by Jonathan Eig
Regardless of the precise number, it’s clear that Cassius Clay fought often — an average of about once every three weeks — and won much more often than he lost. It’s also clear he would have fought more frequently if not for a four-month respite imposed by a doctor who thought he detected a heart murmur in the boxer. In addition to his organized bouts, Cassius sparred at least three or four times a week as he prepared for competition.
Rudy boxed too, and on many occasions the brothers appeared on the same card, although they never fought each other. “To tell you the truth,” said Vic Bender, a fellow boxer and friend to both of the Clay boys, “Rudy had more potential [than Cassius], we thought. He was a little bit stronger.” Cash and Odessa Clay attended almost all of their boys’ bouts. There’s something unnerving for an adult in the sight of a boy boxer, scrawny, loose-limbed, awkward, transformed at the clang of a bell into a hard-breathing, wild-eyed attacker, fueled by hormones he didn’t know he had. On fight nights, Cash would hoot and holler and punch the air as his sons threw lefts and rights while Odessa moaned and covered her eyes. After the fights, the Clays would go home and eat meatloaf or big bowls of Odessa’s homemade chili served over spaghetti, followed by bigger bowls of store-bought vanilla ice cream.
The more he fought, the more Cassius began to develop a style of his own. Some fighters like to move forward, to step in for big punches, but Cassius preferred to circle his opponent clockwise, to punch and move away, to pull his head back from blows rather than duck them. Bobbing and weaving won’t work when an opponent gets in close. But Cassius learned that if he could keep his distance and keep circling, sticking, and moving, he would absorb less punishment. His greatest talent may have been measurement; he had a brilliant knack for staying just beyond the reach of his opponents and, then, getting just close enough to throw punches that hurt. He possessed a “built-in radar,” as he said years later. “I know how far I can go back, when it’s time to duck or tie my man up. I learn there is a science to making your opponent wear down. I learn to put my head within hitting range, force my opponent to throw blows, then lean back and away, keeping my eyes wide open so I can see everything, then sidestep, move to the right, or to the left, jab him again, then again, put my head back in hitting range. It takes a lot out of a fighter to throw punches that land in the thin air. When his best punches hit nothing but space, it saps him.”
There was danger in such an approach. Fighters are taught to keep their hands up near their heads to block punches, but Cassius dropped his gloves, tempting his opponents to go for his face and counting on his reflexes to get him out of the way in time. Also, by keeping his distance, Cassius all but abandoned the body blow as a weapon. He seldom got inside and pounded a fighter’s ribs. He seldom launched punches with the full force of his own body behind them. He fought like a bomber jet rather than a tank, counting on speed, agility, and good aim.
Although he was exceptionally fast and probably absorbed fewer punches than most young fighters, Cassius Clay wasn’t fast enough to avoid all the hard shots launched in his direction. On February 4, 1955, just three months after his first amateur bout and three weeks after his thirteenth birthday, Cassius was beaten by a young fighter named James Davis. In the summer of the same year, he beat John Hampton one week and lost to him the next. On August 30, 1957, fifteen-year-old Cassius beat a seventeen-year-old Louisville fighter named Jimmy Ellis, who would go on to become, briefly, the World Boxing Association’s heavyweight champion. Fighting eight days later, Clay lost in the first round when he suffered a cut over his eye against a fighter named Terry Hodge. A month after that, Cassius fought Jimmy Ellis again, losing this time in a split decision.
As his skills improved and he challenged older boxers, as his television appearances brought him a measure of local celebrity, Cassius grew more confident than ever, predicting he would win the national Golden Gloves boxing championship, then turn professional and become the heavyweight champion of the world. Some of his fellow fighters tired of Clay’s rap. Clay didn’t care. In the school cafeteria he needed two trays to carry his lunch, which included half a dozen bottles of milk and tilting towers of sandwiches, and if anyone accused him of gluttony, he reminded them that he was in training.
“I started boxing because I thought it was the fastest way for a black person to make it in this country,” he once said. “I was not that bright and quick in school, couldn’t be a football or a basketball player, ’cause you have to go to college and get all kinds of degrees and pass examinations. A boxer can just go into a gym, jump around, turn professional, win a fight, get a break, and he’s in the ring. If he’s good enough he makes more money than ballplayers make all their lives.”
Cassius continued to attend classes at Central, although his absences must have mounted given his schedule of boxing tournaments. He also hustled for money, working as a babysitter for some of his neighbors and doing light janitorial work in the library of Louisville’s Nazareth College, where the nun who supervised Cassius once found him sleeping deep in the library’s stacks when he was supposed to be dusting.
Joe Martin and his wife, Christine, drove their team of young boxers to tournaments in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toledo. “In those days the black boys couldn’t go in the restaurants, so I didn’t take any of the boys in,” Christine Martin told a reporter. “I’d just go in myself and get what they wanted, however many hamburgers per boy, and bring it back to the car. Cassius was a very easy-to-get-along-with fellow. Very easy to handle. Very polite.”
Cassius was not merely polite; he was genuinely shy in small groups, and especially around girls. But when it came to boxing, he had a sure sense of his talent. He sensed early on that confidence could be a weapon; it made him seem bigger and tougher than he was, and sometimes it rattled opponents. At a tournament in Louisville when he was only twelve, he walked into the visiting team’s locker room and started sassing a fighter named George King, who was twenty-one years old and married with a child. “I’m taller than you,” Cassius said. “Do you think you could beat me?” Cassius threw two quick punches at the air. “Think you could stop this jab?”
He composed the kind of poems that would later become his trademark, this one for the Louisville Courier-Journal:
This guy must be done.
I’ll stop him in one.
In February 1957, when Cassius was fifteen, the well-regarded light-heavyweight Willie Pastrano came to Louisville from Miami for a fight with John Holman at the State Fairgrounds. One night, when Pastrano was in his hotel room, Cassius phoned Pastrano from the lobby. Pastrano’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, answered.
“Hello,” Cassius told Dundee. “My name is Cassius Marcellus Clay. I am the Golden Gloves champion of Louisville . . . I’m gonna be the Olympic champion, and then I’m gonna be the champion of the whole world. I’d like to meet you.”
There was nothing on TV, so Dundee and Pastrano told Cassius to come up to their room. Cassius asked if his brother could come, too.
Cassius and Rudy spent four hours in the company of Pastrano and Dundee, with Cassius asking questions about training and boxing technique. Later, Cassius asked if he could work out with Pastrano in the ring, and Pastrano and Dundee consented. Pastrano, from New Orleans, had more than five years of experience as a professional fighter and would go on to win the world light-heavyweight championship a few years later. But he would regret the decision to get in the ring with the teenaged Cassius Clay.
“He hit me many times, and I didn’t like being made to look bad by an amateur,” Pastrano said. “He didn’t look so good from outside the ring, but when he’s up there in front of you he throws them long jabs. They come out so easy and so fast.”
A year later, on February 25, 1958, Cassius Clay was in Chicago for the biggest fight of his life, in the Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. More than 250 of the best fighters from twenty states competed in a series of bouts that stretched for ten days. The fights were held at Chicago Stadium, home of hoc
key’s Chicago Black Hawks and once the world’s largest indoor arena. Cassius had fought before big crowds in Louisville. His fights had been televised. But never before had he witnessed a scene like this. For a fighter, there is no drama like that of an important bout in a big arena, the cigarette and cigar smoke draping the air, the shouts, the moans, the voices screaming for holy blood.
After winning his first-round fight, sixteen-year-old Cassius faced Francis Turley, a young rancher from Roundup, Montana. Turley was short, at five-foot-eight, but he was rugged. In his first fight of the tournament, Turley had bloodied his opponent’s nose in the first round with a left jab before pummeling him through the ropes and out of the ring in the third round. Turley and Cassius traded punches more or less evenly in the first round, but in the second Turley noticed that Cassius was keeping his distance, putting all his weight on his right leg, and stepping in to punch. Turley timed it right, closed the gap quickly, and unleashed a furious flurry of punches that set the crowd roaring and Cassius tumbling to the mat.
Still, Cassius got up, overcoming the noise of the crowd and whatever buzzing he might have had in his head, and floored Turley with a right, demonstrating for one of the first times his ability to shake off damage and continue fighting. In the final round, Cassius danced away, avoiding Turley altogether, and the judges awarded the victory to the young fighter from Louisville.
With one more win, Cassius would fight for the light-heavyweight championship. But his opponent in the semifinal match was another strong one: Kent Green, who was not only two-and-a-half years older but also nine pounds heavier than Cassius.
The night before the fight against Green, Cassius and another Louisville fighter stepped out of the St. Clair Hotel, hailed a taxi on Michigan Avenue, and asked the driver to take them to a place where they could purchase prostitutes. The driver took them to 47th Street and Calumet Avenue on the South Side, where the boys were quickly approached by two women, one black and one white, who said they could each be had for “seven and two” — seven dollars for the sex and two for the room. Cassius picked the black woman, who looked in his young eyes to be about thirty years old. The women escorted the teenaged boys inside a nearby building, up rickety wooden stairs, and past graffiti-covered walls.
“Do you want a trip around the world?” the prostitute asked Cassius as she led him to bed.
“What’s a trip around the world?”
“Well, that’s some of everything.”
As he recalled years later: “She grabbed me with both her hands, pulling me to her. ‘Just push,’ she said. The panic left and all of a sudden I felt like a man. In a man’s position. ‘Just go up and down,’ she said. So I went up and down, up and down, until finally she asked, ‘Aren’t you through? Hurry up. Aren’t you through?’ But I just kept on going up and down. She said something like ‘Did you? Did you reach your climax?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Didn’t you get a ticklish feeling? A sensation? I said, ‘No.’ There was nothing else to say.
“She pushed me off, and I got up right away and started to put on my pants. She stood up and cut the lights on.
“I hollered, ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ And I cut the lights right back off.
“ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she shouted.
“ ‘I haven’t got my clothes on yet,’ I explained. I couldn’t look at her.”
The next day, as the tournament resumed at Chicago Stadium, Cassius used his most effective punch — the jab — to keep Kent Green from attacking. The jabs landed, and landed hard, but they weren’t enough. Green took the punches and moved forward, getting in close to Cassius’s body, turning the fight into a slugging match that favored the bigger, stronger man. By the second round, Cassius had abandoned his jab completely and tried to match Green with hooks and uppercuts, going toe to toe, power punch for power punch. Cassius soon tired while Green continued throwing and landing big punches. Finally, the referee stopped the fight, scoring it a technical knockout for Green.
The kid was “getting shellacked pretty good,” Martin recalled.
In the dressing room after the fight, Clay cried.
The following year, Cassius returned to Chicago to fight in the intercity Golden Gloves tournament. At seventeen he was still slender — all elbows and knees, with a flat chest and rippled stomach — but he had grown to six feet in height and weighed more than 170 pounds.
Cassius, fighting for the Chicago team, which included boxers from twenty states, fought his way to the finals of the light-heavyweight division where he was matched against the New York team’s most accomplished light-heavyweight, Tony Madigan, a twenty-nine-year-old who had represented Australia in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before moving to New York. Despite his advanced age and experience, Madigan remained an amateur. Their fight — on March 25, 1959 — would be held before a crowd of more than seven thousand fans and televised nationally on ABC. Madigan was the heavy favorite to win.
Even in the 175-pound-and-under light-heavyweight division, boxers tended to be sluggers. Madigan certainly fit the bill. He had a strong right hand, and he often tussled like a barroom brawler, lowering his head and swinging away until someone fell. It usually wasn’t him. Madigan had won ninety-four of ninety-nine bouts.
From the opening bell, however, it was clear that this fight was not going to be the usual for Madigan, nor was it the kind of fight that boxing fans, gathered around black-and-white TVs or crowded into smoky arenas, were accustomed to seeing big men fight. Clay flicked jabs and flitted around the ring, moving so quickly that the shorter-armed Madigan couldn’t reach him. When Madigan tried to fight his way inside, Clay popped a left to the top of Madigan’s head and bounced away. After three or four left jabs, with Madigan still forcing himself forward, Cassius would throw a right with real power that stopped the veteran fighter’s progress. Soon, Madigan’s eyes were swollen, his face red.
As the older fighter weakened and slowed, blinking away pain, Cassius began setting his feet and throwing more thumping rights. A year ago, he had lacked the power to stop Kent Green from muscling his way inside, but Cassius was stronger now. Madigan’s only hope was a knockout punch, but every time he loaded up to throw one, Cassius disappeared out of range.
In the end, Cassius won convincingly.
By the 1950s, boxing’s popularity was in steep decline. As the U.S. economy improved, young men had better options for work. Millions of World War II veterans were enrolled in college or job-training courses. As population shifted from the cities to the suburbs, neighborhood fight clubs began to fail and boxing matches grew less numerous. Black and Latino fighters started taking the place of the sport’s Irish, Jewish, and Italian boxers. Overall, the number of professional boxers in the United States fell by 50 percent. If not for television, the sport’s decline would have been more precipitous. In the mid-1950s, boxing could still be seen on TV almost every night of the week, and it rivaled I Love Lucy in the ratings.
Of all the fights televised March 25, 1959, Cassius Clay’s was the most exciting. Fans who had expected to see the younger, lighter boxer take a beating instead caught a glimpse of boxing’s future. The next day, in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, this report from the Associated Press appeared:
New York won an unprecedented second straight intercity Golden Gloves team title over Chicago Wednesday night, but the individual spotlight was turned on the Windy City’s Cassius Clay.
Clay, a 17-year-old high school student from Louisville, Ky., proved he was quite advanced for his age and a sharp counter puncher in taking a three-round decision.
The world was beginning to take notice, just as he had always said it would.
5
The Prophet
Before fights, when other boxers were usually conserving their energy, focusing their thoughts, receiving last-minute counsel from trainers, praying, or throwing up, Cassius Clay was on his feet, shadowboxing, telling jokes, bragging, and checking his reflection in the mirror, as if idle
time were the only challenger he feared. Years later, he would admit to friends that he had been frightened before every one of his fights. But he hid it beautifully. And once the bell rang, his fears vanished.
In 1959, before his nationally televised fight with Tony Madigan, Clay couldn’t sit still, driving the other fighters to distraction with his nervous energy. He was in Chicago, three hundred miles from home. He wanted to do something. Didn’t anyone else want to do something? He kept asking until he got the answer he wanted.
“We trained together,” said Wilbert “Skeeter” McClure, a teenage boxer from Toledo, “and I remember Cassius kept bugging everybody on the team, saying, ‘Man, there are all these pretty girls on the streets, all these pretty girls walking around; we got to meet some of these girls.’ ” Some of the young men were afraid to explore Chicago on their own. Others wanted to rest for their upcoming fights. But Clay persisted: “Come on, let’s put on our [Golden Gloves] jackets and go someplace to impress the girls.” Eventually, the adult chaperones for the boxers relented and organized an outing to Marshall High School on the city’s West Side.
“We had pretty girls as hostesses to show us around,” McClure said. “Then we went into the cafeteria for lunch, which was filled with more pretty girls. There were pretty girls sitting everywhere. And the guy who’d been agitating just sat there, staring at the food on his tray the whole time. He didn’t say a word.”
Some of the young men who met Clay at these boxing tournaments found him irresistibly fun; they took his boastfulness as an act and weren’t put off by it. Others found his self-absorption repulsive. None recalled conversations on politics, world affairs, race, or culture. He wanted to fight. He wanted to be great. He wanted to be famous and wealthy. He wanted to have a good time. That was all.