King of the World

by David Remnick

  That doubt extended to the United States Senate. It turned out that Ali’s backers had made a handshake agreement with Liston’s backers for an automatic rematch in case of an upset. Liston’s Intercontinental Promotions paid Ali fifty thousand dollars for the right to promote his next fight, be it a rematch against Liston or against someone else. Several points occurred to the senators. First, the law prohibited such agreements because it was an incentive for a champion to lose and then fight a rematch for a far bigger purse. Second, Liston the Unconquerable had quit without ever having been knocked down. The senators found this inconceivable. Third, Liston never bothered to follow Estes Kefauver’s fatherly injunction to choose his managers more carefully. Carbo was in jail, but Liston was still a property of such men as Pep Barone and Sam Margolis, and friend to Ash Resnik.

  New York, February 21, 1965. Assassination of Malcolm X.

  And so the Senate antitrust and monopoly subcommittee, now chaired by the Michigan Democrat Philip A. Hart, held a hearing in March 1964. It did not uncover much that the readers of the sports columns did not already know. Jack Nilon testified that Liston was indeed “a difficult man” to handle, a “neurotic” who refused to train very hard or follow instructions. If he had a case of the sniffles, Nilon said, Liston “acted as if he were dying” and stayed in bed. It was also true, Nilon allowed, that Liston kept company in Miami with various unsavories. “Sonny thinks an awful lot of Mr. Barone,” Nilon testified. “He thinks Pep Barone’s good luck. Sonny’s very superstitious. He won’t let you throw a straw hat on the bed.”

  The other Nilon brother, Bob, testified, however, that for all of Liston’s recalcitrance, for all his unwillingness to train properly and follow the moral guidance of others, his cornermen and business associates had no advance notion whatsoever that a rematch with Muhammad Ali would be necessary. “Never at any time did I consider as a remote possibility that Cassius Clay could beat Sonny Liston,” Bob Nilon testified. “Before my God, I didn’t think he had any more chance of beating Sonny Liston than if he were in the ring with Grandma Moses. But I thought Clay represented a great show business property, the greatest thing since Jenny Lind.”

  Hart’s subcommittee was scolding, but not entirely censorious. The senators uncovered no evidence of unseemly collusion, to say nothing of an outright fix, and did nothing to stand in the way of a second Ali-Liston fight. Its only result was a series of familiar resolutions to increase the level of regulation—not right away, of course, but sometime very, very soon.

  LISTON TRAINED FOR THE REMATCH AT A KARATE AND JUDO CLUB in south Denver. For the first time since the early days of his career, he seemed determined to prepare himself for a long fight. In the early morning he often drove out to the mountains and ran to the Shrine of Mother Cabrini. He’d run up the 350 steps to the statue of the Sacred Heart and shadowbox there, all alone, breathing the cool mountain air. When it came time to move his camp to New England, Liston set himself up at White Cliffs, a fine old country club near Plymouth Rock with a golf course overlooking the Atlantic. Every morning Liston ran at least five miles up and down the dunes, and in the afternoons in the gym he went through his exercise routines and sparred. He even worked out with a martial arts instructor to improve his agility. Willie Reddish, his trainer, had been furious with Liston in Miami; he could not bear the way his fighter had dissipated his talent with whiskey and prostitutes. But now Liston was in a monastic mood, angry, focused on beating Ali. Reddish saw a new Liston, or at least the old Liston, the ferocious fighter who had demolished Floyd Patterson twice in less than five minutes, total.

  One late-October afternoon, Liston worked over a sparring partner named Lee Williams so thoroughly that he left him reeling and sporting an ugly gash between his eyes that needed eight stitches. That left Liston, if not Williams, in a regal mood. “Blood is like champagne to a fighter,” Al Lacey, an old trainer, remarked. “It gives his ego bubbly sensations. It helps the fighter’s inner man. They used to feed Dempsey old has-beens in the last days of his training just so he could knock them down, and it never failed to pick up his spirits.” Other sparring partners in Liston’s camp quit because, as one of them, Dorsey Lay, put it, “some guys don’t see the point in risking their faces for fifty bucks a day.”

  Ali was training no less hard. He quickly peeled off the weight he had gained on his trip to Africa. He began a running regime that was even more rigorous than before. Ali also looked stronger, broader, than he had in Miami; his body was maturing, and yet as he got stronger, he was not slowing down. Dundee, of course, heard that Liston was working with more discipline, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Liston was not going to be any younger in Boston, Dundee reasoned. Also, the stylistic difference between the two fighters—to say nothing of the age difference—had not changed, and neither, Dundee said, would the result: “Liston buys everything. He’s a one-way fighter. He can’t lick a two-way, let alone a four-way fighter, a guy that can go forward and back, side to side.”

  The bookmakers believed that the Miami fight had been an aberration. The world, they calculated, would soon right itself. One week before the fight was set to go off at the Boston Garden, the Vegas odds were nine to five Liston.

  The promoters were also in a buoyant mood. Unlike the commercial disaster in Miami, this fight promised profits. Fans would be curious to see a matchup between a wounded Liston and an ascendant character as fast and as loud as Ali. Boston Garden officials predicted a sellout crowd and a record gross of five million dollars from closed-circuit and radio rights. Good news all around.

  Three days before the fight, on Friday the 13th of November, Ali was in room 611 at the Sherry Biltmore relaxing. In the morning he’d gone out on a five-mile run, but that was all. He was not sparring anymore. Mainly he stayed around the hotel with his growing entourage—with his brother, now called Rahaman Ali, and Bundini, Dundee, Captain Sam, and several new Muslim friends. From time to time ministers and hangers-on like Clarence X, Louis X, Thomas J., Brother John, and Minister George stopped by to say hello. It was a Muslim fast day, but because the fight was coming up, Ali ate a moderate dinner—a steak, greens, a baked potato. Afterward, he turned on a 16-millimeter projector and watched a rented film: Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.

  Suddenly, just after six-thirty in the evening, Ali sprang from the bed, ran to the bathroom, and started vomiting. He was in terrible pain.

  “Oh, something is awful wrong,” Ali said weakly as he came out of the bathroom. “You better do something.”

  “I’ll call a doctor so the press won’t find out!” Rahaman said.

  “Damn the press,” Ali said. “Get me to a hospital, man. I’m real sick.”

  Captain Sam, Rudy, and a few others helped carry Ali on a stretcher down the halls of the hotel to a service elevator. They covered his face with a towel, the better not to attract any press. They carried him through a laundry room and out the exit. Within a few minutes, Ali was headed toward Boston City Hospital in an ambulance, a boxy vehicle that looked more like an ice cream truck. By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital, a photographer for the Boston Herald was already there, ready to take pictures. He was dissuaded from doing so by a cadre of the Fruit of Islam.

  “Keep away,” Louis X shouted. “Nobody goes through these doors. Somebody will get hurt if they try.”

  The doctors soon discovered the source of Ali’s pain: a swelling the size of an egg in the right bowel, a dangerous condition known as an incarcerated inguinal hernia. If Ali had waited longer to call an ambulance, the hernia could have been life-threatening; as it was, he required an immediate operation.

  As he was being prepped for surgery, a nurse told Ali in her best soothing voice, “Remember now, you’re the greatest.”

  “Not tonight I’m not,” he said.

  The surgeon announced that it was a terrible shame to cut open such a splendid torso, but there was no choice. Now there was a big crowd at the hospital, including all of Ali’s cor
nermen. Dundee had been at a theater watching a college football game on closed circuit when someone told him the news. He raced to the hospital, and as he was being interviewed by a local television station, he wept. Bundini looked over at Dundee and told a reporter, “I wish the Black Muslims could see Angelo now. Those are tears, real tears of love from a white man for a Negro. They don’t think anything like that can happen. It ought to be a lesson to them.”

  When the wires put out the news of Ali’s illness and the inevitable postponement of the fight, rumors circulated that Ali had been poisoned. It was all part of the war between the Nation of Islam and the followers of Malcolm X. Ali was faking injury on orders from H. L. Hunt or Robert Kennedy or Elijah Muhammad. It was the Mafia. It was Ali who had brought the hernia on himself because he was afraid of Liston.

  Geraldine Liston heard the news on television, and everyone in camp could hear her cry out, “Chaaaarles! Come quick! Do you know what that boy’s gone and done?”

  Once Sonny had absorbed the news, he cracked open a bottle of vodka and made himself a screwdriver. Training was officially over. “If Clay wouldn’t run around the streets the way he does,” Liston said, “he wouldn’t have anything wrong with him. When he opens his mouth a lot of wind goes in. That’s what gave him the hernia. I’m sorry, it could have been worse. It could have been me.” But for all his joking, Liston was crushed. He had worked himself to a physical peak, and there was no telling if he had the strength or the discipline to start all over again. All night, Liston kept muttering to no one in particular, “That damned fool. That damned fool.”

  The promoter, Sam Silverman, would end up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. His reaction to the news of Ali’s hernia was only slightly different from Liston’s. He poured himself a tall bourbon.

  The rematch was put off until May 25, 1965.

  BY THE END OF 1964, MALCOLM X HAD EVERY REASON TO BELIEVE that he would not survive another year. The Nation of Islam had declared war on him; various ministers declared it everywhere from the pulpits in Chicago and Boston to the pages of Muhammad Speaks. Malcolm took what precautions he could. When he went to a television studio in New York to give an interview, the building was guarded by men carrying shotguns. Before going on the air, he called his wife at their house in Queens and said, “Keep those things near the door and don’t let anyone in until I get there.” Six weeks later, on Valentine’s Day 1965, Malcolm’s house was firebombed. The entire family, Malcolm, Betty, and their four daughters, escaped without serious injury. As the fire tore through the house, Malcolm stood out on the street, barefoot and in his pajamas, holding a .25-caliber pistol. He was furious, but not surprised. For months, Malcolm had been hearing that the Nation had set up murder squads to kill him. There had been rumors of car bombs and hit men; the articles in Muhammad Speaks only confirmed what he already knew. Malcolm even believed that Elijah Muhammad’s men were working together with the Klan and the American Nazi Party to get rid of him. On February 18, he called the FBI—the same agency that had monitored him and harassed him with such diligence for so long—and said that there was a conspiracy to murder him.

  “It’s time for martyrs now,” he told the photographer Gordon Parks. “And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood.”

  On February 21, Malcolm was scheduled to speak at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. After flashing his anger and jangled nerves backstage, ostensibly because there were no preliminary speakers ready, Malcolm came out to the rostrum and opened with the traditional Islamic greetings. As the crowd answered in kind, a driver from Newark’s Mosque No. 25 ignited a smoke bomb and yelled, “Get your hand out of my pocket!” As most of the crowd turned to look at this theatrical diversion, three gunman crouched in front of the stage.

  “Hold it!” Malcolm shouted.

  Then came the shooting. Malcolm was hit with at least one shotgun blast and died almost instantly. He was thirty-nine years old. One gunman, Talmadge X Hayer, was apprehended, and the other two ran off.

  A few hours after the shooting, there was a fire in Ali’s apartment on the South Side of Chicago. The fire was ruled an accident. “Some fellow’s bedspread on the floor caught on fire,” Ali told the press. “Elijah warned that there would be bad publicity and it will test the weak followers. There will be more tests to come and the true believers will survive. The white people have got all the airplanes and all the bullets, and I’m not afraid of them. Why should I be afraid of the black man?” Two days later, a bomb went off at the Nation’s New York mosque, and the ensuing fire nearly leveled the building.

  Neither Elijah Muhammad nor Muhammad Ali expressed satisfaction at Malcolm’s death, but they didn’t express any sympathy, either. “Malcolm X was my friend and he was the friend of everybody as long as he was a member of Islam,” Ali said. “Now I don’t want to talk about him. All of us were shocked at the way he was killed. Elijah Muhammad has denied that the Muslims were responsible. We are not a violent people. We don’t carry guns.”

  “Malcolm died according to his preachings,” Elijah Muhammad said at a rally in Chicago on February 26. “He preached violence and violence has taken him away.”

  AFTER ALI RECUPERATED FROM HIS OPERATION HE DID SOME preliminary training in Miami, then decided to leave for New England on April Fool’s Day. The idea was to drive his bus from Miami to the training center in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. In addition to a twelve-person entourage that included his sparring partners Cody Jones and Jimmy Ellis, his wife, Sonji, and various friends, cooks, and adjutants, Ali also invited along a few writers: Edwin Pope of The Miami Herald, Mort Sharnik and George Plimpton of Sports Illustrated, Bud Collins of The Boston Globe. Everyone gathered at Ali’s house in northwest Miami and waited for the champion to get ready.

  “Don’t need no map,” Ali told everyone. “Just going to point that old bus north and be in Boston in nothing flat.”

  Sonji came out of the house and interrupted her husband’s monologue.

  “Ali,” she said, “you see about my dry cleaning?”

  “All sent.”

  “How ’bout my shoes at the shop?”

  “Done.”

  “Then take out the garbage.” Ali put a finger to his mouth.

  “Champs don’t take out the garbage,” he protested, but he took it out all the same.

  Once the bus was loaded with distilled water, soda, and baskets of chicken, everyone got on board and headed for the Sunshine State Turnpike. The bus itself was still decorated on the outside with Ali’s advertisements for himself—“World’s Most Colorful Fighter” and so on—but inside it was nothing special. Half the seats were broken. “From the moment we set out, the atmosphere was like an old-fashioned circus caravan,” Pope said, “and, of course, Muhammad was the lead entertainer.” Ali was often behind the wheel (a somewhat terrifying experience, especially when he would push the bus to seventy or eighty while turning around in his seat and lecturing the passengers). Sometimes Ali would leave the driving to one of the men in his entourage and perform without the handicap of holding the wheel. Early in the trip, he got up in the door well of the bus and, struggling to keep his balance, danced a soft-shoe in his workboots while Howard Bingham sang “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

  “I have to admit that before that bus ride,” Ed Pope said, “I didn’t understand Ali even though I’d been around him quite a bit in Miami. He seemed hostile and strange to me. But on that bus I got a sense of how complicated and how sweet he could be and how funny he was, always funny.”

  In the evening, they stopped in Sanford, Florida, Bundini’s hometown. Bundini told everyone that when he was growing up, on the nights of Joe Louis’s fights, people in the black part of town, Goose Hollow, would string up loudspeakers in the pines to listen to the action.

  Then they moved on, shoving on north into the night, until Bundini announced, at around eleven, that his hunger was fierce. “Let’s stop and eat,” he said. �
�I empty.” They stopped in the town of Yulee not far from the Georgia border beside an old, broken-down roadside luncheonette. Bundini and the four white journalists headed out of the bus. The others stayed back.

  “You’re goin’ watch a man face reality—that’s what you’re goin’ to see,” Rahaman said.

  “I might not be welcome,” Ali told Bundini, “and besides, I don’t believe in forcing integration. You go ahead, though, Jackie Robinson.”

  Bundini had grown up in Florida, but after so many years abroad and up North, he thought he could avoid an incident. But in the luncheonette, the manager told them in the plainest terms that there was a separate place, a window “out back,” where they could get something to eat if they insisted on eating together.

  “You mean the champion of the world can’t get served like other people if he wants to come in here?” Bundini said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Isn’t this discrimination against the law?” Bud Collins said.

  “Not in Nassau County,” the manager answered.

  “Isn’t this county in the United States?”

  “Not yet.”

  Ali went in and grabbed Bundini by the collar and started shouting, “What’s the matter with you—you damn fool! I told you to be a Muslim. Then you don’t go places where you’re not wanted. You clear out of this place, nigger! You ain’t wanted here!”

  Ali kept it up, haranguing Bundini all the way back onto the bus. The writers looked on amazed. Bundini was on the edge of tears.

  “You got showed, Bundini. You got showed!”

  The bus moved on, but Ali did not. He kept it up for a long time, demanding Bundini admit that he had faced reality at long, long last, shouting “Uncle Tom! Tom! Tom!” and whacking him over the face with a pillow.