King of the World Page 14

  AND SO WITH HIS BACKING COMING INTO PLACE, CLAY BEGAN A professional career. On October 29, 1960, he beat up the police chief of Fayetteville, West Virginia, Tunney Hunsaker, in a six-round match at Freedom Hall in Louisville. To prepare for his debut, Clay had sparred mainly with his brother, Rudy; his trainer for the fight was Fred Stoner, a local boxing man with experience. Clay senior preferred Stoner to Martin mainly because he was black. And yet for an ambitious Olympic champion, neither Clay nor the Louisville Group thought Stoner was sufficient in the long run. Clay should have been able to knock Hunsaker out. He would not go far hammering out decisions against officers of West Virginia law enforcement.

  One of the first telegrams Clay had received after winning in Rome was from Archie Moore, who still held the light heavyweight title and ran a training camp in the hills outside San Diego. Moore appealed to Clay as both a fighter and a personage. And he appealed to the Louisville Sponsoring Group because once Clay established California residence its contract with Clay would hold. Unlike other states, California had passed a law saying that minors with firm state residency could sign binding contracts and enlist the court to watch over their earnings until they reached a majority. (The law was written mainly to protect child actors.) Elsewhere, minors could ignore contracts at will; at the same time, their earnings were not protected from avaricious relatives or anyone else with legal authority. Both sides liked the California variant.

  Moore had always been a clever fighter, but with age and the loss of strength, he had become the Euclid of the ring, a master of angles, of evading the aggression of the young and eager and landing a precise blow to end it. Moore also loved to talk. Clay’s verbiage was borrowed from his father and the badinage of the playground—he was the first rapper, the precursor to Tupac Shakur and Puff Daddy—but Moore affected the fancy speech of the vaudeville Englishman, splashing the blood of his game on the lace of his syntax. (There was little mystery as to why Moore was a favorite of A. J. Liebling’s. Moore’s talk resembled Liebling’s prose, and one could not help but wonder if, consciously or not, they had formed a symbiotic literary relationship.)

  Clay had sought out Ray Robinson as a trainer, but Robinson, a more remote figure, demurred. And so, just days after dispatching Chief Hunsaker, he was off to Ramona, California, and the training camp that Moore had dubbed the Salt Mine. Clay loved the sight of the place. The gymnasium, known as the Bucket of Blood, was a big barn with a skull painted on the front door. Outside there were boulders strewn all around, monuments to great fighters of the past; the names of such men as Jack Johnson, Ray Robinson, and Joe Louis were painted on the rocks. Years later, when Ali had a camp of his own in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, he set up similar monuments.

  Moore was immediately impressed with Clay’s seriousness. He marveled at how he ran up and down the steep hills surrounding the camp and stopped only when Moore demanded it. As an innovator himself, Moore saw nothing wrong with Clay’s unorthodox ring style, the low-slung hands, the movement. He saw unlimited potential in Clay and wanted to keep him. “I loved that speedy style of his even though he wasn’t nearly as fast then as he would be in a year or two,” Moore said. “In the back of my mind, I thought to myself, here, finally, is someone who could have knocked out Joe Louis, ’cause, God knows, I couldn’t have.” But Moore lacked the psychological flexibility that Clay needed in a trainer. Moore still had the vanity of a fighter, and Clay’s vanity offended his own. When Moore tried to suggest ways of winning early knockouts—“Slip the punch, go under, and put him out! Then move on!”—Clay would rebel, if only verbally, telling him he didn’t want to be another Archie Moore, he wanted to be a heavyweight Sugar Ray.

  The Salt Mine was a spartan camp with no support staff. The young fighters were expected to pitch in, help with the cleaning and the washing up, chop wood for the stove, do all sorts of chores around the property. But Clay, who had been spoiled at home by his mother, was in no mood for that. He wanted to train and spar.

  “Archie, I didn’t come here to be a dishwasher,” he said. “I ain’t gonna wash dishes like a woman.”

  Eventually, Cassius did his chores, but he made it plain he didn’t much like it. The arrangement, in short, was doomed. Moore wanted to keep Clay around not merely for the training fees the Louisville Group was paying out, but for the sport of it—here was a fighter waiting for guidance, for a chance to win the title. But after a few weeks, Moore called Faversham in Louisville.

  “I think I’m gonna have to ask you to take the boy home,” Moore said. “My wife is crazy about him, my kids are crazy about him, and I’m crazy about him, but he just won’t do what I tell him to do. He thinks I’m trying to change his style, but all I’m trying to do is add to it.”

  Faversham, the spokesman and chief operative for the Louisville fathers, declared that perhaps Clay needed nothing less than a “good spanking.”

  “He sure does,” Moore said, “but I don’t know who’s gonna give him one. Including me.”

  IN PUBLIC, THE MEMBERS OF THE LOUISVILLE GROUP TRIED TO show they didn’t mind that their fighter refused to behave. “Cassius is a really dedicated boy,” said Faversham. “His garrulity is a little rich at times, but we don’t discourage him. He has decided to create an image and he works at it.”

  After looking around at available trainers, Faversham persuaded Angelo Dundee to take on Clay. Dundee had good memories of meeting Clay when he came to town with Pastrano and other fighters like Ralph Dupas, Luis Rodriguez, and Joey Maxim.

  “I wanted to put off Cassius for a couple of months, but have you ever heard him take no for an answer?” Dundee said.

  Angelo Dundee was the fifth of seven children of illiterate immigrants from Calabria. The family name was originally Mirena, but when one of Angelo’s brothers began fighting under the name Joe Dundee (the Fighting Ashman) as a tribute to an Italian featherweight champion of the twenties, Angelo and his brother Chris took on the name. During the war, Angelo worked as an airplane inspector and then went into the navy; in 1948, he went to New York to join Chris, who had set himself up as a manager. Chris Dundee was well connected in the shadowy boxing world of that era, and he was given the go-ahead to set up camp in Miami as a promoter. “I’m sure the Dundees, especially Chris, had some dubious acquaintances in those days,” said Gordon Davidson, “but when we went looking for a trainer we knew there was no one that was simon-pure. That was boxing in those days. Compared to everyone else, Angelo Dundee was as good as it gets.” Television was taking its toll on the small clubs of the Northeast, and the great minds of the sport figured that Miami Beach, with its big-money tourist trade, could turn into a boxing center. Chris Dundee began running boxing and wrestling shows at the Convention Hall and in other local arenas, and Angelo joined him in the early fifties. With years of New York experience behind him and his brother a local lord, Angelo picked up fighters quickly, especially refugees from Cuba and the rest of Latin America.

  The Dundees operated from a rat-infested, termite-ridden walk-up on the corner of Washington Avenue and Fifth Street in Miami Beach called the Fifth Street Gym. To get there, you entered a door next to a pharmacy and navigated a rickety staircase to the second floor, where you were greeted, more often than not, by Emmett “the Great” Sullivan, a stooped old man with baggy clothes and an unlit cigar shoved in his toothless maw. Admission was fifty cents, and if you dared try to avoid it, Sullivan would call you a “mud turtle” and withhold from you his priceless smile. Inside there were two filthy windows with a pair of boxing gloves and the words “Fifth Street Gym” painted on them. The plywood floor was rubbed smooth from thousands of shuffling boxing shoes. There was a ring, speed bags, a heavy bag, rubdown tables, a couple of bare lightbulbs, some fight posters, and Chris Dundee’s desk in a corner of the room. The gym was home at the time to such fighters as Sugar Ramos, Mantequilla Napoles, and Luis Rodriguez, who were all champions, as well as such contenders as Florentino Fernandez, Baby Luis, and Robinson Garcia. Most af
ternoons, the regulars (the Pugilistic College of Cardinals, as they were known) would stand around the ring and pass judgment on the quality of a prospect’s punch. They were, in the main, old fat guys, bad-cigar guys, guys with names like Sellout and Chicky and Evil Eye. “Them guys would all say the same things about Muhammad that the sportswriter guys would say, that he kept his hands too low, that he can’t punch, that he was a headhunter, no body shots, the usual,” Dundee said.

  Dundee put Clay up at a hotel in the black ghetto, the Mary Elizabeth, a headquarters for pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and winos. Cassius, well brought up as he was, never succumbed to the temptations of the Mary Elizabeth. In fact, after the local hustlers found out that he was a fighter, and after they had met him and were charmed by him, they would take him out to the big local nightclub, the Sir John, to hear the best music in town, and while they got loaded, Clay drank orange juice and went home early. His day began with a long run at around five on Biscayne Boulevard near Bay Point, and later he would run from the ghetto to Miami Beach to train with Dundee on Fifth Street.

  “Remember, this was Miami, pre—civil rights and all that stuff, the Deep South, and Muhammad would run across the MacArthur Causeway to the gym, and I got calls from the police saying that there’s some tall skinny black guy running—and did I know anything about it,” Dundee said. “I said that’s our guy, Cassius Clay. He was the easiest guy in the world. He ate his meals at the Famous Chef and signed for the food there. Never complained about nothing. All he wanted to do was train and fight, train and fight.”

  Like any wise handler, Dundee wanted to bring Clay along slowly, purposefully, exposing him, with each successive fight, to a new challenge, a new set of problems, physical and mental. From the start, Clay accepted what was put before him with serene confidence. Which offended the Pugilistic College of Cardinals. Before taking on one Herb Siler in his second fight, Clay told the crowd, “I’m gonna beat Floyd Patterson! I’m gonna be champion!” Read now, so many years after his rise and eclipse, those words have a certain logic to them, a sweet familiarity, like an old pop tune heard once more on the car radio. But back then, in 1960, Clay was a kid, eighteen years old, an undercard fighter with promise; it was as if an outfielder in the American Legion league had called the general manager of the San Francisco Giants and vowed to take center field away from Willie Mays.

  Part of Dundee’s initial appeal to Clay was that he never tried to mold him, never tried to quiet him down, make him fight in another style. Instead, Dundee encouraged Clay’s showmanship, he thought it was harmless at worst, and, more likely, a commercial and psychological boon. That year, Clay fought four times in Miami Beach—against Siler, Tony Esperti, Jim Robinson, and Donnie Fleeman—and each time he drew more people who had heard about the new kid with the fast hands, the kid with the gold medal and the silver tongue.

  “One of those fights, with Fleeman, was at the start of spring training, and so some of the heavyweights of the literary field—Shirley Povich, Doc Greene, Al Buck, Dick Young, Jimmy Cannon—were down here with time on their hands,” Dundee said. “They were friends of mine and I wanted to show my fighter off. Well, Muhammad came out of the shower. He had won. But the writers weren’t that sold on him as a fighter—they thought he bounced around too much and did everything wrong. They figured he was all mouth and no talent. This was still an era when fighters thought they needed nine guys to talk for them. Joe Louis used to say, ‘My manager does my talking for me. I do my talking in the ring.’ Marciano was somewhat like that, too. But Muhammad was different right off the bat, and I thought it was great. So Muhammad waited for them to take their pads out. ‘Aren’t you gonna talk to me? Aren’t you gonna talk to me?’ And so he wore them down. They started to listen.”

  One of the regulars at Fifth Street was Ferdie Pacheco, a doctor who ran clinics in the black and Hispanic ghettos. For kicks, for a release from the pressures of medicine, Pacheco worked with Dundee in the corner for various fighters. Even before Pacheco joined the Clay entourage, he watched the way Dundee gave his new fighter leeway, the way he put himself in the background and used subtle psychological tricks to get the most out of him.

  “Angelo had the reputation, and Ali respected that a lot,” Pacheco said. “He was also strong when he needed to be strong and weak when he needed to be weak. Angelo had a survivor’s instinct that came from dealing with his brother Chris, who was a strong boxing guy. In order to work with Chris, you had to learn how to bend and when to fight. By the time Ali—Clay—rolled around, he had that act down pretty good. Mainly, Angelo was always, always, always subservient to the fighter. He was never ego-maniacal like most of these managers who say ‘I’m fighting so-and-so’ or ‘I’ll knock him out.’ That was especially true in those days. Angelo felt he was the second banana in the show. The real show is the fighter, even if the fighter is a moron. That sat well with Ali. Ali was not an egomaniac, but you didn’t try to control him.”

  “Angelo Dundee, I like him cause he’s half colored,” Ali once said jokingly. “Got a lot of colored nigger blood in him. He’s Italian and passes for white, but he’s got a lot of nigger in him. I get along with him. He never bosses me, tells me when to run, how much to box. I do what I want to do. I’m free. I go where I want to go. And he’s a nice fella. Everybody likes him. He’s got the connection and the complexion to get me the right protection which leads to good affection.”

  Even in those first fights, Dundee did not see Clay as a reclamation project, his Frankenstein. The idea was to refine what was there, to make him smarter, to have him watch out for the tricks—but to teach it all indirectly, by inference. “Every fighter has things to be worked on,” Dundee said, “At first I wanted to get a little of the bounce out of him. But you couldn’t actually direct him to do something. You had to sort of mold him. He resented direct orders. He wanted to feel that he was always the innovator, and so I encouraged that. I learned this from one of the great teachers, Charlie Goldman, who used to say if a guy’s a short guy make him shorter, if he’s tall, make him taller.”

  Like any traditionalist of the craft, Dundee would have liked Clay to batter an opponent’s body instead of pursuing the head all the time. “Body-punching is a capital investment,” boxing people say. But Clay would have none of it. “Keep punching at a man’s head,” he said, “and it mixes his mind.”

  So Dundee saw he would get nowhere trying to retool his man, and he made the best of it. “I tried to make Muhammad feel like he innovated everything,” he said. “For instance, he’d be in there sparring and when he came out I’d say, ‘Gee, your jab is really coming along. You’re getting your left knee into it and really stopping him in his tracks.’ He may not have been getting his knee into it at all. The next time out he’d be concentrating on it. But mainly, it was all him. His quickness, the ability to get in and get out, was unbelievable from the start. He was a big advocate of roadwork. Luis Sarria, Muhammad’s exercise guy and his masseur, put him through endless calisthenics, which is big in boxing. That’s why his body grew so fast from a little kid’s body to such an impressive body. He came in here at about a hundred and eighty-nine pounds and he was over two hundred like a snap. And all muscle. It was a transition that scared you, but it was natural. No weights. It was light bag, heavy bag, roadwork, usually three miles and more. He could run like a gazelle.”

  Clay’s speed overshadowed his size and strength, which is partly why he remained an underrated fighter in the eyes of the sportswriters for so long. But Pacheco, who became Clay’s physician as soon as he arrived in Miami, said, “In 1961, 1962, 1963, he was the most perfect physical specimen I had ever seen, from an artistic and an anatomical standpoint, even healthwise. You just couldn’t improve on the guy. If someone came from another planet and said, ‘Give us your best specimen,’ you’d give him Ali. Perfectly proportioned, handsome, lightning reflexes, and a great mind for sports. Even when he got a cold it went away the next day.”

  THE MIAMI FIGHT
CROWD, HOWEVER, DID NOT FALL OVER backward for Clay—or at least not until Ingemar Johansson came to town for a rematch with Patterson. The publicity man for the fight was Harold Conrad, a dashing roué possessed of an oily charm that made him a regular on the “21”—Stork Club—Toots Shor’s circuit. Conrad was a link to the days of Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell, the old Broadway saloon crowd, though he preferred a joint to a martini. He was an all-star pothead before the invention of rock and roll. He also had a fantastic instinct for promotion, Conrad had heard about Clay—especially Clay’s mouth—and he thought it might help sell some tickets for the Patterson fight if he had Clay spar publicly with Johansson. Johansson was short on sparring partners, so he was willing, and Clay, of course, was eager for attention. His immediate response was not a simple yes, but rather “I’ll go dancin’ with Johansson.”

  Johansson, who had destroyed Patterson in their first fight, suddenly discovered he could not touch a nineteen-year-old with just a few pro bouts to his credit. The Swede was never a graceful fighter, but now he was a marionette with a clipped string. He stumbled after Clay, trying to keep up, and all the while Clay kept flicking the left jab in his face and chanting, “I’m the one who should be fighting Patterson, not you! Come on, sucker, what’s the matter? Can’t you catch me?” The longer Clay kept flicking his jabs and his taunts, the more furious and frustrated Johansson became, until finally his trainer, the legendary Whitey Bimstein, brought it to an end after two exhausting rounds.

  “I’d heard a little about Clay, but as I sat there watching this amazing exhibition, I thought, ‘Jesus Christ! What have we here?’ ” said Gil Rogin, who wrote for Sports Illustrated at the time. “We were still a pretty young magazine—we started up in 1954—and what I was seeing was the most important story we would ever have. To a great degree it was the story that we built the magazine on.”