King of the World

by David Remnick

  “I’m the champ! I’m ready to rumble! Tell Sonny I’m here! He ain’t no champ! Round eight to prove I’m great! Bring that big ugly bear on!”

  The team marched into a dressing room, and, as Clay changed into a white terry-cloth robe, Robinson and Dundee tried to calm him down.

  “You gotta act right,” Dundee said. “This is for the championship. There’s gonna be press people here.” That Clay might make a scene at the weigh-in was no secret to anyone who had watched his press conferences and interviews in Miami, and so a distinguished elder of the Miami Beach Boxing Commission came to the dressing room to counsel Clay on manners.

  “Then we went out and Clay went crazy,” Dundee said. “The problem was we were too early. No one was there yet. So we ended up doing the whole thing twice. It was amazing: we thought it was a certain time and I figured we’re gonna make a big entrance and Muhammad is saying, ‘I’m the prettiest fighter in the world!’ Screaming, yelling, the whole shebang. But we were an hour early. So we ran back, messed around in Chris’s office for a while, and then we did it all over again an hour later.

  “I just knew it was gonna be chaos. Muhammad had told me at the gym, ‘Angie, I’m gonna bring Drew Brown down there.’ And I said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t do that! That guy’s nuts. What are you doing to me?’ But he loved Drew because he got kicks from the guy. He liked those kind of guys. They charged his battery.”

  Clay and Bundini came out screaming and yelling at 11:09. They were still screaming when Liston came out two minutes later.

  “I’m ready to rumble now!” Clay shouted. “I can beat you any time, chump! Somebody’s gonna die at ringside tonight! You’re scared, chump! You ain’t no giant! I’m gonna eat you alive!”

  Clay lunged at Liston. Bundini grabbed the belt of his robe and Faversham, Robinson, and Dundee held him back. Robinson tried to shove Clay against a wall, and Clay shoved back, shouting, “I am a great performer! I am a great performer!”

  Years later, when this sort of hysteria was understood as a standing joke, like Emmett Kelly slipping on a banana peel or Don Rickles calling someone in the audience a hockey puck, the writers merely rolled their eyes. It was just Ali. But no one had ever seen anything like this before. Traditionally, anything but the most stoic behavior meant that a fighter was terrified, which was precisely what Clay wanted Liston to believe.

  “Ali whispered in my ear, ‘Hold me back,’ and then he winked at me,” Mort Sharnik, the Sports Illustrated writer, said. “Ali had the capacity almost of self-hypnosis or self-induced hysteria and he’d work himself up to this crazy pitch.”

  “Round eight to prove I’m great!” Clay shouted, holding up eight fingers. “Round eight!”

  Liston smiled thinly and held up two fingers.

  When it came time to weigh the fighters, Clay insisted that Bundini and Robinson be allowed up on the platform. He refused to budge until the boxing commission officials bent their rules.

  “This is my show, this is my show,” he said.

  “I’ll keep him quiet,” Bundini told the cops. “I have to be up there to keep him quiet.” Finally, the commissioners relented and the police waved all three up. Clay weighed 210 pounds.

  Then Liston stepped up on the scale.

  “Liston, two hundred and eighteen pounds,” shouted Morris Klein, the Miami Beach boxing commissioner. Liston stepped down from the scale.

  “Hey, sucker!” Clay yelled up at him. “You’re a chump! You been tricked, chump!”

  Liston looked down at Clay with a slight, fatherly smile.

  “Don’t let anybody know,” he said. “Don’t tell the world.”

  “You’re too ugly!” Clay shouted. “You are a bear! I’m going to whup you so baaad. You’re a chump, a chump, a chump …” Clay’s voice was shrill, his eyes were bugging out, and he was lunging around like a mental patient.

  “No man could have seen Clay that morning at the weigh-in and believed that he could stay on his feet three minutes that night,” Murray Kempton wrote later in The New Republic.

  “Suddenly almost everyone in the room hated Cassius Clay,” Kempton went on. “Sonny Liston just looked at him. Liston used to be a hoodlum; now he was our cop; he was the big Negro we pay to keep sassy Negroes in line and he was just waiting until his boss told him it was time to throw this kid out.… Northern Italian journalists were comforted to see on Liston’s face the look that mafiosi use to control peasants in Sicily; promoters and fight managers saw in Clay one of their animals utterly out of control and were glad to know that soon he would be not just back in line but out of the business.… Even Norman Mailer settled in this case for organized society. Suppose Clay won the heavyweight championship, he asked. It would mean that every loudmouth on a street corner could swagger and be believed.”

  Clay’s performance seemed to be the sweaty ravings of a nut, the frightened rant of a kid who had been terrified ever since he confronted Liston in that Las Vegas casino more than a year before, but what no one saw was how deliberate and effective this performance was, how it unnerved Liston. “It convinced Liston to the end of his life that Ali was crazy,” said Clay’s cornerman, Ferdie Pacheco. “Ali became impossible for his opponents to gauge. Years later, when Ernie Shavers almost knocked him out in the Garden, Ali was falling back against the ropes but Shavers held back because he thought Ali was kidding. The same thing happened to Joe Frazier, in the third fight in Manila. He saw Ali start to fall, staggering back, and instead of rushing him, Frazier just stood there and looked, because he couldn’t believe that Ali was hurt. George Foreman, too, didn’t know when Ali was hurt or when he was kidding. People always thought he was crazy. His reputation was so huge that you imputed things to him that he wasn’t really doing. And it all began in Miami, at the weigh-in with Liston.”

  As Clay kept barking away and ignoring warning after warning, Klein stepped in and shouted, “Cassius Clay is fined two thousand five hundred dollars for his behavior on the platform and the money will be withheld from Clay’s purse.”

  The commission doctor, Alexander Robbins, took the pulse and blood pressure of both fighters. Liston’s counts were slightly above normal. Considering all the commotion, there was no worry there. Robbins could barely get to Clay, who kept jumping and shouting as if he had been stuck with a cattle prod. Several times Robbins approached Clay with his stethoscope outstretched and then Clay would keep wriggling and Robbins would jump back, frightened, bewildered. Finally, the doctor was able to make his reading: Clay’s pulse, which was normally fifty-four beats per minute, had shot up to 120, and his blood pressure was soaring, too, at two hundred over one hundred.

  Jimmy Cannon, who carried himself with such authority that one might have believed him to be chief of surgery as well as the columnist from the World-Telegram, slid into a chair next to Dr. Robbins and said, “Could it be that the kid is scared to death, Doc?”

  “Yes, yes, Mr. Cannon,” the doctor said. “This fighter is scared to death, and if his blood pressure is the same at fight time, it’s all off.”

  Both fighters finally cleared out and went to their makeshift dressing rooms. Clay was already calming down.

  “What do you think?” he asked as he sat on a training table. “He was really shook up. He was little and he was short, and they’re telling me he was so big. I think he was shook up.”

  As Clay left the arena, he ran into a ubiquitous Miami character named King Levinsky. Levin sky had been one of Joe Louis’s “bums of the month,” a heavyweight with one night in the spotlight to his credit, but his fighting career had left him poorer of mind and pocket. Levinsky now sold bad-looking ties out of a worse-looking cardboard suitcase. “King used to grab you around the head and say, ‘Wanna buy a tie from King Levinsky?’ ” George Plimpton recalled. “He was everywhere, and after you’d bought a few ties, you started running.”

  Now, as Clay left the arena, Levinsky came running after him, not to sell ties, but to offer him a job.

 
; “He’s gonna take you, kid!” the King shouted. “Partners with me, kid. You can be partners with me!”

  THE COMMISSION INSTRUCTED PACHECO TO KEEP A REGULAR watch on Clay’s blood pressure and to report if the numbers were still too high. Clay went back to the dressing room and came back out in his “Bear Huntin’ ” jacket. He and his entourage drove back out to his house.

  “It was the most amazing thing,” Pacheco said. “An hour after all the commotion, I took his blood pressure and the pulse was at fifty-four, normal for him, and his blood pressure was one-twenty over eighty, perfect. It was all an act.”

  “Why did you do that?” Pacheco asked Clay. “Why did you act so nutty up there in front of all those people?”

  Clay leaned forward and said, “Because Liston thinks I’m a nut. He is scared of no man, but he is scared of a nut. Now he doesn’t know what I’m going to do.”

  The gamblers in town were equally sure that Clay had revealed himself as a frightened challenger. As a team, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joe Louis, and Ash Resnik placed a call to a friend in Las Vegas, the gambler Lem Banker. They told Banker to lay down a huge bet on Liston.

  “They were sure Sonny was gonna win because they thought Clay was insane,” Banker said. “But Sonny had done his pretraining in Vegas at the Thunderbird and I’d seen him sparring with Foneda Cox and Jesse Bowdry and he’d looked lousy to me. He never took the fight serious. There was a racetrack behind the Thunderbird, and he’d run around the track twice. Anyway, Ash, Louis, and Sammy Davis called for the price of the fight to bet, and I said there was no price because of the weigh-in. You could only bet on Clay. But I said there is a four-round proposition: will the fight go four rounds? Ash wanted to bet fifty thousand. But Ash was slow-paying and Sammy never paid his bills, so I moved ten thousand on a four-round ‘do or don’t.’ I knew Sonny wasn’t in shape. Sonny was my friend, but I had to like Clay.”

  By evening there were reports on the radio that Clay was so frightened that he was escaping, that he had been seen at the Miami airport buying a ticket to fly abroad.

  On the way into the arena that night, Mort Sharnik bumped into Geraldine.

  “Sonny thinks that boy is crazy!” Geraldine Liston said.

  “Who?” Sharnik said.

  “That boy Cassius. Crazy. Out of his mind.”

  “You mean he thinks Cassius is a madman?”

  “Just out of his cotton-picking mind,” she said. “And you never know what to expect from a man like that. You never know what to expect from a madman.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Eat Your Words!”

  FEBRUARY 25, 1964

  AFTER THE QUESTION OF CLAY’S SANITY HAD BEEN RESOLVED IN the affirmative, he took a nap. And while he slept, his doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, called the local boxing authorities to let them know that the challenger’s systems had returned to normal and that the fight could certainly go on.

  But then Pacheco thought about the night ahead, about what could happen. Unlike Geraldine Liston and Jack McKinney and a very few others who were close enough to see how complex Liston really was—the sulfurous brew of deprivation and rage, the constant ache to prove himself worthy—Pacheco saw Liston as forbidding, frightening. Pacheco had been hanging around gyms in Florida for years and he had never before seen anyone as ruthless or as strong, inside and outside the ring. Pacheco was a pretty good amateur painter—he painted scenes of historical Mexico, of the cigar rollers in his native Tampa—and when he thought about Liston the colors that came to mind were raw umber and Prussian blue. “It never seemed to me like there were any gray areas with Sonny,” he said. Like so many others in Clay’s camp, Pacheco was worried that the night would end not merely in defeat, but in serious injury.

  Dundee was a man of a different spirit, always up, always an optimist; he really did believe that “styles make fights” and Clay had the style to beat Liston. “I thought he could outquick him and out-think him and wear him down in eleven, twelve rounds,” Dundee said. But Pacheco had the feeling that Liston, a great champion, was now so angry at Clay for all the accumulated humiliations—the taunts in the press, the mocking verse, and now the antic weigh-in—that he would want not just to knock Clay out, but to work him over, to hurt him. And so Pacheco made sure everything was in order. He was particularly concerned about the fastest routes to the various local hospitals. Which was closest? Where was the best emergency room? Who was on duty? Did he know the doctors? He finally settled on Mount Sinai, where he’d been an intern in 1958.

  “Eat your words!” Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston, 1964.

  In the late afternoon, Clay ate a steak and a salad and vegetables, and in the evening he dressed in a tuxedo and headed off to the arena with Dundee, Pacheco, masseur Luis Sarria, Bundini, and a few others. He went earlier than he needed to because he wanted to watch his brother, Rudy, who was fighting in a preliminary bout against Chip Johnson, a solid journeyman heavyweight.

  The arena, which held 15,744, was nearly empty when Rudy entered the ring. At a championship fight it is considered low-rent to attend too many of the preliminaries, and so the empty seats were no shock. Unfortunately for the promoter, Bill MacDonald, the arena was going to stay that way. Only 8,297 tickets had been sold. The high-end seats were sold out, but the middle and upper reaches were desolate. Although Clay and his backers split $630,000 and Liston and his sponsors divided up $1.3 million, MacDonald lost more than $300,000. It was hard to say what hurt the gate more: the forbidding odds in Liston’s favor, the rumors of Clay’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, or the rainstorm that was now beating down on Miami. No matter how hard Harold Conrad tried, the promoters never succeeded in putting a white hat on Clay’s head; they could not repeat the promotional dumb show of Patterson-Liston, the Good Negro versus the Bad Negro. For most Caucasian Floridians (and who else had the money to pay for a seat?) this was a matchup between a Muslim punk and a terrifying thug.

  Clay stood in the aisle, way back from the ring, and watched his brother fight. Rudy was not a particularly good boxer, and he fumbled his way through the first round, barely surviving it. The writers who had bothered to attend Rudy’s bout spent as much time watching Clay yell encouragement to his brother as they did watching the fight. In the end, Rudy hung on to win a decision, but he was not impressive. He had been beaten up pretty thoroughly, and matters promised to be worse against tougher competition. It hurt Clay to watch his brother being bruised in the ring.

  “After tonight, Rudy,” he said, “you won’t have to fight no more.”

  Slowly, the crowd, or what there was of it, started streaming into the arena. Malcolm X, who had returned to Miami the previous day, settled into his seat. As always, he was dressed in a conservative dark suit, dark tie, white shirt. Despite all the commotion around him, the conflict with the Nation, the ugly dustup with Bill MacDonald, Malcolm was in a fine mood, chatting with the reporters who approached him. There was probably no one in the arena as confident of an upset. The night before the fight, Malcolm had met with Murray Kempton, who was then writing his column for the New York World-Telegram. Kempton said that he hoped Clay would not be too immobilized by fear when he went into the ring to face Liston.

  “To be a Muslim,” Malcolm instructed Kempton, “is to know no fear.”

  But Kempton, who was the keenest observer of character on press row, saw something else in Clay that night. As he watched Clay survey the arena, he thought Clay’s eyes were “blank” and wandering. “There was a sudden horrid notion,” Kempton wrote, “that just before the main event, when the distinguished visitors were announced, Cassius Clay in his dinner jacket might bounce into the ring, shout one more time that he was the greatest, and go down the steps and out of the arena and out of the sight of man forever. Bystanders yelled insults at him; his handlers pushed him toward his dressing room, stiff, his steps hesitant. One had thought him hysterical in the morning; now one thought him catatonic.”

  In the locker room, Clay dressed slowly. He
waited while he got his hands taped and then he began to loosen up, jabbing the air. He’d thought it all out: go out moving and jabbing for two or three rounds, start to wear Liston down, then coast awhile, wait until Liston was exhausted, and then start moving in for the kill in the eighth or the ninth. Usually, Dundee had to be careful that Clay did not tire himself out in the dressing room before a fight; he was so full of energy, so eager to perform, that he would throw a blizzard of punches and dance himself into a lather of sweat. But now his movements were wary, serious. This was not a performance, but a fight.

  “For all the joking and the clowning that morning,” Dundee said, “he knew this was serious business. This was everything he’d ever dreamed of and a very tough customer stood in his way.”

  “He was very nervous, you could see it,” Pacheco said. “I was with him against Joe Frazier, all three fights, against George Foreman in Zaire, I was there for all of them, and this was the only time I ever really saw him nervous. The first and last time. After that, well, it’s like the other night: I was watching The Benny Goodman Story and there was this scene when someone says to Benny’s mother, ‘Benny has to play the Mozart clarinet concerto tonight—isn’t he nervous?’ And she says, ‘What? Are you kidding? The clarinet is his life. You put the music in front of him and he can handle it. He’s never nervous. It’s the rest of life that can be a problem.’ That’s Ali. Boxing was what he did. He could handle anything in the ring. It was the rest of life that could be confusing. Except for the first Liston fight. He was just a kid, and that night he had no idea if he could really do what he had been saying he could do all along.”

  Clay was not only nervous about Liston and the prospect of hurt and shame, he was also shaken up by the rumors that had been whispered in his ear.

  “Watch out,” Captain Sam Saxon had told him. “The white power structure is out to get you.”