Blood Brothers (19 page)

Clay's opponent, Henry Cooper, had spent his career fighting a perpetual battle against the inevitable. He was a fine boxer, with knockout power in his left hand, but the sharp features of his face—prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes—and tissue-thin skin rendered him chronically susceptible to cuts. “That's why the people who live off Clay selected Cooper,” wrote Jimmy Cannon. “The flesh on his face is lined with the scribbling of old scars. A hiccup reopens them.” Sooner or later in any competitive fight, Cooper's face would resemble a scene out of a slasher movie. His goal was always the same: win before the referee stopped the contest.
¹⁵

Knowing that Clay's punches were of a peculiarly surgical nature and that he better score while his eyes were clear of his own blood, Cooper began the fight like he had an early curfew. He rushed Cassius, threw lunging punches, and held and hit in the clinches. Cooper's fans
reacted with delight. After one “unclean clinch” Clay emerged with a smear of blood on his nose, and the blood this time was not Cooper's. Wembley exploded with cheers. Clay appealed to the referee “for justice,” but on this night, the 148th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, he found no sympathy.
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Between rounds Dundee scolded Clay, telling him to stay out of clinches and fight from the outside. In the second, Cassius did just that, moving and jabbing. By the middle of the round a dark smudge, like a small grape, appeared under Cooper's left eye. After several more pinprick jabs, the grape split open and a trail of blood trickled down his face. A round later, another cutting punch above the left eye turned the trickle into a river. The BBC's blow-by-blow man, Simon Smith, informed his listeners, “Cooper's left eye is beginning to look a little bit bad now. This is the sort of thing, of course, that Cassius Clay does. He scientifically and systematically cuts up his opponent and that's why he stops so many inside the distance.” But Cooper's eye was more than a “little bit bad.” It was literally spurting blood, as if an artery had been sliced open, splattering onto reporters at ringside.

In full control of the contest, with still more than a round before the fifth, Cassius virtually stopped punching and began mugging and clowning, shouting boasts to the spectators close to the ring and sneaking glances at Liz Taylor. He extended his gloves to keep Cooper at arm's length and popped his gloves in the English fighter's face. He jutted out his chin and challenged Cooper to hit him. “Contemptible cheek,” one ringsider muttered. “A show of bad taste and worse sportsmanship,” Horn wrote. Sitting at ringside, Bill Faversham was furious. After the round ended, he stormed to Clay's corner, telling Dundee, “Make him stop clowning.”
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But Clay was determined to coast until the fifth and then fulfill his prediction. Ignoring Faversham's orders, he continued his act, dancing and talking and treating Cooper like a bit player in his Cassius Clay Show. In the meantime, Cooper continued to bleed, pawing at his eye like a wounded bear. He looked to Wilson like “a red-rimmed Cyclops.” The British champion could already sense that it was bad. “You don't actually feel a bad cut,” he said later. “It just stings and goes numb. What tells you it is a bad one is when you feel the warm blood dripping on your body. This one felt like a tap pouring on my chest.”
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Just before the end of the round, Cooper saw an opening. Perhaps, as Clay later said, he had taken his eyes off Cooper to “look at Cleopatra.” Regardless, Cooper lunged at him with a sweeping, rising left hook that landed solidly on his cheek. Clay bounced against the ropes, then crumbled to the canvas. His face was blank, like he had just come out of a powerful anesthetic. He rose to his feet quickly but moved like a drunk, unsteady, uncomprehending, his hands at his side. But the bell sounded immediately. Dundee leaped into the ring and escorted Clay to the corner.

“You OK?” Dundee asked.

“Yea, but Cooper's getting tired,” Cassius answered.
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Dundee noticed a small tear in the seam of Clay's left glove. While he lobbied the referee and the British Boxing Board of Control for new gloves, his second broke a vial of smelling salt under Clay's nose, dropped ice cubes into his trunks, and massaged his legs. Later the legend would grow that Dundee's rant to the authorities gained valuable seconds—even minutes—for Clay to recover before the fifth round. Not so. Clay had recovered fully in the sixty seconds between rounds, and he was ready to make good on his prediction.
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As Clay threw punches, small tufts of horsehair spit out of the tear in his glove like spent cartridges, noted one reporter. A punch or two and blood was flowing from Cooper's eye in “sobbing, pulsing spurts,” splattering referee Tommy Little. Dressed all in white, the referee looked like he had been working in an active army field hospital. “Blood from the red ruin which was the left side of Cooper's face splashed yards out of the ring and on to the paper on which I was writing,” wrote Wilson. A reporter for
Time
magazine said Cooper “looked like a man who had just gone through the windshield of a car.” Spectators chanted, “Murder! Murder!” and “Stop it! Stop it!” as they threw wadded-up newspapers into the ring. Liz Taylor jumped out of her seat crying, “No, no, no.” She could not watch any longer. Finally, at the same time as Cooper's corner threw in the towel, Little halted the contest.
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Back in his dressing room, Cassius praised Cooper. He wasn't a bum and a cripple, he admitted. “He shook me up. He hit me harder than I've ever been hit. . . . I was a little numb.” With his performance in England officially over, he was gracious and soft-spoken, almost as if he
were auditioning for another role. But more than anything he wanted to return to America and talk with the wise men he so admired.
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T
HE DAY AFTER
he fought Cooper, Clay returned to the United States. His victory did little to improve his reputation among boxing scribes. Jimmy Cannon summed up the prevalent opinion: “It was clear after the close fight with Doug Jones that Clay didn't qualify as an opponent for Sonny Liston. There is no doubt about it now that Cooper has exposed him as a gabby amateur.” But he knew that after Liston dispatched Floyd Patterson in their rematch, Clay would get a title shot. Cannon's only suggestion was that the match be held in an emergency ward, saving Cassius a ride in an ambulance.
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“I don't need Liston,” Clay told reporters when he landed at Idlewild Airport, which would be renamed John F. Kennedy Airport at the end of the year. “He needs me.” He now fancied himself a world figure, the sort of man who could be plopped down any place on the globe and attract adoring crowds. “I'm very big in those foreign countries. They love me over there,” he said.
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Clay knew he was the draw. The gates for the Archie Moore, Charlie Powell, Doug Jones, and Henry Cooper fights had proved it. But he was reckless in the ring. If Cooper had caught him early in the fourth, rather than just before the bell, Cassius might not have survived the round. The thought gave pause to his sponsors. Clay was now ranked second in the world, and he would advance to first after Liston defeated Patterson. The Louisville Sponsoring Group saw no reason for him to face another contender. The risk was just too great. Besides, before the end of the year, LSG lawyer Gordon Davidson wrote a sponsor, Clay “could earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 through public appearances and exhibitions.” It seemed that every week he received an offer to perform on a television variety show or make some other appearance. Frank Sinatra wanted Cassius for a major part in a movie. For the small screen, Jack Benny promised to write an entire script about him if he appeared on his show, the producers of
Mr. Ed
promised similar star treatment, and executives for
Talent Scouts
and other television programs requested his services.
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To be sure, Davidson did not want any of the appearances “to prevent Clay from stepping into the ring with Liston with the best possible
conditioning and training, and thereby give him the best possible opportunity to defeat the ‘Ugly Bear.'” But he supported marketing “the boy's national image” as a show business personality. Should Liston defeat him, Davidson argued, Cassius could still make money as “a comic star.”
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But Cassius was living two lives. Publicly trained by a white man and managed by a consortium of white millionaires, he was also privately advised by Malcolm, Rudy, and a small group of trusted Muslims. His career demanded that he work with the one group, while his psyche depended on him living with the other. Whenever a reporter probed near the heart of the matter, he asserted his independence. Tom Wolfe recalled hearing a phone conversation in New York between Cassius and some man who wanted to set up a business deal. When the man asked to talk to Clay's manager, Cassius exploded: “I don't have no manager. I got a trainer and he's in Florida. I'm my own boss. I got backers, they put up the money, but I'm the boss, I'm the
onliest
boss.”
²⁷

This theme—“who made me is
me
”—was nothing new. But since moving closer to the Nation, Clay had grown more inwardly self-confident and outwardly self-aware. In a conversation with Alex Haley, Malcolm took credit for Cassius's maturation. “In general,” he said, “I taught him that ninety percent of success would depend upon how alert and knowledgeable he became to the true natures and motives of all the people who flocked around him.”
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Clay absorbed these lessons well. After spending time with the fighter for an
Esquire
profile, Wolfe concluded that Cassius's “chief mental asset” was that “he is quite aware, even supersensitive at times, to other people's motives. He is aware of the newspapermen's motives, his backer's motives, his trainers' motives, autograph hunters' motives, and even the social motives of sophisticated white New Yorkers he has seen only at a glance.”
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Suspicion of white men colored Clay's awareness. When he returned to Louisville a week after the Cooper match, he avoided his white sponsors and spent time on the West Side, entertaining black youngsters and joking with old friends. When a white reporter asked him why he didn't follow Dundee's instructions and try to knock out Cooper in the third round, he replied angrily, “I'm the boss in the ring, not Angelo or my backers. They're boss outside the ring, handling money and that stuff. They've got the easy job.”
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Without an upcoming match consuming his time, Clay was free to travel with Rudy and attend more Nation of Islam functions. Doing so, he risked that a journalist might see him at a mosque and reach the obvious conclusion, and it was only a matter of time until the inevitable came to pass.

On July 2, Bruce Hills, a reporter for the
Chicago Sun-Times
, spied a tomato-red Cadillac convertible in an alley behind the Nation's University of Islam. He waited, and soon Cassius, Rudy, and another man came out the back door and got into the car. Clay was dressed in conservative Muslim attire and wearing a star-and-crescent NOI membership pin. Since Cassius's Kentucky driver's license had been suspended for repeated traffic infractions, Rudy got behind the wheel and Cassius climbed into the backseat. Two automobiles filled with “glowering Black Muslims, determined to protect the heavyweight pretender from questions,” flanked the Cadillac. But Hills and his driver were determined to get the story, even if it meant a high-speed chase.
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Out of the alley onto 54th Street, then to Lake Park and finally to Stony Island, the reporter in his own car dogged Clay, conducting a dangerous, rolling interview. He asked the obvious question: “Are you a Black Muslim?”

For a block, Cassius considered the question before responding, “No,” only to promptly amend his answer to, “I don't know.” After another second or two he added, “I'm for the Black Muslims.”

“Do you believe everything they advocate?” Hills asked.

“Listen, I've looked real hard at every organization that's for the black man. This is the greatest one I've found.” Then, raising his voice above the roar of traffic, he emphasized, “The Black Muslims are the sweetest thing next to God.”

As the interview continued, Cassius explained that he was in favor of “anything good that can happen for the black man,” but that he would not participate in any southern demonstrations. “I don't want anybody to sic dogs on me,” he said.

Before Rudy turned onto the Skyway and headed toward the Indiana border, Hills asked another question: “Are you afraid your identification with the Black Muslims might hurt your boxing career?”

“Say, I don't have a record,” Clay replied, referring to Sonny Liston's criminal past.

A day later, Cassius was already backing away from his answers. To other reporters, he did not deny that the interview had taken place, but he asserted that he hadn't been wearing a Black Muslim pin and wasn't a member of any organization. He was still searching for a movement under the leadership of a holy man that offered an “eternal solution and not just a temporary one,” a statement that was pulled straight out of the teaching of Elijah Muhammad. Besides, he believed that athletes and entertainers did not have the time or experience to lead civil rights groups. Someday he might join an organization, but until then he would “wait to see which is best.”
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M
ALCOLM
X
AGREED
, at least publicly, that black athletes and entertainers should not define or lead the civil rights movement. On July 22, 1963, the day of the Liston-Patterson rematch in Las Vegas, Malcolm's fight was in Brooklyn, where more than a thousand protesters were demonstrating against racial discrimination at a hospital construction site. From across the street, where he shook hands and supported the participants, he watched as policeman arrested peaceful protesters and sent them off to the station in paddy wagons. What did a million-dollar contest in Las Vegas have to do with this fight against discrimination?
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