King of the World Read online

  The more Liston hung around with Resnik, the less he seemed inclined to fulfill the resolutions he had made to the press and on the plane from Chicago to Philadelphia. He was even surlier with the press than before and he was cruel to the help. Robert H. Boyle, a reporter for Sports Illustrated sent to cover the fight, wrote: “Well, Liston has had the championship for almost a year now, and in that time he has become insufferable. He is giving back all the abuse he ever had to take. He looks upon good manners as a sign of weakness, if not cowardice, and he accepts gifts and favors with all the good humor of a sultan demanding tribute. Most of the time he is sullen. A contemptuous grunt passes for speech. He acts this way toward almost everyone. Of course, he can cop a plea with the press by claiming that he has been unfairly treated because of his past. What counts, however, is the way he deports himself with bootblacks, porters, maids, waitresses. As a onetime nonentity himself, he might be expected to know how they feel. Yet he has carried into his public life the bullying and cockiness that he uses to intimidate opponents in the ring.” The reporter quoted an unnamed black busboy at the Thunderbird Hotel: “Sonny Liston is just too mean to be allowed around decent people. They ought to ship him back to Africa. No, make that Mississippi.”

  Liston did not even bow to the conventions of the old fight world. One night in New York when Liston was eating a steak at Toots Shor’s, the public relations man Harold Conrad escorted Shor over to the champion’s table. For decades, Shor had been host to all the major columnists and athletes: Jimmy Cannon and Joe DiMaggio, Earl Wilson and Joe Louis were all his close friends. What was more, before going into business for himself, Shor had started out at a speakeasy called the Five O’Clock Club, owned by the mobsters Owney Madden and George “Big Frenchy” LaMange. He and Liston surely shared a few interests. And yet Liston couldn’t be bothered to look up from his meat.

  “I don’t shake hands while I’m eatin’,” Liston said.

  Shor stalked away in a fury. Here was the proprietor of Mecca rebuffed by an impudent pilgrim. Shor turned to Harold Conrad and said, “Don’t you ever bring that bum in here again.”

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE FIGHT, CASSIUS CLAY FLEW OUT TO Las Vegas with his trainer, Angelo Dundee. It is the custom for past champions and contenders for the title to come to championship bouts. Clay, however, came not for the sake of tradition but in the spirit in which Jack Johnson pursued Tommy Burns to Australia. Johnson wanted to embarrass the reluctant champion, to shame him into fighting. Clay wanted to taunt Liston, to sell himself as the number one contender even if most of the press corps still considered him little more than a light-hitting loudmouth.

  One afternoon, Liston’s friend Jack McKinney was in the ring with one of the champion’s own sparring partners, Leotis Martin. Liston was standing near the ring apron watching McKinney when Clay walked in.

  “Hey, Sonny,” he shouted across the ring, “you couldn’t even beat McKinney!”

  “That was a real quiver to the heart for Liston,” McKinney recalled. “Everyone was laughing their asses off and Sonny didn’t like it one bit. He wasn’t of the opinion that it was terribly funny.”

  A night or two later, Liston was shooting craps at one of the casinos. From across the casino floor, Clay spotted him and headed straight for the table. Liston was down four hundred dollars. Clay delighted in Liston’s distress.

  “Look at that big ugly bear, he can’t even shoot craps,” Clay announced to everyone and no one.

  Liston glared. He rolled again. Craps again.

  “Look at that big ugly bear! He can’t do nothing right.”

  Liston threw down his dice and walked over to Clay.

  “Listen, you nigger faggot,” he 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.”

  Some time later, Liston spotted Clay on the casino floor.

  “Watch this,” Liston told his friend McKinney.

  The champion went up to Clay and slapped him hard across the face, a blow that did not so much hurt as stun.

  Clay’s eyes widened.

  “What did you do that for?” Clay thought it had been a big game, a charade, an advertisement for future ticket sales. Liston did not.

  “Why?” Liston said. “ ’Cause you too fucking fresh.” And as he walked away he said, “I got the punk’s heart.” And it was true. Clay admitted it, to Dundee, to his friends. He had been scared.

  It was a jailhouse moment, or at least it was to a con, a moment in which you do not back down and the other man does and you have the better of him and he is your chicken, your slave, you have his heart, you have his everything, all yours, for all time. So Liston believed.

  THE SCENE ON THE CASINO FLOOR WAS DOUBTLESS MORE TRYING for the champion than the second fight with Patterson. Liston spent the first half minute or so of the fight waiting to see if Patterson had anything new to offer. Considering his training, his long vacances au soleil, he did not care to wait longer and so, thus convinced of the challenger’s lack of inspiration, he battered him to the ground with a terrific uppercut to the jaw and a straight right.

  In a calmer moment, Liston would wax theoretical on the power of his punch and the damage it could do. He kept in his mind an image of tender human physiognomy, its equilibrium, and the way in which it can be forever altered by the power of the fist: “See, the different parts of the brain set in little cups like this. When you get hit a terrible shot—pop!—the brain flops out of them cups and you’re knocked out. Then the brain settles back in the cups and you come to. But after this happens enough times, or sometimes even once if the shot’s hard enough, the brain don’t settle back right in them cups, and that’s when you start needin’ other people to help you get around.”

  To judge by the blankness of Patterson’s eyes, his brain had flopped out of its cups, and only at the count of nine did it settle back in. He got to his feet, barely escaping the fastest exit in the history of heavyweight championship fights.

  Little more than a minute later, Liston began a barrage that left Patterson a heap on the ground. Liston had calculated just right. He didn’t need to train much at all. The fight lasted four seconds longer than the first, though, to be fair, this time it included two counts of eight after knockdowns, Patterson had gone into the ring determined this time to listen to his trainers, to box, to get warm, to test Liston’s endurance—and once more he forgot everything.

  “It was the same as last time,” said Cus D’Amato. “We would have said something to correct him in the corner between rounds but the guy knocked him out before we had a chance.”

  “I felt good until I got hit,” Patterson said. But once he was hit, that last time, he’d temporarily lost his ability to tell fantasy from reality. Somehow the sensation of being knocked out, of concussion, made it seem to him that everyone in the arena was in the ring there with him, circled around him like family. “You feel lovable to all the people,” he told Talese. “And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women.…” After he had regained his bearings and walked back to the dressing room, Patterson said he loved boxing and, seeing as how he was just twenty-eight, he was going to start “at the bottom and start all over again.” There was no point in challenging Sonny Liston anytime soon. Who would pay to see a third Liston-Patterson fight?

  Patterson went through the rituals of defeat: the hugs from family and friends, the news conference. But he did not intend to stay around very long. Since losing the first fight to Liston, Patterson had taken up flying and bought himself a little Cessna. He drove out to the airport hoping to get home soon. But once Patterson and his copilot, a former crop duster named Ted Hanson, got up and out over the Nevada desert, the controls said they were overheating, they were carrying too much weight in the luggage hold. They flew back to the Las Vegas airport, and as Hanson looked around for a plane to rent, Patterson hid from the fight fans who were waiting to leave town. His fake beard was buried away somewhere i
n his luggage. Instead, he hid in the dark, as he had as a child, in the alleys of Bed-Stuy, in the shed at the High Street subway station.

  On the long flight back to New York (with stops in New Mexico and Ohio), Patterson tried to focus on his flying, on the instruments in front of him, but time and again Hanson had to break him out of reverie. Patterson was thinking, “How could the same thing happen twice?… How?… Was I fooling these people all these years?… Was I ever champion?” And he remembered how after the fight he had locked himself in the bathroom for a few minutes, and the press was banging on the door and the cornermen were banging on the door, yelling, “C’mon out, Floyd, c’mon out,” and all he could think was, “What happened?” All the months of running, of living away from your children, all the fighting in the gym, the anxiety, the pain, and then it’s over in a flash.

  “What happened?”

  THE MOST MEMORABLE PERFORMANCE OF THE EVENING CAME before the fight and just after. Patterson, after all, had crumbled, and Liston had put on a performance rather like a grown man whipping a dog—convincing, but hard to enjoy.

  Before the opening bell, when the various fighters from the past and future were invited out for a bow, the old ritual, Clay bounded into the ring wearing a sharp checked jacket. He shook hands with some reverence with Patterson, but when he reached Liston’s corner he threw up his hands in mock terror. If he had been frightened after the incident in the casino, he made sure to show he was frightened no longer: his eyes were too wide now for his terror to be anything other than a gag. Liston stared. Patterson laughed as if he had just seen Chaplin slip on a peel.

  Patterson was barely on his feet before Clay came bounding back into the ring at the end of the bout. He headed for the television mikes, for the radio mike held by Howard Cosell.

  “The fight was a disgrace!” Clay was shouting. “Liston is a tramp! I’m the champ. I want that big ugly bear!”

  When Clay started running for Liston’s corner, three police officers held him back.

  “I’ll whup him in eight!” he cried, holding up eight fingers. “Don’t make me wait! I’ll whup him in eight!”

  Clay had come to the fight with props. He pulled out a phony newspaper that had a banner headline reading “Clay Has a Very Big Lip That Sonny Will Sure Zip.” Sonny Liston looked across the ring, his eyes narrow. He poked his trainer, Willie Reddish, and said, “Can you believe this guy? He’s next.” Afterward, when a reporter asked Liston how long it would take to beat Clay, he said, “Two rounds—one and a half to catch him, and a half round to lick him.”

  PART TWO

  Cassius Clay, age twelve.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Bicycle Thief

  AS A FIGHTER, AS A PERFORMER, AS A MAN OF INDEPENDENCE and American originality, Cassius Clay would transcend the worlds of Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. He began his life with an advantage, an economic one. Boxing has never been a sport of the middle class. It is a game for the poor, the lottery player, the all-or-nothing-at-all young men who risk their health for the infinitesimally small chance of riches and glory. All of Clay’s most prominent opponents—Liston, Patterson, Joe Frazier, George Foreman—were born poor, born more often than not into large families with a father who was either out of work or out of sight. As boys, they were all part of what sociologists and headline writers would later call the underclass. One of the less entertaining components of the Ali act was the way he tried to “outblack” someone like Frazier, call him an Uncle Tom, an “honorary white,” when in fact Frazier had grown up dirt poor in South Carolina. If Ali was joking, Frazier never found it funny.

  Cassius Clay was born on January 17, 1942, and in the understanding of his place and time, of Louisville after the war and through the fifties, he was a child of the black middle class. “But black middle class, black southern middle class, which is not white middle class at all,” says Toni Morrison, who, as a young editor, worked on his autobiography. True enough, but still Clay was born to better circumstances than his eventual rivals. His father, Cassius Clay, Sr., was a sign painter and an occasional artist who drew religious murals and landscapes. He always worked, for others or on his own. His mother, Odessa Clay, worked sometimes cleaning houses and cooking meals for upper-class whites in Louisville. (“We adored Odessa! She’s like one of the family!”) Mainly she was a housewife and mother. The Clays had two children—Cassius Marcellus and Rudolph, who was born in 1944. The Clays bought their house on Grand Avenue in the West End when they were still in their twenties for $4,500. The house was a boxy cottage with a small yard, in an all-black neighborhood, but it was also distant from Smoketown, the poorer black neighborhood in the southwestern part of town. (The white elite in Louisville lived in the East End, in the River Road area, in Indian Hills, or in Mockingbird Valley; the tiny black elite of ministers, merchants, and funeral directors generally lived in the East End.) In those days, some of the roads in the West End were not well paved and many of the houses were mere shacks, but while the Clays never knew even the suggestion of material luxury until their son became the champion of the world, they never wanted for the basics of life. The two Clay boys were well clothed, well fed. Once in a while Cassius and Rudy helped their father paint signs on weekends or after school, and they took a few other brief jobs to earn some extra money (Cassius swept the floors for the nuns at the Nazareth College library), but unlike Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson they never suffered the terrible anxiety of watching their parents fail.

  “He wasn’t a kid who ever missed a meal,” said Lamont Johnson, a schoolmate of Clay’s. “In those days, there was no other way to think of his circumstances as anything other than black middle class.”

  When he became a Muslim, Ali would say that Clay was his slave name—and that, of course, was true. But it was also a name in which his family took a certain pride. Cassius Clay was named for an abolitionist, a nineteenth-century Kentucky farmer who inherited forty slaves and a plantation called White Hall in the town of Foxtown in Madison County, Kentucky. Clay was six-foot-six and commanded troops in the war with Mexico. When he returned home, he became an abolitionist and edited an antislavery newspaper in Lexington called The True American. He was one of the first men in the state to free the slaves on his plantation. Clay ignored death threats and gave speeches in Kentucky denouncing slavery. “For those who have respect for the laws of God, I have this argument,” he said, theatrically laying down a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible. “For those who believe in the laws of man, I have this argument.” Now he laid down a copy of the state constitution. “And for those who believe neither in the laws of God nor of man, I have this argument,” and he laid down two pistols and a Bowie knife. During one debate with a proslavery candidate for state office, Clay was stabbed in the chest; luckily he was carrying his Bowie knife and stabbed his assailant back. Abraham Lincoln sent Clay to Russia for the government, but after a year he returned home from St. Petersburg for more abolitionist activity. He maintained his physical courage to the end. When he was eighty-four, he married a fifteen-year-old girl.

  Cassius Clay—the boy, the fighter—grew up hearing stories about his great-grandfather, who was brought up on the property of the abolitionist Clay. “My grandfather was with the old man, but not in a slave capacity, no sir!” Clay senior, the fighter’s father, told Jack Olsen, who interviewed the fighter’s parents extensively. (They died in the 1990s.)

  On Odessa’s side of the family, the blood was mixed, a fact that would cause Ali some uneasy moments after his conversion to the Nation of Islam. Ali would claim that any white blood in his family came through “rape and defilement.” The reality was more complicated. One of Odessa Lee Grady Clay’s grandfathers was Tom Moorehead, the son of a white man and a slave named Dinah. Her other grandfather was a white man—Abe Grady, an Irish immigrant from County Clare, who married a black woman; their son also married a black woman, and one of the daughters was Odessa.

  Odessa Clay was a sweet, light-skinned, moon-fac
ed woman who took her sons to church every Sunday and kept after them to keep clean, to work hard, to respect their elders. Clay called his mother Bird and she called him, after his first “words,” Gee Gee. (In retrospect, his father took this name as an omen, a harbinger of the Golden Gloves championships his son would win.) The extended Clay family was a big one, and at family gatherings Cassius was the beautiful child, always gabbing, making jokes, demanding, and winning, everyone’s attention.

  “He was always a talker,” Odessa Clay said. “He tried to talk so hard when he was a baby. He used to jabber so, you know? And people’d laugh and he’d shake his face and jabber so fast. I don’t see how anybody could talk so fast, just like lightning. And he never sat still. He was in the bed with me at six months old and you know how babies stretch? And he had little muscle arms and he hit me in the mouth when he stretched and it loosened my front tooth and it affected my other front tooth and I had to have both of them pulled out. So I always say his first knockout punch was in my mouth.”

  “He loved to talk,” said Clay’s father. “I’d come home and he’d have about fifty boys on the porch—this was when he was about eight years old—and he’s talking to all of ’em, addressing them, and I’d say, ‘Why don’t you go in and go to bed?’ A whole neighborhood of boys and he’d be doing all the talking. He’d always find something to talk about.”

  Cassius Clay, Sr., was a cock of the walk, a braggart, a charmer, a performer, a man full of fantastical tales and hundred-proof blather. To all who would listen, including the reporters who trooped off to Louisville in later years, Clay senior talked of having been an Arabian sheik, a Hindu noble. Like Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason’s bus driver with dreams, Clay senior talked up his schemes for the big hit, the marketing of this idea or that gadget that would vault the Clays, once and for all, out of Louisville and into some suburban nirvana. His great weakness, however, was for the bottle, and when he drank he often got violent. The Louisville police records show that he was arrested four times for reckless driving, twice for disorderly conduct, and twice for assault and battery; on three occasions, Odessa called the police complaining that her husband was beating her. “I like a few drinks now and then,” Clay senior said. He often spent his nights moving from one bar to the next, picking up women whenever possible. (Many years later, Odessa finally grew so tired of her husband’s womanizing that she insisted on a period of separation.) John “Junior Pal” Powell, who owned a liquor store in the West End, told a reporter for Sports Illustrated about a night when the old man came stumbling to his apartment, his shirt covered with blood. Some woman had stabbed him in the chest. When Powell offered to take him to the hospital, Clay senior refused, saying, “Hey, Junior Pal, the best thing you can do for me is do what the cowboys do. You know, give me a little drink and pour a little bit on the chest, and I’ll be all right.”