King of the World Page 17

  “You gotta be fixin’ ’em or else you couldn’t tell Archie Moore when he was fallin’. You got to be a phony!” he said. “You either a phony or Shorty’s in your corner. I been with Sugar Ray. I been with Johnny Bratton. I never heard of anybody predictin’ weeks in advance the round they’re gonna win in. Tell me the truth!”

  “You know what the truth is?” Clay said toward the end of a long conversation. “The truth is, every time I go into the ring I’m scared to death.”

  Bundini, who wept easily, now wept buckets.

  “I knew Shorty was with you,” he said. “Shorty had to be with you. You mean you actually scared out there? Why?”

  “I’m scared because after all that poppin’ off, all that predicting, all those people wanting to see me get whipped, I know I’m in trouble. If I lose, they’ll be ready to run me out of the country. I’m out on a limb and I know I gotta win. Now that’s a fact that only you and me know.”

  “You, me, and Shorty,” Bundini said.

  From that moment on, Clay decided he had to have Bundini around as his own motivator-jester. Bundini was black, but he was an integrationist, a civil rights man. Clay didn’t care. He liked Bundini, liked the way he could play off him verbally, the way Bundini could lift him up emotionally; he liked talking about spacemen and horror movies with Bundini, he liked playing the dozens with him, and he liked the fact that Bundini had been around, that he knew something of the world.

  Drew Brown was born in 1929 and grew up poor in rural Florida. He said he started paying his own rent before he was ten and joined the navy as a messboy at thirteen. “I went through the Pacific and Atlantic campaigns and I know the mysteries of life,” he once said with characteristic grandiloquence. “I know about men and women and love and death and the power and the glory.” He left the navy after threatening an officer with a meat cleaver. After that he drifted, doing odd jobs, working for fighters. Over the years, Bundini would fall out of favor with Clay—not least when he sold his championship belt to a barber in Harlem for five hundred dollars—but the two men communicated on a level of magic and love that was quite different from the more orderly way that Dundee connected with the fighter. Bundini wept when Clay was hit, he cried tears of joy in victory. Years later, after he had worked the corner for many fights, he said, “I get sick before a fight. It makes me feel like a pregnant woman. I give the champ all my strength. He throw a punch, I throw a punch. He get hit, it hurts me. I can’t explain it, but sometimes I know what he’s gonna do before he even knows.”

  Clay would need whatever empathy Bundini could give him against Doug Jones. By fight time the odds were two to one in Clay’s favor, but not only did he find it impossible to fulfill his predictions of a sixth-round knockout, he never really hurt Jones. In the end, all he could rely on was the aesthetic preferences of the judges and their good wishes for his future, for it turned out that Jones, weighing just 188 pounds, fourteen less than Clay, was elusive, sidewise, tricky. All night long, it was as if Clay had to box a sand crab.

  Clay should have dominated the fight, or such was the feeling in the arena. But round after round, Jones slipped inside Clay’s jab. Jones’s sole advantage was experience, and he used it to keep even, to counterpunch. With time, the crowd began to understand that Clay would fail to meet his deadline; in fact, he would be fortunate to win at all. The excitement in the crowd, the unending noise, had less to do with the quality of the boxing than with the expectation of an upset. “All the time that I was watching this quite ordinary fight—just good enough to watch at all,” said Liebling, “my nineteen thousand fellow-viewers, to judge by the noise they made, were witnessing a vast allegorical struggle between the Modest Underdog and Mr. Swellhead Bigmouth Poet.”

  In the end two judges, Frank Forbes and Artie Aidello, scored it five to four (with one round even) for Clay, and the referee, inexplicably, scored it eight to one, one even, Clay. The crowd, which had turned antipoetical by the middle rounds, began booing the instant the decision was announced. The more ardent among them filled the air with crumpled beer cups, cigar stubs, and paper airplanes. Clay took off his gloves and picked up a few of the peanuts that had been hurled at him. He shelled them and, dramatically, ate them. He raised his hands in victory and defiance, but considering his usual level of exuberance, the gesture was ceremonial only. He knew he had failed. Afterward, Clay went up to Harlem for a victory party at Small’s Paradise, but was so sick with exhaustion that he nearly collapsed on his victory cake. With the help of some hangers-on, he made it back to the hotel for a long sleep.

  “I ain’t Superman,” he said uncharacteristically. “If the fans think I can do everything I say I can do, then they’re crazier than I am.”

  When the newspapers went back to work, there were scores of columnists all too eager to lay their reviews on the young performer. Pete Hamill of the New York Post, a much younger and more liberal columnist than the better-known writers at the time, registered his impatience and distaste with the young sensation. “Cassius Clay is a young man with a lot of charm,” he wrote, “who is in danger of becoming a dreadful bore.”

  IN HIS NEXT FIGHT, THREE MONTHS LATER, AGAINST HENRY Cooper at London’s Wembley Stadium in June, Clay did not fare much better. Again he was favored and again his concentration drifted. Once more his prefight promotion was more than any promoter could have hoped for: he paraded around London in a bowler and carrying a cane and pronounced Buckingham Palace a “swell pad.” But he carried his sense of play too far in the ring and risked his chance at a title bout.

  Cooper was known as a one-punch fighter, the possessor of what his countrymen called “ ’Enry’s ’ammer.” But Clay showed no sign of caring. Cooper opened the fight by pushing Clay back on his heels. Clay was faster and his jabs kept bouncing off Cooper’s forehead, but Cooper, performing in front of 55,000 Englishmen, was inspired and far slower to tire than an antique like Archie Moore. In the fourth round, Cooper had Clay against the ropes and lashed out with a terrific blow that spilled Clay to his backside. Clay’s mouth made a little “O” of pain and surprise. Clay was up quickly and the round was over.

  In the comer, Angelo Dundee noticed a slight tear in the seam of Clay’s gloves. If his man had been clearly ahead, if he hadn’t needed some extra time, Dundee might have ignored the flaw, but now he took advantage, sticking his finger in the hole and ripping the seam open even more. Then he called the referee over to show him the tear. During the time-out that followed, Dundee worked on Clay with cold wet sponges and smelling salts, and by the time the bell finally rang for round five, the mists had cleared from his eyes and he was ready. Since he had predicted a win in round five, he went in with a sense of mission, slashing Cooper with ripping jabs and hooks that suddenly turned Cooper’s face into a river delta, so copious were the bloody streams on his brow and cheeks.

  Finally, the referee, Tommy Little, turned to Cooper and held him back.

  “The fight’s over, chum,” he said.

  “We didn’t do so bad for a ‘bum’ and a ‘cripple,’ did we?” Cooper said as he left.

  Clay claimed that he had left himself open for Cooper’s big punch in the fourth because he had glanced overlong at Elizabeth Taylor, who was sitting at ringside. The more skeptical among the fight press disagreed. The kid, they declared, was sometimes amusing, and he had potential, but he was not ready. Even Senator Kefauver, who now seemed to consider himself a professor of the fight game, solemnly told the press that it would be “many years” before Cassius Clay was mature enough to take on the champion.

  Only the champion himself thought otherwise. He would not have to wait long. Liston had sent his manager, Jack Nilon, to London as his emissary, and, after the fight, Nilon went to Clay’s dressing room to give him the news. “I’ve flown three thousand miles to tell you we’re ready,” Nilon said.

  NILON, OF COURSE, WAS SURE HE WAS THE LION’S AMBASSADOR announcing to the lamb a willingness to engage. After the Jones fight, and now the u
neven performance against Henry Cooper, Cassius Clay looked like nothing but easy money to the Liston camp. Liston took no fights after his second defeat of Patterson. His image as a destroyer was built on the two minutes it took him to win the title and the two minutes it took him to defend it. And now he was waiting for Clay. Despite the young man’s flawed performances against Jones in New York and then Cooper in London, no other challenger on the scene would attract such a gate—and, in Liston’s mind, few challengers would be easier to dispatch.

  Clay knew that Liston thought he’d gotten the better of him at the craps table in Las Vegas. Now he had to change the psychological balance of power. And so before the two fighters even sat down to contract negotiations, Clay decided he had to goad the bear out of his hibernation and his lip-smacking self-satisfaction.

  “I had been studying Liston, careful, all along, ever since he come up in the rankings, and Patterson was trying to duck him,” Clay told Alex Haley in a Playboy interview. “His fighting style, his strength. His punch. Like that—but that was just a part of what I was looking at. Any fighter will study them things about somebody he wants to fight. The big thing for me was observing how Liston acted out of the ring. I read everything I could where he had been interviewed. I talked with people who had been around him, or had talked with him. I would lay in bed and put all of the things together and think about them, to try to get a good picture of how his mind worked. And that’s how I first got the idea that if I would handle the thing right, I could use psychology on him—you know, needle him and work on his nerves so bad that I would have him beat before he ever got in the ring with me. And that’s just what I did.… I set out to make him think what I wanted him thinking; that all I was was some clown, and that he never would have to give a second thought to me being able to put up a real fight when we got into the ring. The press, everybody—I didn’t want nobody thinking nothing except that I was a joke.”

  As if running west from his arrest record in Philadelphia, Liston had since moved to Denver, declaring, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Denver than the mayor of Philadelphia.” Clay decided to pay him a visit. Clay had bought a 1953 Flexible thirty-passenger bus the same colors as his childhood Schwinn, red and white. And like Toro Molino in The Harder They Fall, he turned the bus into his mobile camp and advertising vehicle. He painted a sign reading “World’s Most Colorful Fighter: Liston Must Go in Eight.” With one of his Muslim friends, Archie Robinson, and the man who would become his closest and most loyal friend, the photographer Howard Bingham, Clay set out for Denver to play with Sonny Liston’s mind.

  When they reached the Denver city limits at about two in the morning, Clay called the local papers and wire services and told them to gather around Liston’s house in a little while for a good show. The bus pulled up to the house at around three, and the press was in place. Clay sent Howard Bingham to the door.

  Liston answered wearing a silk robe and shortie pajamas.

  “What you want, you black motherfucker?” the champion said by way of greeting.

  On the curb, Clay and his friends were shouting, “Come on out of there! I’m going to whip you right now! Come on out of there and protect your home! If you don’t come out of that door, I’m gonna break it down!”

  Liston was reluctant to make a move. He was well aware that with his police record a fight in the middle of the street could lead to another arrest and another round of bad publicity in the papers.

  “At first I couldn’t get him really mad, because he had this idea fixed in his mind,” Clay recalled. “But I kept right on working on him. A man with Liston’s kind of mind is very funny. He ain’t what you would call a fast thinker like I am. He’s got one of them bulldog kind of minds.”

  But before anything more could happen, neighbors called the police and the police sent Clay and his merry pranksters on their way. Liston closed the door and went back inside. According to his sparring partner Foneda Cox, he was furious and confused. Perfect. Clay went home happy, satisfied that he had accomplished what he had set out to do.

  “While I was fighting Jones and Cooper,” he said, “Liston was up to his neck in all of that rich, fat ritual of the champion. I’d nearly clap my hands every time I read or heard about him at some big function or ceremony, up half the night and drinking and all that. I was looking at Liston’s age, too.… What made it even better for me was when Liston just half-trained for the Patterson rematch and Patterson looked worse yet—and Liston signed to fight me, not rating me even as good as he did Patterson. He felt like he was getting ready to start off on some bum-of-the-month club like Joe Louis did. He couldn’t see nothing at all to me but mouth.”

  The truth was that almost no one could see much beyond that. The Liston people were sure of a knockout, and so, too, was the Louisville Sponsoring Group. “I have to be honest: until the last minute, I knew that Cassius couldn’t possibly beat Sonny Liston, and when the time came to draw up contracts my entire orientation was that this was going to be his last fight,” the group’s lawyer, Gordon Davidson, said. “My only prayer was that Cassius wouldn’t get hurt.”

  On November 5, 1963, Liston’s representatives signed contracts in Denver to defend the title against Cassius Clay. The fight was scheduled for February 25, 1964, in Miami and would be shown live on closed circuit in theaters around the country.

  Miami, 1963. Playing with the Beatles.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hype

  THE PROMOTER OF THE LISTON-CLAY FIGHT WAS WILLIAM B. MacDonald, a former bus conductor who had made so great a fortune that he now got around in two Rolls-Royces and a fifty-foot cruiser named Snoozie. MacDonald was born in Butte in 1908, the descendant, he said, of generations of sheep thieves. There being few sheep to steal in Butte, he came to Miami and made his money in the parking business, then in laundry and dry cleaning, then in restaurant management, trucking, mobile homes, and a mortgage company based in San Juan, He married a Polish woman named Victoria and, just for fun, bought a stud farm in Delray Beach and a Class D baseball team called the Tampa Tarpons. MacDonald handed out gold cuff links like Chiclets. He lived in a quarter-million-dollar house in Bal Harbour and retained an assistant named Sugar Vallone, late of the bartending trade. His generosity as a father was unparalleled. He built his daughter a tree house with drapes and carpeting matching the main house, and for his daughter’s eighth birthday he installed a jukebox in the tree. Bill MacDonald had a good time. He smoked his cigars and ate his steaks. He played golf and decorated his walls with the many marlin he had pulled out of the Atlantic. On the golf course, driving his cart, he held a Coke in his right hand and a root beer in his left, and steered with his forearms and his belly. He was very fat.

  MacDonald had enjoyed his experience so far in the boxing business. He made some money, if not a lot, promoting the third Patterson-Johansson fight. When he first talked to Chris Dundee about a Liston-Clay title bout, it seemed a no-lose proposition. There was money to be made, what with all the big-money tourists and the winter crowds in Miami in February. How could it flop? Liston was already the most fearsome presence in boxing since Louis and Marciano, and Clay, with his mouth flapping, would sell as many tickets as the Miami fire laws would permit. No lose. And so MacDonald, who had $800,000 invested in the fight, serenely pegged the top ticket at an unprecedented $250.

  MacDonald envisioned a great night, the ring surrounded by movie people and all the usual hustlers, the big-roll guys. He wanted all the big faces up close. “A guy calls me, for instance, wants to buy a hundred-dollar seat for Andy Williams,” he told a reporter for Sports Illustrated. “I tell him Andy Williams’s got to be up there with the big kids. I can’t imagine him sitting back there with the little kids. He’s got to be in there with the wheels, not the hubcaps.”

  Although MacDonald was not exactly expert in boxing, he was smart enough to tell the writers he was acutely aware of the possibility of surprise in the fight. “I figure Clay to win it,” he said. “He’ll take the t
itle if he stays away, jabs and runs, but the little jerk is so egotistical—he’s getting hysterical—he thinks he can punch Liston’s nose sideways. It’s liable to be a stinky fight to watch, but if Clay gets by seven or eight he’s likely to win it.” One could appreciate the sentiment if not the subtlety of MacDonald’s maneuver. You don’t sell tickets when David has no shot at Goliath.

  MacDonald did not expect Liston to get into a verbal war with Clay before the fight. Liston had become so accustomed to hearing about himself as the indomitable champion, a seven-to-one favorite at the minimum, that he trained at the Surfside Civic Auditorium in North Miami Beach with a smug air of business as usual. In contrast to Clay’s gloriously dismal surroundings at the Fifth Street Gym, Liston sparred with air-conditioning. An announcer would intone the next station of the cross—“The champion at the heavy bag”—and Liston would pound away for a short while. Then his cornermen, led by Willie Reddish, would rush to him and towel him off as if he were Cleopatra. Reddish would wing a medicine ball at Liston’s gut a dozen times and then Liston would skip rope to “Night Train,” as he had on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  “Note that the champion’s heels never touch the board,” the master of ceremonies announced. “He does all this off his toes.”

  Liston trained the way Liberace played piano; it was a garish representation of a boxer at work. If Liston was taking Clay at all seriously, it was very hard to tell. He would not even deign to pretend to loathe his challenger. “I don’t hate Cassius Clay,” he said. “I love him so much I’m giving him twenty-two and a half percent of the gate. Clay means a lot to me. He’s my baby, my million-dollar baby. I hope he keeps well and I sure hope he shows up.” Liston’s only health concern, he allowed, was for the destiny of his vaunted left fist: “It’s gonna go so far down his throat, it’ll take a week for me to pull it out again.”