Blood Brothers (14 page)

Yet the great struggle to determine which black man would represent the aching hopes and smoldering resentments of black Americans was not much of a contest at all. Instead of staying away from Liston, Patterson advanced toward him, trying to slip under what he thought was a slow jab and get close enough to land hooks to Sonny's body and face. But Sonny banged away with several hard hooks, then he pushed a left to the head that sent Patterson sprawling onto the ropes. As Floyd bounced awkwardly off the ropes, Liston hit him with a left, a grazing right, and a devastating left hook that half lifted him off the ground.

Patterson dropped to the canvas like a man who had slipped on ice, landing clumsily and rolling onto his back. Immediately, he maneuvered to his side, managing to elevate his torso slightly. There he hesitated, shaking his head a few times in an attempt to regain his senses. Finally, he struggled to his feet. But it was too late. Referee Frank Sikora had counted him out at two minutes ten seconds of the first round. Summarizing the match, Gilbert Rogin reconfigured a Churchillian phrase, writing, “Never have so many paid so much to see so little.”
³³

Spectators trudged out of Comiskey Park and theaters across the country feeling disappointed, if not cheated. Liebling insisted that Patterson was “a nice young man—kind to children, socially conscious, conscientious about his work”—who did not quit: “he just got licked.” As for Floyd, he slunk out of Comiskey wearing a fake beard and mustache and drove through the early morning hours to New York. Still in disguise the next day, he went to the airport and bought a ticket to Madrid, where he stayed for a week or so, limping through the poorer section of town like an old man and eating soup because, he said, that was what an old man would eat.
³⁴

Liston, “who had once been a tool of mobsters” and who kept running afoul of the police, was the new titleholder. Although Sonny claimed that he planned to prove that he could be a “good and decent champion,” few insiders believed he could change his old habits. Boxing, some thought, was dying. The death of Paret and the ascendancy of Liston seemed to seal its fate.
³⁵

I
N THE MINUTES
before the Patterson-Liston fight, boxing's two most vocal practitioners were introduced in the ring. The younger man received little attention. He was, after all, still lightly regarded as something of a comic novelty. “Ladies and gentleman, heavyweight contender, Cassius Clay,” the announcer intoned. Cassius swung through the ropes wearing a black tie and shouting something, “as insolent as ever,” James Baldwin commented dismissively. In Norman Mailer's twenty-thousand- word article on the match, Clay did not even rate a mention. Of more interest to the novelists and fans was the stylish veteran Archie Moore, elegant in a black opera cape and carrying a cane. He entered the ring with the panache of a stage performer, twirling his cape with the flair of a magician.
³⁶

At that moment, when so much talk was about the death of boxing, neither Cassius nor Archie seemed in a position to change the sport's fate. For all his boasting and predicting, Clay was still young, “a barely discernible figure on the distant horizon,” commented Arthur Daley. His record was padded with no-name boxers, over-the-hill fighters, and other assorted paper tigers. And Archie Moore was clearly a boxer on his way out of the sport. Like Liston, his birth date was a mystery, but whether it was 1913 or 1915, it was definitely during Woodrow Wilson's first term. As he neared his fiftieth birthday, the fact that he was still boxing and articulate seemed miraculous. He was a monument to the sport's past, not a cornerstone of its future.
³⁷

For Angelo Dundee, old, out-of-shape Archie, a former light-heavyweight champion who had been stripped of his crown by sanctioning bodies, was both an ideal stepping-stone and a potentially lucrative draw. Cassius began the buildup for a match minutes after he knocked out Alejandro Lavorante. After slipping out of the ring, he noticed Moore sitting near ringside. Pointing a finger, he scowled, shouting, “You're next, old man! Moore will fall in four.” A few days later Moore responded. “That kid's got a lot to learn. And I'm afraid the ole Professor is gonna have to teach him. I've discovered a few chinks in his armor.”
³⁸

Moore understood Clay's showmanship, but he was also keenly aware of the young man's many talents. Cassius had all of the outrageous fortunes of youth—speed, strength, endurance, and the firm belief in his own destiny. Against those advantages, Archie possessed only experience, guile, and a reputation supported by yellowing newspaper
clippings. He no longer had the skills to compete with the best in the young man's sport. But he needed money.
³⁹

By the fall of 1962, with shrinking television ratings and other boxing cards drawing meager audiences, money seemed to be fleeing the sport. Even the Liston-Patterson match was a bit of a financial disappointment, drawing fewer than twenty thousand fans to Comiskey and a closed-circuit audience forty percent below expectations. With these grim facts in mind, promoters Cal and Aileen Eaton took a cautious approach by staging the Clay-Moore match in the Los Angeles Sports Arena—rather than the larger Coliseum—and initially excluded live radio, television, and closed-circuit-theater broadcasts.
⁴⁰

That was before Clay and Moore began drumming up interest. Clay's routine produced good copy, but while he had once been good-natured and humorous, he had now turned edgy and mean. Archie Moore was a beloved and respected West Coast boxer, the sport's elder statesman, and Cassius treated him like a two-bit bum. When the two appeared together on a half-hour television show called
The Great Debate
, Clay came off not so much as an occasional scene-stealer but as a serial scene-mugger. As soon as Moore said “Good evening,” Cassius began a spontaneous filibuster, drowning out virtually everything Archie tried to say. Moore considered himself a thoughtful speaker and conversationalist, but it was difficult to engage a rabble-rouser and a shouter. “Don't humiliate yourself,” Moore finally said. “Our country depends on its youth. Really, I don't see how you can stand yourself.”
⁴¹

As the interest in the bout mounted, the Eatons decided that the fight had blockbuster potential and maneuvered to increase revenues. Although they maintained a television blackout for the LA area, they did contract for a fifty-five-theater closed-circuit broadcast, adding a potential seating capacity of two hundred thousand. By the night of the match, Clay's predictions of his drawing power were confirmed. The fight sold out the Los Angeles Sports Arena—16,200 spectators paid a total of $182,599, both indoor records for California. Closed-circuit venues in New York, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Seattle, and Louisville also sold out, adding nearly another $250,000 in revenues. In a year when prizefighting was under attack and revenues were falling off a cliff, the Clay-Moore bout was the glittering exception. The Louisville Lip, the Mouth That Roared, was a certifiable cash cow.
⁴²

The term “Battle of the Ages,” as it was called, was accurate in only its most literal sense. In two years as a professional, Cassius had filled out into a sleek heavyweight of just over two hundred pounds and had entered his prime. His face creased with age, Moore was old and flabby, with a welted scar on his stomach that looked like it was from some primitive operation. Jimmy Cannon wrote that Archie “seemed to be drowning in his own fat.” Before the fight began Clay danced lightly in his corner, bouncing gracefully and rolling his shoulders. Moore managed a few knee bends, the limbering calisthenics of an old man getting ready to jog around the block. Cassius had predicted “Moore in four,” and nothing about the appearance of the two indicated that the match would not follow the young man's boast.
⁴³

And so it went. As Al Buck of the
New York Post
summarized, “a 20-year-old youth beat up a tired 50-year-old veteran of too many fights. Ancient Archie was fat and slow. He had nothing left.” Once in the ring, Clay demonstrated his superiority. From the beginning of the contest, Cassius circled around Archie, who tried to protect himself with his familiar cross-armed defense. He threw an unusual number of punches for a heavyweight, repeatedly bouncing them off the top of Moore's head. Archie ducked and weaved, avoiding many of the shots, but not nearly enough. “Clay missed 100 punches,” said Moore's trainer, Dick Sadler, “but he threw 200.”

The punches were not as heavy as Liston's, but they had a cumulative effect. “His speed was too much for me,” Moore recalled. “You see, he had a style, he would hit a man a lot of times around the top of the head. And if you hit the top of a man's head, you shake up his thought pattern.” By the fourth round, Moore was as disoriented as a man who had just stepped off of a Tilt-a-Whirl. His face, commented Gilbert Rogin, was “as red as a boy who has been in a jam pot,” and his body was covered with traces of whiplash punches. Quickly, with a flurry of shots, Clay knocked him down, sending Archie's mouthpiece skipping across the ring like a smooth rock across a pond. Dancing, raising his arms, and admiring his handiwork, he remained above Moore until the referee pushed him to a neutral corner. Moore got up at the count of eight, but Clay knocked him down a second time. Again he struggled off the canvas, and once more Clay knocked him down. The referee waved his arms, signaling the end of the contest.

Sitting at ringside, watching the fight with a benign smile, Sonny Liston seemed gratified with the results. Clay had demonstrated that he could fill an arena as well as shown Liston that he lacked real power. After the bout, Cassius had pointed at Liston, shouting, “You're next. I'll fix you in eight rounds.”

“If you can go eight seconds with me, I'll give you the fight,” Liston answered.
⁴⁴

B
Y THE END
of 1962, boxing was creaking back to life. “Clay ‘Saved' Sad Year for Boxing,” headlined the
Los Angeles Times
. It had been an awful year. Paret had died, Lavorante was dying, Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson were limping toward the ends of their careers, and Liston and his gang had captured the heavyweight title. But in a series of matches in Los Angeles, Clay had revealed an ability to attract spectators. He seemed, as he often proclaimed, the savior of the sport.
⁴⁵

Boxing's savior he was. He had the golden touch, the Gorgeous George magic that put customers in seats. He displayed his special talent in November in Los Angeles against Moore, and then repeated it in January in Pittsburgh against Charley Powell, an exceptional athlete but not proficient enough a boxer to challenge Clay. A week after his twenty-first birthday, Cassius knocked him out in the third round. Yet in subzero weather, more than eleven thousand fans, a local indoor record, paid to boo the undefeated boxer.
⁴⁶

It was just before the Powell match that in a conversation with sportswriter Mort Sharnik, Cassius revealed a different side of himself. Without confessing his ties to the Nation of Islam, he began talking about spirituality. He wondered why he couldn't have visitations from God. Sharnik recalled, “He was saying that Moses spoke to God and the prophets spoke to God, and why couldn't he speak to God?” It was a curious observation. Sitting in a room in Pittsburgh, preparing to fight a powerful boxer whom he had dubbed “Frankenstein,” Cassius seemed more interested in his relationship with God. “I had the feeling he sensed he was a special vessel, that he might be ordained for special things,” the writer recalled.
⁴⁷

Sharnik did not understand the source of Clay's power. He was unaccustomed to athletes speaking so openly about deeply personal matters. But Sharnik had not spoken so intensely with Malcolm X, for
whom profound religious conversations were common. Malcolm knew a man who did speak with God. And in the months since he met Clay, he had followed the boxer in newspapers, watching his career blossom. It was time, Malcolm had decided, to visit Cassius, attend one of his fights, and talk about a new message.

Chapter Six

APOLLO

            
Coffee is the only thing I like integrated.

—MALCOLM X

            
I want to integrate my coffee. I don't want to drink it black. Think I'll have my coffee weak this morning.

—CASSIUS CLAY

E
lijah Muhammad's children distrusted Malcolm. They were certain that he coveted the Messenger's throne. In early 1963, they became especially concerned about their father's chronic bronchial asthma. If his health deteriorated, they wondered, who would lead the Nation? Thin as a scarecrow, weighing only one hundred and twenty-five pounds, Elijah couldn't shake a persistent cough. He was so weak that he sent a telegram to Chicago informing his followers that he could not attend the annual Saviours' Day convention, the holiest day in the Nation of Islam. In his place, Malcolm would serve as master of ceremonies, an appointment that drove an even deeper wedge between him and Elijah's children.
¹

In late February, on the eve of the convention, Malcolm met with Elijah's son Wallace to discuss the most urgent problem in the Nation: the Messenger's affairs. Recently paroled after serving more than a year in prison for draft evasion, Wallace arrived in Chicago stunned by rumors of his father's infidelities. He was shocked to see two women standing out in the cold on his father's lawn, holding babies that they claimed belonged to the Messenger. The women said that they would
not leave until Elijah acknowledged the children. Wallace knew the women, he said, and shortly thereafter confirmed to Malcolm that the children belonged to Elijah.
²

During the convention, Elijah's children complained that Malcolm had taken over. When they asked to hear Wallace speak on stage, Malcolm said that there was not enough time for him to address the assembly. The tension escalated when Malcolm called a family meeting, and announced his plan to confront numerous problems harming the Nation. Undercover FBI agents reported that the family “was especially resentful of [Malcolm's] attempts to advise and tell the family what to do.”
³

When his children grumbled about Malcolm's lingering presence in Chicago, Elijah dismissed their complaints, reminding them that Malcolm was responsible for “boosting us up” throughout the country. On other occasions, though, he admitted that he had always known that Malcolm would breach his trust and that he had no business discussing “a family affair”—
his
affairs.
⁴

On March 10, Elijah telephoned his son-in-law, Raymond Sharrieff. Raymond explained that Malcolm had not yet left Chicago and planned to make more public appearances later in the week. Elijah gave Raymond an order: tell Malcolm to go home and check on Betty.
⁵

During the flight back to New York, Malcolm mulled over his conversations with Elijah's former secretaries. The women told him that Muhammad had said that he was the best minister in the Nation but that his ambition made him “dangerous.” Someday, Muhammad predicted, Malcolm would leave him. It was only a matter of time. Listening to the women, Malcolm learned that while Elijah praised him to his face, “he was tearing me apart behind my back.” Just thinking about Elijah's words made it hard to breathe. He felt betrayed.
⁶

What Elijah did not know was that Malcolm already had plans to return to New York City so that he could attend the biggest prizefight of the year, a bout involving Cassius Clay. Since meeting Malcolm nine months earlier, Cassius had attended more Muslim meetings, ingratiating himself with the Harlem minister. But no one outside the Nation suspected that Malcolm had taken an interest in the young boxer. Elijah himself had no idea that Malcolm planned to sit ringside at Madison Square Garden during his next match.

When a reporter asked Malcolm what he thought about prizefighting, he called it “a racket.” “Commercialized sport is the pleasure of the idle rich,” he said. Rich white men exploited poor men who beat up other poor men. “The vice of gambling stems from it.” No one appreciated this better than Big Red. He was, after all, a product of the street, a former “sport” who had lived the life of urbanity, gambling, and vice. It was the same world occupied by boxers, promoters, and hustlers who ran the fight game. It was a world of backroom deals, late-night escapades, and easy women.
⁷

Malcolm nevertheless understood the cultural power wielded by champions. He had matured during the age of Joe Louis, the most admired and talked-about black man of the 1930s. He recalled that in 1937, when Louis defeated heavyweight champion James Braddock, “all the Negroes in Lansing, like Negroes everywhere, went wildly happy with the greatest celebration of race pride our generation had ever known. Every Negro boy old enough to walk wanted to be the next Brown Bomber.”
⁸

Malcolm recognized that unlike Joe Louis, Cassius Clay refused to let white men control him. The brash young boxer had shown an independent side, an unwillingness to play by the white man's rules, asserting his freedom in the world of boxing. Sometimes he defied Angelo Dundee's instructions and ignored his advisers in the Louisville Sponsoring Group. Many white fans and sportswriters who disapproved of his gloating in the ring would have preferred that he stand in the corner after he won a match, like Louis, gracious and expressionless.

The fact that Cassius spoke his mind, attended Muslim meetings, and reached out to the minister, risking his career, convinced Malcolm that he was not the white man's puppet. Perhaps, Malcolm thought, he could mold him like a lump of clay, sculpting him into a new kind of black champion—a champion of Black Nationalism. But to do that, to become the heavyweight champion of the world, the Muslim's champ, and a powerful voice carrying Malcolm's message, Clay had to beat Doug Jones.
⁹

C
ASSIUS WAS IN
New York City to sell tickets. Scheduled to box third-ranked heavyweight contender Doug Jones in Madison Square Garden on March 13, 1963, he faced a daunting promotional task. Jones was a
very good boxer, small for a heavyweight, though a fine defensive fighter with solid punching power. He had won twenty-one of his twenty-five professional matches, and his three losses and one draw had been by decision to boxers of his caliber. Competent and workmanlike in the ring, he was undistinguished outside the ropes, and he most emphatically was not a drawing card.

Cassius had to do the talking for both men, a task he attacked with relish. On Sunday, February 3, he kicked off his campaign with an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, a popular variety program. Once a sportswriter and still a boxing fan, Sullivan regularly introduced boxers on his show and plugged upcoming matches.
¹⁰

Sullivan tried to put the boxer at ease by asking him if he had a prediction for the Jones fight. “I understand that Jones likes to mix, but he must fall in six,” Cassius replied.

“Suppose I were to box you, how far would I go?” the host asked.

“Well, Ed, if you run, I'll have to cut it to one.”

“One round?”

“No, one punch.”

Then, for a moment, Clay became nervous and misspoke. “I'm not just a musician in the ring, I'm not . . . ah, ah . . . I'm not just a musician in the ring, I'm the same out of the ring.” He meant to say that he was a magician in and out of the ring, and to prove his point he took a blue scarf out of his pocket, waved it a few times, and, presto, transformed it into a cane.

Cassius loved magic, and his trick looked professional, winning instant applause from the audience. But what no one at the time realized—or would recognize for some time to come—was that his life had come to resemble his magic. A good magician makes you see what he wants you to see, concealing from your gaze what he wants to hide. He is like a great boxer who, as former light-heavyweight champion José Torres once suggested, lies for a living. “Champions and good fighters are champions and good fighters because they can lie better than the others. The first thing you learn in the gym is that you have to have a double personality if you are to become a good fighter.” Torres understood that to reach a championship level, a boxer had to employ feints and fakes to make his opponent look at one hand when he was about to get hit with the other.
¹¹

Cassius, too, had a deceptive personality. At the beginning of 1963, Cassius's magic showed the world a buffoonish, loudmouth clown while hiding his growing relationship with Malcolm X and his inner feelings about race in America. In public, he shouted, “I am the greatest!” repeating doggerel and refining his Gorgeous George routine. In private, he attended Nation of Islam meetings and memorized the speeches of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Inside Cassius Clay was Muhammad Ali, but for the moment the magician kept that identity hidden.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
appearing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, Clay traveled to Albany, where the movement to abolish boxing in New York had collided with an army of boxers, baseball players, and journalists. Before a joint legislative committee conducting a hearing into the sport, they formed a line of defense against the politicians, moralists, and reformers out to ban the sweet science. Boxing in New York was cleaner than anywhere else in the world, said Melvin Krulewitch, the New York State Athletic Commission chairman. Boxing is safer than baseball, judged Gil McDougald, former New York Yankee infielder. Boxing “is one area of the sports world where equal opportunity is granted to members of my race,” commented James Hicks of the
New York Amsterdam News
, adding, “Negroes may not be accepted on the tennis courts of Forest Hills . . . but they are accepted as equals in the boxing ring.”
¹²

After almost a decade of close scrutiny and a year of hostile attacks, the sport seemed to be slowly rebounding from its lowest point. Dressed in a dark suit and bow tie, Cassius Clay lectured the committee on the history of pugilism. “Boxing is in the winter of its life now. In the time when there were great fighters like Dempsey and Joe Louis, nobody talked against it. When there are no great fighters, people lose interest.” Boxing was like the march of the seasons. “In the winter, things are cold, things are dead. Spring will come again, and so will summer.”
¹³

Clay himself was the warm breeze of spring, he made perfectly clear. “I am here to liven things up. On March 13, I will be fighting in the Garden, and it will be a total sellout.” After answering a few of the committee's questions, Cassius concluded his testimony. “When he stepped down,” journalist A. J. Liebling observed, “a faint odor of
hubris
, like Lilac Végétal, lingered behind.”
¹⁴

The whiff of spring might have lingered in the committee room, but not Clay, who immediately departed the frigid weather of Albany for the sunshine of Miami. On the first leg of the trip, he rode a train back to New York City. Sitting alone, he stared out the window, looking up at the sky and attempting, it seemed, to see beyond the clouds into the mysteries of space. Growing restless and bored, he switched seats, moving across the aisle to sit next to Frank Deford, a junior sportswriter for
Sports Illustrated
assigned to cover the hearings on the off chance that anything of note took place.
¹⁵

Deford assumed that Clay would want to talk about his testimony, the fate of boxing, or his upcoming match against Doug Jones. But Cassius didn't want to discuss his career. Instead, he grabbed Deford's notepad and pen and started drawing what looked like an elaborate solar system “with lines and circles indicating descending aliens and something or other about God.” The sportswriter knew nothing about the theology of the Nation of Islam. He had no idea that the boxer sitting three feet away from him was reciting what he had learned from Muslim ministers about the Day of Judgment.

Listening to him, Deford thought that this was just another one of his gimmicks, an amusing tale designed to provoke laughter. As Cassius continued lecturing, though, he realized that this was no joke. Clay sincerely believed this story about a “Mother Ship” descending on Earth, saving the true believers.

When they disembarked at Grand Central Terminal, Deford packed his notepad in his briefcase, shaking his head at the “
very amusing but nutty
” story Clay had just told him. Later, when he returned home, he tore out the drawings of spaceships and tossed them into the trash. He did not realize that he had thrown away the best evidence that any sportswriter had to prove that Cassius Clay had embraced the Nation of Islam.
¹⁶

Later in the day, Cassius took another train to Miami, arriving late Friday night. The next day, he returned to the 5th Street Gym to begin training for Jones. As he sparred in the ring, Sonny Liston sauntered in to watch. Liston, who had also arrived on Friday, had come to town to train for his April 4 rematch in Miami with Floyd Patterson. Unconcerned about that fight—he planned to knock out Patterson even “quicker than before”—he decided to scout a future opponent.
¹⁷

“Get him out of here, that bum is spying on me,” Cassius yelled.

The comment prompted an exchange of insults.

“What have I got to spy on you for? You're no fighter,” Sonny shot back, and then offered Cassius a job as his sparring partner.

But Sonny was out of his league in the game of the dozens. “You ain't so hot,” Clay said. “I could leave both legs at home and beat you.” Sonny was nothing but a “big ugly bear,” he shouted as he shifted to a more personal assault. “Ugly! I hate him because he's so ugly. I'll murder the bum,” he told everyone in the gym. Then he began to climb through the ropes to get closer to the champion.
¹⁸