by Jonathan Eig
In the second round, Clay slowed. He stood still and allowed Liston to land solid shots. Liston won the round, but Clay was never hurt, and the mere fact that he remained standing after two rounds surprised his critics and may have surprised and dismayed Liston.
In the opening moments of round three, Clay offered another surprise. Instead of running, he came hard after Liston, mixing jabs and hooks in wild flurries. With everyone screaming, Liston hit him back, but Clay responded with more flurries and pinpoint jabs. The punches landed — hard. Liston looked confused.
“He’s getting hit with all the punches in the book!” the TV announcer, Steve Ellis, shouted.
Desperate, Liston launched his biggest blow of the night. Clay sidestepped. Liston missed so badly he almost flung himself into the ropes. Clay jabbed again, concentrating his punches on Liston’s left eye, where a big red welt was rising, and then, at roughly the midpoint of the round, he began to circle. Clay was catching his breath and jabbing when Liston uncoiled a left hook that jolted Clay’s head side to side. Liston, eager to end the fight fast, moved in for the kill as Clay backpedaled and jabbed. The round ended and the fighters returned to their corners.
The ringside press began to buzz. What was happening? How dare Clay put up a fight? The kid had taken Liston’s best punch. The last thing anyone expected, least of all Liston, was a slugfest, but that’s how this was shaping up. Through four rounds, Liston had landed fifty-eight punches, including at least three that looked potent enough to knock down telephone poles. Clay had landed sixty-nine punches. The vast majority of them were jabs, but they were jabs that cut, jabs that hurt, and jabs that even spectators in the cheap seats could hear snap like lashes on a snare drum when they met skin. Blood seeped from Liston’s nose as well as his left eye. The reporters, talking among themselves, agreed that the fight was nearly even. That was shocking enough. But even more shocking was that if anyone had the edge, it was Clay, who had clearly won the opening round, who had proven he could take Liston’s best punch, and who was in better condition as the battle wore on.
Then everything changed. Clay sat on his stool, and Dundee began mopping the fighter’s forehead.
“There’s something in my eyes!” Clay said, blinking.
Dundee wiped his fighter’s eyes.
“I can’t see. Cut my gloves off!”
Clay was blinded. It wasn’t clear why. He wanted to quit.
Meanwhile, at ringside, Joe Louis was telling viewers: “Clay is surprising the whole world.”
Clay stood up and put his hands in the air, as if to surrender.
In Dundee’s version of the story, it was he, Dundee, who sent the fighter back into the ring, shouting, “Cut the bullshit! We’re not quitting now.”
Bundini Brown, however, said he was the one who compelled Clay to fight on, saying, “You can’t quit. You’re not fighting for yourself anymore, you’re fighting for God!”
No one in Clay’s corner was going to stop the fight. He would have to run until his vision cleared.
“Something’s wrong with Clay,” Louis told viewers. “Something’s wrong with Clay’s eyes.”
The bell rang. Clay blinked and blinked and tried to keep his distance from Liston. Liston pounded him, first to the body, then to the head. Clay turtled, not even trying to throw punches, just covering up. He reached out feebly for Liston’s face and then turtled again. Liston launched big left hooks while Clay hunched over and tried to absorb the blows with his arms. With less than a minute to go, Clay’s vision cleared enough for him to tease Liston, sticking his left hand out and rubbing it all over Liston’s nose. Liston was dominating the round but he couldn’t land the big punch he needed, and the effort sapped him so much he didn’t bother to swat away Clay’s glove as it massaged his nose. Clay, for his part, had fought sightlessly against the so-called toughest man on the planet for the better part of a round. Billy Conn, the former light-heavyweight champion, had predicted that Liston would knock Clay out with his first punch. Now Clay had taken thirty-seven punches in one round and lived to tell about it. He hadn’t quit. He hadn’t gone down. For Sonny Liston, that might have hurt more than any punch Clay had thus far landed.
Later, all sorts of speculation would arise as to what had blinded Clay. Film of the fight suggests that Clay didn’t start blinking or complaining about his eyes until Angelo Dundee wiped his face with a towel at the end of round four. Some of his Muslim friends had been warning Clay not to trust Dundee, saying the trainer had mafia ties. Now they wondered if Dundee had blinded his own fighter. After the fight, Dundee said he had checked his sponge and towel by wiping his own eyes but there had been nothing wrong with them. Had Liston’s trainer put something on Sonny’s gloves hoping that it would blind his opponent? Had some kind of liniment used on Liston’s cut migrated accidentally to Clay’s eyes? Had an ointment used on Liston’s aching shoulder somehow blinded Clay? Barney Felix, the referee, said he checked Liston’s gloves and found no trace of any foreign substance, but no one would ever know, and three minutes later no one would care.
Liston’s face showed cuts and welts as he sat in his corner, waiting for the bell to signal the start of the sixth round. Over the past three and a half years, all his fights combined had lasted less than six rounds. Liston was a demolition man; he knocked things down and moved on. He was not accustomed to work that taxed his attention span or his stamina, and, now, Clay was coming out clear-eyed and as fast as ever, having proved he could take Liston’s best shots. Clay threw eight jabs to open the round, finding Liston’s face at the end of every punch.
“Easy target!” Steve Ellis told viewers. “EASY!”
Clay threw combinations that jolted Liston’s head. Liston jabbed in return but never launched a sustained attack. Clay was hurting the champion, and the champion could do nothing about it. He was too old, too slow, and found his tank nearly empty. The round was more than a minute gone before Liston connected with a punch.
Clay could fight like this all night long, mixing jabs and combinations and waltzing circles around the ring, while Liston’s fatigue and frustration would only grow. Clay could see it and feel it. With a minute left in the sixth round, he attacked with blurring speed. He hit Liston with two left hooks to the head. Liston wobbled. He was in danger. The bell rang, and Liston walked solemnly to his corner.
As Liston sat, his trainers put ice under his swollen eyes and rubbed his left shoulder. The champ was a mess.
“I think Clay’s got all the confidence he needs now,” Joe Louis said. “I think he’s gonna win it now.”
The bell rang to begin the seventh.
Clay, ready, rose from his stool.
Liston did not.
“You gotta fight!” one of the men in his corner shouted. “You gotta get up, Sonny! You’re gonna be a bum all your life if you don’t get up!”
Liston wouldn’t budge
Suddenly Clay was dancing and leaping and raising his hands in the air. Liston had quit. The fight was over, and Clay was the new heavyweight champion.
In barrooms and movie theaters across the country, the cry rang out: Liston had thrown the fight, thrown the heavyweight championship of the world. How else to explain it? Liston said later that he had hurt his left shoulder in the first round of the fight on a wild punch that missed its mark. After the sixth round, he said, he had numbness running from the shoulder to the forearm. He would later get a note from his doctor to prove it. Still, it was hard to believe that a champion would give up so easily. Hard to believe that a man could throw 171 jabs with his left hand, including 21 in the final round, and then say his bum left shoulder made it impossible to go on. Hard to believe Liston would have thrown three times more lefts than rights in the final round if his left shoulder had been seriously impaired. Hard to believe a man as tough as Liston, a man who had gone the distance once with a broken jaw, couldn’t fight through numbness. Hard to believe that a man with the most powerful right hand in boxing and a man supposedly imp
ervious to punches wouldn’t carry on one-handed given the stakes.
Later, there would be rumors that members of Liston’s camp bet $300,000 on Clay at seven-to-one odds. Also later there would be news that the Nilon brothers paid fifty thousand dollars to the Louisville Sponsoring Group for the rights to Clay’s first fight after Liston — a deal that made sense only if they believed Clay would win.
But those were mysteries to be unwrapped at another time, if ever. In the meantime, the arena erupted in pandemonium. Clay was up, running around the ring, Bundini wrapped around him like a human cloak, brother Rudy following behind.
“I am the king!” Clay shouted. “I am the king! King of the world! Eat your words! Eat! Eat your words!”
ABC radio reporter Howard Cosell reached Clay first, sticking a microphone in front of Clay’s face as the fighter peered over a row of newspapermen. “I am the greatest! I am the greatest! I am the king of the world!” Clay shouted.
Cosell asked Clay what had happened in the fourth round.
“He had liniment on his hands, gloves,” Clay said. “I couldn’t see all that round. Almighty God was with me! Almighty God was with me!”
He moved over to a TV camera and continued, “I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived! I’m so great I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest! I showed the world! I talk to God every day! If God’s with me, can’t nobody be against me! I shook up the world! I know God! I know the real God!”
He raised his arms in the air.
“I’m the king of the world! I’m pretty! I’m a baaad man! I shook up the world! I shook up the world! I shook up the world!”
14
Becoming Muhammad Ali
It was not the wildest victory party in boxing history, but it may have been the oddest. While the Louisville Sponsoring Group hurried to organize a celebration at the Roney Plaza Hotel, Clay and Malcolm X slipped away to a soda fountain for big bowls of vanilla ice cream. From there, the men drove to the Hampton House motel, where Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, Howard Bingham, Rudy Clay, and a few others gathered in Malcolm’s room for a night of sober conversation that lasted deep into the morning.
Cooke, nicknamed “The King of Soul,” was the man behind the hit songs “Chain Gang” and “You Send Me,” a man who had recently cofounded a record label to assert control of his business affairs, and a man, at age thirty-three, who had never cared for the Nation of Islam but admired much of Malcolm’s message. Brown was one of America’s greatest athletes, star fullback of the Cleveland Browns. While he was not a member of the Nation of Islam, the twenty-eight-year-old Brown respected Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad for instilling pride in black people.
“Well, Brown,” Malcolm said to the football player that night, “don’t you think it’s time for this young man to stop spouting off and get serious?”
Brown agreed. It was time for Clay to get serious. But Brown also sensed a crisis coming. Clay would soon be forced to choose between his two spiritual mentors, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and the choice would be difficult and potentially dangerous.
Clay stretched out and dozed on Malcolm’s bed at one point. But he didn’t sleep long. Sometime after two in the morning, he returned to his home, where neighbors were waiting on the lawn to congratulate him.
The next morning Clay did his best to get serious. He returned to the Miami Beach Convention Hall for a press conference and answered questions plainly and simply, without rhyming or shouting. He told reporters that he intended to retire as soon as he made enough money. Boxing was a means to an end. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, and he didn’t want to be hurt. If there had been any doubt that his histrionics before the fight had been part of a scheme to discombobulate Sonny Liston, Clay’s mild post-fight demeanor proved it.
“I’m through talking,” he said. “All I have to do is be a nice, clean gentleman.”
But the press wasn’t letting him off so easily. Wasn’t it true, a reporter asked, that Clay was a “card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?”
With that, Clay’s calm demeanor cracked.
“ ‘Card-carrying?’ What does that mean?” he asked. Members of the Nation of Islam didn’t like being called Black Muslims, and “card-carrying” suggested shades of McCarthyism. He continued, “I believe in Allah and in peace. I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian anymore. I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”
Suddenly, this was no longer a press conference about a boxing match; it was a declaration of independence. Clay was casting aside the role black athletes were supposed to play in society and striking out on his own. He was taking stands on race, politics, and religion, refusing to be owned or manipulated by anyone.
Black and white people, he said, were better off apart. “In the jungle,” he said, “lions are with lions, and tigers with tigers, and redbirds stay with redbirds, and bluebirds with bluebirds.”
Although they were likely informed by discussions the night before with Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke, Clay’s remarks were his own. He could not have spoken more clearly in scorning integration or in renouncing Christianity in favor of Islam, but his heaviest punch was this: “I don’t have to be what you want me to me to be.” With that, he rejected the old promise that black people would get a fair chance if they played by the rules, worked hard, and showed proper respect for the white establishment. It wasn’t just Sonny Liston who couldn’t touch him, he suggested. Nobody could. Nobody could tell him how to behave or how to worship God. He didn’t know exactly what he believed or what he wanted to be — he was only twenty-two years old, after all — but he had seen enough to understand the liberating power of self-determination.
The newsmen scrambled. What was this kid talking about? How could a black person oppose integration? What was the Nation of Islam exactly? A religion? A cult? A hate-mongering gang of thugs? And how were they supposed to write about such subtle matters within the confines of the sports pages?
The next day, Clay and Malcolm X continued to educate the white working press. Clay said he had been studying Islam for months and had not made his decision lightly.
“A rooster crows only when it sees the light,” he said. “I have seen the light and I’m crowing.”
He explained that he was not a part of a fringe group, that there were 750 million Muslims around the world. “You call it Black Muslims, I don’t,” he said. “The real name is Islam. That means peace. Yet people brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we’re Communists. That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don’t carry knives. They don’t tote weapons. They pray five times a day. The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don’t commit adultery. The men don’t marry white women. All they want to do is live in peace with the world. They don’t hate anybody. They don’t want to stir up any kind of trouble.”
Clay expressed a controversial view in asserting that integration would never work, but he was hardly being cynical. In America, black citizens were still excluded, officially or unofficially, from countless neighborhoods, churches, labor unions, social clubs, corporate offices, hospitals, hotels, retirement homes, and schools. There were no black governors, no black U.S. senators, no black Supreme Court justices in 1964. Of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 5 were black. It was certainly reasonable for Clay, who had never attended an integrated school or lived in an integrated neighborhood, to believe that democratic principles did not apply to people of color, and, more to the point, that white people intended to keep it that way. Most of American history told him so.
“I get telephone calls every day,” Clay said. “They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They tel
l me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood.” But to do so would be to invite violent attack, he said. And to what end? “I don’t want to be blown up. I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind. I’m a good boy. I never have done anything wrong. I have never been in jail . . . I like white people. I like my own people. They can live together without infringing on each other. You can’t condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself.”
In his last refrain, he sounded more like Malcolm X than ever. And no wonder: the men had been nearly inseparable for weeks. Malcolm not only enjoyed Clay’s company but also, increasingly, had come to believe that the boxer had an opportunity to shake up black-white relations and rally more young black men and women to join a popular uprising more aggressive than the one led by Martin Luther King Jr. “The power structure had successfully created the image of the American Negro as someone with no confidence, no militancy,” Malcolm told one reporter shortly after Clay’s victory. “And they had done this by giving him images of heroes that weren’t truly militant or confident. And now here comes Cassius, the exact contrast of everything that was representative of the Negro image. He said he was the greatest, all of the odds were against him, he upset the odds makers, he won . . . They knew that if people began to identify with Cassius and the type of image he was creating they were going to have trouble out of these Negroes because they’d have Negroes walking around the streets saying ‘I’m the greatest.’ ”
Malcolm understood how ordinary black men and women were responding to the young boxer. They were unbothered by his embrace of the Nation of Islam and unbothered by his rejection of integration, even if they didn’t share his religion or his politics. The little that most white Americans knew about the Nation of Islam came from a 1959 Mike Wallace documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced, which made the Nation sound as bizarre as it was frightening. Black Americans, however, knew that the Nation, for all its oddities, was a powerful grassroots organization dedicated to self-empowerment. They knew that Clay, regardless of his religion, carried himself with pride.