The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  Little by little the unfair conditions written in New York gave way to moral pressures over the years, but they have never given way altogether. No longer need the challenger submit a complete description of the challenging yacht ten months in advance with the defender not even identified until just before the start. No longer need the challenger be sturdy and seaworthy—and slow—enough to travel to the scene of the match on her own bottom.

  She still must be designed and built in the country of the challenging club, however, and this condition has been stiffened since the first Australian challenge. Back in 1962 Gretel I was permitted to use some American-made sails and rigging—which Australia didn’t have the facilities to duplicate—and her designer was given free use of the towing tanks at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.

  Gretel won one race and made the other four so close that plaster fell from the ceiling of the New York Yacht Club. Never again the sporting gesture.

  RUM + VODKA + IRISH = FIGHT

  NOTRE DAME, INDIANA, 1977

  A card on the breakfast table recommended a Fighting Irish cocktail. Perhaps “recommended” is the wrong word. The card merely announced that the confection was available at $2.50 (souvenir glass $1.75). “I’d like orange juice,” a guest said, “pancakes, crisp bacon and coffee. But first, what is a Fighting Irish cocktail?” “All right,” the waitress said. “One shot of rum, one shot of vodka, half a shot of Galliano, about this much orange juice and some green food coloring.” There was a respectful silence. Then: “Thank God it’s Sunday and you can’t serve me one.” “I’ve never tasted one,” the waitress said, “but anybody I ever served one never asked for another.”

  This was in the Holiday Inn about three furlongs from the campus on the road to Niles, Michigan. Six days a week the Fighting Irish and other refreshments are available here in Gipper’s Lounge, a shrine dedicated to the memory of George Gipp, the patron saint of football and eight-ball pool at Notre Dame. Walls of the lounge are covered with photographic blowups of football plays and players. Three dominate the decor: behind the bar stands the Gipper himself, half again larger than life, wearing the soft leather headgear and canvas pants favored by all-America halfbacks around 1920; at his right is a huge head shot of Frank Leahy, the late, great coach; at Gipp’s left, Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden and Don Miller sit astride four plow horses. The riders wear football regalia with cowled woolen windbreakers, and each has a football tucked under an arm.

  With the possible exception of Knute Rockne’s twisted smile, which appears on the wall of a corridor just outside, this equestrian study must be the most readily recognized photo ever made around here. George Strickler, who traveled with the 1924 team as undergraduate press agent, dragooned the spavined steeds from a nearby farm and posed the picture on returning from the Army game in New York where Grantland Rice had written the story that immortalized the backfield as the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. On a campus where a five-dollar bill represented wealth, Strickler sold hundreds of 8-by-II prints at one dollar each.

  Photographic evidence notwithstanding, football played no special part in campus affairs or discussions this weekend. Reunion ‘77 was on, bringing together classes spaced five years apart from 1972 clear back to 1927 and beyond, each group identified by baseball caps of a certain color.

  Wherever the eye turned it lighted on a cluster of gold caps covering skulls that were sent out of here stuffed with learning fifty years ago, for something like 125 of the 400-odd members of the class of ‘27 made their way back. They came prepared for the discovery that their friends had aged faster than they did in the last half-century, and sometimes they were pleasantly surprised.

  Little Eddie Broderick of Morristown, New Jersey, has retired from the bench, yet he is the same blithe spirit who enlivened Pat Manion’s law classes. Time has not dimmed the laughter in Joe Dunn, though the waistline has expanded a trifle since he quit Brainerd, Minnesota, for the good life in Scottsdale, Arizona. The terra-cotta coiffure of Red Edwards, quarterback and co-captain in 1926, has not changed, and big John McManmon, the ag student from Lowell, Massachusetts, who played tackle in front of Red, still discourses with scholarship on the useful properties of manure.

  It seemed improbable that the Soviet Union, Communist China, or even Southern California could muster a more presentable clutch of septuagenarians than the class of ‘27. Considering that the clammy hand of Prohibition was on the land when these men were undergraduates, their appearance lent support to their youthful belief that barbed-wire gin, needled beer and white whisky warm from the still would make a man live long and do good deeds.

  There was little talk of frivolous nature. John Harwood, now a Nashville architect, had attended a morning mass yesterday in memory of 227 deceased classmates and had doubts about returning for the reunion mass at 5:30 P.M. “If I went to church twice in one day,” he said, “God might think I was pushy.”

  Pat Cohen of Taunton, Massachusetts, said that after a fifty-year trial he had decided to settle permanently in South Bend and had bought property for that purpose.

  “Property, Pat? Where?”

  “In the Jewish cemetery.”

  Regarding the unlined face of Joe Breig, an old crock remembered how that face had looked one evening in the spring of 1924. On the first Saturday in May—the day Black Gold won the Kentucky Derby—the Ku Klux Klan attempted to hold a state convention in South Bend. With deplorable disregard for the right of peaceable assembly, two thousand students intervened, even employing force in some instances to separate delegates from their bedsheet hoods.

  A night or two later, word reached the campus that a fiery cross was burning downtown. Maybe fifty students caught a trolley car to the scene, the rest following on foot. The trolley delivered the first group into an ambush manned by thugs with blackjacks and brass knuckles along with some cops. When reinforcements arrived on foot, Joe Breig’s glasses were broken, his right ear was partly detached from a bloody head, and nightsticks had raised welts across his back.

  Yesterday, though, he was telling of postgraduate days on the Vandergrift News in his native Vandergrift, Pennsylvania. When he covered city council, members tried to delay newsworthy business until after he had left their meetings, but he was young and could wait them out if they stalled until 4:00 A.M. One day a committee waited on him at the paper to protest that day’s headline, which reported that council had ignored an issue of civic importance. He explained that he had written the story because it was the truth. The council-men argued. Joe was firm. The council president slammed Joe’s desk with a fist.

  “Dammit, Joe!” he said. “We didn’t ignore it. We didn’t bring it up!”

  9

  Boxing

  “I’M THE GREATEST”

  MIAMI BEACH, 1964

  Cassius Marcellus Clay fought his way out of the horde that swarmed and leaped and shouted in the ring, climbed like a squirrel onto the red velvet ropes and brandished his still-gloved hand aloft.

  “Eat your words,” he howled to the working press rows. “Eat your words.”

  Nobody ever had a better right. In a mouth still dry from the excitement of the most astounding upset in many roaring years, the words don’t taste good, but they taste better than they read. The words, written here and practically everywhere else until the impossible became unbelievable truth, said Sonny Liston would squash Cassius Clay like a bug when the boy braggart challenged for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  The boy braggart is the new champion, and not only because Liston quit in his corner after the sixth round. This incredible kid of twenty-two, only nineteen fights away from the amateurs and altogether untested on boxing’s topmost level, was winning going away when Liston gave up with what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder.

  He might have been nailed if the bout had continued, but on the evidence of eighteen frenzied minutes, Cassius was entitled to crow, as he did at the top of his voice before Liston retired: “I’m th
e greatest. I’m gonna upset the world.”

  “That’s right,” his camp followers howled. “That’s what you’re doin.”

  And he was.

  On this score, Clay won four of the six rounds, and in one of the two he lost he was blinded. Apart from the unforeseen ending, that was perhaps the most extraordinary part of the whole wild evening.

  It started between the fourth and fifth rounds. “Floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee” as he and his stooges had predicted, Cassius had made Liston look like a bull moose plodding through a swamp.

  Dancing, running, jabbing, ducking, stopping now and then to pepper the champion’s head with potshots in swift combinations, he had won the first, third, and fourth rounds and opened an angry cut under Liston’s left eye.

  Handlers were swabbing his face in the corner when suddenly he broke into an excited jabber, pushed the sponge away and pawed at his eyes. As the bell rang he sprang up waving a glove aloft as though forgetting that a man can’t call a time-out in a prize fight. In the corner, frantic seconds sniffed the sponge suspiciously.

  Cassius couldn’t fight at all in the fifth, but he could and did show a quality he had never before been asked for. He showed he could take the sternest hooks and heaviest rights Liston could throw—or at least this Liston, whose corner said later that the shoulder had slipped in the first round.

  Just pawing feebly at the oncoming champion, Clay rocked under smacking hooks, ducked, rolled, grabbed, and caught one brutal right in the throat. He rode it out, though, and at the end of the round he had ceased to blink.

  “You eyes okay, champ,” they were screaming from his corner as the round drew to a close. “Everything okay.”

  He didn’t confirm that until the bell rang for the sixth. Then, getting up from his stool, he looked across the ring, nodded with assurance, and went out to enjoy one of his best rounds, pumping both hands to the head, circling, dancing.

  “Get mad, baby,” his corner pleaded. “He’s retreatin’, champ.”

  It was at the end of this heat that he came back crowing about upsetting the world. Yet he couldn’t have known how quickly his words would be confirmed.

  Just before the bell for the seventh, Cassius sprang up and waved both hands overhead in a showoff salute to the crowd. He took a step or so forward, as the gong clanged, then leaped high in a war dance of unconfined glee. He had seen what scarcely anybody else in Convention Hall had noticed.

  Liston wasn’t getting up. Willie Reddish, Sonny’s trainer, had his hands spread palms up in a gesture of helplessness. Jack Nilon, the manager, swung his arm in a horizontal sweep, palm down. The fight was over, the championship gone.

  Dr. Robert C. Bennett of Detroit, who has treated Liston in the past, hastened into the ring and taped Liston’s shoulder. The former champion told him he had felt the shoulder go midway in the first round and the left hand had grown progressively number from then on.

  They’ll fight again to answer the prodding question of what might have been, and it will be a big one. Althought return-bout clauses are frowned upon these days, Bob and Jimmy Nilon, Jack’s brothers, have an independent contract with Clay entitling them to name the time, place, and opponent for his first defense.

  As Bob Nilon explained this, Clay rode the ropes. “Eat your words,” he bawled.

  THE BIG SLEEP

  LEWISTON, MAINE, 1965

  Lewiston’s finest stood at the doors of the hockey rink and frisked every lady’s handbag for firearms before the great rematch of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston last night. They should have searched Liston for concealed sleeping powders.

  For fifteen months after Liston quit in his corner and surrendered the heavyweight championship of the world to the bluegrass bard from Louisville, the boxing public awaited a return bout.

  For fifteen minutes after post time for theater-television, a sweltering little knot of customers in the Central Maine Youth Center waited for Jersey Joe Walcott, the referee, to wave the gladiators into combat.

  Old Jersey Joe waved, and witnesses waited one minute more. Then they were on their feet yelling, “Fake—fake—fake,” as a triumphant Clay leaned across the ropes screaming, “Where’s Floyd Patterson?”

  One wee righthand punch that Cassius threw from the hip had dropped his copiously sweating challenger for the quickest knockout ever recorded in a match for the heavyweight title, though Walcott didn’t know it at the time. Unable to hear the timekeeper’s count, the referee let Liston struggle to his feet and try to defend himself before the clocker told him Sonny had got up at the count of twelve.

  Most of those who crowded down behind the press rows and bawled “fake” were young—too young, it seemed, to have been holding $25, $50 or $100 for admission. Possibly they had found a way to get in for less (pronounced nothing) when it began to appear that only about half of the 5,400 seats would be sold.

  At any rate, they hollered loud enough to be in on the cuff, and a lot of them couldn’t have been old enough to have seen the last fight held up here in the Moose country.

  Chances are few of them even saw the punch that did the job, for it was a tiny shot that couldn’t have traveled more than four inches. It didn’t look like a blow to paralyze a big, brutal head-breaker who had never been knocked out in twelve years as a professional bruiser. Yet half an hour afterward, there were guys around calling it a “perfect punch.”

  Clay had bounced out of his corner at the opening bell to lead with a light, swinging right followed by a jab of no consequence. From then on he circled swiftly to his left as Liston chased him, hands down near his sides, his feet flashing across the canvas in showy double shuffles.

  There was a look of menace in Liston’s red-rimmed eyes. He was moving about as fast as he can, advancing on an angle to intercept Clay in his circling retreat. Sonny landed a jab or two of no great consequence, brought a howl from the crowd with a right swing that didn’t land solidly, and banged one heavy right into the ribs.

  Just once Clay paused in his flight to throw a left-right combination at the head, halting Liston for a fragment of a second. The crowd was silent then, for there had been boos for the champion as he entered the ring and cheers for Sonny when he came in with sweat dripping off his face in the punishing heat of the ring lights.

  Now Sonny lunged forward to throw a left. Clay’s right was level with his hip and he seemed scarcely to move it. Yet down went Liston with a massive, astonishing crash. He lay flat on his back, twitched, quivered, rolled over and hauled himself up on one knee.

  The crowd drowned out Jersey Joe’s count—if he had ever picked it up from the knockdown timekeeper. Sonny started to pull himself erect, pitched over and was flat again. Once more he forced himself up and this time he made it. It was a surprise when Walcott let Clay come on, for it seemed that at least ten seconds had passed.

  Clay came on with a rush, punching frantically as Liston backed into his corner. For a moment Walcott left them to consult the timekeeper. Then he hustled back to declare a cease-fire.

  The crowd bawled derision and anger. “The biggest fake I ever saw in my life,” screamed one youngish guy with a pencil-thin mustache. Clay howled for Patterson, as if to take the former champion on then and there. Floyd joined the swirling mob in the ring, but with no intent to do bodily harm. So did George Chuvalo, another heavyweight with dreams.

  Cassius paid no attention to the swelling jeers. He babbled into microphones, stayed to watch a taped rerun of his performance for a brace of strangers brought in to box after the main event. Half an hour later he was back from his dressing room haranguing what was left of the crowd through a loudspeaker.

  In spite of many rumors about Black Muslim plots against Clay’s life—threats which must have worried police chief Joe Farrand colorblind, for most of the handbags his minions snooped into were carried by white gals—nobody got shot. This may have been good.

  ALI-FRAZIER I

  1971

  Early in the fifteent
h round a left hook caught Muhammad Ali on the jaw and it was as though Joe Frazier had hit him with a baseball bat, Frank Howard model. Several times earlier Ali had sagged toward the floor. This time he slammed it like a plank. He went down at full length, flat on his back.

  He rocked back on his shoulder blades, both feet in the air, rocked forward to a sitting position and pushed himself wearily, sadly, to his feet. He was up by the count of four, but Arthur Mercante, the referee, counted on for the mandatory eight seconds. He stepped aside and Joe came on, bloody mouth open in a grimace of savage joy.

  Another hook smashed home, and Ali’s hands flew up to his face as if to stifle a scream. When they came down, he had an advanced case of mumps. The comely visage he describes with such affection—“I’m the prettiest; I’m the greatest”—was a gibbous balloon, puffy and misshapen.

  “Broken jaw,” somebody said at ringside, but the diagnosis was not confirmed. As the fifteenth round started, Angelo Dundee, Ali’s handler, had said the jaw was broken. But x-rays taken later showed there was no fracture.

  On one point there was no shadow of doubt. Joe Frazier, whom they had called a pretender, was heavyweight champion of the world—the only champion of the only world we know.

  Though he was on his feet at the final bell, Ali took a licking in the ring and on all three official scorecards, his first defeat in thirty-two bouts going all the way back to the days when he answered to the name of Cassius Marcellus Clay.

  Losing, he fought the bravest and best and most desperate battle he has ever been called upon to make. In all his gaudy, gabby years as a professional, he had always left one big question unanswered: Could he take it? If ever he was hit and hurt, how would he respond?

  He not only took it, he kept it. Each fighter got $2.5 million for his night’s work, and earned it. At least they did in the estimation of 20,455 witnesses, but those beautiful people have so little respect for money that they paid $1,352,961 at the gate.