by Jonathan Eig
Clay arrived in Miami on December 19, 1960, in time to prepare for his second pro fight — against Herb Siler, who, like Clay, had only one professional bout to his name. On his first day in Miami, Clay insisted that Angelo Dundee take him to the gym so he could do some sparring. He carried his Olympic gold medal with him everywhere he went and insisted that strangers try it on until the gold began to wear off from being handled so much.
Clay lived on his own now for the first time. Dundee rented his young fighter a room at the Mary Elizabeth Hotel in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood. The Mary Elizabeth and its neighbor, the Sir John Hotel, were hot spots for visiting black entertainers. Sammy Davis Jr., Redd Foxx, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Cab Calloway came to town to perform in posh hotels for white crowds on Miami Beach, but those posh hotels refused black guests, so the celebrities retired after their shows to the Mary Elizabeth and Sir John Hotels, where they would often hold after-hour parties far more entertaining than their earlier performances. Pimps and prostitutes plied the lobbies, but Clay avoided them. Each morning he ran along Biscayne Boulevard, watching the day break orange and yellow. He would run until he burned and his gray sweatshirt turned black under the arms and across his chest.
“Training him was like jet propulsion,” said Angelo Dundee, the former airplane inspector. “You just touched him and he took off.”
And take off he did. Clay fought four times in less than two months after his arrival in Miami. On December 27, 1960, he beat Siler with a four-round technical knockout. Three weeks later, on his nineteenth birthday (and three days prior to the inauguration of the new president, John F. Kennedy), Clay needed only three rounds to beat Tony Esperti, who soon after retired to become a shakedown artist for the mob. Three weeks after that, Clay defeated Jimmy Robinson, a last-minute replacement for Willie Gulatt, who had failed to show up for the fight; and two weeks later, Clay wore out Donnie Fleeman — “a pork and beaner,” as the Louisville Times called him — who abandoned his boxing career after the loss.
In these early fights, Clay fought the same way he did as an amateur: dancing, bobbing, and snapping back his head to avoid punches. Sportswriters sniffed. His technique was a mess, they said, and while it might be effective against bums like Jimmy Robinson, it would never be good enough to beat a talented fighter. Interestingly, though Dundee was a boxing traditionalist, the trainer made no attempt to change Clay’s style. Dundee even tolerated the young man’s big mouth. No doubt he had heard that Clay had butted heads with Archie Moore. Perhaps the experienced trainer recognized that Clay would not respond well to lectures. Perhaps he knew that the best way to hang on to his two-hundred-dollar-a-week job was to keep his fighter happy. Or perhaps he recognized that Ali was like a gifted singer who couldn’t read music, one whose natural gifts might be diminished by excessive education.
Dundee proved to be a smart psychologist. Recognizing that Clay possessed an extraordinarily healthy ego, the trainer kept feeding it. “There’s only one way to handle a kid like this,” he said. “Reverse psychology. If you want to teach him something, you pretend it was his idea in the first place . . . After a workout I’ll walk up to him and say, ‘Hey, that was really some uppercut you threw in there. That’s one of the best I’ve ever seen.’ Of course, he never threw any uppercut, but I’m dying for him to work on one. Next day he’s in there throwing uppercuts.”
Nothing in Clay’s early experience as a professional fighter dissuaded him of his own greatness. He began wearing white T-shirts with his name printed in red script, perhaps inspired by the Coca-Cola logo. Fighters always wore their own names on the backs of their robes, but that was only on fight nights, when there were fans and TV cameras focused in. It may have been the first time an American athlete devised his own name-brand apparel for daily wear. Already, he was emerging as one of the most adept self-promoters in all of sport.
After beating Donnie Fleeman, Clay was invited to spar for three rounds with Ingemar Johansson, a heavyweight with a punishing right hand and a lifetime record of twenty-two wins and only one loss. At the time, Johansson was preparing for a third fight with heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson. Johansson had beaten Patterson in 1959 to win the heavyweight championship before losing a rematch in 1960. Although it was only an exhibition, Clay must have been excited to step into a ring for the first time with a heavyweight who ranked near the top of the sport. Better yet, he did so in front of about one thousand paying customers. To Johansson, it may have been just another workout, but Clay took the chance seriously. He moved quickly across the ring to engage Johansson, flicking jab after jab and skipping out of reach. Johansson stumbled clumsily in pursuit. After only two rounds, the Swede’s manager put an end to the performance.
When he was told he would get twenty-five dollars for the sparring session, Clay cheekily said he ought to get a split of the gate.
Weeks later, Johansson twice floored Patterson in the first round of their title fight, but Patterson came back to win with a sixth-round knockout. Clay’s conclusion was perhaps predictable: he boasted that he could beat either fighter.
Still, boxing was a hierarchy, and Clay would have to work his way up to a shot at the championship. His first tough opponent was LaMar Clark, a slugger from Utah who had beaten forty-three of his first forty-five opponents, knocking out forty-two and dispensing with twenty-eight in the first round. The fight took place in Louisville, before a crowd of more than five thousand, including many of Clay’s friends and relatives.
While Clay had been training in Miami, there had been drama back home. His father had been carrying on recklessly — drinking, bragging, and fighting with his wife even more than usual, according to a family friend who gave an interview to Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated. “The old man teed off on the old lady right after the Olympics,” the family friend said, “and Rudy damn near killed [Cash] . . . Rudy said he wasn’t gonna have it anymore.” Rudy moved out of his childhood home after the incident. At one point, the fighting grew so intense that Odessa threatened to divorce her husband, and Cassius Jr. made an emergency trip from Miami to urge his parents to work out their differences.
At about the same time, in what most young American men at the time accepted as a formality, Clay registered for military service with the Selective Service System. In a form signed March 1, 1961, he described his eyes as dark brown, his skin light brown, his height six-foot-three-and-a-half, his weight 195 pounds, his occupation “professional boxer,” his pay three hundred dollars a month, his employer the “Louisville Sponsoring Groupe [sic],” and his prior work experience as “Winning the World Light heavy Weight Olympic Boxing Champion at Rome.”
The fight against Clark was held April 19, 1961, at Freedom Hall in Louisville. In the first round, Clark almost embarrassed the local hero. A right to the jaw and a left to the chest staggered Clay, but the young boxer slipped away and kept his distance until he recovered, and in the second round he broke Clark’s nose and left him lying in a heap on the mat.
After Clark, Clay faced and defeated tougher and tougher opponents, but his performances continued to raise doubts among sportswriters.
“The world of the squared circle is not quite sure whether Cassius is a wonder boy or just another windbag putting his mouth where his gloves should be,” the New York Times said. Certain prejudices were hard for writers to overcome: A ballerina was supposed to be lithe and light on her feet, a blues singer was supposed to wail with sorrow in his voice, and a heavyweight boxer was supposed to act more like King Kong than Fred Astaire.
Clay’s next fight was against a big Hawaiian named Duke Sabedong. How big was Sabedong? “Six-foot-twenty,” Angelo Dundee joked. “Big, tall sucker.”
It was Clay’s first bout in Las Vegas.
“I’m not afraid of the fight; I’m afraid of the flight,” he said.
Once again, Clay won, but his victory did nothing to sway the skeptics. The fight went ten rounds, and Clay never came close to a knockout. “He punches like
a middleweight,” said Sabedong, thus landing one of his better shots.
Before the Sabedong fight, Clay appeared on a local radio show with Gorgeous George, the most famous professional wrestler of his day, who wore his blond hair long and showed up for his matches with the hair still in curlers, waiting until moments before the start of each fight before allowing one of his handlers to brush out his wavy locks. He painted his fingernails and wore a silver lamé robe. “The Human Orchid,” as Gorgeous George called himself, was one of the most famous entertainers of his time. In 1950, he made $100,000 — the same as Joe DiMaggio got for playing center field for the Yankees. Gorgeous George spent more time working the news media than battling opponents in the ring, and he knew perhaps better than any performer in America that infuriating fans could be more lucrative than charming them. People paid because they wanted to see George get his beautifully coifed head knocked off. In later years, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and John Waters would all say they took inspiration from Gorgeous George.
After his radio appearance, Clay watched Gorgeous George wrestle in a sold-out arena. “I saw fifteen thousand people coming to see this man get beat,” he said. “And his talking did it. I said, ‘This is a gooood idea!’ ”
Clay was already an accomplished showman, but he redoubled his efforts after meeting the perfumed wrestler. As he prepared for the toughest opponent he’d ever met, Alonzo Johnson, Clay told anyone who would listen that he was ready for Floyd Patterson, that he, Clay, was the greatest, the soon-to-be youngest champ in history, a fighter like no other the heavyweight division had seen, too fast to be hit, too strong to be hurt. Reporters didn’t buy it. Neither did Alonzo Johnson, loser of six of eight previous fights but once a highly rated contender. Johnson managed to go the distance with Clay and made the young fighter look bad at times before losing on points. “He knocked me down once but I wasn’t hurt,” Johnson said years later, reclining in a chair in his basement, where fight posters and old black-and-white photos filled the walls.
Clay’s victory over Johnson was so uninspiring that the crowd booed him in the later rounds. This was not the sort of booing Gorgeous George had in mind; these were paying customers voicing their dissatisfaction with the quality of the boxing match they were witnessing. Their disapproval was all the more troubling given that the fight took place in Louisville.
After the fight, Clay took a six-week vacation in Louisville, indulged heavily in his mother’s cooking, and gained fifteen pounds. He returned to Miami, where he stayed in an un-air-conditioned room to begin getting back in shape. “I just sit here like a little animal in a box at night,” he said. “I can’t go out in the street and mix with the folks out there ’cause they wouldn’t be out there if they was up to any good. I can’t do anything except sit . . . It’s something to think about. Here I am, just nineteen, surrounded by showgirls, whiskey, and sissies, and nobody watching me. All this temptation and me trying to train to be a boxer . . . But it takes a mind to do right. It’s like I told myself when I was little. I said, ‘Cassius, you going to win the Olympics some day, and then you’re going to buy yourself a Cadillac, and then you’re going to be the world champ.’ Now I got the gold medal, and I got the car. I’d be plain silly to give in to temptation now when I’m just about to reach out and get that world title.”
Before his next fight, with an overweight Argentinian boxer named Alex Miteff, Clay not only guaranteed a win but also predicted the round in which the bout would end. “Miteff must fall in six,” he said. In the opening rounds, Clay clobbered Miteff’s head. Miteff hammered Clay’s body. By the fourth round, Miteff’s face was puffed like a dinner roll, but Clay was losing speed as Miteff’s body blows wore him down. Clay quit bouncing. He set his feet and put more weight behind his punches. In the fifth, he threw machine-gun-fast combinations at Miteff’s head, and in the sixth one of those combinations — a light left jab and a whopping, compact right — sent the big Argentine tumbling to the mat. Miteff got up, but he was too wobbly to continue.
It was, without a doubt, the best performance of Clay’s professional career — so good, in fact, that Dundee told him after the fight he could beat anybody if he continued fighting so well.
Most fighters at this point in their careers began to understand the near impossibility of their mission. They lived in poverty, fighting every three or four weeks for purses so small they could barely pay rent on their gym lockers, struggling to get enough food to replace the thousands of calories they were burning every day in training, knowing each time they stepped in the ring that a single injury or a single defeat might end their careers and send them back to the assembly line or truck-driving jobs they had been sacrificing time, money, and brain cells in order to escape. But Clay was the Golden Boy. He was a boxer on a salary, something almost unheard of in the sport, which meant he had no financial worries. If his special treatment wasn’t enough to make him feel superior, his success in the ring surely did. He predicted a seventh-round knockout of Willie Besmanoff, and when the German appeared ready to fall in the fifth, Clay backed off, circled, and tossed jabs through the sixth, then made good on his prediction, finishing off his opponent in the next round. Once again, reporters griped. It was bad etiquette — and dangerous — to coast for a round so that a prediction might be fulfilled, they said. Once again, Clay didn’t care what his critics thought. He liked his new gimmick, liked the extra attention that came with his increasingly bold behavior, and he was convinced that publicity would help him get a quicker shot at the championship.
“I’m tired of being fed on set-ups,” he said. “I can’t get a title shot by knocking out a bunch of has-beens or novices.”
Clay surely knew there was one big difference between his act and Gorgeous George’s: Clay was black, which meant that every time he bragged and acted up, he was playing the part of the sassy Negro and risking a backlash from white writers and fans.
Clay was a young man in a hurry. But was he trying to make a larger point? Was he subversively and subtly making the kind of argument that Elijah Muhammad might — that a black man was better off going his own way than attempting to play by the white man’s rules?
He never said.
9
“Twentieth-Century Exuberance”
One December afternoon in 1961, Cassius Clay went roller-skating with friends at the Broadway Roller Rink, a blacks-only establishment on Broadway and Ninth Street in Louisville. Despite his growing fame, he was still a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, still a playful kid, and he still enjoyed the company of old friends from the West End and Central High.
When he left the rink at about 6 p.m., it was already dark. Streetlights guided men and women on their way home from work. Across the street from the roller rink, Clay spotted a crowd on the sidewalk and decided to check it out, hoping to find “a pretty girl to say something to,” as he recalled years later in a letter. By the time he got across the street, Clay recognized what was happening. The crowd was listening to a black man in a dark suit preaching on the wisdom of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam.
“My brother,” the man in the suit said, turning to Clay, “do you want to buy a Muhammad Speaks newspaper, so that you can read about your own kind, read the real truth of your history, your true religion, your true name before you were given the White Man’s name in slavery?”
Clay knew about the Nation of Islam. He could recite lyrics from Minister Louis X’s song, “The White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell,” and he had heard a similar street-corner speech in Harlem before his trip to Rome. But the newspaper was probably new to him; this was only the second issue of Muhammad Speaks. Clay accepted a copy, and the man in the dark suit invited him to attend a meeting at eight o’clock that evening at 27th and Chestnut Streets.
“OK, I’ll be there,” Clay said.
He took the newspaper and walked away, with no intention of attending the meeting. Later, though, as he thumbed the pages of Muhammad Speak
s, a cartoon at the top of page thirty-two caught his eye. About ten years later, he described the impact of that cartoon in a handwritten letter. The letter, which survives only in fragment, is revealing for its earnestness and naiveté. Rather than exploring some of the deeper reasons the Nation of Islam appealed to him, Clay explained step by step how Elijah Muhammad’s message began to take hold of him. With unsteady spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, he wrote,
The Cartoon was about the first slaves that arrived in america, and the Cartone was showing how Black Slaves were slipping off of the Plantaintion to pray in the arabic Language facing East, and the White slave Master would Run up Behind the slave with a wip and hit the poor little [slave] on the Back with the Wip and say What are you doing praying in the Languid, you know what I told you to speak to, and the slave said yes sir yes sir Master, I will pray to Jesus, sir Jesus, and I liked that cartoon, it did something to me.
He was on the brink of independence, moving beyond Louisville and beyond his parents, and he was exploring what else the world had to offer. Clay had encountered the Nation of Islam at least three times by 1961, which offered a solid indication about the speed with which Elijah Muhammad’s message was spreading across America. If you were a black man in an American prison, or in a major American city, the Nation of Islam was becoming all but unavoidable. With the advent of the newspaper, Elijah Muhammad was building a broader and more mainstream audience, as well as a new source of income.