King of the World
Page 23
“I can’t see! Cut ’em off!” Clay shouted into the void, into the noise of the crowd. “I can’t see! Cut off the gloves!”
This would be the most important single minute of Dundee’s two decades with Clay. Without this one minute, without Dundee’s instinctive reactions, there might never have been a Muhammad Ali. Sonny Liston would not likely have given a rematch to someone who had humbled him, forced him to juice his gloves; nor would the public have gone out of its way to demand boxing justice for a member of a religious sect that professed hatred of white America.
While Dundee’s fighter screamed at him, demanding he let him quit, Dundee was cool. “I’d had this problem before,” he said. “Isn’t experience wonderful? I’ve only been doing this for forty-eight years. You can’t get to where you’re hysterical and lose your cool. Then you’re no good to the fighter.” Dundee had an inkling of how painful the substance was. He had dipped his pinkie into the corner of Clay’s eyes and then put the finger in his own eye. It burned like mad. But he would not relent.
“This is the big one, daddy!” Dundee shouted in Clay’s ear. “Cut the bullshit! We’re not quitting now.”
With his sponge, Dundee tried to get as much clean water flowing into Clay’s eyes as possible. He had no idea how this had happened—to this day he discounts the idea that Liston’s corner juiced the gloves; he is almost too nice to believe it—and he cared less. He cared about the fight, about getting through the next round.
“You gotta go out there and run!”
In those tense seconds, Dundee also had to deal with the Black Muslims who were sitting behind the corner. Dundee’s brother ran over to him and told him that the Muslims were now convinced that Angelo himself had blinded Clay on behalf of the Italian gangsters backing Liston.
Pacheco and Dundee could hear the Muslims shouting, “That white man is trying to blind Clay! It’s a conspiracy! It’s a conspiracy!”
Dundee thought the only way to prove he was clean was to take the sponge and rub the water in his own eye.
Barney Felix noticed the commotion in Clay’s corner and started walking over. Dundee didn’t want Felix to hear Clay’s complaints, and so he positioned himself to cut the referee off from the fighter.
The bell sounded for round five.
“Now go out there and you run!” Dundee shouted.
“Yardstick ’im, champ!” Bundini shouted. “Yardstick ’im!”
The idea was that Clay would keep moving and measuring Liston with his left jab long enough for the solution to wash out of his eyes. Clay got to his feet, straightened himself, and walked in slowly.
“That was one time Angelo really earned his money,” Pacheco said. “He said, ‘You go out there and you run.’ It was dangerous, but by the time the bell sounded it wasn’t like he was completely blind. You don’t need two eyes to stay away from Sonny Liston. You need one eye and a good pair of legs. Sonny had shot his bolt already.”
Easy for Pacheco to say. Clay went into the fifth round blinking madly, his eyes on fire. He could see only the blurred outline of his opponent. Liston charged in after Clay right away. As tired as he was, he knew well that this was his chance. Clay’s only hope was to keep moving and use the “yardstick”—he extended his long left and tried to keep it in Liston’s face as both a measuring stick and a distraction.
“I was praying he wouldn’t guess what was the matter,” Clay told Alex Haley. “But he had to see me blinking, and then he shook me with that left to the head and a lot of shots to the body.” In the early part of the round, Liston especially attacked Clay’s body with big, loaded-up hooks to the ribs and belly, and many of them landed. “I was just trying to keep alive, hoping the tears would wash out my eyes. I could open them just enough to get a good glimpse of Liston, and then it hurt so bad I blinked them closed again. Liston was snorting like a horse. He was trying to hit me square, and I was just moving every which way, because I knew if he connected right, it could be all over right there.”
Liston was hitting Clay and he was certainly winning the round, but he was just too worn out, and Clay was too skillful—Liston could not land a decisive shot. Months later, Clay looked back on the painful fifth and explained to Playboy what it is like to be hit by a heavyweight:
“Take a stiff tree branch in your hand and hit it against the floor and you’ll feel your hand go boinggg. Well, getting tagged is the same kind of jar on your whole body, and you need at least ten or twenty seconds to make that go away. You get hit again before that, you got another boinggg.… You’re just numb and you don’t know where you’re at. There’s no pain, just that jarring feeling. But I automatically know what to do when that happens to me, sort of like a sprinkler system going off when a fire starts up. When I get stunned I’m not really conscious of exactly where I’m at or what’s happening, but I always tell myself to dance, run, tie my man up, or hold my head way down.”
Clay did just that. He kept moving, yardsticking, and when Liston connected, Clay threw out his big arms and wrapped them around Liston in such a way that he could no longer throw an effective blow. The strategy would not work for long—Liston was just too powerful—but it bought Clay the two or three minutes he needed. With about a half minute left in the round, Clay’s eyes came clear. This was the decisive moment in the fight, the moment at which Liston realized he had lost the opportunity of the challenger’s blindness. Liston was a bully. In the ring, and even as an enforcer for the mob, he had always relied on intimidation, on backing other men down. Clay never backed down. And what happens with bullies, fighters who expect nothing from their opponents except capitulation, is that they quit in the face of resistance. Many years later, in the ring with Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran would stop in the middle of the fight and say, “No más,” rather than go on with humiliation.
In the sixth, Clay came out with clear vision, and a second wind. He dispensed with choreography, and, flat-footed nearly the entire round, he went to work on Liston, doubling up on his jabs, throwing combinations, left hooks, right uppercuts in the clinch—and everything landed. Liston had nothing left. He was paying now for every hot dog and whiskey, every afternoon with the prostitutes on Collins Avenue, every run cut short out of arrogance. He knew now that even cheating was useless. Clay had thought it would take eight rounds or so to get Liston this tired, this beaten up, but now he knew he did not have to hold back.
At one point, Clay recalled, “I hit him with eight punches in a row, until he doubled up. I remember thinking something like ‘Yeah, you old sucker! You try to be so big and bad!’ He was gone. He knew he couldn’t last.… I missed a right that might have dropped him. But I jabbed and jabbed at that cut under his eye, until it was wide open and bleeding worse than before. I knew he wasn’t due to last much longer.” Just before the end of the round, Clay slammed two left hooks into Liston’s head, and it was a wonder that the champion did not go down.
“By now even the most inveterate Clay doubter had to know that something special was happening,” Robert Lipsyte said. “Sonny’s face was a mess and he couldn’t do a thing to stop this terrible thing that was happening to him.”
The bell sounded, ending the sixth. Liston walked back to his corner, blank-eyed.
“That’s it,” he said as he sat down.
For the first time that night, Pollino and Reddish felt a rush of encouragement. That’s it. Now Sonny would finally throw himself into the fight, they thought. Now he would teach this kid not to play with him. Finally, he was angry enough to win. Both men started working on Liston. He had complained of sore shoulders, and so they massaged his shoulders and back, and they gave him water and smeared Vaseline on his brows. Then Pollino put Liston’s mouthpiece in.
Liston spit it back out.
“I … said … that’s it!”
Pollino and Reddish now understood what Liston really meant. He had quit. They argued with him, telling him that he couldn’t give up the championship sitting on a stool, that he had to
go out and fight Clay, take the fight back and win. Quitting was unthinkable, especially in a heavyweight title fight. Liston had not been knocked down once, and now he was quitting? The last time a heavyweight surrendered his crown had been on July 4, 1919, in Toledo, when Willard failed to answer the bell for the fourth round against Dempsey. Willard, however, did not have a sore shoulder and a couple of cuts; his jaw was broken, his ribs were cracked, and two of his teeth were on the canvas.
Liston did not appear to care. He stared straight ahead, right through his cornermen.
“That’s it.”
Reddish let out a long breath and sighed. “Well,” he said, “maybe another day.”
Reddish held out his hand and waved, Barney Felix immediately understood the signal.
AS HE SAT ON HIS STOOL WAITING FOR THE SEVENTH ROUND, Clay could hear the reporters buzzing. He could make out scraps of talk, the idea that he, this preposterous kid, was beating the hell out of Sonny Liston, and could you believe it? Clay twisted around and leaned down and shouted, “I’m gonna upset the world!”
“I never will forget how their faces was looking up at me like they couldn’t believe it,” he told Haley later in a Playboy interview. “I happened to be looking right at Liston when that warning buzzer sounded, and I didn’t believe it when he spat out his mouthpiece. I just couldn’t believe it—but there it was laying there. And then something just told me he wasn’t coming out! I give a whoop and come off that stool like it was red hot. It’s a funny thing, but I wasn’t even thinking about Liston—I was thinking about nothing but that hypocrite press. All of them down there had wrote so much about me bound to get killed by the big fists.”
Now Clay was on his feet, his hands thrust over his head. He knew immediately what Reddish’s wave meant.
“I am the king!” he shouted. “I am the king! King of the world! Eat your words! Eat! Eat your words!”
Eat your words.
Clay’s hysteria in the morning had been manufactured, but his exuberance now could not have been more real. Steve Ellis, for television, and Howard Cosell, for radio, were sticking microphones in his face, and Clay was shouting nonstop: “Almighty God was with me! I want everybody to bear witness! I am the greatest! I shook up the world! I am the greatest thing that ever lived! I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest! I showed the world! I talk to God every day! I’m the king of the world!”
At ringside, Red Smith of the Herald Tribune, who had written column after column doubting and mocking young Clay, could hear the new champion’s taunt clearly. Eat your words. And after Smith heard it, he started writing: “Nobody ever had a better right. In a mouth still dry from the excitement of the most astounding upset in many roaring years, the words don’t taste good, but they taste better than they read. The words, written here and practically everywhere else until the impossible became the unbelievable truth, said Sonny Liston would squash Cassius Clay like a bug.…”
Smith scored the fight overwhelmingly in Clay’s favor, giving him the first, third, fourth, and sixth. He thought the second was debatable, and, of course, Clay had been practically blind in the fifth.
But some of Clay’s other detractors could barely bring themselves to admit that they had been so wrong about him. Dick Young’s column for the Daily News seethed with resentment, as if the outcome had been a conspiracy designed specifically to offend him. “If Cassius wants me to say he’s the greatest, all right, I’ll say it,” Young groused in print, “but I’ll also say he scored the greatest retreating victory since the Russians suckered Napoleon into a snowbank. I never saw Joe Louis run away and win, or Rocky Marciano, and I’m sure my father never saw Jack Dempsey run away and win, and my grandfather never saw John L. Sullivan run away and win. So, if Cassius wants to be rated, he’d better stand still long enough,”
Clay was not about to stand still for anyone. He bounded all around the ring with Bundini and Dundee at his side. He never stopped shouting and pointing. The ecstasy! “Electric bulbs seemed to light up behind the great lagoons of his eyes, the way moonglow spangles water,” Jimmy Cannon wrote.
Rocky Marciano, sitting next to Cannon, slapped his forehead with his palm and said, “What the hell is this?” Cannon used the phrase as the headline for his next day’s column. Cannon allowed that Clay had fought with a “dignity” he clearly had not expected, but the real emotion in his copy was disappointment, contempt. Liston had let him down, and, in doing so, had ushered in something foreign and strange. When Liston’s corner announced that he had quit because his shoulder had given out, Cannon, among others, was not accepting the excuse: “The old hoodlum, who had contemptuously ridiculed Clay as a big talking doll, explained he had dislocated his left shoulder in the first round of a fight which must be measured peculiar even by the standards of the mean racket.”
In theaters around the country, the crowds could accept the victory of an underdog, but not the sight of a champion, a champion revered as the toughest man on the planet, giving up on his stool. At the Jefferson City prison, where Liston had learned to fight, the warden had set up a series of televisions and paid to have the fight piped in. When the prisoners saw that Liston was giving up his title sitting down, the shouts of derision were so loud you could hear them beyond the walls, ringing in the cold darkness. Liston’s shoulders were undoubtedly sore. (“A man that strong can’t swing and miss that often and not be sore,” McKinney said.) But while Nilon, Pollino, and the other cornermen used the shoulder as an excuse, they were telling a story they knew was only partially true.
Liston wept as Pollino walked with him from the dressing room to a car. His left arm was in a sling and there was a bandage under his eye. On the way out, Liston said that losing made him feel the way he did when Kennedy was shot, but then he said that it was just “one of those little things that happens to you.” Uncharacteristically, he thanked the reporters and was gone.
“Nasty as Sonny was, he was always a pussycat when he lost,” Robert Lipsyte recalled.
Liston was taken to St. Francis Hospital. Mort Sharnik was the only reporter to catch up with him there. “At the hospital Sonny was laying on a table looking like an instant middle-aged man,” Sharnik said. “He looked like a middle-aged truck driver who had driven into an abutment. He was swollen all over: his eyes, his whole face, his body. He just lay there with Nilon patting him on the shoulder and saying, ‘We’ll get him again.’ While the doctors worked on Liston, Nilon said something about giving Sonny a job at Nilon Brothers, a food services company that sold hot dogs at ball games. Sonny looked like a lump of clay there. He was just swollen all over.”
Dr. Alexander Robbins, the commission doctor, announced that Liston had injured his left shoulder, torn a tendon, but the question that would run through all the press coverage was whether the shoulder injury was the decisive one. It wasn’t. “It was all bullshit,” one of Liston’s cornermen, who is still alive, admitted. “We had a return-bout clause with Clay, and if you say your guy just quit, who’s gonna get a return bout? We cooked that shoulder thing up on the spot.” The shoulder was indeed injured, as a half-dozen more doctors later confirmed, but Liston had endured worse physical pain; what he could not endure in Miami was more humiliation.
As Liston sat on his hospital bed, he turned to Nilon and Sharnik and, in a low, rumbling voice that they could barely make out, he said, “That wasn’t the guy I was supposed to fight. That guy could hit.”
They were all silent for a while, then Nilon said, “What are we going to do with Sonny?”
Anyone who knew Liston worried that he would soon revert to his worst and most self-destructive habits. Anything he had ever worked for, any semblance of pride he had ever achieved, he had left behind in Miami.
In the early morning, when Jimmy Cannon finished writing his column, he went back to the Fontainebleau and ran into the great lightweight Beau Jack, who had a job shining shoes at the hotel.
CLAY CARRIED HIS OBSESSION WITH THE PRESS FROM THE RING to the interview room:
“… Whatcha gonna say now? It won’t last one round? He’ll be out in two? How many heart attacks were there? Oh, I am pretty. I beat him bad and that’s so gooood. The bear couldn’t touch me, couldn’t even get a good lick of me.…”
The rant went on and on until finally Clay said he wanted justice from the reporters gathered around him.
“I’m gonna show you how great reporters are,” he said. “Who’s the greatest?”
There was no reply.
“No justice. I don’t get no justice. No one’s gonna give me justice. I’ll give you one more chance. Who’s the greatest?”
There was a pause. Then a few reporters muttered, “You are.”
Jackie Gleason, who was playing reporter by filing columns for the New York Post, was probably the only truly contrite member of the press. In his column the next morning, he said, “So here I am munching on crow, which isn’t the best meal in the world, particularly the feathers. It’s not so much the $600 I dropped (when I back a man, I back him), it’s the side bet … where I promised to down five belts of Old Overshoe for every round Blabber Mouth was still on his feet. Well, I don’t think I have to explain the exact shape I was in when the end came. Ole Cassius got his revenge on me without doing a thing.”
As Clay got ready to leave the arena, Gordon Davidson, the lawyer for the Louisville Sponsoring Group, who had only hoped that his fighter would survive the fight, was in the position of trying to improvise the unforeseen victory party. “We’d never even thought about it,” he said, “so all of a sudden we were on the phone to the Roney Plaza at around midnight, with the kitchen closed, trying to get them to put together some food and champagne and the rest. Lots of people headed over there—our group, some reporters, Budd Schulberg, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and so on—but Cassius decided not to join us.”