Blood Brothers (4 page)

But at the center of the action was young Cassius, just beginning his professional career and fighting in small-money preliminary matches, but with an ego and energy that filled the gym. Observing the action inside the facility, sportswriter Myron Cope wrote, “Cassius reigns over the gym's white, Negro, and Cuban fighters like the leader of a street gang who has established his authority merely by talking his subjects into submission. He jabbers away at the Cubans in homemade, simulated Spanish, and they throw up their hands and walk away, shouting,
‘Niño con boca grande!'
—the baby has a big mouth.” There was no resentment in the comment, just a statement of fact.
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In Cassius's case, trainer and fighter were ideally matched. Dundee saw immediately that by the standards of classic boxing Clay was a deeply flawed fighter. He kept his hands too low, often avoided
punches by moving straight back, and was a dyed-in-the-wool headhunter. He did not even faintly resemble Joe Louis or Sonny Liston, hard-punching heavyweights with wonderful balance, great left jabs, and knockout power in both hands.

But for all his deficiencies, Cassius had assets. Most obviously, he had extraordinary hand and foot speed. When he arrived in Miami, he was a small heavyweight, weighing only 182 pounds, but his quickness was more than just the result of size. Probably no heavyweight had ever been as fast as Clay, certainly none in the early 1960s, when most, with the exception of Floyd Patterson, tended to be orthodox plodders.

Less readily apparent, Clay's sense of distance was nearly perfect. This ability is crucial in boxing. Throw a punch from too far away, and it falls short of its target. Throw it too close, and it loses its full leverage. In addition, a fighter who moves too close to an opponent is easier to tie up. Clay's speed allowed him to dart in and out; his sense of distance permitted him to throw a punch at the ideal moment, when it could reach its target with maximum force. Almost no fighter could snap out a jab as quickly or accurately as Clay, and none could deliver a faster right-hand lead. Furthermore, his quickness and sense of distance allowed him to dodge his opponent's punches, sometimes by mere inches.

Many trainers would have winced at Clay's glaring flaws and attempted to teach him proper technique. Dundee, however, focused on Cassius's magnificent assets. To be sure, he tried to refine Clay's unorthodox style, smoothing his herky-jerky movements. He worked on his balance, convincing him to throw more flat-footed power punches, and advised him to get his weight behind his blows. But crucially, Angelo did not seek to fundamentally change Cassius's style. He believed that every fighter was unique and should be treated that way. “There's not two alike,” he noted. “You don't say, ‘This guy fights like this guy.' They don't. They're all individuals. They all got their own idiosyncrasies, got their own rhythm.”
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Much as Cassius may have imagined himself as another Sugar Ray Robinson, Dundee's primary job was to train Cassius Clay to box like Cassius Clay. After listening to Clay talk and watching him spar, Dundee told his fighter, “You, my friend, are neither Sugar Ray Robinson nor Archie Moore, and you've got a long way to go before you will even resemble them. Who you are is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., and that's the man
I'm going to teach you to fight like. A guy is never going to get anywhere thinking he's somebody else.”
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Angelo quickly realized that, for all his bluster, Cassius was a dedicated athlete. He came to the gym on time, trained tirelessly, and learned quickly, as long as the lessons were packaged correctly. Dundee seldom told Clay what to do; rather, he made Cassius feel like he was the source of every improvement. “I didn't train him,” Dundee recalled. “I advised him. He'd be in the gym and I'd say, ‘You're really putting your left hand into that jab. You're really snapping it.' Then, when I'd see him doing something right again, I'd say, ‘Oh my God, I've never seen a heavyweight throw a left uppercut so perfectly. Oh boy!' Then he'd throw it again. And again.”
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Confronted with Clay's ego, Dundee discarded his own, becoming the ideal second banana. If Cassius said, “I'm going to run five miles,” Angelo responded, “That's good for your legs.” If Clay changed his mind and said, “No, I'm gonna rest,” Dundee instantly added, “Good, you need your rest.” This way the fighter was in charge even when he was not really in charge.
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On the one critical aspect of the pace of Clay's career, Dundee had the final word. Clay repeatedly told reporters that he wanted to break Floyd Patterson's record as the youngest heavyweight champion of all time (twenty-one years and ten months), which meant that he had to capture the title by December 12, 1963. But that was Cassius's obsession, not Angelo's, who was more concerned with advancing his fighter cautiously. He had seen too many fighters pressured into a mismatch. For the first few years at least, Dundee would only take sure-bet contests for Clay, matches that he could win on his worst day. In the language of the fight game, Angelo arranged for Cassius to box “opponents,” men who had virtually no hope of reaching contender status, or one-time contenders on a steep slide down the rankings.

Beginning in the last week of 1960, Cassius began to fight a string of set-ups. The fights were not fixed, but it would have taken a virtual act of God for him to lose. Herb Siler was a drunk who had no boxing talent; Clay took him out in the fourth. Anthony “Big Tony” Esperti had just gotten out of the can on an unlawful entry conviction and was in no condition to fight; Cassius ended the match in the third. “Sweet Jimmy” Robinson had a razor cut on his cheek and no business in a
prize ring; the referee stopped the fight halfway through the first. In just over a month in Miami, Cassius had improved his record to 4–0.
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Still, matches against set-ups were little help when it came to persuading boxing fans to accept Clay's claim that he was a great fighter. For now, what happened in a sparring match was more important. In February 1961, a handsome Swedish heavyweight and former world champion, Ingemar Johansson, came to Miami to train for his upcoming title fight with Floyd Patterson. Needing sparring partners, the Johansson camp told promotional coordinator Harold Conrad to hire a few. Conrad went to the 5th Street Gym and asked Dundee for recommendations. Calling Clay over, Dundee said, “Hey, Cash. You wanna work with Johansson?”
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The question was a switch, lighting up Clay. “I'll go dancin' with Johansson,” he said, repeating, “I'll go dancin' with Johansson.” Conrad just looked at Angelo. “You ain't seen nothing yet with this crazy bastard,” Conrad recalled Dundee saying.

And he hadn't. “Johansson had a great right hand but two left feet,” Conrad said. Once the former champion and the preliminary fighter were in the ring together in front of sportswriters and two thousand spectators, Cassius literally danced circles around Ingemar, hitting him with light jabs as if he were fighting a rematch with Big Tony. “Cassius Clay, 19, advanced on Ingemar Johansson,” wrote the
Miami Herald
's John Underwood. “Whap! His jab bounced off the Swede's headpiece. Whap-Whap! Two more jabs. Clay danced lightly, shifted feet, led with the right. Zing! Ffrap! Whap! The combination explored the celebrated Johansson profile, above and around the dimpled chin.” And so it continued, Johansson, a miffed lumbering bear, chasing “the bee who had stung him.”

Talking while he moved, Clay exhorted, “I'm the one who should be fighting Patterson, not you. Come on, here I am; come and get me, sucker. Come on, what's the matter, can't hit me?” It was like Jack Johnson fighting Tommy Burns, like Clay was the champion and Johansson the trail horse.

“Johansson was furious,” Conrad recalled. “I mean, he was pissed.” He chased Clay around the ring, throwing amateurish punches, missing by feet, and looking, at last, “ridiculous.” After two rounds he was exhausted, and the session was stopped.

“He made a monkey out of Johansson,” remembered
Sports Illustrated
writer Gil Rogin. When he returned to New York he told the editors at the magazine, “This guy is going to be heavyweight champion someday. You have to write about him.” For Rogin, Underwood, and other sportswriters, this was Clay's true Olympian moment; they recognized the emergence of a star.

The Johansson session showed Dundee that it was time to match him against more experienced boxers. Clay stopped Donnie Fleeman, a good club fighter, in the seventh round. Then he fought LaMar Clark, who possessed a gaudy 46–2 record that included a streak of forty-four straight knockouts. Against Clay, however, the heavy-punching Clark was outmatched. Cassius took him out in the second round.

Marv Jenson, Clark's manager, was impressed. “This guy isn't very many fights away from a championship as far as I'm concerned,” Jenson said. “He has the fastest hands of any heavyweight I've seen any place, including Patterson.” Black sportswriters were even more generous. Evoking the near-sacred “L” word, a
Pittsburgh Courier
scribe compared Clay favorably with the legendary Joe Louis. And for the first time in his professional career,
New York Times
feature writer Arthur Daley devoted a “Sports of the
Times
” column to Clay. Describing him as “a compulsive talker with the engaging personality of a youthful Archie Moore,” Daley wrote, “This good-looking boy is a charmer and is so natural that even his more extravagant statements sound like exuberance instead of braggadocio. On him they look good.”
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W
ITH COMPARISONS TO
Louis and notice in the
New York Times
, Clay's career was bounding forward ahead of schedule. After a month's vacation in Louisville and road trips to visit Wilma Rudolph and other friends from the Olympics, in the late spring of 1961 he once again boarded the
South Wind
for Miami, where Dundee waited to resume his education. And that was fine with the fighter who viewed any gym as safe territory—an oasis away from the nation's racial problems and the traps and temptations that waited around every corner of the urban South.

“It's either get rich in three hours or get poor in eight,” he liked to say: train hard for three hours (or four or five) or get a manual day job for pennies an hour. He had chosen the path to wealth and applied himself totally, and the Louisville Sponsoring Group made sure that,
unlike most other fighters, Cassius did not have to get a job to make ends meet. Train and dream, dream and train, from busy days at the 5th Street Gym to lonely nights at the Charles Hotel—these formed the physical and emotional parameters of his life in Miami. Boxing, however, could not satisfy his spiritual life.
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T
HERE WAS NO
avoiding the world outside his hotel and the boxing arena. After all, Cassius was in the South, the land of Emmett Till's murder and his father's gruesome tales.

Since he did not own a car, he jogged more than five miles from his hotel to the gym at the south end of Miami Beach. He ran in blue jeans and old military boots. As he crossed the Julia Tuttle Causeway, with the Miami skyline in the distance and a cool breeze blowing across the bay, Clay shadowboxed.

It was a strange sight to the white policeman who thought that a black man running across the highway, furiously punching the air, must be crazy or a thief—or both. In Miami, police frequently harassed blacks on the streets and raided black pool halls and bars. The officer stopped Clay to question him. Sweating and excited, Clay explained that he was running to Angelo Dundee's gym. The police then called Dundee to verify his story. The trainer explained that “the kid” was his boxer. “That's Cassius Clay,” he said.
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The episode offered an important lesson for Clay. White policemen didn't know his name and didn't care to know it. To them, he was just another “Negro” living across the tracks in the “colored” district of Overtown.

After Clay returned to Miami from his visit home, Dundee upgraded him from the low-rent living quarters at the Charles Hotel to the Sir John Hotel on Little Broadway, a vibrant strip of nightclubs, theaters, diners, and shops. Some of the most famous black entertainers and athletes in America stayed at the Sir John Hotel and the Mary Elizabeth Hotel, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sugar Ray Robinson. These celebrities did not choose to stay at the Sir John or the Mary Elizabeth because these establishments offered the finest accommodations. They had little choice. Blacks could not enter the best downtown hotels unless they waited tables, prepared meals, scoured toilets, or hauled white peoples'
bags. Not even Joe Louis could check into the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.
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Since the early twentieth century, real estate developers had promoted Miami as “the Magic City.” Beautiful beaches, luxurious resorts, and exotic entertainment attracted wealthy investors, tourists, and dreamers. But the city's black citizens were barred from the beaches, restaurants, golf courses, schools, and theaters of Miami's tropical paradise. In 1959, civil rights activists defied white supremacists, sponsoring dozens of sit-ins at department stores, drugstores, and diners. By August 1960, just before Clay arrived, their persistence and shrewd backroom negotiations with white leaders had led to the complete desegregation of the city's downtown.
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Yet Clay quickly learned that the city's culture of racism remained intact. In August 1961, Flip Schulke, a white photographer from
Sports Illustrated
, visited Miami for a photo shoot with Clay. Schulke was a serious photojournalist who had traveled the world and taken memorable photos that appeared in leading American publications, but he had never photographed a boxer. Shopping at Burdines department store, Clay picked up a short-sleeved shirt while Schulke snapped pictures. When a white store clerk saw the tall, lean black man touching the shirts, he informed him that store policy prohibited blacks from trying on clothing. Schulke fumed. It shocked him that Cassius Clay—an Olympic champion—could not try on a shirt in an American store. But Clay was not surprised. He wasn't even angry. This was the South. As a southerner he outwardly accepted second-class citizenship as a way of life. “Come on, Flip, don't worry about it,” he said. “I don't want to make a big mess here. It's not a big deal.”
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