Blood Brothers (16 page)

The first round began predictably. Clay came out on his toes, circling away from Jones's left leads, flicking out whiplike jabs meant to aggravate more than injure. His head down and protected by his hands, Jones moved straight forward in a direct, no-nonsense fashion, his eyes locked on Clay, looking to land power punches. Both fighters concentrated on head shots, avoiding body punches as if they had been outlawed for the fight.
³⁷

Less than a minute into the bout, Clay made a critical error. Since his amateur days, conventional boxing experts had criticized his habit of avoiding punches by moving straight back instead of slipping to one side or the other. It was like avoiding a speeding train by backing up on the tracks rather than by jumping off them. Now, as Cassius pulled back, Jones leaped forward with a sweeping right hand, landing with devastating power on Clay's chin. Cassius's knees buckled momentarily as he stumbled back into the corner ropes, hitting them hard and bouncing off into a charging Jones. He was hurt, and, as the over eighteen thousand spectators in the Garden rose out of their seats as if they had been shocked, Jones pressed his advantage.

Cassius grabbed Jones's arms, pulled him close, and hugged him like a long-lost friend, placing his face cheek-to-cheek with his opponent's. The desperate maneuver gave him ten or so seconds to clear his head and steady his legs. When the referee pried them apart, Clay fought like a seasoned professional. He backpedaled, pushed out defensive jabs designed to keep Jones at a distance, and gave himself more time to run a check on his senses. A half minute later he was out of danger and back in control of the fight. Jones had missed an opportunity, and Clay was wiser for the exchange. He had taken Jones's best punch, and now he knew just how fast the Harlem fighter could strike.

After the first round, the fight settled into a pattern. Jones worked to connect with another hard right, and Clay fought from a distance, content to score points and avoid damage. Neither combatant was very aggressive, and Liebling contended that both had “repertories . . . as limited as the club fighters.” In the next two rounds Clay landed the most
punches, but when Jones reached Cassius with anything approaching a clean shot, the Garden exploded with cheering. It was the sort of match that the judges had to watch carefully with their eyes so they would not be influenced by their ears.

There was another factor that played against Cassius: his prediction. At the weigh-in he had boasted, “I'm changing the pick I made before. / Instead of six, Doug goes in four.” If he did not fulfill his prophecy, the partisan fans would interpret it as a victory for Jones. And although he increased his attack in the fourth, he was unable to hurt, let alone finish, his opponent.

As the big electric clock in the Garden counted down the seconds in the round and Jones remained upright and strong, the jeers and catcalls built like the climax of a Beethoven symphony. The spectators felt cheated, and they rained insults into the ring. “Clay, you're a big bum! Nothing but a bum!” a ringsider shouted. “You can't fight or write poetry!” cried another. The round ended with Clay landing a hard right at the bell, which created another stir of discontent. The round had come and gone, and Doug Jones moved briskly back to his corner with no sign of damage.

In the middle rounds Jones fought Clay evenly, but the unconditional support of the spectators made it seem like he was winning. In Clay's corner, watching the action and listening to the fervor, Angelo Dundee was alarmed. After the seventh round, he felt the fight slipping away. Imploring Clay to action, he told him “he could kiss Tomato Red goodbye.” That got Cassius's attention. “Dundee shook me up,” he said after the fight. “I came out in the eighth saying, ‘So long Dougie, hello Tomato Red.'”
³⁸

In the last three rounds, Clay consistently landed three or four times as many shots as Jones did. He fought with heart, cutting the distance between Jones and him and taking more chances. Victory, at this juncture, was more important than survival. Following the fight from just behind Clay's corner, Bundini Brown beamed. “When I saw . . . how he bear down . . . and start beatin' the man to death, he made me fall in love. I was with him from that fight on.”
³⁹

The pause between the final bell and the decision seemed interminable. Finally, announcer Johnny Addie approached the microphone: “Both of the judges, Artie Aidala and Frank Forbes, they score it this
way—five, four, one even in favor of Clay.” Cassius had won, and boos showered the ring. Undeterred, the unflappable Addie finished his chores, though the booing made it difficult: “Referee . . . referee . . . referee Joe LoScalzo has it eight, one, one even Clay. The winner by unanimous decision, Cassius Clay.” And the floodgates of discontent opened wide. Spectators screamed and jeered, held their heads in amazement and looked dumbfounded, protesting with all their faculties what they considered a miscarriage of justice.

Cassius egged them on. He raised his hands, opened his mouth wide, mimicking the booing fans while he mugged for the cameras, and stuck out his tongue. As he began the ring interview with Don Dunphy, the spectators commenced a chant: “Fix! Fix! Fix!” Then: “Fake! Fake! Fake!” As Cassius told Dunphy that he did not want to fight Jones again and that he was ready for Sonny Liston, spectators started to throw bottles, programs, crumpled cigarette packs, cardboard drinking cups, and whatever was at hand into the ring. Some tossed unshelled peanuts; one pitched his switchblade. Cassius smiled as he gathered, shucked, and ate a few peanuts. A short time later he asked a reporter, “Why did those people boo me when I whup him? Why they don't boo
for
me?”
⁴⁰

In the packed Miami Beach Auditorium, Liston had watched the match in a theater on closed circuit. He smiled when Cassius said he wanted to fight him for the title.
What did Clay show him?
someone asked. “He can't punch. Clay showed me I'll get locked up for murder if we're ever matched.” He added, “He don't know how to duck, he don't even know how to run. He don't know how to do anything.” But the packed Garden and impassioned fans showed Sonny something else. Boxing fans, that dying species, had been resuscitated and would pay to see someone close the Louisville Lip.
⁴¹

J
UST OVER A
week after he defeated Jones, Cassius's notoriety reached a landmark when he was featured in a portrait on the cover of
Time
, the country's leading weekly newsmagazine. The drawing had two main parts: a book and the man. The illustration of the boxer hardly looks like him. The skin is darker, the features more coarse. Above his head two boxing gloves hold open a book of poetry, looking remarkably like a holy text. Together the images suggest that Cassius Clay was a man of action and words, a warrior and a prophet.
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The accompanying story portrayed the boxer as a simple athlete with simple dreams: “I'm going to drive down Walnut Street in a Caddy on Derby Day and all the people will point and say, ‘There goes Cassius Clay.' Pretty girls will be there, and I'll smell flowers and feel the nice warm air. Oh, I'm cool, then, man. I'm cool. The girls are looking at me, and I'm looking away.” This, the author of the piece implied, was Cassius Marcellus Clay, the fresh, innocent savior of boxing, the sum total of his dreams a tomato-red Cadillac Eldorado, the right woman, and a heavyweight crown.

The cover story, however, lacked depth. It laughed at Clay, noting his low IQ and uncomplicated dreams of material success. It bought his magic, seeing only what he chose to reveal. Nowhere in the article is there a mention of the civil rights movement or the Nation of Islam, of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. There is no sense that he had an inner life, or that he wore a disguise as complete as those worn by the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sydney Carton, or Ellison's Invisible Man. Even in the spring of 1963, he was not who people thought he was or wanted him to be.

Chapter Seven

HIDE YOUR CAT

            
Every man should have something he'd die for. A man who won't die for
something
is not fit to live.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

            
Treat me like a man or kill me.

—MALCOLM X

S
ince Clay turned professional, he had rarely uttered a single political word. Not once had he complained about the slow pace of desegregation, nor groused to reporters about the escalating racial violence in America. His entire focus was on building a boxing career so that he could earn a title shot and enough money to buy a grand house with two swimming pools—one inside for those rainy days—and a garage full of Cadillacs. All he talked about was boxing, his dreams, and himself. If Clay was a spokesman for any cause, it was his own. Yet the day after he defeated Doug Jones, he told a black writer in Harlem, “I will become the first heavyweight champion to fight a benefit for the NAACP.”
¹

Clay's statement was completely disingenuous. He didn't really have any plans to fight for the NAACP. What concerned him more than civil rights was status—his status in the world of boxing and his material worth. In some ways, his attitude about social mobility and materialism reflected the temper of his generation, one that came of age in the “affluent society.” National advertising campaigns encouraged the millions of young people of his generation to buy rock 'n' roll records,
radios, blue jeans, shirts, shoes, soft drinks, cereal, comic books, magazines, movie tickets, and gasoline for cruising in chrome-covered cars. Clay belonged to a youth culture that celebrated pleasure and instant gratification, a distinct demographic that was told that their opinions about everything, from consumer products to social issues, mattered.
²

In an age of growing prosperity, black teenagers who identified with this youth movement believed that freedom and living “the good life” should be one and the same. Seeing themselves as first-class consumers, many black youths became increasingly alienated when confronted with the reality of their second-class citizenship. When they entered a diner or a department store and were turned away because of the color of their skin—as Clay was in Louisville and Miami—they were told that the good life was not for them. The tension between full participation in the consumer culture and racial exclusion from society cut deep into the dreams of black youths.
³

Yet Clay never expressed the same dissatisfaction that tens of thousands of black activists did when they demonstrated against racism during the sit-ins. When he was growing up in Louisville, there were certain places that he could not go because he was black: restaurants, libraries, public swimming pools, and some downtown movie theaters. The one time he joined a picket in Louisville, a woman dumped hot water on him and he never returned to the marching lines again.
⁴

But by March 1963, he was a celebrity and, by his calculation, rich. If for any reason he could not eat somewhere, he could always return to the hotel where he was staying and order anything he wanted from room service, or he could ask his private chef to make him a meal at his home in Miami. Wealth helped him escape discrimination, a luxury most blacks could not afford.

Cassius now had more money than most youths ever dreamed of having. He took home $13,500 from selling out Madison Square Garden and earned another $10,000 from the closed-circuit-theater ticket sales. By the end of the year, he'd made $81,000, not too far from the president's $100,000 salary. Donating money to the NAACP, therefore, would have certainly benefited him during tax season, a fact that was not lost on him. He frequently complained that the more money he made, the more he paid Uncle Sam.
⁵

When he declared that he would raise money for the NAACP, he never said anything about giving civil rights lectures or joining any marches in the South. Rather, his financial offer reflected his own strategy of dealing with racism. His success as a boxer earned him economic independence, the kind that Elijah Muhammad promoted. Money, Muhammad preached, gave black men freedom from whites.

Most reporters who covered boxing never suspected that Clay had embraced Muhammad's philosophy. Since he rarely talked about race or the civil rights movement, writers assumed that he gave the subject little thought. All they ever heard from him were bombastic proclamations of his own greatness. But in his declarations of preeminence, Alex Poinsett, a black writer for
Ebony
, heard something more. “For when Cassius Clay declares, ‘I am the greatest,' he is not just thinking about boxing,” he wrote. “Lingering behind those words is the bitter sarcasm of Dick Gregory, the shrill defiance of Miles Davis, [and] the utter contempt of
Malcolm X
.”
⁶

Poinsett was circling in on the truth, though he had no idea just how much Clay echoed Malcolm or why he had started to sound like him. Hidden behind Clay's clowning, behind the “publicity gimmicks and boyish buffoonery, behind the brashness, Cassius Marcellus Clay is a blast furnace of race pride. His is a race pride that would never mask itself with skin lighteners and processed hair,” the way Detroit Red once degraded himself, burning his scalp with a homemade congolene in a quest for straight hair.
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Clay possessed “a pride scorched with memories of a million little burns like the paper cup he drank root beer from at a New Orleans stand while his white companion [
Sports Illustrated
's Huston Horn] sipped from a glass.” He may not have talked publicly about discrimination, but he projected a more militant, defiant posture, rejecting any notion of racial inferiority. When he boldly shouted, “I am the greatest,” he defined his self-worth on his own terms, expressing an emerging attitude of Black Power.
⁸

The
Pittsburgh Courier
's Eric Springer viewed Clay as a new kind of black cultural hero, a symbol “of the change that is occurring in our youth,” an emblem of racial pride and boundless confidence. In the past, black heroes had been expected to act inconspicuously, humble
and deferential to whites. But Clay ushered in a new age when black youths agitated for change, unafraid of testing the limits of white acceptance. Springer compared him to the courageous black teens who endured daily abuse when they entered Central High School in Little Rock and the brave black college students desegregating southern universities, like James Meredith at Ole Miss.
⁹

The moment blacks began embracing Cassius as the personification of youth activism and the struggle for integration, he shed any responsibility for being a leader of his race. “I'm no James Meredith,” he told the
New York Post
's Pete Hamill. “He's got more guts than I'll ever have.” Clay had no interest in meeting him or following his example.
¹⁰

He stunned readers when he announced that he did not believe in racial integration. “I believe it's human nature to be with your own kind,” he declared. “I know what restrooms to use, where to eat, and what to say. I don't want people who don't want me. I don't like people who cause trouble. I'm not going out there to rile up a lot of people.” The civil rights movement, he said, was not like a boxing match. “There's no referee in the street.”
¹¹

Only a few days after he told a black reporter that he would raise money for the NAACP, and after further consultation with Malcolm, he denounced the organization's goals. “I'm a fighter,” he claimed, sounding like he had just left Malcolm's mosque in Harlem. “I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I'm no cheek-turner. The NAACP can say, ‘turn the other cheek,' but the NAACP is ignorant.” Then he added a final point, ripped from the rich language of his new teacher: “You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.”
¹²

For the first time Cassius found himself at the center of a political controversy. When he attacked the NAACP, many blacks hoped that this was just another publicity stunt, but Clay was not performing the role of the self-created villain. His comments provoked fear that one of the most famous black athletes in the country had forsaken the ideals of integration and embraced the separatist ideology of the Nation, an unsettling thought for those who had built him up as a hero. While most New York newspapers did not cover the controversy due to the labor strike, rumors spread throughout the black press that Cassius had spent time with the Black Muslims, though no reporter confirmed his visit with Malcolm after the Jones fight.
¹³

In Louisville, Clay's white sponsors worried that he had made a grave mistake, alienating much of the country and one of the most respected civil rights organizations in America. Dr. Maurice Rabb, an executive with the NAACP's Louisville branch, contacted the national office, informing them that Cassius had been “thoroughly exposed to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.” He reported that Clay “sneered at the fact that a Jew is the National President of the NAACP,” a questionable accusation given Clay's unsophisticated knowledge about the group's leadership.
¹⁴

The Louisville Sponsoring Group's director, Bill Faversham, arranged for Clay to apologize to Rabb and other local civil rights leaders. Accompanied to the meeting by his brother Rudy and his chauffeur, Cassius denied his verbal assault on the NAACP, but when Rabb invited him to show his support for the organization by purchasing a lifetime membership, he said that the only way that he would join was if they paid him $250,000. Clay left the appointment promising that he would attend the branch banquet and “take a bow” if he was in town.
¹⁵

After the meeting, the controversy faded from the pages of the black press, though Faversham remained concerned about Clay's increasingly defiant behavior. He told Rabb that if the NAACP wanted to influence the boxer, they might try reaching out to Jackie Robinson or Sugar Ray Robinson, two black athletes Cassius greatly admired. But, he advised, don't bet on him listening to them either, because “
CASSIUS
makes all decisions concerning
CASSIUS
.”
¹⁶

Faversham suspected that Clay had ties to the Black Muslims. Someone must have been advising him and confusing him, he thought, filling his head with dangerous ideas. What he did not know was that Clay was listening to a new mentor who did not trust whites, the NAACP, or Jackie Robinson. This man taught Clay that he was special not in spite of his skin color but because he was black, an empowering message that awakened his political consciousness. For the first time in his life, Cassius said, “I feel free since I learned the truth about myself and my people.”
¹⁷

A
S
C
LAY CAME
into his own, Malcolm hesitated, unsure of his future. Since he had returned from Chicago, all he could think about was the collateral damage from Elijah's affairs. On the streets of Chicago and
Harlem, blacks who were not Muslims told him that they had heard about Muhammad's harem. He pretended that he did not know what they were talking about, but it was no use. He could no longer ignore the truth.

For years, he had built up the Messenger as an honorable man, the moral compass of the Nation. Every time he mentioned the Supreme Minister's name, he referred to him as “the
Honorable
Elijah Muhammad,” but Malcolm could no longer call him an honorable leader, knowing how he had disgraced the Nation. He hated to admit that Elijah was nothing more than an imposter hiding under the cloak of divinity because that meant that he, too, was a fraud.
¹⁸

He realized that he had no choice: the only way he could deal with the Nation's calamity and his own personal crisis was by confronting Elijah. He began by writing Muhammad letters, explaining his actions in Chicago. FBI agents listening to wiretapped lines between Chicago and Phoenix overheard NOI officials say that Malcolm was only “seeking, prodding, and prying” under the guise of helping. Muhammad assured the NOI officials that Malcolm would never discuss the “problems” in person, but his younger minister had already decided to fly to Phoenix to confront the issue before it was too late.
¹⁹

When he arrived at Muhammad's home, Elijah embraced him like a returning prodigal son. They walked through his backyard patio and settled into chairs near the swimming pool. “Well son,” Elijah asked, “what's on your mind?” Malcolm spoke directly and plainly about what he had heard in Chicago, suggesting a biblical solution that justified Elijah's indiscretions. He explained that he and Wallace had studied the Bible and the Koran for precedents that would justify Elijah's fathering children outside his marriage. If necessary, he said, the ministers could tell the followers that the pregnancies were “the fulfillment of prophecy.” Elijah smiled and praised his loyal minister. “Son, I'm not surprised. You always have had such a good understanding of prophecy, and of spiritual things. You recognized that's what all of this is—prophecy.”
²⁰