by Jonathan Eig
Some boys weren’t interested in dating a young woman with a baby, even a beautiful young woman like Swint. The boys tended to become even more leery when they learned that the father of Swint’s child was doing time in jail. Clay didn’t care. He’d always had a crush on Swint, and he was not the sort to worry about minor details. After the talent show, Clay walked Swint back to her home in the Beecher Terrace apartments. Swint enjoyed Clay’s company. She liked his infectious laugh. She liked the fact that, despite all the bragging, he seemed nervous and humble. Swint knew that Clay was a celebrity at Central High. All the girls knew about his athletic success, and they all admired his striking features and long, muscular arms, which he went out of his way to show off by wearing tight, white, short-sleeved shirts. He had beautiful skin and dark brown eyes and a small gap between his two upper front teeth, an imperfection that made him even more desirable. “He was like a live chick walking through Colonel Sanders,” recalled Swint, who later changed her name to Jamillah Muhammad. “He drew them like a magnet.” But it was his personality even more than his looks that attracted Swint.
“The thing I liked about him,” she said, “I don’t care what kind of mood you were in, being around him one hour could make you forget everything. He was always positive, always funny. He had a sense of humor like you wouldn’t believe.”
That night, when Clay and Swint reached Beecher Terrace, they walked together up the stairs to Swint’s second-floor apartment. When they reached her door, Clay leaned in for a kiss, and Swint closed her eyes to give him one back. Then came a series of loud thudding sounds — and no kiss. When Swint opened her eyes, Clay was lying on the ground at the foot of the stairs in a tangle of long arms and legs.
Clay had fainted.
From the bottom of the stairs, he looked up sheepishly at Swint. “Ain’t nobody gonna believe this,” he said.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1960, Clay and Swint dated, although Clay was too busy boxing and Swint too busy raising her baby for the relationship to get serious. Clay loved playing with Swint’s little boy, Alan. The baby had a stuffed Collie, and Clay would tie a string around the toy dog’s neck, hide the string under the rug, and make the dog move around the room.
“Every minute I ever spent with him was fun,” she said. “That’s just the kind of man he was.”
Although he had talked about turning professional, Clay remained an amateur, and in May 1960, he traveled to San Francisco to fight for a spot on America’s Olympic boxing team. Eighty young men would compete. Ten of them — one from each weight division — would make the team and go on to the Olympics in Rome. But before he could participate in the trials, Clay had to overcome his fear of flying.
Cassius Clay Sr. was afraid of air travel, and his son had developed much the same phobia after an early flight from Louisville to Chicago in 1958 or 1959. Clay, in his 1975 autobiography, wrote that the turbulence was so severe, “some of the seats were torn from their bolts on the floor.” Joe Martin remembered much the same: “I mean, we was doing all kinds of flips and things were falling out on the floor, you know? And that plane started slipping down thataway and them motors just a-screaming and a-squalling. I really thought it was our last ride . . . We hit bottom so hard it pulled the screws right out of the floor where my seat was, and I had a black mark across my stomach where my seatbelt was. And I mean Cassius was praying and hollering! Oh, man, he was scared to death.”
Now, a year or so after that traumatic flight, Clay told Martin he would skip the Olympic trials in San Francisco if flying were the only way to get there. If he won in San Francisco, after all, it would only mean another flight to Rome, followed by another flight back to the United States. He would be better off turning pro now, he argued, and scheduling fights in cities he could reach by car, bus, and train. His goal, he said, was to be the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. Clay was only eighteen, which meant he had three years to break the record of Floyd Patterson, who had become champ at the age of twenty-one years and ten months.
But Joe Martin wanted Clay to fight in San Francisco and win a spot on the team. He told his protégé that nothing would get him a quicker shot at the heavyweight championship than an Olympic gold medal.
“The decision by Clay is a big one,” wrote Dean Eagle, a sports columnist for one of the boxer’s hometown newspapers, the Louisville Times. “If he doesn’t fly now he might have to ride a lot of buses before he gets anywhere in professional boxing.” Eagle went on to point out that baseball, basketball, and football teams had all recently begun flying, and that the price of airline insurance indicated the low risk. A flier could purchase $7,500 of insurance for only 25 cents, Eagle wrote, which put the odds of death by plane crash at about thirty thousand to one.
Eventually, Martin persuaded Clay to fly. “But then he went to an army supply store and bought a parachute and actually wore it on the plane,” said Martin’s son, Joe Martin Jr. When the flight to San Francisco hit turbulence over Indiana, Clay bent over his seat and prayed.
Clay moved easily through the early rounds of the qualifying competition. But in the final round, he faced an opponent who had left behind a trail of knocked-out fighters en route to San Francisco. Allen “Junebug” Hudson, an army veteran from Long Island, New York, who usually fought as a heavyweight, had one of the meanest left hooks anyone in the tournament had seen, and a personality to match. His previous opponent had lasted only thirty-two seconds.
Hudson intimidated in and out of the ring. But if he made Clay nervous, Clay had a funny way of showing it. Before the fight, the two young men were playing cards. Some gentle teasing became less gentle, and soon Clay and Hudson were barking at each other across the table. Chairs scraped the floor, chests puffed, and fists rose, according to one witness, Tommy Gallagher, an amateur fighter who would go on to become a trainer. According to Gallagher, Clay started the trouble. “He was the most obnoxious guy you ever met,” Gallagher recalled. “Obnoxious! Obnoxious! He came from this middle-class family. He wasn’t no ghetto black guy, and he just had this way about him that was fucking obnoxious. Actually, I think he was just scared to death and he had no idea how to act.”
Julius “Julie” Menendez, head coach of the 1960 Olympic boxing team, stepped in and broke up the fracas, telling the young men to put on gloves and get in the ring if they wanted to fight. They did. The day before their sanctioned fight, Clay and Hudson boxed before a handful of their peers and coaches, a fight in which only pride was at stake.
“I hate to say it,” Gallagher recalled, “but [Clay] kicked the shit out of him.”
The next night, when their official fight began at the Cow Palace, with a trip to Rome on the line, Hudson and Clay barked at each other in a manner seldom seen in the polite world of amateur boxing. It was a foreboding moment for Clay, who would go on hectoring opponents throughout his career, convinced that his braggadocio and ill manners unnerved them. It was also a good reminder that boxing — even amateur boxing — ran on anger, that it was combat, that every boxer who ever stepped into a ring was looking to assert his superiority, to exploit a rival’s weakness, to knock loose a jawbone, fracture a nose, bloody an eye socket, rattle a skull, turn out the lights.
Despite the animosity between these two fighters, Clay kept calm in the early minutes of the bout, jabbing and moving, as if scouting the terrain before launching an attack. With nimble dancing he rendered Hudson’s looping punches ineffective. Clay, his left hand snapping forward and back, stayed out of range of Hudson’s fearsome left hook. Hudson got hit but seemed unhurt, powering his way past Clay’s jabs and pounding the young fighter’s body. After two rounds, the fight was close, but Clay had the lead on points, which meant Hudson probably needed a knockout in the third and final round to make the Olympic team.
The bell rang and the fighters met at the center of the square ring, no longer jawing at each other. The pace quickened. Hudson fired two left jabs. Clay ducked both and hit Hudson with a soft
right. Hudson followed with a hard right to Clay’s body. Clay threw more jabs. Hudson nearly tagged Clay with a left hook, but the punch merely grazed Clay’s face. The fighters clinched and shoved. The referee separated them, and then it happened — the thing Hudson had been counting on but for which Clay was entirely unprepared. Hudson bullied his way past a weak Clay jab and let fly another left hook — one that thudded Clay’s chin and spun his head and neck. Clay probably never saw the punch. He hit the canvas rear end first. It was a quick, thunderous blow, followed by a roar of the crowd. But Clay was popping back up before the referee could begin to count him out, talking to the ref, nodding, clearing the haze from his head, insisting he was okay, ready to fight, not beaten.
The referee grabbed Clay’s gloves, looked him in the eyes for signs of damage, and signaled for the fight to go on.
Hudson moved in, trying to finish his younger opponent, and landed two hard punches. But now Clay was through dancing, through trying to score points. He was on the attack, possibly angry, adrenaline surging. After ducking a punch, Clay leaned back and launched a huge right hook — the sort he seldom threw because it left him open to retaliatory blows. But here it was, and it not only landed; it staggered Hudson, who momentarily lost his balance. While Hudson tried to set his feet, Clay leapt forward and threw another big right, this one square on Hudson’s jaw. The punch spun Hudson 180 degrees, casting him face-first into the ropes in a corner of the ring.
Hudson stumbled to his feet but couldn’t stop wobbling. The referee ended the fight. Clay, arms thrust high above his head in a V, bounced around the ring in celebration as Hudson slumped in his corner and cried.
It was as vicious a contest as anyone had seen that week in San Francisco. Young Cassius Clay had emerged as a winner and, perhaps, as America’s top contender for a gold medal in Rome.
When the Olympic trials were over, Clay asked Joe Martin to lend him money for a train ticket. When Martin refused, saying he had already paid his plane fare, Clay pawned a gold watch that had been one of his prizes for winning the tournament. He traveled home by rail, alone.
Clay arrived in time for graduation ceremonies at Central High. But in the weeks leading up to commencement, it was unclear whether he would receive a diploma. He had spent much of his senior year out of school, boxing in tournaments nationwide. Even when he had attended classes, his academic performance had been desultory, as usual.
Some members of the faculty at Central High School complained that Clay didn’t deserve to graduate. “He was not a good student,” said Bettie Johnson, one of the counselors at Central. “School was something he did because he was supposed to.” During his senior year, Clay submitted a paper to his English teacher about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Any submission of work by Clay should have been cause for celebration among the faculty, but this teacher was “a very conforming Christian,” Johnson recalled, “and just the mention of separatism or of blacks being super-assertive frightened her.” The English teacher intended to flunk Clay. But the school’s courtly and respected principal, Atwood Wilson, stood up at a faculty meeting and made a speech that would be remembered in Central High lore as the “Claim to Fame” address. Wilson said he understood that some members of the faculty believed that granting Clay a diploma would send the wrong message to young athletes, giving them cause to believe that schoolwork didn’t matter if they could run quickly, throw a ball accurately, or land a sharp punch to another man’s head. On the other hand, Wilson said, Cassius Clay might one day be famous, making more money than all the school’s faculty combined. If that were to happen, Wilson said, every member of the faculty and administration would boast about having known him and having taught him. It would be their greatest claim to fame. That’s how Wilson preferred to be remembered, not as the man who flunked Cassius Clay.
Clay received his diploma. He graduated 376th out of 391 in his senior class, receiving a “certificate of attendance,” the lowest degree granted by the school but good enough to make him a high-school graduate.
7
America’s Hero
Before leaving for Rome, Cassius Clay and the rest of the Olympic boxing team spent a few days in New York City. One afternoon, Dick Schaap, a reporter for Newsweek magazine, showed up at the midtown hotel where the boxers were staying and invited Clay and three of his teammates to join him for dinner. Schaap, who knew everybody in town, suggested they go up to Harlem to meet Sugar Ray Robinson.
Clay was thrilled. He idolized Robinson, and he had modeled his boxing style on Sugar Ray’s. Even though he was bigger than Robinson, Clay was convinced he could fight with the same speed and flair. He also admired Sugar Ray’s showmanship, the way he traveled with a giant entourage and ordered new Cadillacs each year in outrageous colors. There were no more than a few black men in America who flaunted their wealth and fame as outrageously as Robinson. Clay was intent on adding to that number, and so he and Schaap and three more boxers squeezed into a taxi for the ride to Sugar Ray’s restaurant at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 124th Street. When they arrived, Robinson wasn’t there, so Schaap and the young men strolled around Harlem. At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, a member of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, dressed in suit and tie, was standing atop a soapbox, urging black men and women to buy from black merchants, to remember who they were, and to be proud of it.
“Ain’t he gonna get in trouble?” Clay asked Schaap.
Clay picked up on an important element of the Nation of Islam’s appeal. There had long been soapbox speakers in Harlem, many of them standing on the very same corner, and many of them had made similar pronouncements about the need for a separate black nation with a separate black economy. What struck newcomers like Clay most about the Nation of Islam’s soapbox orators was the restrained reaction of police, who had been known to drag speakers off their podiums and arrest them for saying things far less virulent than the Nation of Islam’s speakers did.
The Nation of Islam orators spoke of power. They offered proof, divine and historical, that white people were devils and destined to fall. Allah Himself had revealed this to His prophet, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The crowds gazed attentively and hopefully.
To Schaap, it was a sign of the young boxer’s gullibility. Clay, he said, was so “malleable . . . I could’ve converted him to Judaism.” But Schaap, as a white man, could not have understood why a young black man from the South might be excited to have divine confirmation of his experiences, to learn that there was a reason black people had been mistreated for so long, and that their suffering would soon end. As James Baldwin wrote, Elijah Muhammad’s messages had power because they articulated the historical suffering of black people and offered a way to end it, investing followers “with a pride and serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light.”
But Clay hadn’t come to Harlem to hear the word of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He had come to meet a prophet of a different order. When Sugar Ray Robinson finally pulled up in his purple Lincoln Continental, Schaap introduced the young Olympians to the man considered by many to be the greatest and flashiest pound-for-pound fighter of all time. For Clay, there would be no bragging for once. He stepped humbly before his hero.
Robinson autographed a photo for one of the young boxers, muttered vaguely in the direction of the others, and then wandered off. “His usual haughty, disdainful self,” Schaap said. Clay got little more than a nod.
“I was so hurt,” he recalled years later. “If Sugar Ray only knew how much I loved him and how long I’d followed him, maybe he wouldn’t have done that . . . I said to myself right then, ‘If I ever get great and famous and people want my autograph enough to wait all day to see me, I’m sure goin’ to treat ’em different.’ ”
Clay arrived in Rome with a crown atop his head and a choir singing behind him everywhere he went — or so it seemed from the way he comported him-self. He strode into the Olympic Village as if he had been named its king and everyone else ha
d come to celebrate his coronation and gaze upon his beauty and grace.
He introduced himself to one journalist as Cassius Marcellus Clay VII, perhaps hoping that his lineage might be traced back to a Roman gladiator or king. With a camera hanging from his neck, Clay flitted about the village, “friendly and frisky as a puppy” according to the same reporter, snapping pictures and then handing off the camera so he could be included in group photos.
“Took forty-eight pictures today,” he said before hopping away to photograph a group of foreigners. He used hand gestures to pose the men and then returned to the interview. He corralled a group of Russians and quickly had them all smiling and hugging.
“Gotta study the language,” he said. “I’m just lost here. All I know in Italian is bambino.”
He made eyes at a lot of pretty young women — “foxes,” he called them — and seemed particularly enamored with the great American sprinter Wilma Rudolph. He met the singer and actor Bing Crosby, striding with him arm in arm, and then found himself posing for pictures with Floyd Patterson, boxing’s heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist from 1952. Clay noticed — and pointed out to a reporter — that he stood a little bit taller than Patterson and had longer arms.
“Be seeing you in about two more years,” Clay said, implying that he would be ready then to fight and beat the champ. If Patterson answered Clay, reporters didn’t mention it. But it’s safe to say the kid’s swagger displeased at least a portion of his audience. In part, it was Clay’s delivery that hurt him. When other great athletes bragged, they usually did so with a touch of slyness. But Clay’s face seldom showed humor. He seldom softened his affect.
Clay had never been outside the United States and never been surrounded by so many world-class athletes and celebrities. Now, as he went out into the world, he used his new experiences to distance himself from his upbringing. One night he went dancing with athletes from other nations. On another day he joined a group of young men and women who went to see and hear Pope John XXIII in St. Peter’s Square. Why not? No one cared that he was black, that he could scarcely read, that he was young, that he didn’t come from a wealthy, well-educated family. No one knew him yet. He would write his own life story, starting now.