Blood Brothers (12 page)

As a secretary of the mosque, Barnette witnessed how Captain Clarence X and “his terror squad” intimidated Boston Muslims into buying more copies of
Muhammad Speaks
than they could sell. If Captain Clarence and his lieutenants could not collect money from the men, they took them for a ride to Franklin Park and taught them a painful lesson about financial obligations. When more than forty men quit the mosque, Elijah Muhammad Jr., Assistant Supreme Captain of the Fruit, visited Boston, reminding the faithful that “in the old days recalcitrant brothers were killed.” “And,” he warned, “the Messenger fulfills all.”
⁴⁴

Disillusioned with the Nation, Barnette left the mosque nearly two years later. But no Muslim ever really left the Nation. Captain Clarence made sure of that. One afternoon, when Barnette and another former
Muslim drove past the mosque in Roxbury, a pink Cadillac cut them off. In broad daylight, Clarence and his squad dragged Barnette from the car, punching and stomping on him, fracturing his ankle, ribs, and vertebrae. “I believe,” he said later, “we were beaten as punishment for quitting and also as a warning to us to keep our mouths shut.”
⁴⁵

The fratricidal violence within the Nation usually occurred out of sight, far removed from anything Cassius Clay ever saw in the mosques that he visited. But tales of attacks against obstinate blacks terrified Muhammad's followers. Although he refused to let the Fruit retaliate against whites, Muhammad approved corporal punishment against his own people. Such abuse alienated many members. In Harlem, a street corner speaker complained to Louis Lomax, “Those damn Muslims are too scared to do anything to the white man; all they do is talk and beat up on other niggers!”
⁴⁶

I
N MID
-A
UGUST
, after Elijah Muhammad delivered a sermon to a disappointingly small crowd in St. Louis, he attempted to tighten his hold on Malcolm. In a private meeting, Elijah told the increasingly disobedient minister that he disapproved of the way that he deviated from his message, talking publicly about politics and civil rights. In the following months, Muhammad reminded him not to make any more appearances on college campuses without receiving his permission. Before agreeing to let Malcolm speak anywhere, Muhammad wanted to “know exactly how” he would “carry out such a program in advance.”
⁴⁷

For a time, Malcolm decided that he should avoid the spotlight. He declined cover story requests from
Life
and
Newsweek
and turned down a television interview on
Meet the Press.
He also noticed that his name and picture disappeared from the pages of
Muhammad Speaks
after Herbert Muhammad replaced him as editor.
⁴⁸

Elijah resented all the attention focused on Malcolm, even though he had made him the Nation's spokesman. He especially disliked the way that people lionized Malcolm for his intellectual superiority and rhetorical eloquence. Muhammad's insecurities festered, fueling his paranoia over comparisons to the younger man, who claimed that he had learned everything from Elijah. But unlike Malcolm, Muhammad made grammatical errors in his speeches and stumbled over words he did not recognize. Lacking any formal education beyond the fourth
grade, he struggled while reading aloud. His sermons rarely impressed or excited audiences the way that Malcolm's did. “To be able to listen to Muhammad for any length of time,” one observer commented, “you had to be a believer, convinced in advance.”
⁴⁹

Muhammad worried that the controversies surrounding Malcolm's public appearances would invite closer scrutiny from the government. On August 15, three days after the St. Louis rally, Congressman Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), condemned the Black Muslims as a subversive group influenced by communists and announced that an investigation would begin soon.
⁵⁰

When he heard about the HUAC probe, Muhammad became agitated. Although the Muslims were ardent anticommunists, the government suspected that a tinge of red ran through their teachings. It did not help that two years earlier, in Harlem, Malcolm had met with Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro without Elijah's approval. Castro had been in New York to condemn the United States before the United Nations. At the time Muhammad had suspected that the meeting would come back to haunt him. But Malcolm maintained, “We will welcome any investigation, we have nothing to hide.”
⁵¹

Malcolm may have believed that he had nothing to hide, but Cassius Clay did. A month after HUAC announced that it would investigate the Nation, the heavyweight contender appeared in a photograph at the bottom of a page in the September 15 issue of
Muhammad Speaks
. Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and bow tie, Clay seemed completely comfortable smiling for the camera, as if someone were snapping a picture of him and his brother at a family reunion rather than at a Muslim rally in St. Louis. No one interviewed him for
Muhammad Speaks
, as athletes received little coverage in the paper. He was not yet considered an important figure in the Muslims' national agenda, but for the second time in two months he traveled a great distance to hear Elijah Muhammad and to spend more time with Malcolm.
⁵²

Clay's fascination with the Nation evolved alongside his growing notoriety as a boxer. At a time when the government planned an extensive, if unwarranted, investigation into the organization, Clay risked his boxing career by associating with the Nation. Remarkably, the blacks
who saw him in Detroit and St. Louis never shared that information with reporters. If a black writer recognized him at one of the rallies or noticed his picture in
Muhammad Speaks
, or a white writer caught wind of him shaking hands with Malcolm X, it could have ended his career.

Chapter Five

THE WINTER OF BOXING

            
The boxing game was slowly dying

            
And fight promoters were bitterly crying

            
For someone somewhere to come along

            
For a better and different song.

            
Patterson was dull, quiet and sad

            
And Sonny Liston was just as bad

            
Along came a kid named Cassius Clay

            
Who said, “I'll take Liston's title away.”

—CASSIUS CLAY,
EBONY
, MARCH
1963

C
assius Clay's involvement with the Nation was not the only threat to his career. Prizefighting was in a sorry state and was dying in New York. By 1962, everything wrong with the sport—from its endemic mismatches and ring fatalities to its shady characters and fixed fights—was magnified in Gotham. There had been a time when millions of Americans followed the big New York fights of Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano and reporters trumpeted the results on front-page headlines. Now the coverage of boxing had spilled over into the crime pages. The
New York Times
, as well as such national publications as
Sports Illustrated
and
Time
, featured the illegal antics of promoters, managers, and fighters. To make matters worse, Sonny Liston, the most dynamic heavyweight of the early 1960s, had a past so nefarious that he was barred from fighting in the Empire State. Always the bellwether for the sport, the New York fight game pealed as mournfully as a death knell. Boxing needed a heavyweight savior, and no contender was rising more quickly or loudly than the undefeated Louisville Lip. The question was whether he could ascend fast enough to reverse the rapid descent of the sport.

Liston's face was broad, flat, and impassive, his eyes cold and threatening. Just his look was enough to win most confrontations. But his face suggested something even more sinister.
Getty Images

Less than a month after disposing of George Logan in Los Angeles in April 1962, Clay was back in New York for another test. Matched against Billy Daniels, a former Air Force boxer who was 10–0 as a professional, the publicist promoted the contest as a fight between the two finest young heavyweights in America. But Cassius promised to finish him in the fifth round, telling reporters, “I would be embarrassed if he lasted any more.”
¹

The match was a disappointment. Only 1,642 spectators attended the bout at New York's historic St. Nicholas Arena, and neither boxer lived up to their hype. Daniels came out in the first and hit Clay with a powerful left-right combination. As the customers “cheered lustily,” Cassius “tottered and blinked his eyes,” then “went on his bicycle” in an effort to avoid further damage. In the second and third rounds, Clay came back. He bloodied Daniels's nose in the second and cut his right eyebrow in the third. It was a deep, ugly gash, and Daniels's cut man could not effectively stop the bleeding. In the fourth Clay went to work
on the eye, and by the seventh the blood was hampering Daniels's vision. At that point, the referee stopped the fight.
²

The Daniels contest may have been a slip for Clay, but it was no knockdown. He had won, and his undefeated record stood fast. All he needed to continue his ascent was a convincing victory over a contender. With his keen sense for fighters just beginning their decline, Angelo Dundee accepted an offer against Alejandro Lavorante in Los Angeles.

In November 1961, Lavorante, bare-chested, his fists up in a fighter's pose, appeared on the cover of
The Ring
. In the accompanying feature story, Nat Fleischer made him seem like the future of the division. Pinky George, his American manager, asserted that the twenty-five-year-old was ready to fight anyone. “This is the year of the astronaut,” he told the magazine's editor. “Everyone is shooting for the moon. We're doing the same.”
³

It wasn't all hyperbole. Lavorante knocked out highly rated Zora Folley and became a ranked contender. But he fought too often and was brought along too fast. On March 30, 1962, former light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore gave Lavorante a cruel boxing lesson. Struggling to compete, swallowing too much of his own blood, the Argentine boxer absorbed a frightful beating. After the referee stopped the bout in the tenth round, Lavorante slumped to the ropes and had to be taken to his dressing room on a stretcher.
⁴

Less than four months after the defeat, Lavorante was back in the ring against a younger, stronger, better-conditioned boxer than ancient Archie Moore. He was at a crossroads. A loss to Clay would be more significant, indicating that his career was sinking, and boxing insiders recognized it. “When two fighters are on the way up, they avoid each other as scrupulously as two women wearing the same dress at a party,” wrote Jim Murray. Before the Moore fight, Angelo Dundee would have never matched Cassius against Lavorante. But Archie had exposed him, and it was clear to Dundee that “the tango was over” for the Argentine.
⁵

Clay dominated the bout from the opening bell. He staggered Lavorante in the second, opened a cut over his left eye in the fourth, and knocked him down twice in the fifth. Sprawled wide-legged on the canvas after the second knockdown, the Argentine took a full ten count.
⁶

Lavorante rose slowly but recovered before heading back to the dressing room. His manager was grim. A few days before the contest, Pinky George had commented that the fight was critical to his boxer's future. “It's back to the minors if we lose,” he predicted.
⁷

Two months after losing to Clay he fought Johnny Riggins, a preliminary boxer who had lost seven of his previous nine matches. In the sixth round Riggins landed a series of punches, the final one a vicious uppercut that twisted Lavorante's brain stem, causing threadlike veins to hemorrhage. His head swiveled violently and his eyes rolled to the tops of the sockets. He did not so much fall as crumble, finally coming to rest in an awkward sitting position against the lower rope, his head dropping in a sleeping position toward his chest and his arms falling lifeless into his lap.
⁸

An ambulance rushed Lavorante to California Lutheran Hospital, and a surgeon operated immediately to remove blood clots and relieve pressure on his brain. But the fighter never recovered. He sank into a coma, and on April Fool's Day 1964, nineteen months after his last boxing match, he died. He had arrived in America just over four years before. An overly ambitious manager had filled his head with dreams of shooting for the moon, but in the ring, Alejandro Lavorante was like “a child playing in traffic, a blind man heading for a cliff.” And rather than intervening, “people
PAID
to see it.”
⁹

T
HE FATE OF
Alejandro Lavorante epitomized the state of boxing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the years between the emergence of Joe Louis in 1935 and the retirement of Rocky Marciano in 1956, the sport luxuriated in a golden age of great fighters and matches, enormous attention and popularity, and million-dollar gates. When World War II ended, television, just in its infancy, fell in love with pugilism, and by the mid-1950s a fight was being broadcast virtually every night of the week. As comedian Red Skelton quipped, “The Monday fight, scheduled for Tuesday this Wednesday, has been postponed till Thursday and rescheduled for Friday this Saturday because Sunday's a holiday.”
¹⁰

Then, with an unimaginable speed, it ended. The great fighters retired or, worse, kept fighting after their skills had eroded. Television's romance with the sport resulted in a series of financially rocky divorces. Louis and Marciano were replaced by lesser men who were only willing
to risk their titles against still-lesser boxers. Even worse, a series of exposés and criminal investigations revealed boxing's hideous underbelly of violent mobsters, fixed fights, heartless exploitation, and battered fighters.

The problems of the sport were years in the making, but they crystallized before a national television audience in Madison Square Garden on the night of Saturday, March 24, 1962. That evening, ABC's
The Fight of the Week
pitted Cuban Benny “the Kid” Paret against Virgin Islander Emile Griffith for the welterweight championship. The two had battled for the title twice before, Griffith winning the first in a knockout and Paret taking the second in a close decision. There was also bad blood between them. At the morning weigh-in, when Griffith stripped to his underwear and stepped on the scale, the Spanish-speaking Paret moved in close and grabbed Griffith's ass, whispering, “Hey
maricón
[faggot], I'm going to get you
and
your husband.”
¹¹

That word—
maricón,
which Gilbert Rogin of
Sports Illustrated
called “the most vulgar epithet in that violent idiom”—and the touch enraged Griffith. His high-pitched voice, tight clothes, and former career as a hat designer had started rumors that he was gay. He jerked away from Paret's touch, telling him to “shut up” and to keep his hands off him or he would fight him then and there.

In the early rounds, the fight was close, but by the twelfth Griffith staggered Paret with several devastating blows. The next seconds were unquestionably the most violent in recorded boxing history. Punching “faster than most observers could count,” as Robert L. Teague of the
New York Times
wrote, Griffith whaled on Paret, landing punch after punch with deadly force. He connected six or seven times with right uppercuts to the point of the chin, and then landed more lefts and rights to Paret's face and temples. In just a matter of seconds, Teague thought that Griffith landed twenty-five unanswered punches. It might have been more, but the exact number hardly mattered. Paret was unconscious, entangled in the corner ropes, well before referee Ruby Goldstein stepped between the two boxers.
¹²

As Goldstein pulled Griffith away from Paret, the Cuban slowly slid from the corner ropes to the canvas. Ringside observer Norman Mailer later wrote that he sensed death in the air as Paret gave an unconscious half-smile and then fell “more slowly than any fighter had ever gone
down, he went down like a large ship which turns on its end and slides second by second into its grave.”
¹³

The bout ended, and the ring swarmed with activity. The senior ringside physician called for a stretcher while TV announcer Don Dunphy scrambled into the ring to get a statement from Emile. After saying how happy he was to regain the title, Griffith added, “I hope Paret is feeling very good.” Ignoring the chaos in the ring, Dunphy decided that the time was right to unveil ABC's newly developed slow-motion replay system. In nightmarish slow motion, with Emile narrating his brutal beating of Benny, the last conscious seconds of Paret's life were replayed, the man who beat him to death providing the color. All Griffith could do was describe inarticulately how he had killed his opponent.
¹⁴