Blood Brothers (20 page)

Robert Lipsyte, a young
New York Times
reporter, asked the question for a sidebar to the Liston-Patterson match. “They'll always give us the opportunity to act like animals,” responded a black lawyer on the picket line. “We're beyond the point where we can get excited over a Negro hitting a home run or winning a championship,” offered another protester. When Lipsyte approached Malcolm, he received more than a comment. The minister dismissed the reporter's inquiry with a brusque reply: “That's a stupid question.” With that, three shaven-headed members of the Fruit of Islam stepped between Lipsyte and Malcolm. They “formed a wall with their chests and walked me into the gutter,” the reporter recalled.
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“The only stupid question is the unanswered question,” Lipsyte shouted. Smiling, Malcolm nodded to his bodyguards to let the reporter through. “I'm pleased to see that the two best men in the sport are black,” he said. “But they'll be exploited, of course, and the promoters will get all the bread. They let a Negro excel if it's going to make some money for them.”

Ending the conversation, Malcolm said he hoped that Liston would “really shake Patterson up.” Floyd had attacked the Nation. Malcolm, the single-minded revolutionary, obviously knew something about boxing.

I
N
L
AS
V
EGAS
, Cassius worked the spectators and sportswriters who were in town for the big fight like he was performing in the showroom. Dressed in a black-and-white houndstooth sports jacket, he strutted around the streets and casinos belittling the other fighters. According to Cassius, Liston would dispose of Patterson and then have to face him. That would spell the end of Sonny's reign of terror. And the world would be blessed with a new titleholder, a pretty champion in stark contrast with the “big ugly bear.” As he told several journalists, “That poor ol' man, he's so ugly, his wife drives him to the gym every morning 'fore the sun comes up, so nobody'll have to look at him around home.”
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Generally Liston endured the verbal assaults, realizing that it was Clay's shtick, part of the promotion scheme to get people interested in a match between them. But Sonny was a violent, unpredictable man who, given his mood of the moment, was apt to take offense. That was precisely what happened a few days before the Liston-Patterson match. Sonny was shooting craps and losing money at the Thunderbird Hotel. “Liston was a mean-tempered son-of-a-bitch,” recalled publicist Harold Conrad, “and he was losing, so naturally he's mad. Liston picks up the dice and throws craps and there's a big silence.”
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Then a sharp voice cracked the hushed stillness. “Look at that big ugly bear; he can't even shoot craps,” called out Clay, leaning against a wall close to the game. Liston glared, rolled again, and once more threw craps. Again the insouciant voice: “Look at the big ugly bear. He can't do nothing right.” It was the voice of a man about to walk the plank.

Liston had reached the limit of his limited patience. Walking over to Cassius, he fixed him with a dead-eyed stare and said, “Listen, you nigger faggot. If you don't get out of here in ten seconds, I'm gonna pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.” A
New York Times
reporter who watched the confrontation said that Liston also slapped Clay hard across his face, but Conrad swore that there was no slap. Just the hard eyes and violent threat and promise that worse was to come.
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Clay walked away. “He scared the shit out of him; you better believe it,” Conrad said. Cassius agreed: “[That] big ugly bear scared me bad.”
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But Cassius returned for the title fight, determined to upstage Liston and Patterson. When the announcer introduced him before the match, he slipped gracefully between the ropes, shook hands with Patterson, and started to walk toward Liston. Halfway there he froze in mock horror, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and fled the ring. The pantomime drew laughter and applause.

“‘Our boy' stole the show completely,” Gordon Davidson wrote a member of the LSG. As it turned out, the fight itself proved no competition for the Cassius Clay Show. In another one-sided match, Liston again knocked out Patterson in the first round. A reporter for
Time
summed up the contest: “Like a man killing a rabbit with a stick, he clubbed the hapless challenger to the canvas—gracelessly and methodically, his sulphur-and-obsidian eyes betraying neither pleasure nor anger.”
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To the dismay of sportswriters, Liston seemed indestructible, a fighter who was likely to hold the title for years. “He's here for keeps,” noted Jim Murray. “It is like finding a live bat on a string under your Christmas tree.” And sportswriters believed that there was no one in boxing who could get rid of him. Liston, commented columnist Arthur Daley, was “arrogant, surly, mean, rude and altogether frightening.” And “nobody,” not even the “Loudmouth from Louisville,” had a chance against him.
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Cassius, however, did not think that Liston was invincible. After the fight, he was loud and obnoxious, at one point grabbing the TV-theater microphone and announcing his intentions to closed-circuit viewers. It was all, Daley thought, a bit shabby. “The exceedingly likable Clay is lousing up his public relations by his boasting and it's high time he eases off and let his fists serve as his spokesman. Unfortunately, they don't speak anywhere near as eloquently as his vocal cords.”
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Yet Clay's ongoing vaudeville routine was going exactly as planned. By mid-1963 he thought of himself more as an entertainer than a boxer, identifying with Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley more than Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. When Tom Wolfe interviewed him, he referred to himself as a “show-business figure.” “I don't feel I'm in boxing anymore. It's show business.” When it was showtime, his “150-watt eyeballs” lit
up and he went into his act. “He wants to be thought of as a man who does the clown act consummately well, which is to say, an actor,” Wolfe observed.
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He aspired not to Liston's title but to Elvis Presley's. He wanted to be the king—king of the world. Pursuing that goal, after attending the title fight he went to Columbia Studios in New York to cut a spoken-word LP entitled
I Am the Greatest.
Cassius claimed that he wrote “everything on the record” and predicted it would outsell comedian Vaughn Meader's enormously popular spoof of the Kennedy family. In truth, the LP was a collaborative production, filled with sophisticated comic material written by Gary Belkin. When they first met, Belkin was shocked by Clay's reading problems. Clay was in fact an undiagnosed dyslexic, and Belkin judged him “a functional illiterate” and set about composing lengthy poems to go with Cassius's basic couplets.
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People assumed that Clay wrote such poems as “I Am the Greatest” and “Will the Real Sonny Liston Please Fall Down,” and that he actually came up with the line that he was so pretty that his “face should be considered a natural resource” and preserved by the secretary of the interior, as opposed to Liston, whose face “should be appropriated by the Bureau of Wildlife.” But he did not create his material any more than Presley wrote the hundreds of songs he recorded. What Clay provided was the Louisville Lip character, and during the production of the record he worked diligently to weave the material into his persona. He memorized poems, questioned the comic material, and helped shape the finished product. That many of the cuts became permanent routines in his repertoire demonstrates how carefully and successfully he played his part.

Away from the studio, accompanied by the ever-present Rudy and a few black friends, Cassius ventured into Harlem. There, he attended NOI rallies and had private meetings with Malcolm. By the summer of 1963, after three years of feature stories about him in
Time, Life, Ebony, Jet, Sports Illustrated,
and other national publications, scores of television appearances, and his photograph in hundreds of newspaper stories, Clay's face was too well known to go unrecognized.

On August 10, he attended an outdoor rally on the corner of 115th Street and Lenox Avenue, where Malcolm spoke to a large audience about the upcoming March on Washington. The Nation, he said, would
not participate in the march, which he suggested had been hijacked by the Kennedy administration. “When the white man found out he couldn't stop [the march], he decided to join it,” he claimed. It was just another example of “black men with white hearts,” and of the fact that Martin Luther King and his ilk had too cozy a relationship with white politicians.
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An undercover agent from the NYPD's Bureau of Special Services spied Cassius Clay at the rally, listening intently to Malcolm. Now the top-ranked heavyweight contender, Clay was far from being an invisible man.
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O
N
A
UGUST
28, 1963, the entire country focused its attention on the nation's capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The television networks assigned hundreds of people to cover the march, setting up dozens of cameras between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. On the morning of the demonstration, more than two thousand buses, twenty-one special trains, ten chartered flights, and armies of cars converged on the capital. From all over the country, thousands of people, young and old, black and white, came to DC to witness a historic occasion.
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Elijah Muhammad had forbidden his followers from joining. In the months leading up to the Freedom March, FOI captains reminded the faithful that there were serious consequences for violating his edict. In Chicago, Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff issued a directive: “Let me put it more clearly to you. Do not participate in these demonstrations. If you are caught, you will wish you were dead.”
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Although Malcolm publicly maintained that no Black Muslim would attend the march, he could not resist being near the center of the action. After Muhammad granted him special permission, he traveled to the capital to witness what he called “the Farce on Washington.” In the lobby of the Statler Hilton Hotel, he engaged young demonstrators and reporters, offering political opinions, but never divulged his frustrations with the Nation's disengagement from the movement.
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Later that afternoon, sitting in his hotel room, he watched Martin Luther King deliver his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, an idealistic vision of interracial brotherhood. When reporters asked him what he thought about the Freedom March, Malcolm compared it to a sporting
event—“the Rose Bowl game, the Kentucky Derby, and the World Series”—the kind of event where people went simply to say, “I was there.” The Freedom March had done nothing but create false hope for blacks, he insisted.
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A few weeks later, Malcolm traveled to Chicago to visit Elijah. Before he arrived at the mansion, C. Eric Lincoln, the author of
The Black Muslims in America
, waited in the foyer to meet the Supreme Minister. He wondered how Elijah would receive him since many Muslims had expressed dissatisfaction with his book. One angry minister told him that he wanted to “burn them as fast as they came off the presses.” But Elijah greeted him with a firm handshake and welcoming eyes, though he did not smile. In fact, Lincoln thought, he had never seen him smile—except moments later, when Malcolm entered the living room. Elijah embraced Malcolm, kissing him gently on both cheeks, and asked about Betty and their children. Lincoln never suspected friction between them. “There was genuine affection here between these two,” he observed, “not unlike the affection between a father and son who has done well for the family name.”
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If Malcolm felt uneasy being around Elijah, he masked his anxiety. Lincoln sensed that the bond between them was stronger than ever. After they all sat down, the Messenger lectured the ministers while Malcolm dutifully wrote notes, transcribing his every word. Since their meeting in Phoenix, Malcolm had submitted, “getting [Elijah's] permission before doing anything, like he should have been doing all the time.” Lincoln was unaware that Malcolm's faith in the Messenger had already begun to erode.
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The next day, September 15, Malcolm learned that the Ku Klux Klan had bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. As the father of three daughters and another on the way, he could well imagine the pain the parents suffered. He bristled at calls for turning the other cheek. The bombing was a brutal reminder, he said, that the March on Washington had failed. “The Negroes spent a lot of money, had a good time, and enjoyed a real circus or carnival atmosphere,” he told a reporter. “Now that the show is over, the black masses are still without land, without jobs, and without homes. . . . Their Christian churches are still being bombed, their innocent little
girls murdered. So,” he asked the writer, “what did the March on Washington accomplish? Nothing!”
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S
INCE
J
ULY, WHEN
a reporter from the
Chicago Sun-Times
caught Cassius Clay leaving Mosque No. 2, writers had been investigating his involvement with the Nation, probing for clues about his relationship with Malcolm. When he was not training, he visited the Nation's mosques, though he never advertised his presence at Muslim rallies in the same way that he did his attendance at Sonny Liston's title fights.

In late September, Clay attended an Oakland conference on “The Mind of the Ghetto,” organized by Don Warden, chairman of the Afro-American Association, a Black Nationalist group. Warden invited political figures, celebrities, and athletes, including Clay and Malcolm. Although Malcolm did not attend, John Shabazz, minister of the Los Angeles mosque, represented the Nation. When a reporter questioned Clay about his position on the civil rights movement, he denied interest in joining the struggle. “I don't stand for anything,” he said. “I'm not a politician. I don't talk against anything. I'm a peaceful man.” After the writer asked him about his affiliation with the Nation, he replied, “It's like I said though, I don't identify myself with anybody—anybody except Cassius Clay.”
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