Blood Brothers (27 page)

Liston observed the scene with cold disinterest. Once he cupped his enormous hands over his mouth and said mysteriously, “Don't let anybody know. Don't tell the world.” Know what? That Cassius was crazy? That he was a fool? That he was afraid? Interpretations of his cryptic statement varied.
⁹

The comment threw Clay into an even wilder rage. Watching the action, reporter Mort Sharnik thought that there was no way that the boxer could fight that night. “It looked to me like Cassius was having a seizure,” he recalled. Then he witnessed something strange, something that few others saw. While five or six people in his entourage were struggling to keep Clay from attacking Liston, “he winked at Robinson.” At the absolute center of the chaos, surrounded by cameras, shouting, and confusion, “Cassius was probably having a ball.”
¹⁰

Weighing 218 pounds, Liston was a few pounds heavier than expected, and at 210½ Clay was a few pounds lighter. But the numbers that seemed to matter most were 80 and 120. On the platform, where bedlam reigned, Liston's resting pulse rate registered 80 beats a minute, up slightly from his normal 72. Clay's normal rate was 54, but it had rocketed to 120. That alarmed Dr. Alexander Robbins, the attending physician. “Clay is nervous and scared and he's burning a lot of energy,” he said. Later, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon pressed him to elaborate on the comment, asking, “Could it be that the kid is scared to death, Doc?” Robbins said yes and proceeded to venture well outside his professional competency: “He is hysterical. He has a fear of death . . . a fear of getting killed. He acted like a maniac. He's definitely out of control. . . . He acted like a man off the beaten path.”
¹¹

Clay's performance at the weigh-in ticked the odds against him up from 7–1 to 8–1. Some observers ventured even odds that he would not even show up for the fight. Most of the four hundred to five hundred onlookers would have agreed with Jim Murray that Cassius looked like a man who had just seen his own ghost. Rumors circulated that he was high on “reefers,” Benzedrine, or both. Most reporters agreed that Clay was too intelligent not to know that the gig was up. “No man could have seen Clay that morning at the weigh-in and believed that he could stay on his feet three minutes that night,” concluded the
New Republic
's Murray Kempton.
¹²

T
HE
M
IAMI
B
EACH
Boxing Commission fined Clay $2,500 for his conduct on the platform. Hours away from facing the most feared fighter in the world, Clay, many reporters insisted, must be nearly paralyzed with fear. Jimmy Cannon openly questioned his manhood. Cassius was “shaped for a more effete and gayer line,” he wrote, speculating that “the big riddle is will he fall apart in the dressing room?”
¹³

Cannon and the others were reading into Clay their own fears of Liston, rather than listening to what the challenger said. Cassius brimmed with confidence, affirming his masculinity and promising retribution against the army of journalistic naysayers. “I don't know what it feels like to be afraid,” he told Leonard Koppett of the
New York Times
. “The only thing I fear is fear itself. . . . I'm going to win and be champion, and you writers better get on the bandwagon right now. If you're voting
for me, write it now. I'm keeping lists.” He was reading the papers, noting the doubters, and filing the information. “Right after the fight, I'm going to have my roll-call right there in the ring.”
¹⁴

Although fifty-nine of sixty-two writers polled picked Liston to win the fight, generally by a knockout before the end of the third round, Clay was blithely confident, an attitude that Malcolm buttressed. Malcolm told him that it was the will of Allah that he would win, arguing that it was all part of a divine plan. The night before the fight he told journalist Murray Kempton that Cassius feared no man: “To be a Muslim is to know no fear.”
¹⁵

George Plimpton wanted to discover more about the source of Clay's fearlessness. After the weigh-in spectacle, he took a car ride with Archie Robinson, who asked if he would like to meet Malcolm X. Plimpton said certainly, and Robinson drove him to the Hampton House. He took a side table in the luncheonette, and soon Malcolm walked in, carefully weaving through the crowded room, tapping the floor with a walking stick identical to Clay's. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses, Malcolm stood tall, giving the appearance of a stately professor. He sat across from Plimpton, opening a package of peppermints and popping one in his mouth.
¹⁶

He was as serene as a monk. The troubles keeping him awake at night were invisible to Plimpton. He said his problems with Elijah Muhammad were over; in fact, he would be “unmuzzled” in March, less than a week away. Speaking gently, occasionally he jotted a word or two that he wanted to emphasize on the paper tablecloth. Plimpton watched him write, noticing the red ring with a small crescent on one of his thin fingers. Malcolm was polite, repeating “Sir?” when he did not hear a question in the noisy room, but Plimpton detected a slight mocking air about his fastidious manners.

He affirmed his belief that Clay was “likely to beat Liston.” Again, Malcolm stressed the importance of belonging to the Muslim faith. “[Cassius] has tremendous self-confidence,” he explained. “I've never heard him mention fear. Anything you're afraid of can whip you. Fear magnifies what you're afraid of. One thing about our religion is that it removes fear. Christianity is based on fear.”

Malcolm spoke respectfully, even lovingly, about Cassius, ignoring his athletic talents and concentrating on his intellectual and emotional
assets. The boxer was kind, gentle, and humble, not at all like the clown that he played for public consumption. But the minister thought his pupil's greatest gift was his political instinct. “He should be a diplomat. He has the instinct of seeing a tricky situation shaping and resolving how to sidestep it.” Perhaps it was that ability, the fighter's instinct for avoiding the knockout punch, that Malcolm most admired. Malcolm had always been a magnificent debater, but maybe he was realizing that he gave too much of himself away when he talked, that he showed his weaknesses to his most observant opponents. He admired in Cassius the very quality that he lacked. Clay talked endlessly but had the ability to keep his options open.

Meanwhile, Malcolm's options were closing. Officially silenced, instructed to avoid the press and to make no public statements, he continued to pop peppermints in his mouth and discuss black rage and revolution with Plimpton. The day of reckoning would come, he emphasized. “There
must
be retribution.” It was proclaimed in the Koran, chapter 20, verse 102. Later Plimpton checked the citation: “The day when the trumpet is blown. On that day we will assemble the guilty white-eyed (with terror).”

“These are the things you are teaching Cassius?” Plimpton asked.

Malcolm answered: “He will make up his own mind.”

R
AIN PELTED THE
Miami Beach Convention Center on the day of the fight, washing away any chance William MacDonald had of seeing a profit. After paying too much ($625,000) for the rights to the live promotion alone—he had no part of the lucrative closed-circuit television rights—he had compounded the error by scaling ticket prices too high. They ranged from $250 for the Golden Circle seats located just behind the press rows to $20 for seats high up in the arena and far from the ring. High rollers, the sort who came to fights to be seen as much as to see, had quickly bought the Golden Circle seats. And the cheap seats moved briskly. But the tickets for the mid-ranged seats, those priced at $200, $150, and $100, gathered dust in the offices of the Convention Center. MacDonald refused to discount the ducats, hoping that when this inescapable fact sank in, there would be a late rush of buyers. But the hard rain combined with MacDonald's hard line thoroughly dampened the sales. In the end, MacDonald sold only 8,297 of the 15,744
seats in the arena. Altogether he lost in the neighborhood of $363,000 on the venture.
¹⁷

The rain and ticket prices were not the only obstacles for the gate. The contest was generally judged by boxing authorities to be a gross mismatch. When Robert Lipsyte was sent to Miami, his elders at the
New York Times
had only one practical instruction: “As soon as I landed, I was to drive my rental car from the arena to the nearest hospital, mapping the quickest route. My paper didn't want me to waste any deadline time following Clay to intensive care.” Lipsyte's seniors in the profession probably already knew the ambulance route. Writing columns about the fight that seemed penned in acid, Jim Murray's only hope “for Cassius Clay is that he clots easily.” Offering a strategy to the challenger, Murray wrote, “If I were Cassius Clay I would fight him at such a long range he would have to reach me through Western Union.”
¹⁸

It seemed that the only people willing to go on record predicting a win by Clay were close family members and a smattering of associates of Malcolm X. Meanwhile, the stories about Clay's connections with the Nation of Islam had worked a public relations miracle: they had transformed Sonny Liston into the sentimental favorite. Long before, Liston had accepted his role as the villain in the morality plays of professional boxing. But Clay's extreme religious and political opinions had made the champion's peccadilloes seem almost quaint. In a classic understatement, sportswriter Dan Parker commented, “Liston hasn't been a popular champion but, since Clay's yen for the Black Muslim white-hating sect of fanatics was revealed, neither is Cassius a popular challenger.”
¹⁹

The rain, the ticket prices, the expected mismatch, and the unpopularity of both fighters created a perfect storm for the fight's promoters. Capping it off, just an hour or so before the fight a local radio station reported that Clay had been seen at the Miami airport purchasing a ticket for a foreign country. Jerry Izenberg, covering the fight for the
Newark Star-Ledger
, heard the news in a taxi while he was riding to the match. The bizarre twists and turns of the Liston-Clay saga had left even him dizzy. “I didn't know what was going to happen. No one did. Maybe there would be a fight. Maybe there wouldn't. Maybe Clay was in Miami. Maybe he was somewhere over the Atlantic, heading who knows where.”
²⁰

I
ZENBERG HEARD HIM
before he saw him. When the reporter reached his seat, a familiar voice knifed through the silence in the near-deserted arena. “Keep your left hand up! Keep your left hand up! Move to your right!” Turning around, Izenberg spotted Cassius Clay, dressed in a tight tuxedo and a white ruffled shirt, his eyes trained on the ring, where his brother Rudy was making his professional debut in a four-round preliminary bout. As he watched his brother, Cassius ducked and weaved, rolled with the punches and threw a few in return, agonizing over any blow that connected with Rudy. When the referee raised Rudy's hand at the end of the contest, Cassius slipped out of the exit and hurried to his dressing room.
²¹

Rudy's victory seemed to momentarily calm Clay. Dr. Robbins made a perfunctory prefight examination, noting that Clay's pulse had dropped to sixty-four. But no sooner did he begin to relax than new concerns troubled his mind. Told repeatedly by the Muslims that he could not trust any white man, he fretted that some vast conspiracy of Caucasians was plotting his defeat. Looking at Pacheco and Angelo Dundee, his white corner men, he thought they might be part of the cabal. Angelo, according to Clay's tortured logic, was Italian, and an Italian must be associated with the mafia, which certainly had a stake in Liston's keeping the title. After all, it was no secret that the mob controlled Sonny.

“They”—whoever “they” were—were out to get him, Cassius reasoned. But how? Doping him by making him ingest some odorless, tasteless, colorless, debilitating drug seemed a logical guess. It had happened before. Fixers had doped water bottles, oranges, and towels to drug a fighter. And all day Cassius had received calls from Black Muslims warning him to beware of the “white devils.” Shouldn't he at least consider the possibility? As he waited in the dressing room, weaving a web of suspicions, the water bottle assumed an ominous presence. He dumped out the water and refilled it himself, taping it shut and assigning Rudy to make sure no one got near it. But Rudy had just won his first pro fight, and his attention lagged behind his intention. When Cassius noticed this, he again emptied, filled, and taped the bottle. “He did that three or four times,” recalled Pacheco.
²²

Cassius was nervous. For all he had said about his opponent being a chump, boxing authorities claimed that Sonny Liston was one of
the two or three greatest—maybe the best—heavyweight champions in history. Big, mean, and vicious, he had hurt most of his opponents, knocking out the finest boxers in the division. Even as masseur Luis Sarria rubbed Clay's shoulders, Pacheco noticed that the fighter was tight. “He was just a kid, and that night he had no idea if he could really do what he had been saying he could do all along.”
²³

Almost providentially, someone knocked on the door. Malcolm X came into the dressing room, exuding a sense of cool confidence. Malcolm, Cassius, and Rudy faced east toward Mecca, bowed, and prayed, praising Allah and blessing his name. Then Malcolm repeated a variation of what he had been saying since coming to Miami. It was more a prophecy than a pep talk. “The fight is the
truth
. It's the Cross and the Crescent fighting in the prize ring—for the first time. It's a modern Crusades—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!” This was destined to be a historic moment. “Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”
²⁴