Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (11 page)

Malcolm’s wife later recalled the regular late-night pep talks her husband gave to the young fighter. “Cassius was just about hysterical with apprehension of Sonny Liston….They talked continuously about how David slew Goliath, and how God would not allow someone who believed in him to fail, regardless of how powerful the opponent was….”

But if Clay was afraid of his opponent, nobody would have guessed by his public behavior. At the weigh-in ceremony, he and his assistant trainer Bundini Brown stormed up to Liston screaming “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. We’re ready to rumble, you big ugly bear! Let’s get it on right now!”

Meanwhile, Chicago headquarters continued to admonish the suspended minister for associating the Nation with a losing cause. Muhammad forbade him from speaking to the huge media contingent assembled in Miami for the fight. Malcolm, who was being referred to as Clay’s “spiritual advisor,” told most reporters nothing beyond the fact that he believed he would be reinstated at the end of ninety days, even though he knew otherwise.

But despite the prohibition against Malcolm speaking to the media, writer George Plimpton, who was doing a profile on Clay for
Harper’s
magazine, was granted an extensive interview by the renegade Black Muslim.

“The atmosphere was very bizarre,” recalls Plimpton thirty-five years later. “Like most people there, I was puzzled why Clay would associate with a man like Malcolm X and was flirting with the Black Muslims, who we saw as this hate organization. I interviewed Malcolm and came away very impressed by this man. His words were still scary but his mind was fascinating. And as impressed as I was with him, he seemed equally impressed by Clay.”

FBI eavesdropping reports overheard Elijah Muhammad telling his associates that week that Malcolm was trying to usurp his power and was spreading rumors of his adultery to discredit him. In his autobiography, Malcolm reports that it was at around this time that he received his first death threats from within the Nation and heard rumors of a plan to “eliminate” him.

On January 21, Clay suddenly disappeared from his fight camp. Without telling his managers, he flew to New York with Malcolm to address a Muslim rally. Because of his suspension, Malcolm himself could not speak but he stage-managed Clay’s appearance—his first official function as a Muslim—for maximum effect.

Rallying support for his upcoming title bout against Liston, Clay told the crowd of 1,600, “I’m training on lamb chops and that big ugly bear is training on pork chops.” He regularly praised his mentor, saying, “I’m proud to walk the streets of Miami with Malcolm X.” An FBI informant, one of many who had infiltrated the movement at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, immediately alerted the media of Clay’s presence at the rally. The next day, it was all over the papers.

When Clay arrived back in Miami the following day, he was besieged by questions. Asked whether he was a card-carrying member of the Nation of Islam, he deftly avoided answering the question. “Card-carrying, what does that mean? I’m a race man and every time I go to a meeting, I get inspired.” This evasive answer inspired Pat Putnam to track down Cassius Sr., whose sensational claim about his son being brainwashed finally caused the country to take notice.

Plimpton recalls the commotion. “It was chaos around the fight camp,” he says. “Everybody wanted Clay to disavow the Muslims, there were rumors the fight would be called off, ticket sales ground to a halt. The only person who seemed oblivious to all the fuss was Clay himself. He just went on calmly preparing for the fight.”

To deflect some of the attention from the controversy, the fight publicist Harold Conrad arranged for the Beatles, who had arrived in America that week, to show up at the Clay gym for some publicity shots. The fighter clowned around with the four young British musicians, pretending to knock them down like dominoes. “You’re not as stupid as you look,” Clay said to John Lennon after they were introduced. “No, but you are,” Lennon replied jokingly.

The resulting media coverage of the Beatles’ visit was perhaps the last time Cassius Clay was ever looked upon as the lovable clown in the eyes of America. Ironically, years later, Ali’s longtime nemesis Jimmy Cannon would disparagingly label the boxer “the fifth Beatle,” comparing him to the “students who get a check from dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young.”

The day after he returned from preaching in New York, lost amidst the furor over whether he was a Muslim, Clay received a notice to report to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Coral Gables, Florida, to take a military qualifying examination.

Four years earlier, shortly after turning eighteen, Cassius Clay Jr. had routinely registered with Selective Services at his local draft board in Louisville. He was classified 1-A, available for the draft.

“I never thought much of it at the time,” he remembers. “There was no war on.”

As he reported to the Coral Gables induction center, Clay had more important things on his mind than the possibility of being drafted. Such as Liston. He sailed through the army physical, probably the best conditioned recruit the army doctors had ever seen. Then he was ushered into a room along with twenty other potential recruits and given a “mental aptitude test.” When the fifty-minute exam ended, he exited the center and promptly turned his attention back to the upcoming fight, unaware that a chain of events had been set in motion that would alter the course of his career.

Miami Herald
sportswriter Pat Putnam was with Clay in Coral Gables. He remembers the boxer’s attitude before the exam: “He had no problem at that time with the idea of going into the army. He was in a good mood and joking around. There was certainly no talk about not going in.”

Halfway across the world, fifteen thousand U.S. army “advisers” had been dispatched to Southeast Asia by President Kennedy to help contain the communist threat in a place called Vietnam. Like most Americans, Cassius Clay had never heard of it.

A few days later, fight promoter Bill McDonald confronted Clay and told him the Muslim rumors had sparked a boycott of the fight among Miami’s sizable Jewish community. More than half the seats remained unsold. Unless Clay publicly denied the rumors, McDonald threatened to cancel the fight.

Since the age of twelve, Cassius Clay had dreamed of the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight title. To him at the time, the Liston fight might have seemed his only chance to realize the dream. Still, and not for the last time, he summoned up a principle rarely seen in the usually amoral world of boxing.

“My religion’s more important to me than any fight,” he told the stunned promoter. “Do what you have to do.” With that, Clay returned to his hotel and told his entourage the fight was off. He was packing his bags.

But fight publicist Harold Conrad had invested too much time and money in the bout to let everything fall apart. He quickly moved to salvage the situation, approaching McDonald with a last-minute appeal.

“I said to him, ‘Bill, you’re gonna go down in history as the guy who denied a fighter a title shot because of his religion.’ And McDonald told me, ‘Don’t start hitting me with the Constitution. This is the South. I can’t operate here with these people.’”

Conrad suggested a compromise. If Malcolm X agreed to leave town, he asked, would McDonald proceed with the bout? The promoter agreed and the fight was back on. Clay returned to training camp while Malcolm quietly flew back to New York.

He’d be back.

CHAPTER FOUR:

The Making of Muhammad Ali

W
HEN, ON
F
EBRUARY
25, 1964, a beaten and battered Sonny Liston failed to get up off his stool for the eighth round, it was clear a new era had begun in heavyweight boxing. Less obvious was the fact that a new chapter was about to be written in America’s political and social history.

While Clay was pounding the supposedly invincible champion into submission, Malcolm X—who had slipped quietly back into town the night before—sat in a ringside seat, vindicated by his faith in his disciple. With a week to go until his suspension was due to end, Malcolm had already made a decision about his future. The new heavyweight champion of the world was to be an integral part of that decision.

The morning after his victory, Clay arrived at a Miami Beach press conference where hundreds of journalists awaited his verdict on the fight’s shocking outcome—shocking, at least, to everyone but himself and Malcolm X. Before he would agree to answer any questions, Clay looked out on the assembled throng—none of whom had given him any chance of winning the title—and asked, “Who’s the Greatest?” Silence filled the hall. Again, he asked, “Who’s the Greatest of them all?” No response. Finally, he repeated the question and this time the reporters meekly answered en masse, “You are.”

Satisfied, he told the media he had won the fight because he was the better boxer. But the sportswriters didn’t want to talk about boxing. “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” came the first question.

He had still not received official word from Chicago headquarters whether it was okay to publicly proclaim his conversion. He responded with his standard nondenial answer to such a question, but this time he went a little further than he had previously. “Card-carrying; what does that mean? I believe in Allah and in peace. I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I go to a Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see that there’s no smoking and no drinking and no fornicating and their women wear dresses down to the floor. And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn’t be in there. Well, there must be something in there if you don’t want me to go in there. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian anymore. I know where I’m going and I know the truth.”