Bundini could only answer feebly, “I’m a free man. No slave chains around my heart.”
Bundini was crying now; Plimpton thought Bundini’s face resembled the traditional mask of tragedy. Finally, when Ali saw how upset Bundini was, he calmed him down, joked with him, until eventually they were brothers again.
Ali’s rickety bus held out until Fayetteville, North Carolina, where it collapsed and had to be abandoned. The group would have to make the rest of the trip courtesy of Trailways.
“My poor little red bus,” Ali said. “You was the most famousest bus ever in the history of the world.”
Fifty hours later, they reached Chicopee Falls.
“I’m Cassius Clay,” Muhammad Ali announced at the front desk of the best motel in town. “Give me the sixty-dollar-a-day suite.”
“But somebody is in there right now,” the clerk said.
“Well, get him out. The Greatest is here.”
IN EARLY MAY, WITH ONLY A FEW WEEKS TO GO BEFORE THE fight, the Massachusetts boxing authorities, in an odd rush of moralism, decided the fight could not occur in the Commonwealth for fear of infection from promoters with ambiguous credentials and perhaps (who knew?) organized crime. Instead, officials in Maine, eager for the publicity and the money, offered up St. Dominic’s, a schoolboy hockey arena in the impoverished textile town of Lewiston. Lewiston is thirty-five miles from Portland and far from glamorous. The population was 41,000, mostly French Canadians; there were precisely two small hotels and one nightspot. Henry Hollis of the Hotel Holly’s Leopard Room hired an extra stripper for the month of May. “We call ’em dancers,” he said. “It sounds better. This town’s small. It can only support one strip—ah, dancer.”
St. Dominic’s could seat only five thousand souls. Not since Independence Day 1923, when Jack Dempsey fought Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Montana, had there been a smaller venue for a heavyweight title fight. Shelby was a run-down cow town with a population of five hundred. Dempsey’s manager, Jack “Doc” Kearns, tricked the city fathers into paying a $300,000 guarantee to Dempsey in advance (and nothing for Gibbons). Only seven thousand people showed up for the fight, and Dempsey put on a dismal performance, punching just enough to take a fifteen-round decision. When the fight was over, Kearns and Dempsey escaped on a train that Kearns had kept waiting in case of such a disaster.
But while the Dempsey fight led to the virtual bankruptcy of Shelby, Lewiston was not risking much; most of the money for the Ali-Liston fight would come from ancillary media rights anyway. There was even some advantage in holding the fight in Maine. Now the state of Massachusetts would not be blacked out from closed-circuit broadcast.
The twenty-four-year-old mayor of Lewiston, Robert T. Courturier, found boxing distasteful but figured the publicity would be invaluable. He soon discovered that his quiet town was now the focus of a more morbid kind of attention: grave rumors of assassination were soon splashed across every newspaper in the country. All kinds of rumors were circulated by the police, the reporters, the townspeople, the fight camps, and, not least, the irrepressible publicist Harold Conrad, who was only too glad to give the event an aura of menace, the better to sell tickets at theaters showing the fight on closed circuit. One rumor had it that Malcolm X’s followers were sending a hit squad to Lewiston in a red Cadillac to kill Ali, possibly while he was in the ring, possibly before. Jimmy Cannon went for that rumor after hearing it from Conrad, and featured it prominently in his column. This, of course, occasioned a phone call to Milton Gross from the sports editor of the New York Post, Ike Gellis, wondering where his menace-and-mayhem story was. It’s coming, Gross assured him, and you haven’t heard half the story.
Another rumor had it that the Nation of Islam had threatened to kill Liston unless he took a dive. Liston’s cornerman Joe Pollino told Jack McKinney that Liston had indeed been visited by two Black Muslims and afterward Liston had looked almost “catatonic.” McKinney, who was not in New England with the Liston camp this time, said, “Sonny had been sparring with Thad Spencer and Amos ‘Big Train’ Lincoln and he’d been going through them like shit through a goose. But after that meeting, Sonny was a zombie and the two sparring partners were beating up on him. Finally, Joe told them he’d pay them double to let Sonny do well, to let Sonny feel good.” Many of the other columnists, however, dismissed the idea that Liston could be intimidated by the Muslims. “Sonny had the goddam Mafia in his corner,” said Larry Merchant, then of the Philadelphia Daily News. “Why would he get scared about two guys in bow ties when he was the product of the toughest guys in the country?”
The white reporters in town were uneasy about the new and obvious presence of Muslims surrounding Ali. Cannon and Gross, and even some of the younger reporters, found the Muslims, with their bow ties and steely, theatrical stares, unconducive to the gay carnival atmosphere they expected at a heavyweight title fight. Even Angelo Dundee, always so accommodating, was uneasy. At one point he went to thank one of the Muslim women in Ali’s camp for sewing up his shirt; as he expressed his gratitude he lightly put his hand on the woman’s arm. Rahaman Ali sternly called Dundee aside.
“Come out here a minute,” he said. “Don’t you ever put your hand on one of the sisters again.”
“The vibe of the Black Muslims had been pretty subtle in Miami but it was enormous in Lewiston,” Robert Lipsyte recalled. “There were these tall, strong, sober, shining-eyed Muslims. They even tried to shake down reporters for money for interviews with Ali. Most of them were ex-cons, because that’s where the recruiting was going on at the time.”
As the reporters wrote more and more dispatches about the atmosphere of dread, the Lewiston authorities reacted by increasing security. There were careful searches at press conferences and later at the fight itself. Melvin Durslag of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner wrote that police even confiscated his wife’s knitting needles. The Lewiston police chief, Joseph Farrand, put 250 officers on the street, including sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and ninety reserves from neighboring counties. He arranged for forty-five more men for security on fight night. A special homicide detail arrived from New York. No precaution, it seemed, was too much. “I don’t want to go down in history as the place where the heavyweight champion was killed,” Chief Farrand said.
There were moments of strange comedy, too. In Chicopee Falls, Ali trained in a ballroom at the Schine Inn. The makeshift gym was just above a bowling alley, and all during the training sessions the crash of bowling balls and pins could be heard over Ali’s voice. His entourage ranged from hardened members of the Black Muslims to the old vaudeville comic Stepin Fetchit. Ali called Fetchit his “secret strategist,” so named, it was said, because Fetchit was old enough, at seventy-three, to have known Ali’s historical hero Jack Johnson. Fetchit, who was born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry because his father wanted to name him after four presidents, was the warm-up act and master of ceremonies. Fetchit had starred in dozens of movies from the twenties to the fifties, including Steamboat ’Round the Bend and The Sun Shines Bright. He took his name from the horse that had beaten the one he’d bet all his worldly possessions on when he was living in Texas in the early twenties. Fetchit made a sizable fortune in the movies (“I had one mansion so big that when it was three o’clock in the kitchen it was five o’clock in the living room”), but by the early sixties he had become a charity case in Chicago. In the days before a big fight, writers desperate for feature stories troll around the camps looking for an angle. Unlike the grim Muslims, Fetchit filled their notebooks. Perhaps because he had such a sly notion of acting, Fetchit understood Ali’s ability to transform himself. “People don’t understand the champ, but one of these days he’ll be one of the country’s greatest heroes,” he told one reporter. “He’s like one of those plays where a man is the villain in the first act and then turns out to be the hero in the last act. That’s the way it’ll be with the champ. And that’s the way he wants it, because it’s better for the box office for people to misunderstan
d him than to understand him.”
In the knowing eyes of the white reporters in camp, Fetchit was also the epitome of the Uncle Tom Negro, forever saying “Yassuh, I’m a-comin’, suh!” At one press conference, when the phrase “Uncle Tom” came up, Fetchit interrupted Ali and said, “Uncle Tom was not an inferior Negro. He was a white man’s child. His real name was MacPherson and he lived near Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tom was the first of the Negro social reformers and integrationists. The inferior Negro was Sambo.”
The reporters were stupefied.
“What’s the matter?” Ali shouted. “Write it down. Your pencils paralyzed?”
“You tell it, brother!” came the unlikely shout from the Muslims. “Oh, make it plain!”
“The truth was,” Robert Lipsyte recalled, “that Stepin Fetchit was very funny and insisted that his head-scratching and foot-shuffling was just a way to get over, the sly civility of the colonial Indian in British-ruled India.” Fetchit, as it happened, converted to the Nation of Islam a few years later.
Most papers still referred to Ali as Clay. Many of the reporters agreed with their editors and would not have thought to challenge them on the issue. Lipsyte, however, was embarrassed that the Times was still calling the champion Clay (“who is sometimes known as Muhammad Ali”) and came over to Ali one day to try to explain. Ali patted his head and told him not to worry.
“You just the white power structure’s little brother,” he said.
Ali, as always, was open to all reporters and all visitors. One day a young Olympic champion arrived at the gym.
“Do you have any advice for me?” Joe Frazier asked Muhammad Ali.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lose some weight and become a light heavyweight.”
When Ali moved from Chicopee Falls to a Holiday Inn closer to Lewiston a few days before the fight, a dozen uniformed and plainclothes police officers met him at the state line and escorted him to Maine. Ali accepted the protection but laughed it off. “I fear no one but Allah,” he said. “He will protect me. White, black, yellow people all love me. Nobody wants to kill me. If they shoot, the gun will explode in their hands, Their bullets will turn against them. Allah will protect me.” Besides, Ali reckoned, “I’m too fast to be hit by a bullet.” That was all fine for the champion, but the editors of The Boston Globe took out extra insurance for their five writers in Lewiston.
Compared to his antic performances before the fight in Miami, Ali was relatively subdued. By his standards, anyway. He vowed to raid Liston’s camp in Poland Springs but thought better of it when he discovered that the owner of the hotel there had borrowed two black bears from the state game farm and chained them outside near the entrance.
While Ali had certainly sloughed off the weight he had gained in Africa, he was getting hit pretty hard in the gym, especially by Jimmy Ellis. But that was deliberate. Throughout his career Ali always prepared himself for major fights by allowing his sparring partners to beat him up, as if that sharpened his defensive skills and his endurance.
At home, however, Ali was really suffering. His relationship with Sonji was foundering. Sonji had made some overtures to the Muslims, but she would often wear makeup or clothing deemed inappropriate by the crowd of Nation members who now hung around Ali all the time, and Ali could not bear the embarrassment. At one point he complained loudly when Sonji wore a tight denim outfit. Ali demanded she go back inside and put on something more modest.
Years later Ali would admit that he had been deeply in love with Sonji, and their marriage was often a happy one, especially when they were alone and away from the judging stares of the other Muslims. At night he would sing his favorite song for her, Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.” But at times Ali could not bear the gap between them. He would get angry when she questioned the restrictions and the mythologies of the Muslims or when she’d point out how differently he acted when they were alone and when they were with Herbert Muhammad and the other Muslims. Once, Ali even slapped Sonji, something he remembered and regretted thirty-odd years later. “It was wrong,” he told Thomas Hauser. “It’s the only time I did something like that, and after I slapped her I felt sorrier than she did. It hurt me more than it hurt her. I was young, twenty-two years old, and she was doing things against my religion, but that’s no excuse. A man should never hit a woman.”
But for all the commotion, the rumors of violence and the discord at home, Ali remained calm, even in the face of the rematch with Liston. As he started winding down his training before the fight to some early-morning runs with Howard Bingham, Ali spent his time just waiting around at the Holiday Inn in his second-floor suite. One afternoon, Bundini and Pat Putnam of The Miami Herald were in the room with Ali and Sonji. Bundini was in the bathroom, Ali on the bed. Sonji was sitting at a vanity, brushing her hair. Police guards were a few rooms down the outdoor walkway. All of a sudden, there was a gun blast. “It was crazy fucking Bundini playing with his pistol in the bathroom and it went off,” Putnam said. “Everyone else was tight as a drum, except AU. Ali chewed Bundini’s ass off, of course, but then that was it. His mind was on the fight, not hit squads.”
LISTON WAS NOW TRAINING IN THE SPA TOWN OF POLAND Spring. The guests at the hotel included more than a hundred Roman Catholic priests in town for a convention and contestants in a massive drum and bugle corps competition. The boxing writers, who thought the sun came up at ten, were displeased in the extreme to be awakened at seven by the drums and bugles and then bewildered at breakfast by the streams of men in black. Nor were they much impressed with the Poland Spring Hotel, which seemed in its amenities to summon the dusty wooden inns of John Ford westerns. The “fire escape” was a long rope in each room. Bathrooms were communal.
In Liston’s camp, determination was giving way to lassitude and dissension. Liston had screaming fights with Jack Nilon not only in private but in the hotel lobby; usually the subject was money. Geraldine Liston said years later that Sonny was paid $250,000 for the second fight with Ali, but he never got the $150,000 he was owed for the Miami fight. Liston was miserable in Lewiston.
“It was very disappointing,” Geraldine said years later. “The training was bad. It was wet. It was damp. And the little place where they were going to fight was terrible, you know, so Sonny was very disappointed and I … I guess he was just to the point that he’d say, well, win or lose, forget it, you know. He was in a very low spirit.”
If Liston was visited by members of the Nation of Islam, he did not make an issue of it, and he made a great show of treating Ali with disdain. Once more, he was surrounded by the heavyweight traditionalists—Louis, Marciano, Walcott, Braddock, and Patterson—and he worked out in the traditional way. Under a spectacular chandelier, and as sunlight filtered through green stained glass, Liston skipped rope to Lionel Hampton’s “Railroad No. 2,” which has a quicker beat than “Night Train.” To the untrained eye he was, as usual, dominating the sparring partners who had been brave enough to remain to the end. “Don’t tell me I’m afraid of Clay,” Liston told reporters at a workout one day. “All I’m afraid of is that if he opens his big mouth wide enough I’ll lose an arm. I gotta redeem myself after letting that Clay take my tide away.… I’ll convert him all right—convert him into a stiff.” Six days before the fight the Maine Athletic Commission doctor pronounced Liston “the fittest man I have ever examined.”
The doctors of Maine may have been accustomed to a relatively low level of fitness. The truth was otherwise. The layoff had thrown Liston out of rhythm. Given his tender psyche and advanced years, throwing away what he had accomplished training the first time around and then doing it all over again after Ali’s hernia was intolerable. He was drinking, usually J&B, and staying up all night. To the more experienced ring rats and reporters in camp, Liston was growing old before their eyes. When one sparring partner, Wendell Newton, came into the ring imitating Ali’s speed, Liston looked especially weary. What would he do against the real thing? Amos “Big Train” Lincoln did all he could to revive Lis
ton’s spirits by providing him with an open target, but it did little good. And as he floundered, Liston was also showing his temper with the reporters around him, prompting Mark Kram, of Sports Illustrated, to write, “Liston is still Liston, socially primitive and sadly suspicious and forever the man-child.”
A priest in Liston’s camp called him “a hurt man, a humiliated man.” Gil Rogin, who would eventually take on the editorship of Sports Illustrated, had written a prescient article for the magazine describing the disintegration of Liston’s spirit and skills even while he was still training in Massachusetts.
“You can see it in his eyes,” one of Liston’s sparring partners told Rogin. “They don’t look so scary anymore.”
“One day you are the champ and your friends say, ‘Yes, champ, no one in the world can beat you,’ ” Liston said one day as he and Geraldine were coming back to camp from a trip to the grocery store. “Then you are no longer the champ and you are all alone. After that, your friends and the people who have been making a big payday off of you aren’t talking to you but about you, and what they say isn’t what they said the day before.”
Liston seemed pensive, more reflective and sad than ever before. In Poland Springs, he was openly melancholy. He and Geraldine visited a nineteenth-century burial ground near the hotel. They stopped at one headstone for a man named Richard Pottle that read:
Then fare thee well
Why should I weep
To see thee thus
So proudly sleep?
Geraldine said, “Charles, we ought to get us some pictures of those stones.”
“What for?” Liston answered. “You going to be in there soon enough and long enough.”
Ali-Liston, the knockout.
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