Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (3 page)

It was into this climate that a nervous Mamie Bradley packed off her son one August day. But not before she cautioned him “not to fool with white people down there.” Emmett was known to be a bit brash and fun-loving, and she warned him against his usual sass. “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly,” she told him.

The first few days of his visit were uneventful. He hung out with his cousin Simeon and went fishing with his great uncle Mose. He couldn’t help notice the differences between his Northern friends and relatives and these new kinfolk who were openly fearful of whites and consciously subservient, answering “Ya suh” and “Naw suh” when they were spoken to. It was an oppressive atmosphere for the young teenager, but he was determined not to demean himself.

One day, hanging out with his cousin and some friends in front of Bryant’s general store, Emmett—who was known as a prankster—took a picture of a white girl out of his wallet and showed it around, announcing “that’s my girl.”

His friends were skeptical. They told him there was a pretty white woman working in the store at that moment and dared Emmett to go inside and talk to her. Accepting the challenge, he went inside and bought some candy. On the way out, he turned to her and said loudly so his friends could hear, “Bye, baby.” One witness inside the store claimed Emmett had whistled at her.

The sales clerk’s husband, Roy Bryant, was out of town trucking shrimp. When he came back three days later and heard the story, he paid a visit to the hut of Emmett’s great uncle Mose Wright, accompanied by his brother-in-law J. W. Milam. “We come to get the boy who done the talkin’,” they announced.

Mose told them Emmett was just a visiting Northerner unaccustomed to the ways of the South. He tried to convince them to let him off with a “good whipping.”

Unimpressed, they dragged Emmett out of the hut and dumped him in the back seat of the car, where they drove him to the nearby Tallahatchee River. At their destination, they made him carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the riverbank, ordered him to strip, beat him with a pipe, gouged out his eye, and then shot him in the head. They dumped the body into the river, where it was found so badly mangled that Mose Wright could only identify his nephew’s remains from his ring.

The body was brought back to Chicago, where authorities wanted to bury it immediately. But Emmett’s mother was determined to have an open casket funeral so the “world would see what they did to my boy.” Hundreds of thousands of mourners came to view the body, photos were printed in the black press, white editorialists around the country condemned the savage act, and the resulting publicity captured the imagination of Americans.

When the two men went on trial for murder, the case was closely watched across America. Lynchings were commonplace throughout the South, but this was the murder of a child. The trial took place in the nearby town of Sumner, whose ironic motto was “A Good Place to Raise a Boy.” Despite the testimony of Mose Wright, who bravely identified the men who kidnapped his nephew—knowing the risks of testifying against the white defendants—the men were acquitted of the crime and set free.

The verdict shocked a nation and is widely credited as a catalyst for the imminent civil rights movement.

For the young Cassius Clay, it was a traumatic event. “I felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was,” he would write. In fact, Clay was six months older, but the Till incident unquestionably had a deep impact on him and he has brought it up several times in subsequent years. In his autobiography, he describes his reaction to the verdict, although many believe this is another concoction like the diner incident, designed for effect by the ghostwriter.

“I couldn’t get Emmett out of my mind, until one evening I thought of a way to get back at white people for his death ….It was late at night when we reached the old railroad station on Louisville’s West Side. I remember a poster of a thin white man in striped pants and a top hat who pointed at us above the words
UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU
. We stopped and hurled stones at it ….” He and his friend then sabotaged the railroad track, running away as a train ripped up the railway ties.

It is possible this incident happened, and Ali insists it did. But the next words of his autobiography stretch credulity and are clearly fiction. “It took two days to get up enough nerve to go back there. A work crew was still cleaning up the debris. And the man in the poster was still pointing. I always knew that sooner or later he would confront me, and I would confront him.”

While Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights pioneers fought for racial justice, however, Cassius Clay just kept fighting one opponent after another in the ring, racking up amateur victory after victory, including six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, two National Golden Gloves tournaments, and two National Amateur titles before he was eighteen. Those around him were already detecting a special quality in and out of the ring. “You could see that the little smart aleck—I mean, he’s always been sassy—had a lot of potential,” recalled Joe Martin, the Louisville policeman who taught the young Cassius to box and continued to cultivate the fighter. “He stood out because he had more determination than most boys. He was a kid willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve something worthwhile in sports. I realized it was almost impossible to discourage him. He was easily the hardest worker of any kid I ever taught.”

His hard work in the ring didn’t translate to the classroom, where his marks were below average. All he could think about, he says, was his boxing career. “In school, sometimes I’d pretend they were announcing my name over the loudspeaker system, saying, ‘Cassius Clay, heavyweight champion of the world.’”

One often-told story has it that some of his teachers, unimpressed with their poor student’s athletic ability, wanted to fail him, but the school principal, Atwood Wilson, wouldn’t hear of it. It was obvious that Cassius was going places, and he wasn’t going to stand in the way. At a faculty meeting one day, Wilson silenced the talk of failing the school’s young star. “Cassius is not going to fail in my school,” he announced. “One day the greatest claim to fame of Central High will be that we produced Cassius Clay. If every teacher in this room fails him, he’s still not going to fail, not in my school. I’m going to say I taught him and I’m going to be proud.”

Those who knew him at the time came to have a very different impression than the fans who were coming out in increasing numbers to watch Clay box. “Cassius was a very easy-to-get-along-with fellow,” recalled Joe Martin’s wife Christine who would drive him to bouts. “He was very easy to handle, very polite. Whatever you asked him to do, that’s what he’d do. On trips, most of the boys were out looking around, seeing what they could get into, whistling at pretty girls. But Cassius didn’t believe in that. He carried his Bible everywhere he went, and while the other boys were out looking around, he was sitting and reading his Bible.”

Her description would have come as quite a surprise to those who saw him box. Already he was being dubbed the “Louisville Lip” by the media and the fans who were witnessing the evolution of his brash style. Each Saturday night, Clay’s bouts were televised on a local TV show called “Tomorrow’s Champions,” and thousands would see Cassius taunt his opponents with cries of “You can’t lay a glove on me, I’m the Greatest.” Before a match, he would pay a visit to his opponents’ dressing rooms and hone the psychological warfare that would infuriate his future professional nemeses. “I’m going to whup you and you’re going to beg me to stop,” he warned them.

When he came into the arena for a match, the crowds would root against him, yelling for his opponent to “Whip the Lip.” One night he told a local reporter that his opponent wouldn’t last one round, reciting a poem to make his point.

This guy must be done
I’ll stop him in one

Sure enough, the fight lasted less than a minute and a new tradition was born, calling the round. His predictions didn’t always pan out, but that didn’t matter; the mystique was growing.

Amateur boxing official Chuck Bodak, who coached at the Golden Gloves tournaments, recalled the impression Clay made on him. “You had to be blind not to see how good this kid was. I told his mother once, ‘Cassius must be from outer space, because I’ve never seen anyone like him in my life.’”

Clay himself certainly saw it. The day after out-of-town tournaments, people staying at the same hotel as the young boxer remember buying newspapers and finding the sports section missing. Cassius would be up in his room with a scissors and fifteen sports sections, cutting his own picture out of each one.

By 1960, Clay had proven himself as one of the best amateur boxers in the country but was still a relative unknown in the media. The Olympics could change that, but first he had to get by the trials, which would be held in California. And that meant taking his first airplane trip, a bumpy, turbulence-ridden flight that left the usually supremely confident Clay with white knuckles. He prevailed at the Olympic trials and qualified to represent the United States in Rome. But that meant an even longer flight, and Clay was determined never to set foot on another airplane. Nobody could change his mind. His friends and family implored him to gó, arguing this was his big chance. Joe Martin finally appealed to his dream. “I finally took him out to Central Park in Louisville and we had a long talk for a couple of hours and I calmed him down and convinced him if he wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, that he had to go to Rome and win the Olympics,” Martin later recalled.

The world was about to be introduced to one of the century’s most unforgettable characters.

Much has been written about Clay in Rome, strutting around the Olympic Village, making friends with athletes who didn’t even speak his language, impressing the media with his unique style and personality. But beyond the brashness, the jollity, the confidence, at least one witness saw something beneath the surface of Clay’s act, something almost messianic. Skeeter McClure was a fellow member of the U.S. boxing team, and Clay’s roommate in Rome. The two had met several times at tournaments, and Cassius had even visited McClure’s home in Ohio for a meal after a match. “When I first saw him when he came to our home in Toledo, his pants were up at his ankles, his sports coat was too short, but it’s like the clothing was irrelevant because he glowed,” McClure told Thomas Hauser. “It’s like there was a star when he was born that fated him to do what he was going to do and to have an impact on mankind around the globe, and there’s nothing that he could have done to prevent it and nothing he could have done to make it happen.”

But if there was a star guiding the boxer’s destiny, it seemed to many that for the next decade it was taking him in the wrong direction.

In 1960 boxing was still a dirty business, populated by mobsters and corrupt to its core. Countless congressional and media investigations uncovered ties between organized crime and boxing’s leading promoters, managers, and fighters. From the 1940s until his arrest in 1959—and from prison for years thereafter—a petty New York hood named Frankie Carbo virtually controlled boxing, including its mecca, Madison Square Garden. Fights were fixed, boxing writers supplemented their meager salaries with weekly envelopes filled with cash courtesy of Carbo, and many of the country’s greatest fighters, including Joe Louis, ended up penniless while the mob reaped the benefits.

When Cassius Clay returned from Rome with his gold medal and a reputation, Cassius Clay Sr.—savvy to the sport’s reputation—was determined for his son to end up in the right hands. He located a West End lawyer to safeguard his son’s interests and was ready to start taking offers, which were already pouring in.

“There were a lot of people who wanted to take him over when he came back from the Olympics,” recalled the elder Clay years later, “And I saw he could take care of himself in the ring, but I wanted to see he was well taken care of out of it too. He was underage, and didn’t know how to handle himself in business.”

The most attractive of these offers came from a group of eleven white Louisville businessmen, who called themselves the Louisville Sponsoring Group. The group represented a who’s who of old-line Kentucky breeding. Ali called them the “men with the connections and the complexions.” There were the oil tycoons J. D. Coleman; the steel baron Elbert Sutcliffe; the refined horse breeder Patrick Calhoun Jr., who admitted, “What I know about boxing you can put in your eye;” and plenty of tobacco and whiskey money thrown in to the mix.

None of these men needed the money, to be sure, but most of them regarded it as a bit of a lark—the chance to attach themselves to a hometown hero and have a bit of fun. Cassius Clay and his father, of course, couldn’t meet to discuss the terms at the exclusive Pendennis Club, to which all of the Sponsoring Group’s members belonged. The only way they could enter that Louisville institution would be by the back door as janitors or busboys.

The group represented its motivation as purely magnanimous, but one of its members, Vertner Smith, while having a drink with a reporter from
Sports Illustrated
one day, let slip his real aims.