King of the World

by David Remnick

  Malcolm was torn between his loyalty to Muhammad and his urge to criticize him. At once he apologized to two of Muhammad’s key lieutenants, Louis X and Lonni X, and vowed to do better. Malcolm also recorded his apology for Elijah Muhammad, but when the Messenger listened to the tape he sensed the edge of accusation in some of Malcolm’s words. “Sometimes he speaks nice and good,” Muhammad said, “and other times he is altogether different.” Muhammad extended his ban on Malcolm indefinitely.

  Despite the battle among the leaders of the Nation, Clay invited Malcolm and his wife, Betty, and their three daughters to come stay with him in Miami. He intended the invitation as a sixth wedding anniversary gift. It would be the first vacation Malcolm and Betty had enjoyed since they were married. Malcolm certainly needed the rest, and he figured it would be a good thing to keep away from Chicago or New York. He accepted with relief. On January 14, Clay met Malcolm at the airport—an event duly reported to the FBI by an informant. But the local FBI office thought the report so strange, so unlikely, that they did not send it along to Washington until January 21, when the two men flew to New York.

  For any other boxer, breaking camp with a month to go before the fight would have been a serious disruption of routine, but Clay told Dundee he needed a few days off from training, and Dundee barely shrugged. Clay had not really asked permission to go and provided no details of where he was going.

  In New York, the two ate dinner together, and then Clay went off to a Black Muslim rally at the Rockland Palace Ballroom near the old Polo Grounds. Malcolm stayed away from the rally, to avoid arousing anyone’s anger. Two days later, in a front-page story for the Herald Tribune, Clay’s old friend Dick Schaap described how he had first met Clay in 1960 when he was eighteen and how in Harlem, to Clay’s astonishment, they had met the soapbox preacher talking about black self-help and buying black; and now, Schaap wrote, here was Clay, a contender for the heavyweight title, among fifteen hundred people cheering Elijah Muhammad. Schaap wrote that Clay was now an ardent follower of the Nation of Islam, though Clay himself refused to confirm the story. (In fact, Clay refused to talk to Schaap for a while after the story ran.) Schaap did, however, manage to reach Sonny Liston, who said, “I heard ’bout Clay and the Muslims a month ago. Don’t make no difference to me. I don’t mess with his personal affairs, he shouldn’t mess with mine. But tell him I got it in the contract that the fight can’t be shown in no theaters where they don’t let Negroes in to see it.”

  When Clay and Malcolm returned to Miami, the news really began to break. On February 3, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Clay’s hometown paper, published an interview in which he dropped all pretense of distance from the Muslims. “Sure I talked to the Muslims and I’m going back again,” he said. “I like the Muslims. I’m not going to get killed trying to force myself on people who don’t want me. I like my life. Integration is wrong. The white people don’t want integration. I don’t believe in forcing it, and the Muslims don’t believe in it. So what’s wrong with the Muslims?”

  Then came the most decisive news break of all. Pat Putnam, The Miami Herald’s boxing writer, tracked down Cassius Clay, Sr., and interviewed him about the rumors of his son’s conversion to the Nation of Islam—a conversion that would be announced right after the fight. In an article that ran on February 8, seventeen days before the fight, Clay senior angrily confirmed the rumors and went into a tirade about how his son had been ruined. He claimed the Muslims were stealing money from his son and exploiting his name.

  The story was a scoop for Putnam, but as soon as it was published he got calls threatening him and his wife. “So after work one night,” Putnam said, “I went out to the black section of town where Clay was living and told him about what was happening. I knew him very well by that time. And he said, ‘Pat, don’t worry about it. You’ll never get another call.’ And he was right. That was the end of that.”

  For a while, Clay, Malcolm, and Malcolm’s family enjoyed their time together. Clay put Malcolm’s family up at the Hampton House motel, and they saw each other nearly every day. Sometimes in the evening the two would go walking through the black neighborhoods of Miami. Malcolm kept a camera strung around his neck and took dozens of pictures of Clay. Clay joked with the people, talked about politics and boxing, and kissed babies, as if he were running for office. The three little girls romped around the fighter; Betty, who was pregnant, had some time to relax; and Malcolm avoided the telephone. But Malcolm could not avoid his own despair over his collapsed relations with the Nation. “I was in a state of emotional shock,” he told Alex Haley. “I was like someone who for twelve years had had an inseparable, beautiful marriage—and then suddenly one morning at breakfast the marriage partner had thrust across the table some divorce papers. I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun, or the stars.” Malcolm worried, at times, about the rumors of assassination, but even worse was his increasing sense of betrayal, his shock at the idea that the man he had always understood to be the Messenger, a man of integrity, had covered up his own corruption and weaknesses rather than confessing them.

  Malcolm’s faith in Elijah Muhammad was crumbling, but he remained convinced of the need for a strong black nationalist movement. Over breakfast, he showed Clay pictures of the white Catholic priests who had been close to both Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. He tried to instill in Clay the idea that the fight with Liston was a religious battle, not merely a sporting event.

  “This fight is the truth,” he said. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern Crusades—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens. Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”

  Malcolm’s presence in Miami was an inspiration to the fighter—by the day of the weigh-in he would be shouting, “It is prophesied for me to be successful!”—but it was hurting the gate. The promoter, Bill MacDonald, had to gross $800,000 dollars to break even on the fight, and it was becoming increasingly clear that he was not coming close. The David-versus-Goliath fight he thought he was getting was fast losing its balance of moral forces, especially to white Floridians, who were not inclined to see a brash young black man, much less a Black Muslim, in the role of David. The Miami Convention Hall held 15,744 people, and it was no secret to MacDonald now that he would be lucky to fill half the house.

  Finally, three days before the fight, MacDonald confronted Clay about the press reports and told him that the news was going to cost him his shot at the title. MacDonald said he was getting ready to call off the bout. Was it true? Was Cassius really a member of the Nation of Islam? MacDonald told Clay that if he had to cancel this fight, he might not get another chance at the heavyweight championship.

  Clay knew MacDonald was right, but he stood up to him all the same. The championship was all he’d ever wanted since he was twelve years old, it was his destiny, but he refused to deny his ties to the Nation. If MacDonald wanted to call off the fight, then that was his business.

  “My religion’s more important to me than the fight,” Clay recalled saying.

  Then the fight was off, MacDonald said, and that was it. Clay went home to start packing his bags.

  After that meeting, the publicist, Harold Conrad, immediately went to the Fifth Street Gym to tell the Dundees that the fight was off and that Clay had gone home to pack. Then Conrad went to MacDonald and told him it was impossible to cancel the fight: think of all the tickets that had been sold, the closed-circuit contracts around the country.

  “The hell I can’t call it off,” MacDonald said, according to Conrad. “You’re a Northerner. You don’t understand. You don’t realize that Miami is the Deep South and is just as segregated as any town in Mississippi. How can I promote a fight down here with a guy who thinks we’re white devils?”

  “You know what you’re doing?” Conrad said. “In this co
untry we have freedom of religion.”

  “Bullshit,” MacDonald said. “And don’t you go start hitting me with the Constitution.”

  “Bill, you don’t realize what you’re doing. You’ll go down in history as a promoter who denied a man the right to fight for the title because of his religion.”

  “Jesus, what the hell you want me to do? It’s that Malcolm X. He’s responsible for all this trouble and he’s practically running the kid’s fight camp. That don’t look good.”

  “Suppose Malcolm X got out of town right away?” Conrad proposed. “Would that change your mind?”

  MacDonald allowed that it might.

  Conrad tracked down Malcolm and said, “Look, the way things are now, the fight is off. Cassius will lose his chance to win the heavyweight championship, but you can save it for him.”

  How? Malcolm said.

  “You have to get out of town now. You’re the focal point. You’re the guy the press knows.”

  Malcolm said he would go, and everyone agreed that he could return the night of the fight, when the media’s attention would be on the ring itself. Malcolm was given a ringside seat, seat number seven, near Clay’s corner.

  When the meeting was over, Conrad extended his hand to Malcolm X.

  Malcolm refused to shake it. Instead, he touched Conrad’s wrist with his forefinger and went off to the airport.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bear Hunting

  FEBRUARY 25, 1964

  CLAY WAS IN NO WISE DELUDED ABOUT LISTON’S PHYSICAL gifts. Sonny was a world-class slugger who could move, and yet Clay saw how easily his feelings could be hurt, how he could become confused and vulnerable. Liston was capable of a funny remark, he was certainly smarter than his scant school records would indicate, but he was vulnerable. He had shown over and over that he was sensitive about his age, that he resented being thought of as mobster’s meat, a killer in trunks, boots, and gloves. Liston demanded respect, the solemnity due a king. And so respect was precisely what Clay would deny him. He would play the fool, at once enraging Liston and also leading him toward the danger zones of complacency.

  Clay’s strategy was in place from the moment Liston arrived in Miami to train. Clay met Liston’s plane, and as the champion came down the steps toward the tarmac, Clay was there to meet him, shouting, “Chump! Big ugly bear! I’m gonna whup you right now!”

  As Liston got closer to Clay, he said, “Look, this clowning, it’s not cute, and I’m not joking.”

  “Joking?” Clay said. “Why you big chump, I’ll whup you right here.”

  Liston looked Clay up and down. He could not have failed to notice that Clay, for all his featherweight speed, was a big man, taller than himself.

  Miami, 1964.

  Liston was accompanied by Jack Nilon, his manager, and Joe Louis, who was being paid walking-around money to be in the champion’s corner and tell the press what a fine fellow he was. Liston, Louis, and Nilon climbed in a VIP car and took off for the house Liston had rented on the beach.

  But Clay didn’t let it go. He drove after Liston’s car, chasing him as he left the airport.

  Liston’s car suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, and Liston, fuming, got out and headed for Clay.

  “Listen, you little punk. I’ll punch you in the mouth. This has gone too far!”

  Clay started to take off his jacket, screaming, “Come on, chump, right here!”

  The two men were separated before anything serious could happen, but Liston had been given a taste of the harassment he was about to endure. Clay and his entourage made sure to put out rumors that they were going to stage a “full-scale raid” on Liston as he trained at the Surfside Auditorium, and once in a while they did send over an emissary to make sure that Liston kept thinking about them. Another time Clay just drove to the estate where Liston was living and held court on his lawn, knowing that the champion could see him from the window. “Liston was humiliated,” said Mort Shamik, who was in Miami for Sports Illustrated. “He had difficulty getting that house to begin with because it was in a white neighborhood. At first, he used to sit out there on the lawn with his family like a wealthy planter. But after Clay came around bear-hunting, he didn’t sit outside anymore. He was like a prisoner in his own luxurious surroundings. This soured Liston’s sense of expansiveness and of being king.” Liston, who had craved acceptance, was getting just the opposite from Clay. He was champion of the world and a twenty-two-year-old kid who had barely gotten by Doug Jones and Henry Cooper was out on his lawn, inside his training camp, on television, and in the papers, everywhere making a fool of him. The gall!

  In the meantime, Clay trained harder than ever. What was more, after studying films of Liston’s bouts with Cleveland Williams, Eddie Machen, Patterson, and other opponents, he came up with a well-planned strategy.

  “You know, a fighter can condition his body to go hard certain rounds, then to coast certain rounds,” Clay told Playboy afterward. “Nobody can fight fifteen rounds. So I trained to fight the first two rounds, and to protect myself from getting hit by Liston. I knew that with the third, he’d start tiring, then he’d get worse every round. So I trained to coast the third, fourth, and fifth rounds. I had two reasons for that. One was that I wanted to prove that I had the ability to stand up to Liston. The second reason was that I wanted him to wear himself out and get desperate. He would be throwing wild punches, and missing. If I just did that as long as he lasted on his feet, I couldn’t miss winning the fight on points. And so I conditioned myself to fight full-steam from the sixth through the ninth round, if it lasted that long. I never did think it would go past nine rounds. That’s why I announced I’d take him in eight. I figured I’d be in command by the sixth. I’d be careful—not get hit—and I’d cut him up and shake him up until he would be like a bull, just blind, and missing punches until he was nearly crazy. And I planned that sometime in the eighth, when he had thrown some punch and left himself just right, I’d be all set, and I’d drop him. Listen here, man, I knew I was going to upset the world!”

  Liston, on the other hand, was training for a quick knockout. He went through the usual motions: skipping rope and hitting the bags to the throbbing “Night Train.” But he ran far less than he should have—maybe a mile or two a few times a week—and worked out against mediocre sparring partners. Ever since the first Patterson fight, he had allowed himself to believe that he could climb in the ring and take off his robe, and the other man would drop for the ten-count.

  “I don’t think Sonny was in the best shape,” said Hank Kaplan, one of the regulars at the Fifth Street Gym. “I myself saw him eat hot dogs and popcorn and drink beer over in Surfside not too long before the fight.”

  Clay’s recreation time was taken up with Malcolm X. Liston’s fun was less high-minded, taking, as he did, his after-hours counsel from Ash Resnik, who had come in from Las Vegas for the fight. One of Liston’s cornermen told Jack McKinney that Resnik fixed Liston up with a couple of prostitutes. “Nilon has a heavy responsibility for the destruction of Sonny Liston,” McKinney said. “He was a gutless worm and didn’t assert himself. He wanted to play the part of the prosperous businessman, a fight manager on the side, but he was a worthless character.… In Miami Beach, Joe Pollino pointed out two obvious hookers that Resnik had fixed Sonny with—and that’s no credit to Sonny—he was screwing around with these bimbos on Twenty-third and Collins. That’s what Ash Resnik brought him in the way of intellectual and cultural enrichment. See, no matter who you’re fighting, you need people around you constantly telling you that anything can happen. You have to train—even with the pushovers.”

  “Sonny never got serious until about a month before a fight,” one of his sparring partners, Foneda Cox, said. “And when he went to Miami, he firmly believed that he would kill Clay. I mean it, really kill him. Why work too hard?”

  When someone in his camp would question his training, Liston just shrugged it off. Harold Conrad told Liston he was worried: Clay was fit
and very much the real thing. Liston just smiled.

  “Don’t worry, Hal,” he said. “I’ll put the evil eye on this faggot at the weigh-in and psych him right out of the fight.”

  THERE IS NO COMPELLING REASON TO WEIGH HEAVYWEIGHTS before a fight. Unlike other fighters in the lighter divisions, they are not required to “make weight,” to stay under a given limit. Occasionally there is, at the moment a heavy strips off his robe, a flash of drama: “Oh dear! He looks fat!” Or, “Oh my! How fearsome!” But there is little of that. The reporters have usually seen the fighters train and they know pretty well the physical condition of the champion and his challenger. If there is a reason for a heavyweight weigh-in, it is to intensify the sense of ritual, as sumo wrestlers stomp their feet and toss handfuls of salt prior to battle. As in actual warfare, rituals matter. The solemnity of weights and measures, of large men posing in their underwear on a scale, is crucial. It may matter most of all for the journalists, who are eager to have first-edition stories and pictures to run on the day when the main event, the fight, begins as late as eleven at night. The weigh-in allows for an evaluation of the “baleful stare”; the reporter can judge the fighter “ready” or “nervous”; the TV man can say with conviction that “these two men plain don’t like each other.” The promoter will try to sell tickets and, if he is generous, put in a word for the fighters on the undercard.

  The Liston-Clay weigh-in was scheduled for the morning of the fight; it was to be held in a freight area of the Miami Beach Convention Hall. Clay arrived at the arena wearing a blue denim jacket with the words “Bear Huntin’ ” embroidered on it in red. His entourage included Dundee, Sugar Ray Robinson, William Faversham of the Louisville Group, and Bundini. Hardly anyone was at the arena yet, but Clay was already warming up: he and Bundini shouted, “Float like a butterfly! Sting like a bee!” and Clay pounded the floor with an African walking stick.