King of the World

by David Remnick

  For his homecoming as a professional, Clay took on Lamar Clark, a tough heavyweight with forty-five knockouts in a row. For the first time as a pro, Clay made a prediction: Clark would be gone in two. And so he was. Two rounds into the fight, Clay broke Clark’s nose and dropped him to the canvas twice. The referee ended it there. “The more confident he became, the more his natural ebullience took over,” Pacheco said. “Everything was such fun to him. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so much fun if someone had knocked him lopsided, but no one did. No one shut him up. And so he just kept predicting and winning, predicting and winning. It was like Candide: he didn’t think anything bad could happen in this best of all possible worlds.”

  Clay’s next fight was in Las Vegas against a gigantic Hawaiian, Duke Sabedong. It was his first trying battle. Sabedong never really had a chance to beat Clay—the difference in their abilities was clear from the first minute of the fight—but he started hitting Clay with low blows and hoped for the best. Clay won a ten-round decision, his longest bout so far. What he learned beforehand, however, was even more instructive.

  One of Clay’s prefight promotional duties was to appear on a local radio show with Gorgeous George, the preeminent professional wrestler of the time. Gorgeous George (known to his mother as George Raymond Wagner) was the first wrestler of the television age to exploit the possibilities of theatrical narcissism and a flexible sexual identity—a Liberace in tights. His hair was long and blond, and when he entered the ring he wore curlers. In his corner, he would release the curlers and let one of his minions brush out the golden hair to his shoulders. He wore a robe of silver lamé and his fingernails were trimmed and polished. One lackey sprayed the ring mat with insecticide, another sprayed Gorgeous George with eau de cologne.

  At the radio interview, Clay was not exactly silent. He was already known by various nicknames in the press (Gaseous Cassius, the Louisville Lip, Cash the Brash, Mighty Mouth, Claptrap Clay, et al.), and he was quick to predict an easy win over Duke Sabedong. But compared to Gorgeous George he was tongue-tied.

  “I’ll kill him!” Gorgeous ranted. “I’ll tear his arm off! If this bum beats me I’ll crawl across the ring and cut my hair off. But it’s not gonna happen because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world!”

  Gorgeous George was already forty-six—he had been retailing this shtick for years—but Clay was impressed, the more so when he saw Gorgeous George perform. Every seat in the arena was filled and nearly every fan was screaming for George’s gilded scalp. But the point was, the arena was filled. “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth,” he told Clay in the dressing room after the show. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”

  Clay took direction well. “I saw fifteen thousand people coming to see this man get beat,” he said. “And his talking did it. I said, this is a gooood idea!”

  AS THE PRESS PAID MORE ATTENTION TO CLAY, FIRST IN Louisville and Miami and then in such national media as Sports Illustrated, the idea kept cropping up that no twenty-year-old could possibly have come up with this act, this bizarre combination of loose-limbed athleticism and blatant showmanship. All manner of theories were proposed, and would persist for years to come: the fighting style came straight from Ray Robinson by way of Billy Conn; the lip came from Cassius Clay, Sr.; the flamboyance came from Jack Johnson, from Archie Moore, from Gorgeous George. Clay, in fact, was the latest showman in the great American tradition of narcissistic self-promotion, a descendant of Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill by way of the dozens. Clay gave credit to his predecessors when he was aware of them, but he was insistent on his originality—and rightly so.

  “I know some guys in Louisville who used to give me a lift to the gym in their car when my motor scooter was broke down,” he said. “Now they’re trying to tell me they made me, and how not to forget them when I get rich. And my daddy, he tickles me. He says, ‘Don’t listen to the others, boy, I made you.’ He says he made me because he fed me my vegetable soup and steak when I was a baby, going without shoes, he says, to pay the food bill, and arguing with my mother, who didn’t want me eating them things so little. My daddy also says he made me because he saved me from working so I could box—I’ve never worked a day in my life—and he made me this and he made me that.… But listen here. When you want to talk about who made me, you talk to me. Who made me is me.”

  Through 1961 and 1962, Clay gained speed as both fighter and performer. He beat a succession of ranked heavyweights—Alonzo Johnson, Alex Miteff, Willie Besmanoff, Sonny Banks, Don Warner, George Logan, Billy Daniels, Alejandro Lavorante—and even at the most perilous moment, when he got too careless in the first round, too glib, and Banks knocked him down, he showed a new ability to take a punch, and he recovered to win easily in four. Afterward, Harry Wiley, Banks’s cornerman and a legendary New York boxing fixture, described the phenomenon of fighting Clay: “Things just went sour gradually all at once. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”

  Here, for once, was a young man energized by fantasies of his own power and gorgeousness and wit who had what it took to fulfill those fantasies. He was, first of all, a great fighter. “Watching Muhammad get up off the floor against Sonny Banks, kill out the rest of the round, and then recover to win—that was the night I fell in love with the kid,” Dundee said. In between these various exams in the ring, Clay had a good time. For five hundred dollars, he took a bit part in Requiem for a Heavyweight, the story of a destroyed old fighter, played by Anthony Quinn, who is pushed into taking more bouts by Jackie Gleason. Clay, of course, played the role of the fresh-faced challenger.

  In November 1962, Clay signed a contract for an episode right out of Requiem: he was scheduled to fight Archie Moore, who was now forty-seven (more or less) and the veteran of two hundred fights. “I wasn’t a fool, I knew how old I was and I knew Clay from training him for a while,” Moore told me decades later, “but I felt pretty good about Clay, and I thought if I could bear down, I could beat him. I had to outbox him or wait him out. He was so young, and you can never tell what a young man can do in boxing.”

  The truth was, Moore badly needed the purse. His only chance was that Clay’s inexperience would yield an opening, a chance for a right hand and a knockout. That was unlikely, according to the oddsmakers. Clay was a three-to-one favorite, and his prediction was for a quick night: “When you come to the fight, don’t block the aisle, and don’t block the door. You will all go home after round four.”

  Clay and Moore sold out the arena in Los Angeles, not least because they kept up the verbal sparring at every venue possible, especially television. The two fighters even staged a half-hour mock debate.

  “The only way I’ll fall in four, Cassius, is by tripping over your prostrate form,” Moore said.

  “If I lose,” said Clay (echoing Gorgeous George), “I’m going to crawl across the ring and kiss your feet. Then I’ll leave the country.”

  “Don’t humiliate yourself,” the old man replied. “Our country’s depending on its youth. Really, I don’t see how you can stand yourself. I am a speaker, not a rabble-rouser. I’m a conversationalist, you’re a shouter!”

  Moore played the avuncular elder to the boorish wannabe. After the debate, he reflected on the young man at a certain professorial remove: “I view this young man with mixed emotions,” he said. “Sometimes he sounds humorous, but sometimes he sounds like Ezra Pound’s poetry. He’s like a man who can write beautifully but doesn’t know how to punctuate. He has this twentieth-century exuberance but there’s bitterness in him somewhere.… He is certainly coming along at a time when a new face is needed on the boxing scene, on the fistic horizon. But in his anxiousness to be this person he may be overplaying his hand by belittling people.… I don’t care what Cassius says. He can’t make me mad. All I want to do is knock him out.”

  Once the two fighters were in the arena, stripped of their robes and their promotional poses, it was imposs
ible to ignore the physical difference. Clay was sleek as an otter, beautiful, and not even at his peak of strength. Moore was middle-aged. His hair was going gray. Fat jiggled on his arms. He kept his trunks pulled up around his nipples.

  In the first round, Clay conducted a survey. Moore had a reputation for speed (now gone) and as a sneak, the master of the quick, unseen punch. And as Clay flashed his jabs into Moore’s face, he seemed to convince himself that there would be no answer coming. Each jab that Clay bounced off Moore’s scalp assured the younger man of the cruelty of age—a soothing discovery to him, if not to Moore.

  In the second, Moore actually caught Clay with a right hand. It shot up out of a crowd of tangled arms and gave Clay a start, but there was nothing much to it. By the third, Moore was already so exhausted from trying to keep up that his arms began to sink. His inclination to send any damage Clay’s way was down to nothing. Moore crouched, lower and lower, as if to meld with the canvas, but Clay’s reach was long and he leaned over to drill one left hook after another into Moore’s bald spot. Years later, Moore would say that those punches, in their accumulation, made him dizzy: “They stirred the mind.”

  Clay was doing whatever he wanted. Every punch—the jabs, the hooks, the quick overhand rights—landed, and Moore was barely hanging on, squatting lower and lower. Midway through the third, Clay hit Moore square on the chin. Moore wobbled. Then he took a few running steps backward to the rope, found it, and hung on. Clay refused to follow up, more for aesthetic reasons, it seemed, than for lack of intent. He had predicted a fourth-round knockout and wanted to preserve his pure vision of the fight.

  Clay came out flat-footed in the fourth, the better to leverage his punches, and after a few preliminary jabs to warm up the shoulders, he started looking for the knockout. Moore bent at the waist again, as if in prayer, but he could not bow low enough. Moore took a few wild swings to preserve his name, and Clay jabbed back, scolding him for the delay. Clay circled, circled, and then suddenly jumped in with an uppercut that straightened Moore out of his crouch, then a few more punches, all sharp and straight, like clean hammer raps to a nail, put him down. Clay stood over the prostrate lump to take his bow, shuffled his feet in a flash, and then retreated, reluctantly, to the neutral corner. He disdained this obligatory retreat; it meant leaving center stage.

  Moore, meanwhile, roused himself and rolled onto his left side, an old man waking from a fitful sleep. Then he pridefully lifted himself to his feet just before “ten.” With a look of annoyance (he’d thought it was over), Clay met Moore again in the center of the ring and started punching. Moore took one wild swing, as if to acquit himself of any lingering charges of resignation, and then slowly melted back to the floor as Clay hit him on top of the head. The time had come and Moore knew it. He stayed on his backside.

  With the fight over, Clay hugged Moore sweetly, the way one would embrace a grandfather.

  Later Moore responded with an endorsement. “He’s definitely ready for Liston,” he told the reporters gathered around him. “Sonny would be difficult for him and I would hesitate to say he could beat the champ, but I’ll guarantee he would furnish him with an exceedingly interesting evening.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Secrets

  BY 1962, CLAY WAS A TOP CONTENDER FOR THE HEAVYWEIGHT title, but by now his reputation was based as much on his persona as on his athletic abilities. “Word was getting around that I was something the world had never seen before,” he said decades later. For all his dreaminess in the classroom, for all his trouble reading a book or a balance sheet, Clay may have been the most self-aware twenty-one-year-old in the country. Like the most intelligent of comedians or politicians or actors, he was in complete command of even the most outrageous performances. “Where do you think I’d be next week if I didn’t know how to shout and holler and make the public take notice?” he said. “I’d be poor and I’d probably be down in my hometown, washing windows or running an elevator and saying ‘yassuh’ and ‘nawsuh’ and knowing my place.”

  Clay’s references to the American racial divide in those days were frequent, but guarded. The truth was that Clay was holding on to a secret. Even before he went off to win the Olympic gold medal in Rome, he had become fascinated by a sect called the Nation of Islam, better known as the Black Muslims. Clay first heard about the group in 1959 when he traveled to Chicago for a Golden Gloves tournament. Chicago was home base for the Nation and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and Clay ran into Muslims on the South Side. His aunt remembers him coming home to Louisville with a record album of Muhammad’s sermons. Then, in the spring, before leaving for the Olympics, Clay read a copy of the Nation’s official newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. He was clearly taken with what he was reading and hearing in the Muslim rhetoric of pride and separatism. “The Muslims were practically unknown in Louisville in those days,” said Clay’s high-school classmate Lamont Johnson. “They had a little outfit, a temple, run by a black guy with white spots on his skin, but no one paid it any mind. No one had heard about their bean pies, the way they lived, what they thought. It wasn’t even big enough to be scary in 1959.”

  New York, 1964. With Elijah Muhammad.

  Clay stunned his English teacher at Central High when he told her he wanted to write his term paper on the Black Muslims. She refused to let him do it. He never let on that his interest in the group was more than a schoolboy’s passing curiosity. Something had resonated in his mind, something about the discipline and bearing of the Muslims, their sense of hierarchy, manhood, and self-respect, the way they refused to smoke or drink or carouse, their racial pride.

  After coming back from Rome, Clay attended meetings in various cities of the NAACP, of CORE, and of the Nation of Islam. Other athletes, like Curt Flood and Bill White of the St. Louis Cardinals, had stopped in to hear Muslim preachers, too, and left after listening for a few minutes to the rhetoric about “blue-eyed devils.” But Clay was impressed by the Muslims in a way he was not by any other group or church. “The most concrete thing I found in churches was segregation,” he said years later. “Well, now I have learned to accept my own and be myself. I know we are original man and that we are the greatest people on the planet Earth and our women the queens thereof.”

  In March 1961, after he had moved to Miami, Cassius met a man on the street who went by the name of Captain Sam—Sam Saxon, a poolroom guy, a street hustler, who had transformed himself in the mid-fifties after hearing Elijah Muhammad speak and joining the Nation. After a stint in Chicago, Captain Sam went to Miami to spread the word. The chief Muslim minister in town was Ishmael Sabakhan, and Saxon said that “the Messenger,” Elijah Muhammad, wanted him to be Sabakhan’s captain. When he wasn’t recruiting new Muslims or selling Muhammad Speaks on the street, he was running concessions at the Miami racetracks: Hialeah, Gulfstream, Tropical Park. In the bathrooms he made tip money handing towels to white guys and offering shoe shines and Bromo-Seltzers.

  Captain Sam and Clay started chatting about Elijah Muhammad. Saxon was surprised that the young man had heard of the group, knew something about it.

  “Hey, you’re into the teaching,” he said.

  “Well, I ain’t been in the temple, but I know what you’re talking about,” Clay said. Cassius introduced himself and told Saxon (as he told almost everyone) that he was soon going to be heavyweight champion of the world. He invited Saxon back to his place to look at his scrapbook. Saxon went along, and in their talks he noticed how Clay talked about the Muslims. As untutored as Clay was, it was clear he had a great interest, and so Saxon invited him to a meeting at the local mosque.

  The preacher, a man named Brother John, unspooled a sermon on black identity that would become, almost word for word, a set piece of Muhammad Ali’s. “Why are we called Negroes?” Brother John preached. “It’s the white man’s way of taking away our identity. If you see a Chinaman coming, you know he’s from China. If you see a Cuban coming, you know he comes from Cuba. If you see a Canadian coming, you know he comes fr
om Canada. What country is called Negro?” Brother John then talked about the names of American blacks being slave names, names that gave no sense of ancestry, names that actively erased a black man’s ancestry.

  “That was plain to me,” Ali told the writer Thomas Hauser many years later when they collaborated on an oral biography. “I could reach out and touch what Brother John was saying. It wasn’t like church teaching, where I had to have faith that what the preacher was preaching was right. And I said to myself, ‘Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a Kentucky white man, who owned my great-granddaddy and named my great-granddaddy after him. And then my granddaddy got named and then my daddy and now it’s me.’ ”

  From then on, Clay started delving deeper and deeper into the Nation of Islam, reading Muhammad Speaks, listening to the record album called A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell, and, most of all, hanging out with Muslims who saw him as a cherished recruit. Jeremiah Shabazz, the Nation’s regional minister, based in Atlanta, traveled to Miami to meet Clay. He told him how in China Buddha looks Chinese, and the Europeans and Americans worship a white Christ. Why didn’t black Americans worship a black god? Why did a black man like Cassius Clay, Sr., spend his time painting murals of a white Jesus? In fact, Shabazz told Clay, God was black, according to the Nation of Islam. He gave Clay oral lessons in the history of slavery, telling him that there could be no devil below ground worse than the devil on earth who oppressed the black man, put him in chains, made him build America while enslaving him, enslaving his children. He told Clay that the church he grew up in was a kind of slavery, too, a sophisticated form of pacification, a way of keeping the Negro singing and crying on Sundays instead of marching the streets and freeing himself. He told the young man how foolish the civil rights movement was, how foolish it was for black people to let themselves be gassed and beaten in the streets, bitten by dogs, knocked over by firehoses, all to impress white people; how foolish it was to beg for their liberties, for what was theirs by natural right. The preachers of the Nation called for uncompromising opposition, for opposition by any means necessary. “Anybody can sit,” Elijah’s disciple Malcolm X said, criticizing Martin Luther King’s Freedom Riders and sit-in protesters. “An old woman can sit. A coward can sit.… It takes a man to stand.” The Nation of Islam, Malcolm said, refused to sit and be beaten. He told white people, “You might see these Negroes who believe in nonviolence and mistake us for one of them and put your hands on us thinking that we’re going to turn the other cheek—and we’ll put you to death just like that.”