An Accidental Sportswriter (7 page)

Someone asked, “So are you a card-carrying Muslim?”

Clay sounded annoyed. “I go to Black Muslim meetings, 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 go in there. Well, there must be something in there if you don't want me to go in there.”

“What about your responsibility as champion to the youth?”

He quickly replied, “I don't have to be what you want me to be, I'm free to be who I want.”

That sounded like an athletic declaration of independence to me. Maybe my heart didn't quite leap, but it bounced a little. This was going to be a big story, and it was going to be around for a while, and I was going to ride it to the buzzer.

Back in New York, it was obvious that I had made my bones. I was anointed the new boxing writer, which meant the Clay beat was mine. I got a raise. In the next few weeks I scored a series of exclusive interviews: with the newly named Muhammad Ali; with the Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad at his Chicago home while pregnant young “secretaries” padded about; and with Malcolm, recently split from the Muslims, in the back room of a Harlem bookstore. He was witty, wise, intellectually stimulating. Likable. Greg arranged that meeting. When Malcolm told me that my coverage of Ali had been the fairest, I was so pleased I made the mistake of telling the sports editor, who cracked wryly, “That's just great, we'll put it up on the trucks.”

It was the headiest of times, chasing Ali and finishing
Nigger,
which came out that year. My Ali coverage gave me confidence that hard, dogged work would allow me to compete successfully with the top sportswriters. The book gave me confidence that I wasn't confined to sportswriting, that I had choices. There were offers from other places: a column in the
Herald Tribune
, writing lifestyle stories for
Newsweek.
But I loved the
Times
, and the paper loved me back, more raises and more freedom to make my own assignments, more freedom to find my own style. I was twenty-six, and I thought this would last forever.

With that measure of autonomy and the
Times
' willingness to let me travel, the Ali story was a magic carpet, although the ride was not always smooth. There were surreally delicious moments: strolling the beach in Key West with the sensuous Sonji Roi, Ali's first wife, as she told me how sweet he had been and how the Muslims had stolen his mind and broken up their marriage; loitering in his Stockholm hotel room while Swedish reporters berated him for his apparent bias against white women. Why wouldn't he go out with them? Ali tried his redbirds-bluebirds riff, then gave up, bewildered. They were mad because he
wasn't
screwing white women?

There were weird moments. When I tried to explain to him the
Times
' policy of referring to him as Clay instead of Ali because he hadn't changed his name legally, Ali patted my head and said, “You just the white power structure's little brother.” That's what should have gone up on the trucks.

And there were ugly moments. Ali and I quarreled after I questioned him about the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, after he had publicly broken with the Muslims and was on his way to becoming a charismatic international spokesman for peace and understanding. I've always thought that somewhere up the road, Malcolm and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated three years later, would have joined hands and created a powerful moral authority.

Ali made himself unavailable for a while after Malcolm's murder, claiming death threats against himself. I hadn't expected Ali to leave the Nation of Islam when Malcolm did, soon after that first Liston fight. Malcolm was disillusioned by the Nation's religious rigidity, its reactionary politics, and its leader's hypocrisy—those “secretaries” were pregnant by him. Ali was still in thrall to the Honorable Elijah, and by pointedly saying that anyone who turned away from Elijah deserved death, he seemed to be almost offering his preapproval of Malcolm's execution. When I finally got the chance to bring that up to Ali, he brushed it aside, then got annoyed. Malcolm got what he deserved, he said. We went back and forth angrily until someone intervened. (Years later, I forgave him but never forgot my own feelings about his betrayal. It became a bone of contention between me and Ali's fourth wife, Lonnie. She wanted me to stop writing about it.)

This was the first major low point in the cycles of my relationship with Ali. The magical youth was getting tiresome with his dogmatic religionism on one hand and his cunning asides on the other, his sotto voce “I don't believe all the stuff I say,” and, most disconcerting, the continual dismissal of compliments with the throwaway line “I'm just another nigger trying to get bigger,” which I could never get into the paper of record.

The two fights of 1965 were dissatisfying—the first-round “phantom punch” that knocked out Liston in Maine and the cruel tormenting of Floyd Patterson, who had insisted on calling him Cassius Clay in a defense of Christianity and America. Ali shouted, “No contest, get me a contender!” as he carried Patterson for twelve rounds. He could have knocked him out, but he chose to pick him apart with painful blows.

It was a repulsively fascinating fight, but I had to struggle to keep my mind on it. There was a more compelling story line buzzing through my head.

Two nights earlier, I had taken an old boxing manager to dinner. He was rheumy and garrulous and very old, I thought then, although later I figured out he was only fifty-seven, though thirty immeasurable years older than I was at the time. Constantine “Cus” D'Amato, who had managed and trained Floyd Patterson, among others, to championships, was on the skids and going through a depressed period. He had been brought to Las Vegas with “walking-around money” to dress up the fight promotion and regale reporters like me.

He told me about an old gym he had once owned in a rough section of lower Manhattan. The gym was on the third floor, and late at night Cus would sit at the top of two shadowy, twisting flights of stairs with a gun and a German shepherd, listening for footsteps. What he dreamed of hearing was the hesitant yet resolute steps of a kid climbing up those stairs alone, driven by the desperation of his life on the street to fight his fear of the dark stairs and the unknown at the top, a kid who wanted to fight because he wanted to be somebody.

A kid like that, who used his fear as fuel, said Cus, would have a chance to become a contender. I wondered, what kind of kid would dare to come up those steps, what would be going on in his life, what would he find at the top?

The plot formed on the flight home: a black high school dropout, his life a dead end, the local gang on his back, climbs those stairs because he needs to learn to fight. At the top, he learns to live. When I got back to the
Times
office, as if preordained, there was a letter from an editor at Harper & Row Publishers, Ferdinand Monjo. He wondered if I had ever thought of writing a book “with boxing as its milieu.” I called Mr. Monjo right up and began to babble, Yes, I said, I've been thinking about a book with two flights of stairs and a young black hero. I'd call it
The Contender
. Mr. Monjo said, “Go right ahead, dear boy.”

I knew nothing about young adult literature then. This was just my novel, “with boxing as its milieu.” It was linear, it had a seventeen-year-old protagonist, and there was no sex.

The Contender
was a great success when it came out in 1967 and has been in print ever since. The times were right for the book. Government money was available, there was a desperate need for books with minority protagonists, and, perhaps most important, there was a generation of librarians and teachers dedicated to getting realistic fiction into the hands of boys. That's been a mission of mine, too.

. . .

I had just started writing
The Contender
when Ali made his great leap into the cauldron of global politics. I was there to do a feature story on his training for an upcoming fight when it happened.

On February 17, 1966, we were sitting outside his little rented bungalow in Miami, ogling schoolgirls on their way home. On television—although not on his television—Senate hearings raged over the war in Vietnam. Sharp political lines were being drawn. A nation was pulling apart even as I was writing down Ali's best pickup line, “Hey, little girl in the high school sweater, you not gonna pass me by today.”

The phone rang inside the house, and his cook came out. A reporter was calling. When Ali came back, he was fuming. His draft board in Louisville—which had originally classified him as unfit for service, perhaps as a gift to the local pillars of white society who had sponsored Cassius Clay back then—had just reclassified him 1A, ready for combat. His first response was “Why me?”

He began to rant. After embarrassing him with a classification that implied he was too dumb or nutty for the army, how could they suddenly reclassify him without another test? Friends and bodyguards from the Nation of Islam showed up to stoke his mounting fear and fury. He would be called up right away, they said, sent to the front lines, cracker sergeants would drop live grenades down his pants.

Ali became more upset. He was the heavyweight champ. Why didn't the draft board call up some poor boys? Think of how many guns and bombs his taxes paid for. This was hardly the response of the pacifist he would claim to be, but it was real. How much of the antiwar movement was principle, and how much was fear of getting hurt or killed or even of merely having your life interrupted?

Television news trucks pulled up. Interviewers sensed his anger and provoked him further.

“Do you know where Vietnam is?”

“Sure,” he mumbled, but he didn't sound sure.

“Where?”

Ali shrugged. (In 1966, I only dimly knew where Vietnam was.) This went on for hours, questions about war, about going off to kill Viet Cong. It was dusk when a newcomer with a mike asked the question for the hundredth time.

“Well, what do you think about the Viet Cong?”

Exhausted, exasperated, scared, Ali blurted the sound bite that would help define the sixties, a headline sentence that made him simultaneously hated and beloved. He said, “I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong.”

That was the original line. He would repeat it, and it would eventually become “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Everybody in the world except me led with that as if it had been a prepared statement. I heard it as a provoked response. It didn't seem like the key to the story, which I thought was his selfish rant about being drafted. Was I out of touch with the world, too deep into the story? What I thought was a nonstory was only one of the biggest of the decade. It sold a lot of papers.

It got bigger. On April 28, 1967, he refused to step forward and be drafted into the army. Within minutes, it seemed, boxing commissions withdrew their recognition of him as champion and refused to license him to fight in their cities or states. Once indicted and released on bail, he was not allowed to leave the country. For the next three and a half years, prime time for a twenty-five-year-old boxer, he was unable to ply his trade.

Boxing commissions are appointed by politicians, so it was easy to ascribe their actions to patronage or patriotism, but there was another likely reason: the former owners of Ali's contract, the Louisville pillars, had been supplanted by a new company led by Black Muslims. The commissions were concerned that those folks would be a lot harder to deal with than the traditional New York and Las Vegas types who ran American boxing, many of them decadent millionaires and front men for the Mafia.

That year, Ali took a seventeen-year-old Muslim bride as his second wife and slipped off the media screen. I didn't have time to miss him. I was anointed a columnist in September 1967, sharing the “Sports of the
Times
” space with Arthur Daley. I had a sense of power and responsibility.

I kept tabs on Ali in his exile, but I was writing mostly in the mainstream currents: the Olympics, the human rights movement briefly coming to sports, Billie Jean King and women's tennis, and an amazing year and a half in which New York's Mets, Jets, and Knicks all won championships. Tom Seaver! Joe Namath! Bill Bradley!

I wrote more columns about Bradley than anyone other than Ali. He was the anti-Ali, a Princeton- and Oxford-educated, politically aware, white Christian banker's son who had served in the military (a brief air force reserve stint). He avoided the media and selflessly played a team sport. The Knicks' rise, dragging the NBA up with them, occurred during Ali's exile from the ring and my first hitch as columnist.

Much of the media attention was on Bradley's
whiteness
, and how his presence in a sport whose aura was urban schoolyard, black, and drug-ridden helped sell it to a cool New York crowd. That 1969–70 Knicks team image (two whites: the patrician Bradley and the working-class Dave DeBusschere; three diverse blacks: the flashy hipster Walt Frazier, the mysterious intellectual Dick Barnett, and the stoic captain, Willis Reed) was a model for a postracial America. It was clever pop sociology and great marketing but missed what terrific basketball they played together and how crucial Bradley's fierce and heady contribution was. Sometimes I thought Bradley's
jockness
did not get its due. He wanted to win, demanded to win.

Meanwhile, Ali was out growing up, mostly without me. Early on, he had lost the crowd on college campuses with jokey slurs against marijuana and mixed-race couples. He learned from the experience, listened to the questions, asked questions, and eventually became a rousing Black Is Beautiful and antiwar speaker.

I was delighted when he returned to boxing in 1970. My Big Story was moving into a great new chapter, I thought, as I settled into my ringside seat at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, for the so-called Fight of the Century against Joe Frazier.