by Mark Kram
Archie summed up his view of Clay years later. “Underneath,” he said, “he’s a fine human being. But his ego and fears are always in battle, and sometimes it leaves him empty inside. He’s always going to be that, a lonely and hollow man. He’s scared of life, never learned to live it right. He wanted to listen. But his ego wouldn’t hear. I’m not so sure the Muslims are using him. It may be the other way around.”
Two years later Archie got a spanking from Clay. He must have been flattered even to get the bout, for he had begun his career in 1936, and here he was in 1962 being taken seriously. Well, not that much. Clay advertised what he thought of Archie by hiring a sixty-three year-old sparring partner and another named One-Round Andrews. He put Archie away in the predicted four rounds, and the crowd booed as he stomped around Archie, shouting: “Where’s the dishes? Where’s the laundry? Gimme the laundry!” After the fight he visited Clay. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m done. Never show up other fighters, son. You may be coming down yourself one day.” Clay shrugged him off, laughed; to him, Archie was just a busted-out swami.
Clay soon moved to Miami to be under the eyes of Angelo Dundee at the Fifth Street Gym, a specialist in Cuban fighters with a large influence among the national press. He immediately saw in Clay a heavyweight with a welterweight’s speed, as rare as finding a jaguar on the streets of Kansas City. He was a shrewd matchmaker, crucial for a young pro. Overmatch him, put him in against the wrong style, and his will can dissipate. Dundee guided him smartly when he looked desultory. He kept the atmosphere light, never indicating in any way he wanted any part of Clay’s stage. Instruction by indirection worked best with Clay; make him think that all was his discovery alone, that a change in technique was something he had on his mind all along.
After the Archie Moore fight Clay got his first close glimpse of Sonny Liston, the champion. Sonny drew up to him as he was rouging parts of his face with a red powder from a disc, and Clay said, “I keep lookin’ like an angel ’stead of a punched-up fighter.” Sonny was almost avuncular in approach, putting a hand on Clay’s shoulder and saying: “Take care, kid. I’m gonna need you. But I’m gonna have to beat you like I’m your daddy.” Clay was speechless, which alone impressed a veteran manager who was there. “The kid looked at Sonny,” Ketchum said, “like Sonny had a gun to his head. Don’t let anybody tell ya that Clay wasn’t scared to death of Liston.” Sonny was in no hurry; prison does that to a man. Though he insisted otherwise much to the annoyance of the Syndicate, Clay wasn’t ready to trade leather or blinks with the inglorious, aspiring sociopath.
Much doubt followed Clay’s progress. The public and the old heads in boxing were used to seeing big, coiled men with the skimpy moves like Joe Louis, or windmill brawlers like Marciano and Jack Dempsey. Why did Clay fight with his hands down by his sides? His punch was not good enough to keep a resolute big man at bay. He had an aversion to working in the pit, inside to the belly where fights were set up to be won. And what would happen if he ever got tagged? Classicists viewed his predictions as carnival; incompatible to serious work or intent. Marciano was unmoved by him, Dempsey thought he was laughable, and Louis labeled him fundamentally unsound. The last stung Clay. Louis was in personal decline. His retort was withering to his early goal of being well liked. “I never want to end up like Joe Louis,” Clay said. “He broke and everybody feel sorry for him.”
There really was no reason to believe that Clay couldn’t handle a big punch. Early in 1962, Sonny Banks had burned him with a left hook, dropping him early in a Garden fight, and he got up to knock Banks out in the fourth. Dundee sighed with relief; he had seen what you can never foresee, a positive response to a direct, crumpling hit. Clay returned to the Garden some time later to meet Doug Jones. The newspaper strike at the time did not please him. But he found an outlet before the New York legislature, where a hearing was being held on boxing. One legislator asked if all his seventeen victories (fourteen by knockout), being suspicious of his predictions, were on the level. “They say it take a crook to know a crook,” Clay said. He missed his prediction against Jones. Trying to win over the crowd, he entered the ring with tape slashed across his mouth. They howled injustice when he was given the decision.
Despite hectoring the Syndicate for a shot at Liston, who didn’t want him anywhere near him, Clay showed up in London for more controversy against Henry Cooper, a chivalrous and proud left hooker. British heavyweights were not respected in the United States, but Cooper was of solid mettle and was cherished, with one big negative—a butter face. But he was a serious man, not a straight line for Clay’s comedy. The Brits weren’t too enamored of Clay, though Noël Coward pronounced him a man of “grand style.” He had emulated Archie Moore with his dress, and having gone to a hatter to be measured for a bowler, the man told him his head was lopsided. “You mean I’m not perfect!” Clay shouted. “Can’t be.” One other beauty observation was made during the physical exam when the doctor said: “My God, man, you do have an extraordinary arse!”
The fight found Angelo Dundee in the middle of an incident that is still misapprehended. With blurring combinations, Clay dug a deep cut on Cooper’s eye. In the third round, Cooper banged a high-grade left charge off Clay’s jaw, dropping him to the count of two as the bell rang. Unaided, Clay moved back to his corner, where Dundee motioned to the ref to examine a split in Clay’s glove. The story came down through the press and British public that extra time was bought by the request for a new glove. No new glove was produced, no time was lost, yet many at ringside believed that Dundee had slit the glove with a razor to give Clay’s groggy head time to clear. “Never happened,” Dundee told the press. It didn’t help matters that Clay then carved Cooper into a filet. Accusations of tampering with the outcome spread through the crowd, and that part of the press that disliked Clay later embellished the harmless incident. Clay said afterward he got tagged because he had looked down and was distracted by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Having worn a royal red robe into the ring, he was now being hatted with a crown by his brother, Rudy. Dundee stopped the coronation, saying: “Get out of here quick. This crowd’s going to kill us.”
Clay had been in with some genuine bangers, did not for the most part have the usual dreamy skate through the ranks. His narcissism had deceived; he could take a real shot to the mouth. But the problem that would detonate, be one for many years, was still embryonic, known by only a few. “The Louisville people,” Odessa said, “should never have sent him to Miami. They let the Muslims steal my boy.” “No,” Cash told her, “it was that idiot Rudy who did it. ’Member they call collect from out of town and say, ‘This is Rudy X with Cassius X,’ and I say I’m not ’ceptin’ any calls from X’s.” Early on Rudy had been at war with the white press, and Cassius had to tell him to “hush, this is my press.” Dietary preference was also telltale.
Refusing to fly once more just into his career, Clay was on a train with magazine writer Myron Cope, who was digging into a roast loin of pork. “Poke give me a headache,” he said to Cope. “Doctors tell me poke 90 percent cell parasites. Poke ninety percent maggots.” Cope gulped and said: “Very enlightening.” Clay continued: “You let the poke lay two day, and it gets up and crawls. The hawg is an unclean animal.” Cell parasites? Far from his frame of reference. No doctor told him this; it was verbatim from the Black Muslim tract on pork. Who cared about his distaste for pig? What the press and public would come to deplore was one of the linchpins of his future mythology, his repudiation of the Olympic gold medal.
Just back from the Games, barely dropped off by the mayor’s police escort to his home and planning to purchase half the earth, the kid was suffering spiritual occlusion. The colonially shackled were shouting to him from all parts of the globe. That’s Clay, the budding revolutionist at the time, according to the Muslims. Not the kid who walked around town wearing the medal, who slept with it, already a self-promoter to the bone who went glum if not recognized. The medal was not an object, it was his calling c
ard. Here also was a kid that avoided confrontation on the streets, rock throwing and such, and did not, his father said, even like for a long time “to sleep alone in a dark bedroom.” But suddenly he was deep into an incident that threatened his life, an evolving narcissist who could not stand seeing his face marked in the ring.
With the Hell’s Angels, of all people. After a racial incident, Clay and a friend, Ronnie, got into it with a pair of them. The action shifted to the highway to dueling bikes, then crashes, knives, guns, whizzing chains, and more Hell’s Angels. When the Angels, mind you, fled, and with blood flecking his gold medal, Clay went to the side of the Jefferson County Bridge, tore the medal from his neck, and, with rain whipping his face, threw his prize into the dark Ohio River. Trouble was that the thrown medal is only divulged after he became a Muslim, a nice propaganda touch to show that Clay had been turned long before their arrival by the natural evil of the white race. “The medal,” his father said, “was lost or stolen. Plain and simple.” Bundini Brown said, “Honkies sure bought into that one.” It was wonderful material for the press who liked him, and for those who didn’t. I asked Ali about the medal during a trip to Korea years later. He shrugged it off, his eyes suggesting that it had become a decayed ornament of his myth, or that he was bored with such trivia. “Who remembers?” he said; so much for a scenario that once seemed to make smoke rise from ears.
Frazier and Yank Durham did not have to go it alone. They were soon directed to Bruce Baldwin, who ran a large dairy. “I don’t know,” he told them. “I just sell milk.” Even so, the civic-minded Baldwin said he’d see what he could do. He eventually came up with a plan to sell stock in Joe to anyone who would buy it. Businessmen as well as average people jumped on, the price being $250 a share, and 8,000 shares were sold. The group was called Cloverlay, and when Frazier left them each share would be worth $14,250. Among the partners was Jack Kelly, brother of Princess Grace. The deal called for a job, a draw of a hundred dollars a week against 50 percent of purses, and a loan on a house. Like Clay, he was now a walking corporation, and one that never had holidays. Under the whip of Durham there was no respite, seven days a week in the gym soaking his head in brine and with the cannon voice of Durham banging at his every move. Cocksucker, get that left hand out of your ass and throw it! Or, Water, you want water! I got no water! Gimme a big round, then I got water!
For certain, Joe wasn’t ready for bronze. His left hook looped, and his feet did not talk to each other. “You’re fuckin’ hopeless,” Durham shouted. “I’m losing my voice with you. Go home, get some rest, come back and show me why anybody should be backin’ you with their money.” Slowly, Joe began to gain some definition as a puncher. And he could handle severe punishment. The best workmen in Philly drilled him with shot after shot, and he absorbed them like a heavy bag. Yank never had to tell him to stay in on a guy; the ring was a phone booth to him. “That’s it!” Yank would yell. “Stick to him like chewin’ gum. But, hey, cocksucker, throw punches. This is your life. You’re gonna live or die on his chest. You wanna be a catcher, join a baseball team!” So it went, day after day, in the early days in the gym and through his first tentative fights; ten knockouts, one TKO. “We’re gonna step you up,” Yank said.
It was a risky step, given that the opponent was Oscar Bonavena, who fancied himself the next Luis Firpo of the Argentine, the Wild Bull of the Pampas. All agreed that Oscar was wild, certainly a bull. Where they split was whether or not he was a fighter, or even human. His punches were an abomination, slung out as if attached to barbells. He didn’t move, burdened by an ample belly and ankles as big as softballs; his specialty was, with jaw sticking out, the collision rush. In street clothes, though, he could pass for a frayed Italian tenor. In and out of the ring, he was a bane to owners, an untutored oaf whose only desire was to leave the United States with 14 million pesos and enough left over for five estancias just like Firpo. After a fight, Oscar liked to scratch figures on an envelope, rather than talk about the fight he had just made. What was that about? “He’s a banker,” Charlie Goldman, the little man who had trained Marciano, said. “He doesn’t care about sense, just cents.”
But Bonavena had unlimited stamina and never quit. He was twenty pounds heavier than Joe, and he used it. This was Joe’s first big fight, a Garden affair that was supposed to be an escalator to the marquee. Bonavena dropped him twice in the second round, and shareholders back in Philly were ready to call their brokers. The two early knockdowns prefigured what would be a problem for Joe through his career, extreme vulnerability to punches early on until he could segue into a pulsating rhythm; he needed time, sweat. For a while, it looked as if Oscar were just one big horn flipping, then playing with an object. Joe steadily regained his composure, built up volleys through the fight and dug home the hardest shots, causing Oscar to wince and brake his rushes. Joe survived—that’s all you ever did against Oscar—to take a split decision.
“You did fine,” Yank told him.
“Is that all?” Joe asked.
“What? You want a bonus.”
“I thought I was pretty good.”
“You did good to stay off your ass,” Yank said.
Durham was tickled by his resilience; now the sculpture had a face, a big puncher with a chin. Joe knocked out Doug Jones, retired him, then went on to the Canadian-Croatian George Chuvalo, with a jutting rock of a jaw, a face with heavy bones and a nose that told you what he had been doing too long. Before a larger Garden crowd, George came away with a face split like a cantaloupe that had been too long in the sun. Joe burrowed in and took George apart piece by piece, and what was left of him was stretched on his dressing room table, his chest heaving while blood flowed from the sponge going over him. The doctor worked on a cut, shaped like a scimitar, below his right eye, just a slit ready to burst; later the cheekbone was found to be fractured and needed surgery. A gash was slashed on his scalp, and another cut was outside his other eye.
“He didn’t take all that much punishment,” his manager Irv Ungerman, said, looking down on him.
“What the hell you call this?” George mumbled.
“George’s gonna be rich,” he said. “A trail horse. Every kid on his way up is gonna want a piece of Georgie boy.”
“Please don’t say that,” George said hoarsely. “I’m not a trail horse. Not for anyone.”
One of the best people in boxing with too much heart and no dimension, Chuvalo had been stopped for the first time in his career. That night, George sat in a darkened hotel room on Eighth Avenue, the shadows of cars from below riding around the walls. “Felt like I was being hit by four hands,” George said. “He looks easy to hit, but he isn’t easy. Everything moves, his head, shoulders, his body and legs, and he keeps punching and putting pressure. He fights six minutes every round. He doesn’t let you live. Whoever get him from here on will catch hell.” Durham had come by the dressing room to see how George was, and returned to Frazier, saying, “What a mess. Go look at him. If you ever stop bringing that smoke, you’ll look like that. A catcher. Damn.”
Why were catchers like Chuvalo such open, gracious men? The glovemen, the dancers who moved like a clarinet glissando, were strung tight, the megaton punchers moody and secretive like big cats. “Maybe catchers ain’t got no sense,” Ali joked once. Balling his fist, he said, “You sayin’ I ain’t gracious.” The old trainer, Freddy Brown, Chuvalo’s this time out, dwelt upon the subject. His face looked like crushed, old peanut shell. “’Cause catchers,” he said, pausing to disclaim being gracious himself, “they get all that hooman meanness punched out of ’em. ’Cause catchers sit in automats over old coffee all alone waitin’ for someone to say hello, ’cause the only people understand ’em are cut men and their doctors and drunks who know what it is to get worked over and not know it. The one thing a catcher hates is a mirror. Who needs a catcher…they’re a lotta work and messy with all that blood.”
“I want Clay,” Joe said to Yank.
“Clay. What Clay? I d
on’t see a Clay.”
“Come on, Yank…you know.”
“Clay’s gone. He don’t exist.” He paused and said: “Think he’s gonna be Chuvalo, do ya? Clay moves. And your feet don’t. Not the way I want. Fuck Clay. I hope he’s out there and gets the clap.”
But Yank was certain he had the best heavyweight in the business now. To match his optimism, he made a bold move. He stayed out of the WBA heavyweight elimination tournament, an effort to crown its own champion. He threw his lot in with the powerful Madison Square Garden, which wanted its own king. On March 4, 1968, Frazier won the New York heavyweight title by knocking out an old rival, an elusive and timid Buster Mathis, in the eleventh. Jimmy Ellis, Ali’s favorite sparring partner, won the WBA title. He was a natural middleweight, quick and wise, and he had had some wars in that division. But the climb in weight was too much for him, and when it came time to unify the title few thought he could handle Joe, who was now out once more against Bonavena.
Oscar bothered Joe, first because of the first outcome with him, rather ragged, and second because he was certain the Argentine was a racist. Whenever Joe was in the same room with him, Oscar sniffed, acted like he smelled bad air, made a face as if to say, “You niggers all stink.” Frazier controlled him this time in defense of his title, taking a decision in fifteen rounds. “Jesus,” Joe said. “It was like bumpin’ into a refrigerator all night. I was tryin’ to bust that sniffin’ nose of his, it was like poundin’ into concrete.” By February 1970, two months later, Ellis felt like a feather, and Joe floored him in five; he was the heavyweight champion. Or was he? The press tried to goad him about Ali, his claim to the real title. “Clay ain’t got no title,” Yank cut in. “You talkin’ to the title right here.”
Frazier bought a new house for $125,000, had six cars in the garage and a Harley-Davidson bike that infuriated Durham. He had had it for a while, and twice took bad spills on it, injuring his feet and scraping his arms another time. Durham said to him: “Man, look. You got a Chevy, and you wrecked that, then you knocked a Cadillac to pieces. Now it’s a motorcycle. You’ll get killed. What do I have? Stupid fighters. You as bad as Gypsy. He empties all the distilleries in the state. After the Emile Griffith fight, I go lookin’ for him to give him his money breakdown. I found him. He can’t see. He looked at the sheet and fell asleep. I got stupid fighters.”