were candidly concerned that Clay would end up on a slab in the morgue. Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray joined in that groundswell of opinion when he whimsically observed that he hoped Clay “clots easily.” Darkly, Liston added, “My only worry is how I’ll get my fist outta his big mouth.”
Only 8,297 spectators were intrigued enough by the apparently uneven pairing to show up at Convention Hall, with six hundred thousand more taking in the event via 371 Theater Network Television hookups. Two inches taller and eight pounds lighter than Liston, at six feet three inches and 210 pounds, Clay stepped into the ring as a 7–1 underdog, which only cemented the prevailing wisdom that Sonny would devour him with the ease he would expend on the slab of corned beef that had been set out for his victory party at the Fontainebleau Hotel. But what no one expected was that, even as he carried his hands so dangerously low, Clay would be an unhittable target by virtue of his incomparable speed. From the opening bell, Clay was up on his toes and on the move, as Liston lunged forward and swung wildly in search of a quick knockout. The impeccably sculpted Clay was a blur of spontaneity, his legs operating in sublime orchestration with his hands. Clay swarmed over Liston in the third round and opened up a deep cut under his left eye. But just as it appeared that Clay had command of the affair, Liston waylaid him with an alleged act of chicanery.
On his stool between the fourth and fifth rounds, Clay was beset by a sudden burning sensation in his eyes. Liston had been overheard by Philadelphia Daily News columnist Jack McKinney ordering his corner to “juice the gloves” with a powerful astringent; Dundee claimed it was Monsel’s Solution, which had been used to close a cut under Liston’s left eye and was inadvertently transferred to Clay. Rubbing his eyes furiously, Clay held up his gloves and ordered Dundee to “cut ’em off.” Dundee replied, “This is the big one, Daddy. Let’s not louse it up.” Unaware that referee Barney Felix was on the verge of awarding Liston a TKO, Dundee shoved Clay out into the center of the ring. To buy time until his vision cleared, Clay held Liston at bay extending his left hand in his face in a maneuver assistant trainer Bundini Brown called “yardsticking.” By the sixth round, he was down off his toes and throwing leather. Liston trudged back to his corner at the end of the round and sat down on his stool, his seconds huddled over him. When Liston did not answer the bell for the seventh round—in reply to the cries of “Fix!” he claimed he had injured his left shoulder—Clay flew across ring in uncontained joy and shouted into the microphones that were shoved in his face: “I shook up the world! I shook up the world! I shook up the world!”
Clay did it again the following day in a way that would be profound. For weeks, it had been rumored that he had become a member of the Nation of Islam—pejoratively known as the Black Muslims. Looked upon by outsiders as a subversive organization in the guise of a religion, the NOI preached a doctrine of separatism from white oppressors. The Miami Herald carried a piece that quoted Cassius Clay Sr. as saying that Clay had joined the sect at eighteen. “They have been hammering at him ever since,” said the elder Clay, who added that his son Rudy also had been involved with the NOI. Concerned that the revelation would imperil attendance, promoter Bill MacDonald had threatened to cancel the bout if Clay did not publicly disavow his affiliation with the group. Clay balked. On the advice of Malcolm X, the NOI national representative who was then under a ninety-day suspension by leader Elijah Muhammad for saying that the assassination of President Kennedy had been a case of “the chickens coming home to roost,” Clay would not comment on his association with the NOI until the press conference on the day after he vanquished Liston. While he said he harbored no hate in his heart for the white man, if only because “I would be nowhere today without the white man’s money,” he claimed he adopted Islam in search of the peace he had not found “in an integrated world.” He said, “Why do I want to live in the white man’s way? Why do I want to get bit by dogs, washed down a sewer by fire hoses? Why does everyone attack me for being righteous?” In keeping with his religious conversion, he announced that he would no longer answer to his “slave name”—Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.—but would henceforth be called Cassius X, later to be renamed by Elijah Muhammad as Muhammad Ali (“most high” and “worthy of praise”).
At Ali-Liston II, in out-of-the-way Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, unfounded rumors swirled that Ali was the target of an assassination plot in retaliation for the slaying of Malcolm X, whose friendship Ali had abandoned after Malcolm defected from the NOI and who had been cut down in February in a hail of gunfire in Washington Heights by underlings of Elijah Muhammad. Originally, the bout had been scheduled for the previous November at Boston Garden. To the chagrin of Liston—who had been established as a 13–5 favorite and had whipped himself into top shape—it was postponed when Ali was forced to undergo surgery for a strangulated hernia. Amid heightened concerns that the promotion had a connection to organized crime, Massachusetts blocked the rescheduling of the event, at which point it was moved north to the tiny Central Youth Center in Lewiston. With the FBI and the bow-tied security arm of the NOI, called the Fruit of Islam, on hand to guard him, Ali dropped a right hand on Liston in the first round that caved him as if he were a ceramic piggy bank. As Liston lay sprawled on the canvas with his arms outstretched, felled by what was called “the Phantom Punch,” no one in the sparse crowd of 2,434 or the assembled press was certain what they had seen: Had Ali hit him or had Sonny gone in the tank as part of some betting coup? “Hit he was,” confirmed Larry Merchant in the Philadelphia Daily News, “but how hard he was hit remains in the realm of occult guesswork.” Chaos erupted when referee Jersey Joe Walcott, himself a former heavyweight champion, attempted to steer the exuberant Ali to a neutral corner as the timekeeper pounded out the ten-count on the ring apron. When Liston struggled to his feet, Walcott signaled for the bout to continue, at which point he was summoned ringside by The Ring magazine publisher Nat Fleischer and told that the count had reached twelve. With Ali again throwing punches at Liston, Walcott then stepped between the two and declared Ali the winner. Cries of “Fix” were heard across the land.
To the world over which he held dominion, Ali proclaimed himself “The Greatest,” and that he would be in the eyes of many, in ways that not even he could then know. Less than two years had passed since the Kennedy assassination, and the “Burn, baby, burn” sixties would soon swing into high gear, as a counterculture sprang up in protest of the Vietnam War and the spark that was ignited in Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia in 1964 became a ten-alarm blaze. Ali soon found himself at the center of it, at once a figure of intense adoration and equally passionate scorn. From the vantage point of his boxing career, he had given the sport the vibrant new face it urgently needed. And yet
he himself had something to prove. Given the irregular outcomes in Miami and Lewiston, Ali had been deprived of the unblemished eminence to which he aspired. That would only come years later when he walked through hell with Joe Frazier.
* * *
With a pail of patching cement in his one good hand, Rubin Frazier scaled a ladder propped up against the side of his house. Granddaughter Lisa Coakley, then five years old, was standing at the bottom holding it when a car pulled up in the yard. Out of it stepped an insurance agent, who had come to collect his monthly premium. “That was how they did it back then,” Lisa said years later. “You paid the man when he came around and he recorded it in his big book.” She would remember it was the fall of 1965.
“What are you doing on that ladder, Mr. Frazier?” the insurance agent asked.
From halfway up, Rubin replied, “The roof is leaking. I have to fix it.” He climbed down and joined his visitor in the yard.
“I need to talk to you,” Rubin said. “I need to buy more insurance.”
“Why would you need to do that, Mr. Frazier?”
“Well,” Rubin said, “I am a very sick man.”
Rubin was only fifty-three years old and had been in declining health. Two years before, he had had surgery for lung cancer, and he had battled high blood pressure and diabetes. But he had lived to see his boy win an Olympic gold medal, and he swelled with pride when Billy came back to Beaufort to show it off. Pastor Kenneth Doe was only a small boy back then, but he remembered how the news of what Frazier had accomplished had been met with genuine disbelief. Doe said, “People were like, ‘Billy did what?’ It was as if he had walked on the moon.”
When word reached Billy that his father was gravely ill, he gassed up his car and sped down to Beaufort. He arrived too late to say good-bye. At the Second Mount Carmel Baptist Church, an overflow crowd showed up for the funeral, where Rubin Jr.—Jake—performed a gospel solo. On the way to the Habersham Cemetery, they parked for half an hour across from the house in a final farewell. No one who had come to mourn Rubin that day shed more tears than his youngest son.
Grief lingered within Frazier for a prolonged period. But in Yank Durham, he had not just a manager but a surrogate father. Frazier did not have to look far to see Rubin Sr. in Yank, who even cooked up his own corn liquor concoction and sold it on the side. Frazier remembered in his autobiography that he used to deliver packages door-to-door for Yank. While they were all business at the gym, where Frazier was the obedient listener that Durham had longed for, they were partners in pursuit of a good time away from it. Together, they were known to be dedicated womanizers. They squirreled away cash in a secret safe-deposit box they shared, and even had a matching pair of gold-plated pistols made. George James remembered how he used to shoot dice with the two of them at the gym. “They were like brothers,” said James. They were so close that whenever Durham referred to Frazier in the press, he would do so in first-person singular. Instead of saying Joe needs some time off before he fights again, he would say, “I need some time off before I fight again.” For his part, Frazier echoed in public whatever Durham had impressed upon him in private and was very seldom in disagreement with him. When he was, Frazier would only walk away without a word.
“I’ve never come across a fighter who was closer to his trainer, and a trainer who was closer to his fighter, than Joe and Yank were,” said Joe Hand. “If Yank told Joe to jump in front of a train, Joe would jump in front of a train.”
Frazier found it hard to get going as a pro. In search of backing that would provide him with even a small weekly salary that would enable him to quit the job he then had working on a moving van, he was irked when none of “the dozens of inquiries” he and Durham fielded panned out. “I always said, ‘There’s gotta be a way, man. I gotta keep goin’ somehow,’” Frazier later told Playboy. Only Boston sportsman Peter Fuller overlooked Frazier’s lack of size and stepped forward with a serious proposition. A car dealer who once managed heavyweight Tom McNeeley and who owned a stable of horses that would one day include 1968 Kentucky Derby winner Dancer’s Image (who was subsequently disqualified for having an illegal drug in his urine), Fuller had grown enamored with Frazier in Tokyo and courted him there. But Frazier balked at the arrangement Fuller envisioned: he would have to move to Boston and Durham would have to step aside. With his hand now healed, Frazier began looking toward his pro debut, prior to which he engaged in some verbal sparring with Liston and Ali on a telephone hookup at a Philadelphia restaurant to promote the closed-circuit telecast of their rematch.
Frazier told Liston he heard he had been going easy on his sparring partners.
Liston said he “sent one fellow home” just the other day. He invited Frazier to come up for the fun.
Frazier asked Ali, “Do you have any advice for me?”
Ali replied dismissively, “Yes. Lose some weight and turn light heavyweight.” He then told Joe, if the commissioner would allow him to take on three challengers in one night, “you might be one of them.”
Leotis Martin worked with Frazier at the Twenty-Third PAL in the spring of 1965. The young light heavyweight was employed as a sheet steel pressman, had occasionally sparred with Liston, and also fought under Durham, who Hand remembered had an innovative way of keeping Martin focused. “Yank would use a clipper and sharpen his fingernail to a sharp point,” said Hand. “When Martin sat down in his corner between rounds, Yank would stick him as he was getting his mouthpiece out and tell him, ‘Don’t come the fuck back here again.’ In other words, knock him out and you won’t have to go through this shit again.” Frazier sparred with Martin as the latter prepared for his bout at the Arena in Philadelphia with Lucien “Sonny” Banks, a journeyman from Detroit who, in a losing effort in 1962, had earned some small fame when he became the first pro opponent to floor Clay. Banks outweighed Martin by twenty-five pounds and had him in trouble in the ninth round when Martin dropped him with a right hand to the temple that traveled no more than six inches. As Banks remained in a semiconscious state on a table in his dressing room, Martin sang the praises of his sparring partner, of whom he said: “Joe Frazier is as hard a hitter as anybody I ever fought.” Banks died two days later of brain injuries at Presbyterian Hospital. He was twenty-four.
For a young boxer with promise, opponents are lined up with an eye toward expediency: get in, get out, and move on. In the case of Frazier, he was paired up for his pro debut at Convention Hall in Philadelphia with Don Hobson, who had lost six of his seven bouts and had fought just once in two years. But Hobson begged off with a sprained ankle. To take his place, promoter Lou Lucchese found Roy Johnson for what would also be his pro debut. But Johnson did not show up. Scrambling, Lucchese buttonholed Elwood “Woody” Goss in the lobby of the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. Goss shrugged. “I said, ‘Well, he’s got two arms like anybody else.’ I thought if I got lucky I might tag him.” Goss did not get lucky. Frazier warmed up longer in his dressing room—two rounds—than he spent in the ring. He stunned Goss with a left hook and battered him for an additional twenty seconds until referee Zack Clayton stopped the fight at 1:42 of the first round. Clayton said he did so to keep Goss from getting killed. Frazier asked aloud back in his dressing room, “How did I look?” He earned $125.
Beyond a lapse that occurred in his second fight, when Mike Bruce floored him in the first round for an eight-count, Frazier sailed to easy victories in his three remaining bouts in 1965. But boos cascaded upon him at the conclusion of each, if only because his opponents were what Durham called “runners,” which is to say they were less than agreeable to mixing it up. Two of them could scarcely tie their shoes and the other did not even have a pair. Abe Davis—who billed himself as “The Hartford Hatchet”—had called Durham the week before his scheduled bout with Frazier at the Hotel Philadelphia Auditorium and warned him that he was “no pushover. You better have Joe Frazier in shape for a fight.” But when Davis showed up in Philadelphia, he discovered that he was without his boxing shoes. “H
ere, you can take mine,” Frazier told him. “I can get another pair.” When Davis explained that he wore a size 13 triple E, someone was sent in search of high-top sneakers. The pair that was found had tattered laces and were too tight to accommodate sweat socks, so Davis slipped into some olive-green dress socks. Frazier toppled him with a barrage of blows at 2:38 of the first round. In the Philadelphia Daily News the following day, there was a picture of Davis stretched out on the canvas with the soles of his shoes exposed. One of them had a yawning hole in it.
* * *
Invited to appear at the dedication of the Bright Hope Baptist Church, at Twelfth and Columbia in North Philadelphia, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascended to the pulpit on May 2, 1965, before a congregation of fifteen hundred people and an overflow closed-circuit television crowd of two thousand. King had been asked to come that Sunday by Dr. William H. Gray Jr.—also known as Billy Gray—the pastor at the church and a close friend. In keeping with his message of peace, equality, and universal harmony, King pronounced that in the struggle for civil rights “the church should be the one place where men remove their burden of class.” At the apex of his soaring plea for unity, he articulated that he could foresee a day when “whites, Negroes, Jews, Gentiles and all men, can join hands and sing the words of that old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last.’” So stirring were these words when he had uttered them in his 1963 “March on Washington” speech that they would live on beyond his assassination three years later on the balcony of a Memphis motel.
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