Blood Brothers (3 page)

Chapter One

THE MOTHER SHIP IN MIAMI

            
As a kid in Louisville, the city seemed so big to me. New York seemed so big. Chicago seemed big. And London, England, seemed far away. Africa was far away. I was Cassius Clay then. I was a Negro. I ate pork. I had no confidence. I thought white people were superior. I was a Christian Baptist named Cassius Clay.

—
MUHAMMAD ALI

            
Clay is a product of our times. The minute he got back from Rome, the saga started.

—
MILTON GROSS,
NEW YORK POST

T
hree hundred and four mostly flat, cornfield miles after it departed Chicago's Union Station, the
South Wind
passenger train rolled into Louisville's Union Station. There, on December 17, 1960, a young man stepped aboard, toting a worn suitcase and a pocketful of dreams.

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was eighteen, tall and slender, with a handsome unmarked face. His body was deceptively lithe, like a dancer's, but he was a professional prizefighter. His electric smile could light up an arena, though he was haunted by fears real and imagined. He had won a gold medal in the Rome Olympics, charmed the press corps and fellow athletes in the Eternal City, and signed a lucrative promotional contract with a collection of white Kentucky movers and shakers known as the Louisville Sponsoring Group (LSG). It was that group, most of whom were millionaires, that had paid for his train ticket.

After the brief stop in Louisville the
South Wind
chugged over the rolling hills of Kentucky, through a narrow, river-veined section of Tennessee, and then across the border into Alabama. Looking out the window as evening turned into night, Cassius saw mile after mile of the cotton South as the train made its way through the heart of the old Confederacy, stopping to pick up more passengers in Decatur, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Dothan.

There had never been a heavyweight boxer like Cassius Clay. He had the fresh, unmarked face of a teenage matinee idol and a smile to match. In a division often dominated by ponderous sluggers, his jitterbug style ushered in a new age for the sport.
Getty Images

It was those sections of Dixie, those cities ruled by King Cotton, where the civil rights struggle would soon turn bitterly violent. There, many white southerners stood armed and ready to defend their way of life, certain in their conviction of black inferiority. While in Italy, however, Cassius had felt a freedom that he had never experienced growing up in the segregated West End of Louisville. As a member of the United States Olympic team, he had witnessed black excellence. Rafer Johnson had carried the American flag in the opening ceremonies and then won the prestigious decathlon. Oscar Robertson had led the basketball team to the gold medal. And the incomparable Wilma Rudolph, who ran as gracefully as water being poured out of a pitcher, fired the imaginations
of people around the globe. Together, Rafer, Oscar, Wilma, and Cassius reigned in Rome like ebony gods. If there was royalty at the Olympics, they were it.

After Alabama, the
South Wind
passed through the southwest corner of Georgia and entered Florida, stopping briefly in Jacksonville in the early morning before continuing its crisscrossing route through the state, stopping more often now to drop off tourists at such resort towns as Orlando, Tampa, St. Petersburg, West Palm Beach, Delray Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Hollywood before reaching its destination of Miami.

There, roughly twenty-four hours after boarding the train, Cassius got off. It had been a long trip, but to his way of thinking, riding the train was infinitely preferable to flying. And it had given him some time to plan and dream. He was in the Deep South, a place where white residents still generally regarded Jim Crow as the accepted code of life and believed that a “Negro” should know his place. Even so, Cassius Clay had glimpsed an alternative reality, and he knew with every fiber of his being that he was destined to leave his mark on the world. “I am a Man of Destiny,” he had said less than a year before. “I'm gonna win the heavyweight championship of the world, earn a million dollars and get me a chauffeur-driven, tomato-red Cadillac with a built-in hi-fi, television and telephones.” And that was only for starters. There would be more. Later he admitted, “I guess some sort of divine power must have been with me.”
¹

He had come to Miami to learn a trade that would make him rich. What he did not anticipate was that a divine message would set him on the path to becoming Muhammad Ali.

W
AITING PATIENTLY FOR
the boxer was trainer Angelo Dundee. His name, an alias that mixed the hills of Calabria with the grime of Scotland, said more about his profession than his personality. His real name was Angelo Mirena, but Dundee was such a popular name in prizefighting that his older brother Chris adopted it when he entered the profession. Soon, Angelo followed Chris and took the same name. After World War II, Chris began to promote fights in New York City, and Angelo apprenticed as a trainer.
²

In 1951, when the boxing business became sluggish in New York, Angelo followed Chris to Miami, where the older brother had established a promotional arrangement with the recently built Miami Beach
Auditorium. By the mid-1950s, Angelo had been around boxing for a decade and had learned the craft of training boxers from the tobacco-crusted floor up. His was a hands-on education, learning by talking to and watching the very best trainers in the sport.

By the end of 1960, just short of his fortieth birthday, he had carved out a place for himself in the fight game. He had trained welterweight and middleweight champion Carmen Basilio as well as a stable of fighters who would soon win other titles. Short and round-faced, with bulging dark eyes, floppy ears, and thinning black hair, Dundee liked his pants high-waisted, his trainer's bag well-ordered, and his life as peaceful as his chaotic profession allowed.

Like that of many men in his world, his personality did not seem to fit the boxing profession. Fiercely loyal to his fighters and capable of all sorts of chicanery in the pursuit of victory, he was in all other ways a gentle, gracious man who sought nothing more than tranquility. He readily chatted with strangers, he was open and friendly with sportswriters, and he did his best to please everyone. The model of discretion, he refused to get involved in marital scraps, religious controversies, or political differences. Over the years he had learned to smile, listen, and mind his own business.

Keeping his mouth shut around Cassius, Angelo learned, was easy. No sooner had Clay stepped off the
South Wind
than he began singing his own praises. “People say Cassius Clay fights like Sugar Ray,” he told Angelo, as well as anyone within an earshot. Dick Sadler, Archie Moore's trainer, who had worked with Cassius for a short time in San Diego, had told Angelo if he trained the kid he deserved a Purple Heart with seven clusters. It did not take Dundee long to understand the cryptic warning.
³

From the train station Angelo drove to “Colored Town,” where he had arranged for Clay to share a room at the Charles Hotel with a Jamaican heavyweight. Dundee thought that there were two beds in the room, but there was only a double bed for two heavyweight boxers. Furthermore, since Angelo received a discount on the room, the management recouped some of its loss by not installing an air conditioner.
⁴

The spartan, low-rent condition of the room was matched by the neighborhood. Ferdie Pacheco, who would soon become Clay's “fight doctor” and had a medical practice close to the Charles Hotel, called the
area “a hellhole of pimps, hookers, drug dealers, winos, and general bad guys.” It was a no-man's-land that slept till late in the morning, took a siesta in the afternoon, and then came alive with an adrenaline rush at night. Its after-midnight scene offered a thousand temptations—marijuana from the islands that could knock a smoker on his ass, heroin so pure that it was lights-out with one shot, long-legged “sisters” wearing short, glove-tight dresses, and any sort of alcohol, sex, or adventure that could be dreamt up. This was a place that would test the dedication of any innocent, handsome young man.
⁵

Cassius struggled to get to sleep that first night. He later complained that the worst times of training in Miami were the lonely hours after dark. “I just sit here like a little animal in a box at night,” he told a sportswriter in 1961. “I can't go out in the street and mix with the folks out there 'cause they wouldn't be out there if they was up to any good. I can't do nothing except sit. . . . Here I am, just 19, surrounded by showgirls, whisky and sissies, and nobody watching me. All this temptation and me trying to train to be a boxer. It's something to think about.”
⁶

The next morning Clay made his way to the 5th Street Gym, where Dundee trained his fighters. In the glory days of prizefighting, four training gymnasiums stood above all the others—Gleason's and Stillman's in New York, the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles, and the 5th Street Gym in Miami. Located in South Beach at the corner of 5th Street and Washington Avenue, it was in a neighborhood where nothing good was happening. Increasingly, the money and development were flowing into North Beach, leaving whole sections of South Beach for the derelicts and the druggies. The dilapidated second-story facility featured rotten floors, cracked mirrors, accumulated grime, and the stench of sweat, jock straps, and cigarette and cigar smoke.
⁷

In addition to its foul smell and crusted dirt, the gym suffered from other maladies. Clogged drains in the showers, holes in the plasterboard walls, and chipping paint lent a certain grungy charm to the place, but an infestation of hungry termites threatened the entire structure. They attacked floors, walls, rings, and even chairs and desks. Possibly they were angered, or encouraged, by the heat. Hot and sweltering under its tin roof, fighters training in the gym soon realized that the place had no air conditioning, and large floor-to-ceiling windows added to everyone's discomfort. Many of the best fighters who trained there were from
Cuba and accustomed to such temperatures, but boxers from the North considered the conditions inside the gym inhumane, if not entirely illegal. But to Angelo Dundee, the place was “my little slice of heaven.”
⁸

For the fighters, the gym offered not so much a “slice of heaven” as the chance for salvation. With the windows open, the hot and stale air from the inside mixed with the humid blasts from the outside and the noise of the streets harmonized with the sounds of the gym—men skipping ropes; punching speed bags, heavy bags, and each other; and yelling encouragements and good-natured barbs in English and Spanish. In the 5th Street Gym, white, brown, and black men met in complete equality, fleeing from poverty and even persecution in the pursuit of a dream.

S
OME OF THE
finest boxers of the early 1960s trained alongside Clay under Angelo's guidance. In 1961, the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro outlawed professional boxing in Cuba, sending dozens of skillful Cuban boxers into exile in the United States, and especially Miami, where they added to Dundee's pool of talent. Willie Pastrano won the light-heavyweight championship in 1963, the same year that Ralph Dupas captured the junior middleweight title, Ultiminio “Sugar” Ramos the featherweight crown, and Luis Rodríguez the welterweight belt. Every week, it seemed, Angelo and one of his contenders headed to some world capital for an important match. It was a heady time, with talk of big-money title fights and the smell of success cutting through the malodorous, low-rent atmosphere of the 5th Street Gym.