by Jonathan Eig
In Miami, Clay lived at 4610 NW 15th Court, a small white house in an all-black neighborhood. There were louvered windows in front and a porch big enough for one chair. The screen door was always opening and closing, no need to knock, as children and young men and women from the neighborhood stopped by to see what their local celebrity was doing. At night, Clay showed movies on a big screen, outside in the yard, with moths fluttering in the projector light beam and traffic rumbling by. Most of the time, no one paid much attention to the movie, because there was too much laughter and noise. Clay had a habit of explaining the action on the screen for the children seated around him. Only the scary movies — The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for one — kept the racket down. When the movies were over, Clay’s entourage remained, sleeping two or three to a room. In Clay’s bedroom, a tiny oil painting of a New England harbor scene hung on one wall, along with taped-up newspaper articles about the upcoming fight. Every morning, Bundini Brown would wake Clay at 5 or 5:30 so the boxer could lace up a pair of heavy army boots, size 13EEE, and run three or four miles. After running, Clay would eat a big breakfast and head to the Fifth Street Gym, where he would hit the bags, spar a few rounds, and entertain the press corps. After that, he would go home and nap.
Everyone talked about Liston’s incredible might, and it was true that the champ was one of the heaviest punchers the sport had ever seen. But sportswriters covering the fight were so bothered by Clay’s unusual boxing style and so in awe of Liston’s power that they failed to notice something that should have been obvious: Clay was growing. When he’d started his professional career against Tunney Hunsaker in 1960, the Olympic gold medalist weighed 192 pounds. Now, he was up to 2101/2 pounds, and it looked like he’d added most of the weight in his chest and shoulders. He was strong as new rope. If Clay and Liston had been strangers standing toe to toe in a saloon and getting ready to brawl, Clay might have been the barroom favorite. He was about a decade younger, two inches taller, only seven-and-a-half pounds lighter, and much, much faster. He was also training harder. While Clay was running the streets every morning and punishing his body in brutal sessions with brawny sparring partners at the Fifth Street Gym, Liston was coasting, and the Nilon brothers were letting him coast. Liston worked out in the air-conditioned Surfside Civic Auditorium in North Miami Beach, skipping rope, pounding the heavy bag, absorbing the blows from a medicine ball hurled at his gut, and running a mile or two outside when the mood struck him, which wasn’t often. He sparred, but none of his sparring partners were as big or as fast as Clay. At night, Liston ate hot dogs, drank beer, played cards, and screwed around with prostitutes. He was training like a man who believed he could knock out his opponent with a hard stare.
“When has there ever been a heavyweight in history who could punch as hard as Sonny and still be able to take as good a punch as he does?” asked Liston’s trainer, Willie Reddish. “Never! That’s when.”
Clay, on the other hand, was not only in top shape; he was a diligent student of his sport who had watched countless hours of fights on film, especially Jake LaMotta versus Sugar Ray Robinson, a big, bruising puncher going against a faster, smoother man. He watched the same Robinson-LaMotta fight “over and over,” he said. When someone asked how he felt about being listed as a ten-to-one underdog, Clay explained calmly why the odds makers were wrong:
“Ten to one? Don’t make this man look like a monster. He was nothing ’til he whipped a scared Patterson . . . I’m a natural fighter. I go to bed fightin’, eat fightin’, and even dream fightin’. This will be a mismatch and the easiest fight of my whole career . . . What makes you think I’m gonna get whipped? Ain’t you convinced yet? Do you think I’m gonna stand there like a fool? How’s he gonna body punch me? If he falls on me and wants to wrestle, I will tie him up and push him off and pop the left hand. Floyd Patterson didn’t move, but I’ll move. The secret of my success is speed . . . I’m the fastest heavy who ever lived. Do you suppose that two-hundred-thirty-pound bear is going to catch me? Liston has the whole world believing he is going to whip me. Well, there is nothing more to write about and nothing more to say. I’m ready to fight now. And when I become champ I’m really going to holler. I’ll be in such demand all over the world I’ll need four chauffeurs and two helicopters to get me around. I’ll need twenty-five policemen to guard me. My autographs will cost one hundred dollars apiece. I’ll get $20,000 each for my personal appearances.
“So remember that.”
Ringside seats for the fight were $250 (about $1,900 in 2016 dollars), the highest price ever seen in boxing and a sign of the great optimism of William B. MacDonald, the former bus driver turned millionaire who had invested $800,000 to bring the bout to Miami. Clay was the greatest self-promoter the pugilistic world had ever seen. He was the brave, young hero out to destroy the ogre who terrorized the countryside. Even the Beatles were publicizing the event. What could go wrong?
But as the fight drew near, it was clear that something had gone wrong. Tickets weren’t selling. The Miami Beach Convention Center held 15,744 people, but it looked to MacDonald as if he’d be lucky to fill half the seats. The high prices might have been a factor. The press wasn’t helping either. Reporters almost all agreed that Liston was going to crush Clay, and as much as spectators usually adored violence, 250 bucks was a lot to pay to see one man take three steps across a ring and cave in the side of another man’s head with a single punch.
Bill MacDonald believed there was another reason for weak interest in the fight. Cassius Clay was supposed to be the plucky young underdog, the fresh-faced kid who might knock off the bully Liston. But news reports on Clay’s relationship with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam had changed the storyline. Now, it was the Black Muslim radical against the bully, and it was not at all clear to fight fans which one was less evil. Ambiguity was not the thing sports fans craved.
Three days before the fight, MacDonald, desperate, went to Clay and told him the fight would be canceled if he didn’t retract his statements of support for the Nation of Islam. Given that MacDonald was probably going to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fight, he might have been looking for an excuse to cancel. But his threat to Clay didn’t work.
“I ain’t denying it because it’s true,” Clay said, “and if you want to call the fight off that’s your business. My religion’s more important to me than the fight.” It may have been the first time Clay had referred to Islam as his religion.
Harold Conrad urged MacDonald not to cancel the fight.
“Suppose Malcolm X got out of town right away?” Conrad asked. “Would that change your mind?”
When MacDonald said it might, Conrad visited Malcolm and explained the predicament. Malcolm agreed to disappear for a few days as long as he could return in time for the big event.
Clay had been disrespecting Liston for months, waking him from bed, waiting for him in casinos, surprising him at airports, and always with the same refrain: “You’re a chump. Big, ugly bear! I’ll whup you right now.” It was all by design, as he said later. Angry fighters don’t think clearly. They don’t stick to their plans. They get frustrated, sloppy. Clay knew that Liston was sensitive about his image, that he yearned for respect, and so Clay worked to deny him that respect. By labeling Liston an ugly bear, Clay was tweaking his opponent’s most sensitive nerve and perhaps using racism to do it, suggesting that Liston would never be more than a dumb animal. You can strap a shiny belt on a big, ugly bear and call him the heavyweight champion of the world, but he’ll still be a big, ugly bear. Clay never relented. He said it so many times that everyone — possibly even Clay — got tired of hearing it. The campaign of psychological warfare built up to the day of the fight, when Clay put on his biggest and best show of all.
On the morning of February 25, a cold, wet, windy day, Clay arrived early for the pre-fight weigh-in at the Convention Center, dressed in a blue denim jacket with the words “Bear Huntin’ ” embroidered across the shoulders in red. Accompanying
him were Sugar Ray Robinson, Bill Faversham, Angelo Dundee, and Bundini Brown. Malcolm X remained out of sight. In unison, Clay and Bundini shouted, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” The men walked into a dressing room, where Clay changed into a white terrycloth robe. Dundee and a member of the Miami Beach Boxing Commission issued stern reminders, telling Clay to “act right,” as Dundee put it, as if decorum were expected.
Clay didn’t listen. “I’m the champ!” he shouted. “I’m ready to rumble.” He and Bundini marched out to the area of the weigh-in, only to find it deserted. They were an hour early. So everyone went away and killed time. At 11:09, Clay and Bundini started screaming again. Liston arrived two minutes later, and the show began.
Now the weigh-in area room was packed with reporters, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of aftershave. No public spectacle was required for the fighters to have their weights recorded prior to a fight, but, like the coin toss before a football game or the seventh-inning stretch in baseball, it was a ritual no one questioned. For reporters who would have to file their stories prior to that evening’s fight, it gave them a shot at one last interview and one last scene to describe to their readers. But the press had never seen a weigh-in like this one.
“I am ready to rumble now!” Clay shouted. “I can beat you anytime, chump. Somebody gonna die at ringside tonight! You’re scared, chump! You ain’t no giant. I’m gonna eat you alive!”
Clay lunged. Bundini held him back. Clay lunged again, and Sugar Ray Robinson tried to pin him against a wall.
“Round eight to prove I’m great!” Clay shouted, holding up eight fingers.
Liston smirked and held up two fingers.
“Hey, sucker!” Clay yelled at Liston as Liston stepped on the scale. “You’re a chump! You been tricked, chump!”
Clay continued: “You’re too ugly! I’m going to whup you so bad. You’re a chump, a chump, a chump . . .”
The reporters in the room thought Clay had lost his mind, that he was suffering a panic attack because he actually feared Liston.
Clay’s wild performance was not well received. “Suddenly almost everyone in the room hated Cassius Clay,” Murray Kempton wrote. “Sonny Liston just looked at him. Liston used to be a hoodlum; now he was our cop; he was the big Negro we pay to keep sassy Negroes in line and he was just waiting until his boss told him it was time to throw this kid out.”
Clay kept it up, even after boxing officials announced he would be fined $2,500 for his behavior. He kept it up even after a boxing commission doctor asked him to sit still so they could measure his pulse rate. He kept it up even after the doctor said his pulse and blood pressure were soaring dangerously high and warned that the fight would be canceled if his condition didn’t improve.
Later, he would call it “my finest piece of acting,” adding that if he really set his mind to it he could probably become Hollywood’s top movie star. As he changed back into his street clothes, Clay asked his entourage for reviews of his performance. How did he do? Great, right? Was Liston upset? He was really upset, right? He answered his own question: “I think he was shaken up.”
Fight night finally arrived.
Forty-three of forty-six boxing writers surveyed picked Liston to win, most of them forecasting an early knockout. “It’s even money Clay won’t last the National Anthem,” one writer quipped.
The Convention Center hall was half empty. The crowds stayed away because the tickets were too expensive, because Liston was too tough, and perhaps because a lot of white fight fans couldn’t bring themselves to root for either man. But to make matters worse, a local radio station erroneously reported that Clay had been seen at the airport, buying a ticket to a foreign country, fleeing in fear. If anyone was thinking of buying a ticket to the fight at the last moment, that rumor didn’t help.
The crowd in the arena was overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, inhaling cigarette and cigar smoke. Malcolm X was ringside in seat number seven, joined by the singer Sam Cooke and the football star Jim Brown. Other celebrities in the crowd included Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Rocky Marciano, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Joe E. Lewis, George Jessel, Rocky Marciano, and fashion icon Gloria Guinness. Odessa and Cassius Clay Sr. were there too, of course, as were several members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group. Back in Kentucky, more than ten thousand people crowded Louisville’s Freedom Hall to watch the broadcast on closed-circuit TV. Around the country, about 700,000 fans paid to watch the broadcast in movie theaters, the biggest closed-circuit audience ever assembled for a fight. Fans paid an average price of $6.42 per ticket, bringing the total revenue to $4.5 million. In 1964, by way of comparison, television rights for all twenty Major League Baseball teams cost $13.6 million. In other words, the broadcast of a single boxing match generated about a third as much revenue as a whole season of baseball, in part because closed-circuit viewing was new, but also because Clay had singlehandedly captured so much attention. The fight was shown in Europe, with an audience estimated at 165 million people, thanks to a deal struck with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that permitted a videotaped broadcast to be bounced by satellite from a NASA station in Maine to a receiving station in Europe, and then transmitted across the continent. So while the arena in Miami was half empty, Clay v. Liston would be seen and heard by one of the largest audiences ever gathered for a single event, a sign of a new era for television and sports and an unparalleled opportunity for a young man starved for fame.
Before his fight, when most observers thought Clay would have been in his dressing room, saying his prayers or writing his will, he was instead in the arena, dressed in a tight-fitting black suit with a black bowtie and white dress shirt, standing on tiptoes to watch his brother Rudy win his first professional fight, an unimpressive, four-round decision over a nobody named Chip Johnson. Siblings understand each other. They see personality traits that others miss, thanks in part to the countless thousands of hours spent together as children, before anyone is sophisticated enough to apply artifice. Rudy would always see his big brother as a hero, and the more famous Cassius became, the more convinced Rudy became that his worship was justified. When Rudy’s fight was over, Cassius told him: “After tonight, Rudy,” he said, “you won’t have to fight no more.”
Then, at about 10 p.m., it was big brother’s turn. In his dressing room, Clay bowed in the direction of Mecca before walking to the ring. Clay arrived first, as is customary for the challenger. He wore white shorts with a vertical red stripe on each side and a short white robe. Liston entered the ring looking like a giant sweat sock, his neck and shoulders wrapped in white towels, with a white terrycloth robe over the towels and a white hood over his head. He looked solemn, even bored, as he shuffled his feet and stared at the mat. The referee, Barney Felix, instructed the men to join him in the center of the ring, and Clay and Liston stepped close enough to feel each other’s breath. It was time for Liston to intimidate, as he had intimidated all his other opponents, but Clay wasn’t going for it. Liston stared ahead blankly, motionless. Clay stood straight, possibly rising slightly on his tiptoes. When Felix told the men to shake hands, they didn’t. They turned and walked to their corners.
The bell rang and Clay rushed across the ring. Now the crowd in the arena and everyone on TV could see, almost shockingly, that Clay was not only faster but also bigger than Liston. Liston threw a left jab that missed, then another left jab that missed, then a big knockout right that also missed. Clay circled left, away from Liston’s left hand. Another Liston left . . . missed. Another . . . missed. And on it went. Liston threw the first eight punches and missed them all. Then, at last, he drove a strong right that struck Clay below the heart. A cry went up from the audience at the sound of leather on skin, and Clay’s body thrust backward, but Clay spun away fast and poked Liston with a good jab. Whatever else happened, Clay had survived Liston’s first charge and stung Sonny with a good punch of his own. He was not going to fall at th
e first solid shot as so many had predicted.
Liston attacked again. A wild left missed. Three more jabs missed. Clay stuck a jab in Liston’s face, a punch designed to insult more than injure. The men circled. Clay ducked a jab. With a minute to go in the round, Clay’s feet slowed. He set himself for a moment, looking for an opportunity to hit Liston hard. Liston looked for an opportunity of his own. Clay struck first, with his best jab of the round, the best punch either man had thrown. It smacked loud enough to be heard on TV. Clay circled halfway around Liston and threw a combination, left-right-left, and then another combination. Clay hit him again and again, with big, wide punches. Every punch Clay threw found a piece of Liston’s head. The big, ugly bear, overwhelmed by his speedy attacker, backed up and ducked for cover, then swung wildly and missed with a left hook.
It had been more than two years since an opponent had lasted more than a round with Sonny Liston. Already, Clay had done better than most of the press corps had expected. Liston threw forty-five punches in the first round and landed only six. None seriously hurt Clay. The champ knew now that he wasn’t going to win the fight with his usual combination of a scowl and a single punch; he was going to have to work. And he wasn’t prepared to work.
Clay clowned for the cameras between rounds, opening his mouth in a big O and looking at the ringside reporters, as if to remind them that no one was going to shut him up. Liston sat patiently and listened to Willie Reddish.