King of the World

by David Remnick

  “I know how you feel,” Patterson said in his soft deferential way. “I’ve experienced this myself.”

  Liston did not respond, not right away, and it struck Patterson that Liston still wore that terrible expression of his, that “mean look.” Patterson said a few more consoling things, but he decided after a while that he just couldn’t reach Liston. It would be foolish to go on trying.

  “Okay, I’ll see you later,” Patterson said and turned to the door.

  Liston got up and ran after Patterson and put an arm around his shoulder.

  “Thanks,” Liston said, and Patterson felt better.

  “I knew then that I had reached him.”

  Back in the arena, Ali wandered to his corner. His brother, Rahaman, took the mouthpiece out.

  “He laid down,” Ali said quietly.

  “No, you hit him,” Rahaman said.

  “I think he …”

  “No, man, you hit him,” Rahaman said.

  Eventually, Ali was taken over to a television monitor and asked to look at the round in slow motion. Now he could see what his reflexes and strength had done. Soon Ali alternated between calling the blow “my karate punch” and crediting Stepin Fetchit for passing along Jack Johnson’s “famous anchor punch.” Nat Fleischer would later say that after a long scholarly search he had determined that Johnson never had such a punch. Instead, Fleischer compared the blow to one used by turn-of-the-century middleweight champion Charles “Kid” McCoy, the “corkscrew punch.”

  No matter what the tag, Ali said later that his punch was “timed with rhythm and balance. It had the force of two moving cars coming together and that makes it twice as hard as if one was standing still in a collision.” Liston later said that he stayed on the canvas for a while longer than might have been necessary because Ali was still there and Ali was “a nut.” He feared that Ali would hit him as he struggled to his feet. Besides, before the knockdown he’d had no success in hitting Ali. As Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “If Ali had not thrown this punch and the fight had gone on for three more rounds of the same thing, [Liston] would not have gotten close to him. Sonny could not have hit Muhammad in the ass with a canoe paddle.”

  Liston never denied that Ali had reached him with a sharp, true punch. “I didn’t think he could hit that hard,” he said. “I didn’t quit. I got hit and hurt good. Clay’s right hand caught me high on the left cheekbone and I felt all screwed up. I figured I could beat the count but you don’t figure so good when you get clobbered. It wasn’t the hardest punch I ever took, but it was hard enough.”

  DOUBTS WILL LIKELY REMAIN ABOUT THE SECOND ALI-LISTON fight for as long as anyone cares about fights. Even after taking into account that Ali really did hit Liston a sharp, unseen blow, and even allowing for the confusion in the ring and Liston’s willingness to continue the fight once he was on his feet, it would be foolish to dismiss entirely the possibility that Liston took a dive—or was preparing to take a dive.

  Johnny Tocco, a fight trainer who worked with Liston in both St. Louis and later in Las Vegas, told journalists before he died in 1997 that he, too, had heard the rumor that the Black Muslims had tried to intimidate Liston. “I asked him about it,” Tocco said, “and all Sonny told me was ‘Let’s not talk about that—it was the way the fight had to go.’ ” Tocco claimed that John Vitale had told him that the fight was going to last just one round. But somehow the hearsay evidence that runs from a St. Louis mobster to a Las Vegas ring rat seems less than conclusive.

  In old age, Geraldine Liston took to demanding money from interviewers—an arrangement I declined. But in the last free interview she gave, to producers for HBO in 1996, she denied that there had ever been a fix.

  “He said, ‘You win and you lose.… There has to be a winner in everything, you know.’ And he was that type of guy.… He said it was just one of those things.… If he throwed the fight, he went to his grave, he never told me. And if he throwed it, I didn’t see none of the money.”

  Ali never believed there had been a fix, and his disbelief was not merely a way to preserve his own reputation. What he said made sense. “Sonny is too dull and too slow to be a fixer in a fight,” he said. And besides, Liston would have waited more than just a minute if only “to make it look good.… I hit him flush with all of my two hundred and six pounds and they hated to give me credit.… Didn’t you hear the people hollering fix? Didn’t you hear them hollering fake as soon as he hit the floor? I wanted the world to know I wasn’t satisfied with him falling. I wanted the world to know I had nothing to do with them thinking it was a fix.… Let me have my day, because when something happens to me you will have your day.… Give me justice, but the people are still trying to say fake. My mouth has overshadowed my ability.”

  MOST OF THE REPORTERS WERE IN NO MOOD TO GIVE ALI THE benefit of the doubt, not after enduring a week of conspiracy rumors and a fight that lasted a minute or so. Gene Ward of the Daily News led his story thus: “A right-hand punch, thrown with phantom force and landing with the thud of a cream puff, knocked out Sonny Liston at one minute of the first round here tonight as a screaming crowd filled little St. Dominic’s Arena with cries of ‘fake’ and ‘foul.’ ”

  Jimmy Cannon blamed Liston. He wrote that the Ali-Liston fight—“this swindle of a charade”—might have been the last straw, the “murder” of boxing. “The slayer is Liston who once worked for the mobs of St. Louis as a head breaker. The hell with it. Let it go. It has earned a passport to oblivion. There is no reason for its existence.”

  The august voices of The New York Times seized on the event to attack boxing itself.

  Under the headline “A Hollow Ring,” the Times ran an editorial reading, “On the theory that it is unsportsmanlike to attack an adversary when down, we postpone our usual morning-after demand for the abolition of professional prizefighting. Who, deploring beastly brutality, could find any fault with the brief and gentle Clay-Liston encounter at which only the customers suffered any damage? Not for many years have so few traveled so far to see so little. Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, instead of ‘murdering’ each other, as the quaint language of the ring has it, have presided at the beginning of the end of commercial boxing—we hope. A sport as sick as this one surely cannot survive much longer.”

  Russell Baker wrote in his column that the fight had “done for boxing what Paris has done for women’s fashion. They have made the public pay through the nose for the charm of being bilked.… This criticism has been heightened by the fact that fighters usually come from the hungry classes and were risking their brains for the titillation of the overfed. It can be highly corrupting to be so overfed that you have to pay two hungry boys to beat each other to keep you from yawning. Muhammad and Sonny saved the crowd from all this. Some critics of their encounter have called their show a farce. They are wrong. There was nothing funny about the main characters. It was a morality play in which two of life’s losers—the exploited—turn the tables and exploit their exploiters.

  “What was funny was the wounded fury of the mob. Believing in Santa Claus. Heads full of childish notions about the clash of good and evil. Duped by a pair of canny codgers who, except for rare musculature and reflexes, would have been doomed to toil for peanuts at a shoeshine stand or cracking skulls on a picket line.”

  For a couple of days, at least, while the outrage was still fresh, Cannon and Ward were in the majority. But after a few days of watching replays, other members of the press were more apt to believe their eyes. There was some debate at the offices of Sports Illustrated over what had happened in Lewiston—Bud Schrake was the loudest in proclaiming the bout a fraud—but the lead story, by Tex Maule, reflected the majority opinion in the office: that the fight, and the punch, were legitimate. Even Arthur Daley of The New York Times, who had rarely written a kind word about Ali, now wrote, “Kinetics is a branch of physics dealing with the effects of forces. There is absolutely no method, however, of applying kinetics to boxing so that the force of
a punch can be measured.”

  THE FBI DID NOT CONDUCT A FULL FIELD INVESTIGATION OF the Lewiston fight, but, at the request of the U.S. attorney in Maine, agents did interview a wide range of informants about a possible fix. The bureau came back with a vague report that the state attorney felt did not warrant further investigation. “He did not feel we had developed sufficient information,” William Roemer of the FBI told an HBO producer shortly before Roemer’s death. The report, the U.S. attorney felt, had no “prosecutive value.”

  Three years after the fight, however, Roemer and his partner John Bassett interviewed the Chicago mob front man Bernard Glickman, who had since become a cooperating witness for the government. Glickman, who knew Liston well from the days when the St. Louis mob ran him, claimed that he heard Liston tell his wife that he was going to take a dive, and Geraldine, in turn, Roemer recounted, “said to Liston that as long as he was going to dump the fight, then don’t take the chance of getting hurt. As long as you’re going to lose anyhow, go ahead, go down early.” The problem for the FBI was that Glickman’s uncorroborated testimony had little value as the basis for further investigation. Glickman had perjured himself already on other mob-related issues. What was more, the FBI investigators may have been suspicious of the Lewiston fight, as many columnists were, but in the end they never discovered any betting bonanzas that would have suggested a fix. Nor could they even answer why the Mafia would have wanted to give up the heavyweight championship of the world, the biggest money-making title in sports, for a short-term gain.

  Years later, when Liston was living in Las Vegas, he ran into Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger, one of the few reporters whom he seemed to like and to trust. They exchanged pleasantries and agreed to sit down and have breakfast together. They ordered and began to talk. The first thing out of Liston’s mouth was “I don’t want to talk about Lewiston.”

  “Fine,” Izenberg said. “We’ll talk about something else.”

  And so they did for a while. But then Izenberg put duty before deference and said, “But we’ve got to talk about it. What’s it like? I mean, tell me in one sentence and I’ll never ask you again.”

  “In Lewiston I lost the world heavyweight championship,” Liston said. “I lost it because Nat Fleischer said I lost it.”

  “What makes him the arbiter of conduct in boxing? What gave him that authority?”

  “Because,” Liston said, “he could count to ten faster than Joe Walcott.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  What’s in a Name?

  ON JUNE 23, ONE MONTH AFTER THE FIGHT, ALI FILED A COMPLANT in the Dade County, Florida, circuit court asking that his marriage to Sonji Clay be annulled. The Muslims told him that he had to choose: membership in the Nation of Islam or marriage to a heathen. Never mind that Herbert Muhammad had introduced Ali to her in the first place. The plan had not included marriage. When Ali and Sonji were dating and driving to a Muslim convention in Arizona, Captain Sam married them “Islamically” by turning around in the front seat to the young couple in the back and saying, “I wed thee, I wed thee, I wed thee.” They later received the blessings of the state of Indiana through a justice of the peace in Gary.

  Ali’s complaint cited Sonji’s pledge to follow the tenets of the Nation of Islam and her failure to do so. His complaint was especially detailed in her refusal to follow the Muslim dress code. He cited, as evidence, their dispute over an outfit she had worn to a press conference in training camp before the Lewiston fight.

  “You could see all of her! The seams of her underwear!” Ali would say in court. “Tight pants around all those men was wrong!”

  Sonji’s lawyers actually brought the outfit to court and asked the judge, “Would there be any objection to the court if she put on the dress now during the recess?”

  “I don’t think it is necessary,” the judge said. “The court has a vivid imagination.”

  Muhammad Ali vs. Floyd Patterson, 1965.

  Sonji had worn a knee-length red dress to the hearing, and her lawyer asked Ali, “Is the dress Mrs. Clay is wearing today acceptable to Muslims?”

  “No, it’s too tight,” Ali said. “Her knees are showing and her limbs are showing. She’s wearing false eyelashes and lipstick. It’s lust to the eye and embarrassing to me.”

  It came out that Sonji irritated Ali with her irreverence. When he would recount for her the story of Black Muslim cosmology, that the great flying wheel would drop bombs on the world, she’d needle him, ask him why Elijah Muhammad’s house in Chicago would survive apocalypse when the rest of the South Side would burn. And, like Cassius Clay, Sr., she had little respect for the grim-faced Muslims and wondered aloud if, while preaching the puritan ethic, they were not off chasing women and ripping off the heavyweight champion for his money.

  Sonji left Lewiston in anger right after the fight and did not see Ali again until June 11, when they met in Chicago. That day Ali tried to drive her to a dressmaker to buy some “plain and simple” floor-length dresses. Sonji exploded and demanded he pull the car over to the curb and let her out. They did not live together again.

  In his suit, Ali said that the theme of immodesty had been a constant in their year-long marriage. Once, after he had taken a washcloth to her face to wipe away her lipstick, Sonji left home. “Baby, I can’t take it no more,” her note to him read. “I’m not happy. I’ve never really been happy.”

  “I just love my husband and I want to be with him,” Sonji told reporters. “It’s just this religion. I have tried to accept it, and I have explained this to him but I just don’t understand it. It’s very hard to change to the way they want me to be.… We’ve always had our little arguments about clothes. I told him if I was embarrassing him I would just stay out of the picture. I just want to be his wife and I won’t let them take him away from me just like that.… Cassius said that Elijah Muhammad told him I was embarrassing the entire Muslim nation by not wearing the long white dresses the Muslim women are supposed to wear. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I attend meetings and services and observe dietary laws. I was baptized in his religion. All except the dress. I never joined that part. I am not accustomed to wearing stuff like that. I’m normal like other women. I don’t like to wear that stuff.”

  Ali’s suit declared that the marriage had gone awry right away, within a day of exchanging vows. It said that Sonji’s promise to practice the faith was a “mere sham,” a deception to help bring her all the material wealth promised by a champion. “Every girl dreams of finding a Prince Charming who can afford the things she wants,” she had said once. “I looked up one day and there was mine.” And yet, according to all the non-Muslims around, Ali and Sonji seemed to have a loving marriage which went wrong only when leaders of the Nation started putting pressure on Ali. They were affectionate with each other; Sonji even got along well with Ali’s parents. In time, Ali would become a world-class womanizer—the “pelvic missionary”—but while he was with Sonji he was faithful.

  When the divorce decree was finally issued, Sonji came out of it heartbroken and only modestly enriched. The court ordered Ali to pay her $15,000 a year for ten years and a one-time payment of $22,500 to cover her legal costs. When it was over, Ali left Sonji a bitter note reading, “You traded heaven for hell, baby.” But he was heartbroken, too. He was surrounded by sexual opportunity—flunkies offering to find him women, and women offering themselves. But for months Ali stayed away. He once said that he stayed in his room, still smelling Sonji’s perfume. It was only when the air cleared of her scent that Ali returned to the world of women.

  “Of course, when Muhammad went back to the women he did it with world records in mind,” Pacheco said. Unlike Jack Johnson, however, he never went near white women. A strict adherence to Islamic law would have precluded any sex at all outside of marriage, but Ali, as always, cut his own deals. For him, an avoidance of white women was a moral and political necessity, a form of strength and purity. He was rarely as vehement about anything as he was about i
nterracial sex and marriage.

  “Man, I was in Chicago a couple of months ago and saw a white fella take a black woman into a motel room,” he told an interviewer for Playboy. “He stayed with her two or three hours and then walked out—and a bunch of brothers saw it and didn’t even say nothin’. They should have thrown rocks at his car or kicked down the door while he was in there screwing her—do something to let him know you don’t like it. How can you be a man when another man can come get your woman or your daughter or your sister—and take her to a room and screw her—and, nigger, you don’t even protest? But nobody touches our women, white or black. Put a hand on a Muslim sister and you are to die. You may be a white or black man in an elevator with a Muslim sister and if you pat her on the behind, you’re supposed to die right there.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a carbon copy of a white racist,” the interviewer said. “Let’s get it out front: Do you believe that lynching is the answer to interracial sex?”

  “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman,” Ali said. “And white men have always done that. They lynched niggers for even looking at a white woman; they’d call it reckless eyeballing and bring out the rope. Rapping, patting, mischief, abusing, showing our women disrespect—a man should die for that. And not just white men—black men, too. We will kill you, and the brothers who don’t kill you will get their behinds whipped and probably get killed themselves if they let it happen and don’t do nothin’ about it. Tell it to the president—he ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it. Tell it to the FBI: we’ll kill anybody who tries to mess around with our women. Ain’t nobody gonna bother them.”

  “And what if a Muslim woman wants to go out with non-Muslim blacks—or white men, for that matter?” asked the man from Playboy.

  “Then she dies,” Ali replied. “Kill her, too.”