Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (18 page)

Boxing doesn’t need politicians like Governor Brown to abolish it. It will abolish itself if it persists in its program of anarchy, chaos, and criminal neglect of the thousands who turn to it for escape from the dark corner of discrimination and want in which they find themselves trapped. I hope, for selfish reasons, because I enjoy it, that boxing is not abolished. I’d miss it, the brave, classic encounters. But I would rather miss it, see it abolished, than have it continue down the downward path to Beau Jack’s shoeshine stand or the asylum where Billy Fox sleeps his troubled empty dreams. Boxing is at the crossroads—either it lifts itself or is lifted to some standard of conscience and regard for the boys on whom it feeds, or it will be nine, ten, and out, having lost through apathy and inhumanity its right to survive.

[January 1964]

C
ASSIUS MARCELLUS CLAY WAS
minus six when quietly invincible Joe Louis was demolishing Max Schmeling and sending him on his shield to the land of the self-styled master race. The Joe Louis of Clay’s childhood was another man, a balding, overweight ex-champion getting a boxing lesson from Ezzard Charles and a pathetic thumping from Marciano. Manager-trainer Angelo Dundee, a fixture in Cassius’s corner from the first fight to the last, remembers Clay as a bubbling sixteen-year-old bouncing into the Louisville gym and begging to put on the gloves with Angelo’s flashy light-heavyweight Willie Pastrano. Flying up from Ali’s training quarters last March for the latest and greatest Fight of the Century, Angelo reminisced about his champion. In his voice was the awe one reserves for first meetings with the gods.

“There was something special about him even then,” Dundee remembered. “Something about the way he moved, like the song says. Something about the way he talked. He’s learned a lot, traveling around the world, being with people—he really feeds off people—little people, big people—that’s his college. He doesn’t learn from books—truth is he never really learned to read, but he sucks up knowledge, information, ideas like an
elephant sucks up water. And he trumpets it all out just like an elephant, too.”

“Do you go along with Ali’s description of Ali? Is he the most unusual fighter you ever handled?”

Over the big Cuban cigar in the small Groucho Marx-like face the answer poured forth without a second’s hesitation. “Not just a fighter, he’s the most unusual human being, the most fascinating person I ever met—period.”

In those hectic days before and after “The Fight”—the most widely attended single event in the history of the world—we were to enjoy an intimate look at the man who created the first $20 million rumble through the force of two unique qualities: his physical coordination and his metaphysical personality. A personality as changeable as a March weather report, a psyche simple one moment, complex the next, loving, suspicious, over-generous, self-protective, with flashes of brilliance lighting a dense thunder sky. We were privileged to sit with him in his introspective moments, get caught with him in the midst of crowds that threatened to crush him to death with their love, watch him handle rival hangers-on with the delicacy of a born diplomat, and see him swing from playful child to a man under all the pressures our hyped-up sports world and superstate Pentagon can bring to bear on a quixotic and sensitive nature.

We have said with conceit (in the old-fashioned sense) and also with conviction that, just as a people get the government they deserve, so each period in our history seems to create the heavyweight champion it needs to express itself on the platform where body language and social currents fuse. This seems to have been true of every true knight we have studied in the lists from American slavery’s heavyweight champion Tom Molineaux upward. But never has there been a prizefighter who seemed so to our manner born as Cassius Marcellus Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Ali. His career began, appropriately, in 1960, in the Camelot days, in the time of the Kennedys that welcomed the decade, promised it hope, and
asked for sacrifices in exchange for solutions. The New Frontier. Already antique, the words ring with the sound of pewter respectfully aged and polished for Sunday visitors. Imagine a time before the Bay of Pigs, before Dallas, before Watts, before the attempted Americanization of Indochina, before assassination became an annual horror, Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. … Before the credibility gap of LBJ. Before the Chicago Convention, before Kent State and Jackson State. Before Nixon promised to get us out of the war by invading Cambodia and Laos and North Vietnam.

As our only world-famous athlete of the Shook-Up Decade just past, C.M.C. a.k.a. M.A. received into his beautiful black body every one of the poisoned arrows mentioned above. Wounded by all those arrows of our social misfortune, he refused to die. Hate him for this or despise him for that, he is still our youth, our conscience, our Mark Twain of bitterness and laughter. Of all our champions, gloved and bareknuckled, from the end of the eighteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, he is, in his own words, “the most unusual.” Taunted by the ofays, Jack Johnson taunted back. Accepted by whites who offered him the national laurels and social responsibilities that came with the championship, Joe Louis accepted back. Never quite an Uncle Tom, he was the Good Joe who knew his place. He was the hero but never the author of his allegory.

But the sixties were a whole different number. In a time of prodigies turning on their dads—or rather, tuning out their daddies—ready for the bell, ready to take on all comers in and out of the ring, was that prodigious brown descendant of Henry Clay: Cassius Marcellus Clay, the Fifth Beatle. Before we were prepared for impact—but what were we prepared for in innocent 1960?—the loud laughing mouth in the handsome Greek god of a head was shouting, “Here I come, ready or not!” And who except his fellow teenagers could have been ready for the innovative style that was to revolutionize not only the heavyweight division but the heavy social order that it entertained?

Watching him dance around the best and biggest of the amateurs on his way to AAU and Golden Gloves titles,
cognoscenti
of the game were more amused than impressed. A heavyweight who prances around the ring like a lightweight? Look at the way he bends his dancer’s waist backward to avoid being hit! A tough pro would move in and break his back when he pulled that kid stuff. That just ain’t the way a heavyweight fights. But this was more than fast tactical footwork; it was excessive mobility, sometimes physically unnecessary, a new psychological weapon—hit and run, jab and dance, befuddle, frustrate, and tire the enemy before zeroing in.

Beatle V had begun to create his own pop culture in the ring. Archetype of the young athlete in the Age of Aquarius, he bounced happily to Rome for the 1960 Olympics, dazzling foreign challengers who could not believe a six-foot-three-inch will-o’-the-wisp. Or a bronze Mercury, for the eighteen-year-old original convinced an adoring audience that he was that earlier Roman deity incarnate, combining speed and grace with eloquence, wit, and a mysterious elegance.

Home to Louisville he came wearing his gold medal and his boyish grin, and the white world seemed united with the black in agreement with his own efflorescent image of himself: the prettiest, the wittiest, the greatest. He strutted the streets of his hometown and paused to admire his reflection in storefront windows. “Look at me—I’m beautiful! An’ I’m gonna stay pretty cuz there ain’t a fighter on earth fast enough t’ hit me!” Then he would dance and throw his lightning combinations into the air, or in the direction of a half-scared, half-awed ten-year-old black brother—he has always been drawn to kids, and especially black kids, though this was still 1960 and the pattern was all ego-popping ebullience, a narcissism that might have been irritating but that was instead irresistible because it was so utterly without guile, because it spoke to you with the directness of the wild rose who says, “Look at me, am I not
beauty? Inhale me, am I not perfume?” You could no more resent the natural arrogance of the rose than you could the insouciant “Look, Ma, I’m dancin’!” of young Cassius Marcellus. Of course a rose also has thorns, weapons concealed for its protection. That might have been a warning as to the deeper nature of the brown deity preparing for his pivotal role in the epic drama of the sixties.

Scene 1, Act I, was deceptively harmonious, as truly made epic dramas demand, festooned with integrated hero worship and gratitude seemingly requited.

A group of well-to-do Louisville sports puts its money where its local pride is and sets up a syndicate to sponsor Cassius’s professional career. In return for half the anticipated profits, it pays him a comfortable weekly salary, with a down payment on a tangerine-colored Cadillac, the first of a long line of exotic chariots. His first pro test is a win over a tough white sheriff, Tunney Hunsaker. Clay’s fights are performances—put-ons with blood. As he moves up into the big time, he rhymes his predictions—“Archie Moore will fall in four”—and the ancient light heavyweight, almost thirty years older than the quick-footed bard, suffers the prophecy.

Next we see Clay at, of all places, The Bitter End, a hip Greenwich Village launching pad for avant-garde talent, where he sports a new tuxedo to engage in poetry competition with a lineup of Ezra-Pounded bards, grooving to his impending Garden bout with tough and highly rated Doug Jones. In a style all his own—call it an infectious boxing supplement to the anti-over-thirty spirit of the oncoming youth style—he laughs off all the old champions. Who’s Liston? Louis who? To a generation splitting from its elders and their traditions, he’s “The Greatest.” Under that title he cuts a record of chatter, doggerel, and song, and long before the hard-eyed experts of the ring think he’s championship material or ready for Terrible Sonny Liston, his LP is discovered by teenagers, including my sons, who find in his uninhibited ego-tripping nonsense that indescribable pleasure of being different from us, yes, and
better than us. When my younger son was playing Clay’s platter for the third consecutive time, I tried to cross-examine him as to what was so great about “The Greatest.”

Across the generation net the answer was slapped back into my court in impatient monosyllables, “I dunno, Pop. I jus’ dig ’im. I think he’s cool. I dig the way he dances around those older fighters and makes ’em miss. And the way he rhymes and picks the round. He makes it more fun than in your day. And he’s not a hypocrite. He knows he’s ‘The Greatest.’ So why not say it? Why be a hypocrite? Be honest.”

We retreated strategically, doing a verbal imitation of Cassius’s defensive backbend, sensing the chronological lightning crackling in the atmosphere. We closed his bedroom door, and he went on singing along with Clay. The message was clear: The jib of “our” athletic heroes was cut to modesty. To every age its style, and “ours” (if we had to be consigned to the past) was for winners to hang their heads in mock self-deprecation. “Well, those guys in front of me opened up a pretty good hole and I just ran to daylight and got lucky, I guess.” Did we ever hear a broken-field runner telling the press, “Look, I’m so shifty and so fast, it’s impossible for the defense to lay a hand on me”? It’s true that Joe Louis was asked one too many times how he expected to handle Billy Conn’s speed and boxing ability; but when the fight was over, and the job accomplished, it simply wasn’t Louis’s or “our” style to speak the exuberant truth: “Look, I tried to tell you how great I was, and you chumps wouldn’t listen. There’s never been anything like me in the history of the world.”

Truth, man. Don’t hide behind a lot of well-gee-whizzes like your daddies. Come to think of it, a whole new generation coming of age in the early sixties thought of the preceding generation as slower, dumber, less musical, less honest, more hung-up, less where-it’s-at. Every generation wants to devour its predecessor, and we have only to go back two generations to conjure the Jazz Age of Fitzgerald and
College Humor
when bare knees, rumble seats, ukuleles, bathtub gin, wild parties,
and free verse were creating a new life-style almost as horrifying to the people who grew up in the nineteenth century as the present youth culture is to the parents of Woodstock Nation. The key to that sentence is almost. Maybe it’s because we’re still going through it, but the intensity with which that Now generation wants to rip off daddy and mommy
(vide:
the latest “youth-oriented” epic at your neighborhood moviehouse) makes the Scott-Zelda rebellion seem as dangerous as a game of Post Office.

If the child of our times carries a flower in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other, it is because he is an Oedipus who has read one book too many of Marcuse (or Che or Fanon) and is ready to lay down his guitar and his strobe light to fight for something he defines dimly but deafeningly demands—a better world, an environment that will contain and harmonize our nuclear genius.

And where does this bring Cassius Clay (as he still called himself in his antechampion days)? To Las Vegas in the hot July of 1963. President Kennedy is still safely in the White House. There are some fifteen thousand U.S. Army “advisers” still noncombatant in Vietnam. Liston, first a homeless St. Louis waif, then a tough old jailbird, later a Teamster goon, is heavyweight champion of the world. Yet to burst on the American consciousness is a black intelligence burning with scorn for “the collective white men” and “the so-called American Negro”—Malcolm X.

Cassius Clay has come to Vegas as the heir apparent to the heavyweight throne. He has just butchered the British and Empire champion, Henry Cooper, in five rounds after having been saved by the bell himself at the end of four. Proximity to disaster hasn’t dampened Cassius Clay’s love affair with Cassius Clay. “He thrives on the precipice,” says faithful Angelo Dundee. “He could give Norman Vincent Peale lessons on the power of positive thinking.” And it’s true that the clout of the Cooper hook that put him down has served only to convince young Clay that the most powerful punch in the world can
deflect him but momentarily from his climb to the top of the mountain. He is twenty-one years old, and one of his roommates is Destiny. The other is his brother Rudolph Valentino Clay.