Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  Onlookers were merely amused by the brash kid with the big mouth who seemed to have borrowed his publicity buildups from the wrestlers’ division of the classical school of acting. What was dangerous about Cassius was not immediately appreciated: the intensity, the concentration, the determination with which he played. It was this that separated the fools of Shakespeare from mere Middle Ages merrymakers. Wise kings listened to inspired fools while foolish kings laughed at the exterior apparatus of their jokes.

  The best of fools was a set of delicate Chinese boxes, and just such a fool was Brother Malcolm’s “so-called American Negro,” a series of ingeniously fitted personalities, each larger one concealing and protecting a smaller one within until you finally come to the true resilient core. Many hundreds of years of slavery and now more than a century of hypocritical “freedom”—a democracy with the black man still locked into the steaming cities while the white man retreats from his day’s work to the flowering suburbs—this is the historical imbalance that conditions all but the most profoundly integrated (or whitened, Ali might say today) black man to take refuge in his Chinese boxes as a fox hides in the hedge from the hounds.

  I may have more black friends than 95 percent of white Americans, and sometimes I feel I have succeeded in reaching the box within the box within the box—but I never leave the room without a feeling that the brothers left together will now continue to remove black Chinese box after Chinese box until at last they are left sitting around in their naked souls, like a game of spiritual strip poker that reveals all to each, an exclusive deal played in a private club off limits even to sympathetic white players who would win the game.

  What has all this to do with Cassius Clay in pursuit of Liston’s title and his subsequent odyssey? To our minds, a great deal. We are preparing ourselves not to be surprised when a young man, making of each boxing bout his parable, exchanges one image for another as dramatically but also as easily as an actor changes costumes between scenes.

  And make no mistake about it, they were scenes in a drama that young Cassius knew he was playing, an allegory in the Brechtian manner that he was consciously authoring and acting out. On many different levels—the physical, the psychical, the religio-political. From his training camp for the first Liston fight Cassius waged an intense campaign of psychological warfare. The old bus Cassius had bought to move his entourage was painted red and white with “World’s Most Colorful Fighter” emblazoned across the top, and covered with signs broadcasting his low opinion of the champion: Bear Hunting Season. Liston Will Fall in Eight. Big Ugly Bear. … Cassius would invade Liston’s training camp, hose him with a torrent of insults and threats—poetically alone in America in thinking he could supplant the brooding, dangerous Sonny, who was expected to spank the obstreperous Cassius as a stern papa would whup a wayward son. The odds on Liston were 8 to 1. Of the press who were on the scene from every continent, we remember not one who gave the strident challenger a chance.

  But Angelo Dundee, who somehow managed to remain uninvolved in the psychological high jinks and the gathering morality play, had warned us that Cassius had the style to outbox and defeat the ponderous, aging Liston. An odd group had believed in Cassius Clay. Our teenaged son David, who sent me twenty-five dollars he had saved from allowances to bet on youth vs. age; Drew “Bundini” Brown, an ancient mariner and saloon-keeper with a gift of gab, almost as seven-tongued as Cassius, who was called “assistant trainer” but was really the guru-in-residence; and an unobtrusive black man who was quite possibly the most remarkable man, black or white, then living in America. This was the acknowledged spokesman for blackness in Harlem, the scourge of Uncle Toms and Negro civil rights leaders who spoke of integration and gradual improvements. This was the rising star of black militancy, the ex-hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, and pimp who finally, through the teaching of Elijah Muhammad, had come to understand his life of ghetto hustling as the painful preparation for his eventual role as liberator of his more than twenty million brothers suffering a living genocide in white America. Born Malcolm Little, he was known in the street as Big Red before he became even better known as Malcolm X.

  In tracing two centuries of major prizefights, we can see how inextricably they are woven into our social fabric. From Molineaux to Louis, our champions were heroes of related acts that served as parables of cultural change. But B.C., Before Clay, they had only dimly recognized their roles. Now it was A.D., After Dallas, which Malcolm X had called “America’s chickens come home to roost.” There was a keen black hatred of all white institutions in Malcolm’s mind when he made the statement that Elijah used as the official reason for silencing him, pending his excommunication from the Black Church. The headline, seemingly a crass postmortem on the catastrophe in Dallas, had been taken from a context in which Malcolm had been discussing the atmosphere of racial hatred and social violence that the white man had created in America, a rabid intolerance that finally had struck down the Chief of State himself. This was too tragically true. A liberal white President had no business driving in an open car through a hate-filled Texas city where his enemies were articulate and armed. Camelot was in ruins, the boiling volcano in Harlem was getting ready to erupt again, and Malcolm X, in the moment of greatest travail in a life that sensitively reflected all the nightmare distortions of the American dream, was counseling the challenger along lines either totally unfamiliar or anathema to the sports world.

  Malcolm was not a fight fan; indeed he hardly knew who Cassius was when he met him and Rudolph at the Detroit mosque several years before. Cassius impressed him then simply as a likable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster with a contagious quality.

  But in The Fight of 1964, Malcolm was convinced that Cassius had invited him to Miami to help the young fighter prove to the world the superiority of Islam over a white Christianity that had brainwashed the Negro community to accept inferior status and servitude. Molineaux had fought merely with his fists. Johnson had fought with his mocking smile and his wicked tongue. Cassius would fight with weapons never before carried into an American ring, his faith in a non-Western religion, as well as his growing awareness that, while he might be part of a minority 10 percent in the United States, he was also part of a global family of nonwhites among whom Caucasians were in turn a minority doomed to eventual defeat. While Cassius was rattling his bear trap and playing the loud-mouthed fool, while white Miami was either disgusted or entertained by this shrill showboating, a new philosophical and social confrontation was taking place that would prove as crucial to the middle sixties as was the Louis-Schmeling debate to the late thirties.

  “This fight is the truth,” Malcolm told Cassius. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern crusade—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens.” The mystical reformed master hustler with the razor-blade mind was convinced that Allah had brought Cassius to this moment in order to prove something to black men with stunted egos who thought they needed white spiritual advisers.

  Those who attended the wildest weigh-in in the history of the heavyweight division thought that Cassius was more in need of psychiatric than spiritual assistance. Minutes before he burst into the ring at the Miami Beach auditorium we could hear the threatened promise of his arrival, like thunder before a storm. Then he and Bundini exploded into view, furiously pounding canes in angry rhythms on the floor and shouting their tribal slogan, “We’re coming to rumble. … Float like a butterfly—sting like a bee! Where’s the ugly bear? …” For an hour the demonstration went on, with Cassius screaming, lunging at Liston, shaking his fists, bulging his eyes. Cool and seasoned Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald-Tribune, trained to report without involving his emotions, was for the first time shaken at a weigh-in. “I think they should call it off,” he said to us. “He’s in no condition to fight tonight.” Most experts decided that Cassius was terrified and suffering from manic hys
teria at the prospect of having to enter the ring with the dour-faced champion. Liston did his best to fix him with “the look,” a baleful stare he had perfected during many years in prison. But Cassius would not be transfixed like Floyd Patterson. Screaming like a banshee, pounding the stage with his feet as if possessed, he kept up this bizarre performance until his blood pressure had bubbled over the 200 mark and observers were convinced that the next stop was the psychiatric ward.

  While reporters were asking the local boxing commissioners if they were considering calling off this unequal contest between a seasoned old champion and this hysterical boy, Cassius was back at his motel being examined by Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who found his blood pressure miraculously normal. “A case of self-induced hysteria,” diagnosed Pacheco. As Malcolm said, it was a case of mind over matter. There wasn’t a man in the world Sonny Liston was afraid of. But was this towering dark screamer a human being or a whirling dervish?

  What we were seeing, along with all the other innovations Cassius was bringing to the climactic ritual of the heavyweight championship, were the new tactics of confrontation politics. Already a cult figure to the young, he was applying to the traditional ceremony of the ring the outlandish behavior of an Abbie Hoffman, a “crazy,” against which the old-fashioned prison aggression of Sonny Liston could not aim its cold inner fire. Old-time boxing purists were disgusted, but there was Muslim method in his madness. In that hour of simulated rage he had cried, “You’re the chump and I’m the champ! It is prophesied for me to win! I cannot be beaten!”

  In the fight that night, a macabre affair haunted by goblins and doubting Thomases, Cassius confounded his army of skeptics by making Sonny Liston suddenly look very slow and very tired. The old bull was winded after two rounds, punching ponderous gloves into the spaces that Cassius had occupied a moment before. At the end of seven rounds Liston hulked in his corner like a rejected Buddha, a worn-out god with a hole in his cheek toppled from his throne by a new religion—while the irrepressible standard-bearer of this new religion leaped around the ring proclaiming to the world he had just conquered symbolically for Islam, for Harlem, for Birmingham, for South Chicago, for a billion dark-skinned rooters around the globe, “I am the king! I am the king!”

  Next morning at the press conference we discovered another of the Chinese boxes that make up the complex called Cassius Clay. Or so he had been called until that morning when he announced, in a voice with the volume now turned so low he was barely audible, that he was giving up his “slave name” and from now on would be known as Cassius X.

  He chided the reporters for almost unanimously picking against him and informed them that he believed in the religion of Islam, that he believed Elijah Muhammad was its apostle, and that this was the religion believed in by more than 700 million people throughout Africa and Asia. Now reporters in the back of the room were calling “Louder,” whereas the day before they had feared that Cassius’s vocal gymnastics might burst their eardrums. When he stepped down from the platform we asked him about his immediate plans, and he told us he thought he would travel to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “They will all want to see the new champion of the world who believes the way they do,” he said so quietly you had to lean toward him to hear it all. “And I will talk with the leaders and the wise men of those countries.”

  Of the past eight heavyweight champions, six had been Negro, but this was the first black champion to proclaim his blackness, to say to the white world, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” the ideal practitioner to tap out on the heads and bodies of his opponents the message: Black Is Beautiful.

  [February 1972]

  In Defense of Boxing

  AS MUCH AS I LOVE boxing, I hate it, and as much as I hate it, I love it. Every sensitive aficionado of the sport must bring to it this ambivalence. For make no mistake about it, at its worst, professional boxing is a cruel sport, just as, at its best, it is exhilarating, artistic, and, yes, ennobling. A natural rivalry for the championship of the world between two gifted professionals, tuned to perfection, is, in this opinion, a sporting event surpassing all others, from Super Bowls to Kentucky Derbies. No wonder it has had a grip on our imagination from the original Greek Games to the most recent Olympics, with its crop of new Wunderkinder hoping to replace Sugar Ray Leonard and the other overnight darlings of Montreal.

  Write this off as macho nonsense if you will, but from his primordial beginnings man has fought with his fists—as he came later to club, dagger, sword, gunpowder, and, finally, atomic bombs. With gloves and seemingly civilized rules, the dual instincts of throwing punches and smartly defending against them has been recognized and ritualized as a sport, even a “science”—the “Sweet Science” being no misnomer for a game that has produced such master boxers as Willie (The Wisp) Pep, uncrowned welterweight king Billy Graham, and the two Sugar Rays, Robinson and Leonard. Those who abhor the fight game see it as a brawl between two mindless brutes trying to bash in each other’s skulls. And it is sadly true that a fight between two stiffs who are all muscle and no talent illustrates just what is base and heartless about boxing in general, and maybe the human race in particular, just as a dramatic confrontation between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas (Hit Man) Hearns (as well as Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler) brings into play a chess game of mind and body that may make boxing the most thoughtful sport of them all—in which moves are thought out as far in advance as Willie Mosconi’s at the billiard table.

  Still, this year, when boxing in our international satellite society is reaching larger audiences than ever before, the game that has fascinated writers from Hazlitt and Byron to Hemingway and Mailer is on the ropes—and at least one organization, the American Medical Association, would like to count it out. At its recent convention in Hawaii, the AMA called for a ban on boxing—amateur as well as professional—on the basis that “boxing is the only major (so-called) sport in which the intentional purpose is the physical harm of the opponent, and that chronic brain damage is the almost inevitable result of a ring career.”

  Devoted friends of boxing rushed to the attack. Asked Bert Randolph Sugar, former editor of Ring magazine, “Why have they singled out boxing, making it the litter box of sports, when football has a weekly casualty list that looks like a Vietnam body count and auto racing possesses the charming aspect of having spectators catch the car instead of the ball?” Quick to answer his own question, the irrepressible Mr. Sugar suggests that boxing is made a whipping boy because it has no recognized spokesman, no national commissioner, no Pete Rozelle who can defend the weekly double column of football injuries, no Blue Book breeders of thoroughbreds to defend the fatalities and injuries to horse and rider that make horse racing a sport as dangerous to life and limb as automobile racing, another of the eleven sports listed ahead of boxing both by the ESPN cable network and the National Board of Insurance Underwriters on the index of injury, violence, and death.

  Lack of a commissioner, a Peter Ueberroth, a Federal Commission of Boxing to establish and enforce rules of safety and preventative “medicine” through thorough pre- and post-fight testing, is one of the reasons—and an authentic one—for the prevailing “open season” on boxing. José Torres, the articulate and intensely human ex-champion who headed the New York State Athletic Commission, was only half kidding when he said that “more human suffering may be caused by doctors’ malpractice and failure to make house calls than from boxing per se.” And knowing opponents of the AMA, such as Dr. Ferdie (Fight Doctor) Pacheco, may accurately describe the AMA as a political organization representing less than 50 percent of the American medical profession, with a reputation for furthering economic self-interest rather than socially beneficial medical programs. Still, while accusing the AMA of overkill in urging prohibition of both amateur and professional boxing, Pacheco acknowledges that brain damage can be a consequence of prolonged activity in the prize ring and that the reports of the Journal of the American Medical Association should be studied and heeded. But Pa
checo also views the AMA as “political, opportunistic, and manipulative.” Why didn’t they look into other dangerous sports? Like Torres and other well-informed critics of the AMA, the Fight Doctor believes the answer to his challenge lies in the fact that the medical lobby is taking on a sport that can’t fight back. It is vulnerable for reasons both legitimate and illegitimate. If it had a reputable body that could fight back, that body would also be overseeing a sport that cries out for policing, that is now a plunder ground and sometimes a killing ground, a multimillion-dollar sports business run without rhyme (now that Ali’s gone) or reason, ethics or long-range plan. Instead of a single authoritative body, there’s a bunch of fistic politicos: the WBA, the WBC, the IBF, the USBA, the NABF … with rival champions and conflicting top-ten contenders, with rival safety rules and jurisdictions, all pretending to preside over the one sport to attract nearly all its participants from ghetto America, the favelas of South America, the slums of Mexico, the Philippines, and the Far East. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey players would never tolerate the anarchy in which the boxer is asked to practice his exacting, exciting, and sometimes dangerous profession.

  Without boxing scholarships to lever him into at least a minimal college education, the average fighter is a young hopeful from Spanish Harlem or the mean streets of Detroit or the gang-hardened alleys of Chicano East Los Angeles. With dreams of becoming an overnight millionaire like Sugar Ray Leonard, Larry Holmes, and Thomas Hearns, he eagerly accepts the rigorous dedication of mind and body demanded of a professional boxer. Or, we should correct ourselves, should be demanded. For every careful, caring Cus D’Amato, who taught his boys (like champions Floyd Patterson and José Torres) to protect themselves both in the ring and outside the ropes, there are the “meat merchants” ready to take healthy, hungry boys and throw them to the wolves. In contrast to ringmen in the class of Ray Arcel and Gil Clancy are “brave” managers who beg ringside doctors not to stop a contest in which their “boy” is suffering deep cuts and near-concussion, and greedy promoters who not merely promote their spectacles but own the champions. This includes the seemingly respectable television networks that sign potential stars such as the recent Olympic champions to lucrative long-range contracts, and then fatten their records on set-ups, tankers, greenhorns, or washed-ups who should either not be licensed at all or never be allowed in the ring with gifted and protected opponents who cuff them about at will. With the exception of NBC, which at least has the ring-wise Pacheco making the matches and calling most of the shots, the networks are as guilty of “meat merchanting” as the most cynical of the old-time managers with their “Get-in-there-they-can’t-hoit-us.” And even Pacheco was heard to mention on a recent “show” that one of his contestants was hopelessly outclassed.