King of the World

by David Remnick

  It would be stretching the story to say that Cassius showed unusual talent in his fight against Ronnie O’Keefe. But in the next year or two, he not only showed himself to be extraordinarily gifted, with quick feet and hands, supernatural reflexes that impressed even the earliest of his amateur opponents and judges, but also proved to be one of the hardest-working athletes anyone had ever seen in Louisville. From the moment Clay won that first fight, he would come home in the evening and tell his parents how he was going to become champion of the world, was going to buy them all new cars and a new place to live, and he said it all not with the sort of misty fatalism favored in sports biopics (“And that homerun will be for you, Ma!”), but with a kind of offhand humor. He didn’t just talk about it. Cassius practically lived in the gym. He never smoked, never drank. A couple of times, with some friends, he sniffed the fumes from a gas tank—his sole experience with hallucinogens. He was a nutrition nut. He carried around a bottle of water with garlic in it—a solution, he said, that would keep his blood pressure down and his health perfect. For breakfast he favored his own nutritional concoction, a quart of milk with two raw eggs. He announced that soda pop was as lethal as cigarettes.

  Clay’s discipline, from the age of twelve on, convinced Martin that he had a future as a boxer. Cassius woke between four and five in the morning, ran several miles, and then worked out at the gym in the afternoon, staying long past the hour when his peers had gone home for dinner, “All he ever wanted to do was run and train and spar,” said Jimmy Ellis, a contemporary at the Columbia Gym who won the WBA heavyweight championship when it was stripped from Ali in 1967 for his refusal to go to Vietnam. “As long as there was someone to box, he’d take them on.”

  “He used to talk about his body being pure, a temple, even when he was a kid,” said his classmate Beverly Edwards. “Then in the cafeteria he had to use two trays to carry his lunch: six small bottles of milk, bunches of sandwiches, hot food from the steam table. Man, he could eat! But it was always wholesome—fuel for his boxing.”

  There was a real sweetness, a naiveté, about Cassius. Despite his strength and his local celebrity from his increasingly frequent appearances on Tomorrow’s Champions, he never picked on anyone. He was no street fighter. The football coach was interested in him, but Cassius wasn’t interested in football. “You can get hurt playing football!” he said. “And that would be bad for my boxing.” And as handsome as he was, he was not especially advanced where girls were concerned. He would flirt, he would give one girl or another his Golden Gloves pin and talk about how they would get married and have children, but when it came to more elemental moments, he was lost. When he was a junior in high school, Cassius dated a girl named Areatha Swint, a smart and beautiful girl who had her hair cut just like Dorothy Dandridge’s in Carmen Jones.

  “Cassius usually wore a red-and-gray jacket with a Golden Gloves appliqué,” she wrote in a memoir for the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Cassius didn’t say whether he liked my hair. At that particular time he was more interested in Floyd Patterson. He had his moments, though, when he used to tell me I was the prettiest girl he ever saw. Trouble was, Cassius didn’t see that many girls.”

  After three weeks of dating, he asked her for a kiss. “I was the first girl he ever kissed, and he didn’t know how. So I had to teach him. When I did, he fainted. Really, he just did. He was always joking, so I thought he was playing, but he fell so hard. I ran upstairs to get a cold cloth.”

  When Cassius came to, he said, “I’m fine, but no one will ever believe this.”

  Many of the most trying hours for Clay came in school. He entered the main black high school, Central High on West Chestnut Street, in 1957 for the tenth grade, and his grades were so poor he had to withdraw the next year and then come back. Despite his academic record, he won over Central’s courtly principal, Atwood Wilson. Clay was not Wilson’s idea of a model student. He was constantly skittering through the halls, shadowboxing, showing off, pronouncing himself the greatest of all times, then flying into the bathroom to box some more in front of the mirror. In class, he daydreamed, drawing when he should have been taking notes. But what impressed Wilson was Clay’s precocious discipline, the way he was up before dawn, running through Chickasaw Park in his steel-tipped clodhoppers and a sweat suit, always bragging, but always making good on his boasts. When he told his friends that he was going to go on Tomorrow’s Champions and whup Charley Baker, the toughest kid in the West End, he did it, even though Baker outweighed him by more than twenty pounds. Clay was a gentle kid who never used his muscle except in the ring. And so Wilson decided to encourage him. At school assemblies, he would embrace him and announce, “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen! Cassius Clay! The next heavyweight champion of the world. This guy is going to make a million dollars!” If there were reports of misbehavior in the classrooms, Wilson flipped on the school intercom and announced in a mock-grim voice, “Any acting up and I’m going to set Cassius Clay on you!”

  As graduation time approached, some teachers thought that Clay should not get a diploma, that letting him finish would send the wrong signal to the coaches, who might then want their own failing student athletes to get special treatment. Finally, Wilson got up at a faculty meeting held in the school’s music room and said, “One day our greatest claim to fame is going to be that we knew Cassius Clay or taught him.… Do you think I’m going to be the principal of a school that Cassius Clay didn’t finish? Why, in one night, he’ll make more money than the principal and all you teachers make in a year. If every teacher here fails him, he’s still not going to fail. He’s not going to fail in my school. I’m going to say, ‘I taught him!’ ”

  After Wilson finished what would become known in school legend as his “Claim to Fame” speech, the teachers reluctantly relented. When Clay finally finished Central in June 1960, he was ranked 376 out of 391 and was awarded the minimum rite of passage, a “certificate of attendance.” Clay’s graduation was an act of generosity, the traditional debt of gratitude a school pays to its star athlete. Atwood Wilson had few illusions about Clay. Decades later, in middle age, Ali would still have trouble reading. No athlete would be more written about in this century, and yet the athlete in question would ask his friends and cornermen to read the clippings to him. “But the truth is,” Wilson said, “the only thing Cassius is going to have to read is his IRS form, and I’m willing to help him do it.”

  In fairness, Clay was training like a professional when he was still in his mid-teens. At eighteen, he had already compiled an amazing amateur record: one hundred wins and only eight losses, two national Golden Gloves championships, and two national Amateur Athletic Union titles.

  Christine Martin, Joe Martin’s wife, would drive Cassius and some of the other boys in the gym to tournaments in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toledo in her Ford station wagon. “In those days, the black boys couldn’t go in the restaurants, so I didn’t take any of the boys in,” she once told a Louisville reporter. “I’d just go in myself and get what they wanted, however many hamburgers per boy, and bring it back to the car. Cassius was a very easy-to-get-along-with fellow. Very easy to handle. Very polite. Whatever you asked him to do, that’s what he’d do. His mother, that’s why. She was a wonderful person. 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.”

  Martin was helpful (and so was another local trainer, Fred Stoner), but no matter who was in his corner, Clay was his own person, his own strategist, even as a teenager. Long before he mystified the national press with his verse and his psychological assaults on one opponent after another, he had begun to invent himself. Clay’s performances served a dual purpose: to throw his opponent into a funk and to stir interest in the activities of Cassius Clay. He would duck his head into the dressing room of an opponent and loudly ann
ounce he’d better be ready for a whupping. At a city tournament, when he was still twelve, he started sassing a fighter named George King, flicking jabs at the air and asking, over and over, “You think you could stop this jab?” King was twenty-one and married with a child. Who was this twelve-year-old boy? When he mouthed off at his bouts on local television, the crowds at the Louisville arenas rooted against him, shouting, “Button his lip!” “Bash his nose in!”

  “I didn’t care what they said long as they kept coming to see me fight,” he said. “They paid their money, they were entitled to a little fun. You would have thought I was a well-known pro, ten years older than I was.”

  Clay was already spouting the doggerel that would become an Ali trademark years later.

  This guy must be done.

  I’ll stop him in one.

  So went one poem performed for a reporter for The Courier-Journal.

  The world would be shocked by his hysterical antics at the weigh-in before he faced Sonny Liston for the first time, but he had rehearsed the act even before he became a professional. At a tournament in Chicago in March 1960, Clay went to his weigh-in with his opponent, Jimmy Jones, who was the defending heavyweight titleholder in the competition.

  “Mr. Martin, are you in a hurry to get away from here tonight?” Clay said to his trainer in earshot of Jimmy Jones.

  “Not really,” Martin said. “Why?”

  “This guy over here, I can get rid of him in one round if you’re in a hurry,” he said, gesturing to Jones. “Or, if you’re in no hurry, if you want me to box, I can carry him for three rounds.”

  Martin said, “I’m in no hurry.”

  And so that night Clay took his time. He won in three rounds.

  By the time Clay was fifteen years old, in 1957, he had a sure sense of his own destiny. That year the well-regarded light heavyweight Willie Pastrano came to Louisville from Miami with trainer Angelo Dundee to fight John Holman. One evening, Dundee was sitting in the hotel room with Pastrano when Clay called him from the lobby.

  “I’d always stay in the same room with Willie to bird-dog him, make sure he didn’t go floating around on me,” Dundee recalled. “I wanted to keep tabs on him. Cassius said, word for word, ‘I’m Cassius Marcellus Clay and I’m the Golden Gloves champion, I’ve won this and won that.’ Then he told me he was gonna win the Olympics. I held my hand over the phone and asked Pastrano if he was game to meet the kid.”

  “What the hell,” Pastrano said. “There’s nothing on TV.”

  Cassius and his brother, Rudy, came upstairs and stayed for several hours talking with Dundee and Pastrano. Cassius asked question after question about training, about other fighters, about technique. Dundee was amused and impressed. “The kid was just so alive and committed.” A couple of years later, Dundee and Pastrano came back to town for another fight, this time against Alonzo Johnson. Clay was seventeen, still an amateur, but now he didn’t want to talk. He wanted to spar with Pastrano. Dundee was confident of his fighter, but he was not eager for trouble.

  “I didn’t want him to spar with Willie,” Dundee said, “but he would be there waiting in the gym, bugging me every day, telling me, ‘Why don’t you let me work with your guy?’ Well, I don’t like amateurs to work with pros, and this was the week of Willie’s fight. But this kid was so enthusiastic and I sort of caved in a little bit and let them go two rounds. I figured, what could happen? Well, Willie couldn’t find this kid. Muhammad—Cassius then—was so quick. Bouncing. You think he looks quick when you see him in his later fights, but that’s slow compared to what he was as a young man. Slap, slap, slap, and gone. And could he hit? Anybody can hit. Anybody a hundred and ninety pounds can hit. The key is hitting a guy when the other guy don’t expect it. Willie came out of the ring, and I said, ‘Whoa, Willie, you’re stale, no more sparring for you.’ Willie said, ‘Bullshit, the kid beat the hell out of me.’ ”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Twentieth-Century Exuberance

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1960, JUST BEFORE THE OLYMPICS IN Rome, a young journalist named Dick Schaap walked from his office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan to a midtown hotel to meet two of the best boxing prospects on the American team, Cassius Clay and a fighter from Toledo named Wilbert “Skeeter” McClure. Schaap was Newsweek’s sports editor, and while he would not be joining the press rush to Rome, he wanted to meet some of the more promising athletes on the American team, to get a better sense of how the magazine should cover the Games.

  Schaap knew everyone and got around; athletes loved him. He offered to take Clay and McClure up to Harlem to meet his friend Sugar Ray Robinson, an idea that appealed especially to Clay. Clay had built his boxing style on the principle that a big man could borrow the tactics of a smaller man, a man like Robinson; he had also spun his dreams of luxury on visions of Sugar Ray’s legendary Cadillacs: shocking pink this year, lavender the next. Clay idolized Robinson, but if he was nervous about meeting him, he did not show it on the ride uptown. Block after block, he described how he would destroy everyone in the light heavyweight division, and after that, it was on to the summary destruction of Floyd Patterson. He would become the heavyweight champion of the world, he said, before reaching legal voting age.

  “I’ll be the greatest of all time,” Clay said.

  Louisville, 1963.

  “Don’t mind him,” McClure told Schaap as the taxi sped up Seventh Avenue. “That’s just the way he is.”

  Schaap didn’t mind at all. “Even at eighteen, Clay was the most vivid, the most alive figure I’d ever met,” Schaap said. “It was like meeting a great actor or an electrifying statesman, some sort of figure that had a glow, an energy inside him, and you knew right away that you’d be hearing about him for years.”

  Clay, McClure, and Schaap stopped at Sugar Ray’s bar on Seventh Avenue and 124th Street, but Robinson wasn’t in yet. They decided to kill some time eating dinner and wandering around Harlem. A block from the bar they saw a young man, neatly dressed, standing on a wooden box preaching a doctrine of “buy black” and black self-help, a theme that Clay had heard from his father (via Marcus Garvey) and that would resonate in the speeches of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. There was nothing especially radical about the speech—there were no calls for separatism, no suggestions of the white man as a “blue-eyed devil”—and yet Clay was astonished to find someone out on the street preaching without fear of police or white racists.

  “Ain’t he gonna get in trouble?” Clay asked.

  Schaap said he would not. There had been speakers like this one in Harlem for a long time. Clay listened hard to the young preacher and nodded approvingly.

  Robinson finally pulled up in that season’s model—a purple Caddy. Schaap wondered how Clay would behave, whether he would try to get up in Robinson’s face and put on the braggadocio. In fact, Clay was humble, even hesitant. Robinson gave him just a few moments. With a bored and superior air, Sugar Ray said hello and then strode on past them into his bar. Clay was goggle-eyed. “That Sugar Ray, he’s something,” he said. “Someday I’m gonna own two Cadillacs—and a Ford for just getting around in.”

  It was only later, when Clay looked back on the meeting, that he felt ignored by Robinson. “I was so hurt,” he said years later. “If Sugar Ray only knew how much I loved him and how long I’d been following him, maybe he wouldn’t have done that.… I said to myself right then, ‘If I ever get great and famous and people want my autograph enough to wait all day to see me, I’m sure goin’ to treat ’em different.’ ”

  Clay’s only obstacle as an Olympian was his fear of airplanes. He had made his way through the amateur ranks on trains and in the Martins’ station wagon. Why couldn’t he do the same on his trip to the heavyweight championship of the world? It took Joe Martin four hours of sitting and talking with Clay in Central Park in Louisville to convince him that he could not take a train to Rome, He could grip the armrests, he could take a pill, he could rant and rave, but he had to fly. “He finally agreed to fly,” Ma
rtin’s son, Joe junior, told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “But then he went to an army surplus store and bought a parachute and actually wore it on the plane. It was a pretty rough flight, and he was down in the aisle praying with his parachute on.”

  In Rome, he proceeded to delight himself, inside and outside the ring. As usual, he had some doggerel to recite, this time some lines celebrating Floyd Patterson’s defeat of Ingemar Johansson:

  You may talk about Sweden

  You may talk about Rome.

  But Rockville Centre’s

  Floyd Patterson’s home.

  A lot of people said

  That Floyd couldn’t fight,

  But you should have seen him

  On that comeback night.

  Clay wandered through the Olympic Village meeting people from all over the world and charming them with predictions about his great future. Clay was so much at ease that he became known as the mayor of the Olympic Village. “His peers loved him,” said Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals for the Americans in the sprints. “Everybody wanted to see him. Everybody wanted to be near him. Everybody wanted to talk to him. And he talked all the time. I always hung in the background, not knowing what he was going to say.” Clay developed a crush on Rudolph, but she was engaged to a fellow sprinter. That was all right. When Clay saw McClure writing a love letter to a girlfriend back home, he asked him to take dictation for him: he would write a love letter to a girl in Louisville, if only for the fun of it.