Blood Brothers (15 page)

Liston charged. Clay scrambled back through the ropes to the security of the ring. What had started good-naturedly as a publicity stunt had not gone well for Sonny, and he was angry. “I'm not training for Patterson—I'm training for you,” he fumed as he left the gym. Clay smiled. It was a small, early victory in his campaign against Sonny Liston.

O
N
M
ARCH
6, a large gathering of reporters and radio and television men greeted Clay when he stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station. Wearing a brown sports jacket and gray slacks, he looked fresh after a long ride from Miami, but his voice was subdued, at least at first. Was he surprised that the fight had attracted so much interest? a sportswriter asked. “That's only natural,” he said matter-of-factly. “The fans know what they want. They're coming to see me—to see the greatest.”
¹⁹

It was the beginning of operation hype, but his quips were not covered in the
Times
,
Daily News
,
Herald Tribune
,
Journal-American
, or any other New York City newspaper. The timing of Clay's campaign could hardly have been worse. Cassius, the sportswriter's dream, was silenced by an army of linotype workers, photoengravers, paper handlers, office boys, and other members of Local No. 6 of the International Typographical Union and a patchwork of affiliated organizations. They had gone on strike against the owners and publishers of New York City's seven major newspapers, walking off their posts on December 8, 1962, and not returning for 114 days.
²⁰

For New York sports fans and gossip devotees, it was like a citywide blackout. The strike cut off the circulation of 5.7 million daily and 7.2 million Sunday newspaper copies in a city where newspapers dictated
the rhythms of millions of lives. No Arthur Daley and Gay Talese (
New York Times
) or Red Smith (
New York Herald Tribune
) with their morning coffee; no Dick Young (
New York Daily News
) or Walter Winchell (
New York Daily Mirror
) for their subway rides to work; no Milton Gross (
New York Post
) for their subway rides home; no Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon (
New York Journal-American
) or Westbrook Pegler (
New York World-Telegram & Sun
) as they relaxed after dinner. Although on February 28, 1963,
New York Post
publisher Dorothy Schiff abandoned the other owners and resumed the publication of her paper, the rest of the magnates grimly fought the unions.

Of all sports, the strike had the greatest impact on boxing. The major professional and college team sports have their seasons, with game schedules and times readily available and widely distributed. But boxing has no such predictability. Matches are made and scheduled willy-nilly, and promoters depended on sportswriters to promote the contests by visiting training camps, interviewing combatants, and generally creating the sense that each upcoming battle promised to be the greatest grudge fight since the Paleolithic era. It was the sportswriters who awarded the pugilists personality quirks, created heroes and villains, and imbued the sport with drama.

Better than any other fighter, Clay understood the role of sportswriters and sought to give them what they wanted when they wanted it. Arriving in a city where he had an upcoming fight, he acted like he was running for mayor, prepared to talk to every voter and kiss every baby. There was hardly a newspaper, television, or radio reporter whose attention he did not covet. “The only ones I send away,” he admitted, “are those guys from the little radio stations—they put you on at 4:30 in the afternoon when no one's at home and no one's listening.”
²¹

But with New York newspaper writers carrying placards on picket lines, Cassius had to find other ways to spread his message. Before the strike, television news was hardly worthy of the name, mostly providing fifteen minutes of local tragedies, weather reports, and a few game scores. What hard news the telecasters reported was what they read in the morning
New York Times
. The strike presented them with a challenge and an opportunity. WCBS added fifty thousand dollars to its weekly news budget and hired eighteen news reporters. WNBC expanded from
a fifteen-minute newscast to a half-hour. The city turned to television for its news as never before.
²²

Cassius's routine played even better on screen than in print. The week before the fight he appeared on
The Today Show
,
The Tonight Show
, and once again on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Showing no physical evidence of his profession, he was polite, articulate, and handsome, looking and sounding like the anti-boxer. Since the death of Benny “the Kid” Paret, news reports and documentaries had fed Americans a succession of stories about punch-drunk, broken-nosed, down-at-the-heels fighters. But now here was Cassius Clay, looking more like a movie star than a boxer, talking to Johnny Carson, Hugh Downs, and Ed Sullivan, demonstrating complete poise and humor.
²³

He also made personal appearances designed to attract media attention. On March 7, just before he went on
The Tonight Show
, he headlined a unique media event. Dressed for the occasion, he ventured down to the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village for a noontime poetry reading contest. He looked as out of place in the legendary coffeehouse as Allen Ginsberg would have appeared in the ring at Madison Square Garden.
²⁴

In front of an international audience of writers and curious out-of-towners, a group of poets read their verse. Unimpressed with the poets, Cassius read his own predictable doggerel:

       
The word's been passed around

       
That I'm a very charming guy,

       
The greatest fighter that ever lived,

       
And I'll gladly to tell you why.

       
My secret is self-confidence—

       
A champion at birth;

       
I'm lyrical, I'm fresh, I'm smart—

       
My fists have proved my worth.
²⁵

Laughter and applause punctuated his reading, and the
New York Post
's Pete Hamill acclaimed him “the messiah of the poetry racket,” who had “annihilated, with one terrible stroke, the frail world of Beat
Poets, Square Poets, Academic Poets, and Zen Poets, anti-poet poets, jazz poets, and lady poets.”
²⁶

Throughout the week, Clay worked every angle. From TV shows to standing on street corners and singing his own praises, he did not miss an opportunity to promote himself. His one-man publicity campaign demonstrated that he was just as unique as he claimed. There had been “television boxers” before him, but he was the first boxer who belonged to the television age, the first to understand how to use the medium to project an image and sell an event. Like Chubby Checker, father of the twist dance craze, Cassius realized that fame was just a matter of delivering the same message ten thousand times. A. J. Liebling noted, “The more he bragged, the more of a drawing card he became, although he certainly did not understand the mechanics of this phenomenon.” But Liebling was wrong. Clay fully understood; he knew that his words created a media buzz that produced a honey jar of cash.
²⁷

Doug Jones knew it as well. While Clay worked to build the gate, Jones quietly trained. With what one reporter described as “a catfish-style mustache” and another called a “cueball”-shaped head, he had the look of an interesting character, but he said very little to bring attention to himself. Asked if he resented Clay's constant verbal attacks, he shook his head no. “Let that Cassius keep talking. The more he talks the more money I'll make.”
²⁸

By Wednesday, March 13, the morning of the fight, Clay had had his lengthy say. Unable to sleep, he was up and dressed by six thirty a.m. Slipping unobserved from his room at the Plymouth Hotel, he walked two blocks to Madison Square Garden and looked at the large marquee: tonight—boxing—clay vs. jones. At the ticket booth he saw a smaller sign that read, “Sold Out.” For the first time in six years, all of the Garden's 18,732 seats were sold out. It was the first time they had ever sold out ahead of time. It was tangible proof of his assertions that he was the savior of boxing, hard evidence that the sport was not dying. It was the stuff of his childhood dreams of fame and wealth.

As he had said earlier in the week, “That Jones! That ugly man! I'll annihilate him! You know what this fight means to me? A tomato-red Cadillac Eldorado convertible with white leather upholstery, air conditioning and hifi. That's what the [Louisville Sponsoring Group] is
giving me for a victory present. Can you picture me losing to this ugly bum Jones with that kind of swinging car waiting for me?”
²⁹

Clay walked into the weigh-in that afternoon with a two-inch-wide strip of adhesive tape over his mouth, signaling that he was through talking, though he was not done communicating. When Jones stepped onto the scale, Cassius held up four fingers. Doug Jones, a fighter in his prime who had never been stopped, would fall in four, just like old Archie Moore.
³⁰

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
, as Cassius was resting in his room, he received an unusual visitor. A black man with a mobile face that displayed his every emotion walked into the room, which was easier than it sounds because people were always coming and going around the boxer. He took one look at the cluttered room with clothes, fight equipment, and shoes tossed about haphazardly and began to give orders. “Who takes care of you?” he asked. Clay pointed to a white man seated in the corner, smoking a cigar. The stranger then barked orders at the white man. He said Cassius's shoes needed polish, suggesting precisely the brand of wax to use, and that the boxer's socks needed washing, and that the white man better move fast because “a fighter packing people into the Garden up to the rafters and the seats where before there was nothin' there but
pigeons
” needed to be serviced just right.
³¹

The stranger was Drew “Bundini” Brown. Like Clay himself, Bundini was a larger-than-life self-creation. He had walked uninvited into the boxer's world and decided to stay. When Clay left to go to Madison Square Garden in a limousine, Bundini sat in the backseat with him. When the traffic slowed the limo to a crawl, Bundini ordered the driver to maneuver onto the sidewalk. When several policemen came running, Bundini told them that Cassius was in the car and “if it weren't for him, they wouldn't be out there on duty. Sugar Ray, they let
him
park on the sidewalk.” Everything he said made sense, and everyone seemed to follow his orders. It seemed only natural that he floated alongside Cassius past the Garden's entrance and into his life.

Unlike Cassius and Bundini, A. J. Liebling did not float into the Garden. He struggled through a throng of people coming in the opposite direction. “They were coming away from it because the house was
sold out—a report that they had refused to believe—and the cops were chasing them out of the lobby, where they were blocking the entrance.” Remembering the meager turnout the year before for Clay's first New York match, Liebling reflected on the drawing power of this poet boxer, whom he had dubbed Apollo, the god of truth, prophecy, music, and poetry. “Could Paul Valéry have filled the Vel' d'Hiv,” he wondered, “or Keats Her Majesty's Theatre?”
³²

The greatest venue in pugilism bubbled with life, and in the lobby Liebling thought that he saw the life-size bronze statue of Joe Gans, a champion from early in the century, break “into a sweat of excitement.” The reporter had not seen such a high time since the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano sent the great Joe Louis into permanent retirement. Arriving early to his seat in the press row, he watched the Garden fill from the rafters to ringside. Sitting nearest the action and pulling hard for Cassius were the elite of Louisville—Ross Todd and his father, Jouett Ross Todd, up from their winter home in Nassau; Mr. and Mrs. Worth Bingham, down from a skiing vacation in New England; and, of course, William Faversham, Gordon Davidson, and other members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group.
³³

Not far from the august group of southerners were dignitaries from black America. Legendary baseball player and activist Jackie Robinson sat near tennis great Althea Gibson, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche was not far off. Malcolm X was also perched at ringside, though none of the sportswriters commented about how unusual it was that one of the two most recognizable figures in the Nation of Islam attended the fight. Looking around the Garden, Malcolm realized that all of the people there had come to see one man: Cassius Clay. He had never seen so many people drawn to an event because of a single black man. Not even Elijah Muhammad, he thought, could fill the Garden.
³⁴

Malcolm was joined by athletic luminaries and politicians, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, and members of the Joint Legislative Committee on Professional Boxing, down from Albany to get a closer look at the sport's nefarious activities. They were all there to see if Apollo, a solid 3–1 favorite, would finish the shaven-headed fighter with a catfish mustache in the fourth round.
³⁵

It was a curious fight crowd, not so much pro-Jones as anti-Clay. Cassius had played the villain during his promotion of the fight, and
the spectators treated him as such as he made his way to the ring. Jeers trailed him as he slid between the ropes. In what Liebling labeled “the most emphatic anti-poetry demonstration in American history,” the spectators registered their disapproval for Clay's act.
³⁶