Blood Brothers (28 page)

When he had completed his mission, Malcolm walked back to his seat near ringside, stopping briefly to chat with the singer Sam Cooke, who was seated close to Malcolm in row seven.
²⁵
He moved to seat number seven, a “lucky seat.” Seven, along with twelve and twenty-one, were the three numbers that Elijah Muhammad taught were special for the Asiatic black man. The date of the fight also had significance. It was the twenty-fifth day of February. Two plus five equaled seven. And the following day would be the thirty-fourth Saviours' Day convention. Again, three plus four equaled seven. Believing fully in the power and meaning of numbers, Malcolm must have smiled, at least inwardly. “I took this to be Allah's message confirming to me that Cassius Clay was going to win,” he later told Alex Haley.
²⁶

W
HEN
C
ASSIUS, WEARING
a stylish thigh-length white robe, slipped through the ropes into the ring, the Convention Center looked as if it were an experiment in economic segregation. The Golden Circle seats were practically full, celebrities packed next to each other and to other wealthy ticket holders willing to pay top dollar just to sit close to them. And far from them, up high in the hinterlands of the arena, sat the
twenty- and fifty-dollar patrons. Between the two classes of spectators was a
cordon sanitaire
, row after row of hundred- to two-hundred-dollar seats that were so sparsely populated that they looked as if they had been designed as a physical barrier.

In his corner, Cassius was nervous, like a person who had ventured too far out on a high limb. When he met Sonny in the middle of the ring for the referee's instruction, he later admitted, “I was scared. Sonny Liston was the greatest fighter of all time . . . and he was fixing to kill me. It frightened me, just knowing how hard he hit.”
²⁷

Meanwhile his opponent came into the ring as unfeeling as a rock. His head had been partially covered by the hood of his white robe, but when the fighters met in the center of the ring and Sonny removed the hood, he fixed Clay with a malevolent stare. In the previous three years Liston had fought four times, winning three by knockouts in the first round and once by knockout in the third round. Barry Gottehrer wrote in
Sport
magazine that Liston commanded the center of the ring: “A former convict, a onetime union goon, and a man who seemed drawn to violence, Liston . . . had assumed the aura of a superman, a destroyer who came to kill.”
²⁸

Clay's trepidation was understandable. Most boxers know fear; the greats rise above it and execute their fight plans anyway. Cassius planned to exploit Sonny's age and overconfidence. He knew that Liston expected another short fight and had not wasted much energy training. Clay's plan was to make Liston chase him, fighting in spurts and circling constantly to his left, away from Liston's lethal left hand. Clay later recalled, “I trained to fight the first two rounds, and to protect myself from getting hit by Liston. I knew that with the third, he'd start tiring, then he'd get worse with every round. So I trained to coast the third, fourth, and fifth rounds. . . . I wanted him to wear himself out and get desperate. He would be throwing wild punches and missing. . . . And so I conditioned myself to fight full steam from the sixth through the ninth round. . . .” Cassius thought by the eighth he would have Liston: “I'd cut him up and shake him up until he would be like a bull, just blind, and missing punches until he was nearly crazy. And . . . when he had thrown some punch and left himself just right, I'd be all set, and I'd drop him.”
²⁹

That, anyway, was the plan.

Waiting in his corner for the opening bell, Cassius danced, gracefully shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Sonny scraped his feet against the canvas like a bull digging into the dirt before charging. At the clang of the bell he attacked, moving toward Clay in a straight line as if they were fighting on a tightrope. Yet while Sonny's assault was linear, Cassius's defense was rococo. His hands at his side, he bounced tantalizing just beyond the champion's reach, slipping, ducking, sidestepping, and pulling back from punches. All the while Cassius circled left, making it difficult for Sonny to land a left jab and impossible to connect with a left hook. Liston lunged like an amateur, missing hooks by several feet. When he got too close, Clay briefly clinched and then quickly pushed him back to a safe distance.
³⁰

For the first half of the round Clay hardly threw a punch. He dominated simply by the artistry of his movement. Forward, backward, side to side, feinting up and down—the complexity of his defense baffled Liston. Cassius, wrote Edwin Pope of the
Miami Herald
, moved “like a kid on a pogo stick.” He backed into corners and then slithered out of them so adroitly that Liston was still moving forward when Clay was already brushing by. The harder the champion tried, the more awkward he looked. Then Clay began to jab.

At first he threw snake-tongue jabs designed to gauge his distance from his prey and get a sense of Liston's reaction. Feeling safe, he tried a few harder jabs, mixing in a couple of cruel, flat-footed lead rights and left hooks that stopped Liston's forward movement. Angered, the champion charged, fighting wildly even after the bell.

Although most of the spectators reacted with a communal exhale to Liston's thunderous misses, the more discerning fight fans watched as Clay dominated the action. Between rounds color commentator Joe Louis was characteristically stingy with his observations—but also perfectly accurate. “I think this is one of the greatest rounds that we have seen in a long time. I think Clay completely outclassed Sonny Liston,” he told his ringside colleague Steve Ellis. But, the Brown Bomber concluded, if Clay got too confident, Liston would knock him out.

Sonny pressed hard in the second. He threw more body punches, hoping to take some of the speed out of Cassius's legs. But he had no better luck reaching Clay's body than he had hitting his head. Cassius remained at a safe distance. “Liston came at me throwing everything,”
he later recalled. “He was going to make up for looking so bad that I had lasted
one
round.”

While Clay moved, he watched Sonny's eyes, seeing in them his opponent's thoughts. “Liston eyes you up when he's about to throw a heavy punch,” he said. “Some kind of way they just flicker.” So Cassius watched, looking for the flicker, the warning to move out of range. But he saw something else—a soft red mouse high on Liston's left cheekbone. He knew that one or two sharp punches would split the bump wide open, proving to the experts, the spectators, and, most important, Liston himself that the champion could bleed like any other fighter. And if he could bleed, he could be defeated.

Cassius threw and landed the first punches of the third. He had planned to coast that round but saw that Liston was hurt and confused. He later explained, “I couldn't waste no time. I needed one more good shot, for some insurance with that eye.” His left jabs angled off Sonny's left eye. Then a right-left combination landed with tom-tom precision. Tex Maule of
Sports Illustrated
thought Cassius worked as methodically as a bullfighter placing
banderillas
.

Suddenly it happened. A right hand split Sonny's cheek “from dark to red as cleanly as a sharp knife cutting through the rind of a watermelon.”

“It didn't take but one good combination,” Cassius recalled. “My left was square on his right eye, and a right under his left eye opened a deep gash. I knew it was deep, the way the blood spurted right out.”

Then Cassius opened up, throwing left and right hooks. While a nearly electric shock jolted the spectators to their feet, the blow-by-blow announcer reacted excitedly. “Sonny wobbled! Sonny wobbled! Cassius has him hurt! . . . Sonny has a big mouse below the left eye! Sonny's cut below the eye! And he's getting hit with all the punches in the book!”

Cassius watched as Sonny pawed at his eye. A cut under the eye, as Jerry Izenberg commented, “doesn't mean shit. But it did to Liston when he was the one who had been cut.” Seeing blood on his glove he rushed forward, throwing all of his weight into wild, wide punches. A few crashed painfully into Clay's body, but most missed, visibly tiring the champion. Jim Murray commented, “The old champ was as clumsy as a guy groping for a light switch in the dark with a hangover.” But
several of the punches that missed whooshed just inches past Cassius's jaw. The thought of what might have been kept the spectators on their feet roaring.
³¹

From his press row seat, Maule watched Clay dismantle the Liston legend. The champion had no answer for Cassius's speed and tactics. At one point in the third round, Maule noticed Liston “leaning heavily against the rope, peering between raised gloves. His expression was puzzled and shocked and almost frightened.” His “arrogant self-confidence,” the cornerstone of his awesome reputation, had vanished. And six feet away, Clay was screaming at him. “Come on! Come on, you bum!” At that moment it was clear to Maule that “Sonny Liston was no longer the heavyweight champion of the world.”
³²
But the fight wasn't over yet.

S
ONNY TRUDGED TO
his corner like an aged sparring partner, collapsing hard onto his stool. His trainer, Willie Reddish, and cut man, Joe Polino, crowded in front of him. Polino immediately went to work on Liston's eye, sponging it clean and smearing Monsel's solution, a thick, caustic substance that's now illegal in boxing, on the wound. Monsel's dries quickly, leaves a black residue, and can be blinding if it gets into a fighter's eyes.

Quite possibly another blinding substance was put on Sonny's gloves. According to Jack McKinney, a Philadelphia sportswriter sitting near Liston and Polino, when Sonny returned to his corner he ordered Polino to “juice the gloves”—that is, smear some illegal substance on the them. In several previous fights Liston's opponents had complained that a painful astringent, perhaps from Sonny's gloves, had gotten into their eyes. McKinney claimed that Liston's corner men had a history of juicing his gloves and did it once again in the Clay fight. “If you look at a film of what went on in Liston's corner between the third and fourth rounds of that fight,” McKinney told writer Thomas Hauser, “you'll see Polino in the ring with Willie Reddish standing behind him, blocking everyone's view. And Polino is at Sonny's knees, rubbing something on his glove.”
³³

Round four belonged to Clay from start to finish. No longer was he moving in jerky, pogo-stick bursts. Still circling Liston, he maneuvered more slowly, confidently, snapping out jabs that seemed to explode in
Sonny's face. Soon Liston's right eye had an angry welt under it, and his nose and lips looked like he was having an allergic reaction to multiple bee stings. Sonny tried to respond, but his jabs consistently missed their target and his hooks mostly punished the air around Cassius's head. Once, however, Liston forced a clinch, and although he could not punish Clay with punches, he rubbed his glove across Cassius's eyes. If his gloves were juiced, this is when he did the damage.

Several sportswriters thought that Cassius's jabs connected with the Monsel's on Sonny's left eye and that then he transferred the substance to his forehead as he wiped off sweat. The “thin skin of the caustic on his forehead,” wrote Maule, “washed down into his eyes between rounds when his trainer, Angelo Dundee, swabbed him with a wet sponge.” The trouble with this view is that Cassius did not brush his forehead with his left, his primary punching hand, during the round. The only hand that swept across Clay's eyes and forehead was Liston's.
³⁴

Nor did Dundee contribute to the problem. By the time Clay reached his corner, his face was already contorted with pain. He felt like “some acid” was in his eyes. “I could just see blurry . . . it felt like fire.” Blinking as if he were trying to clear grit out of his eyes, he told Dundee that something was wrong. Removing his mouthpiece, he screamed at Dundee, “Cut off the gloves. Cut off the gloves.” At the time Cassius believed that someone was trying to fix the fight. “Dirty work afoot!” he told Dundee. “Dirty work afoot,” he repeated to his other corner men.
³⁵

Dundee was not about to cut off Clay's gloves, not in a heavyweight championship contest. He quickly examined his fighter. “I put my pinky in his eyes and then mine,” he recalled. “It burned like hell.” While Cassius complained, Dundee tried another test. He dried Clay's eyes with a towel, sniffing and tasting it when he finished. “There was something wrong. I tasted a strange substance.” Maybe it was from Liston's gloves; perhaps it was something else that had been put on Sonny's body.

Unconcerned with the cause, Dundee focused on the problem. He sponged Clay's eyes, trying to flush out whatever substance was in them. He tried to reassure him, telling Cassius that the pain would pass and that he would be fine. “If you can't see, keep away from him until your eyes clear. This is the big one. Nobody walks away from a heavyweight championship.”

While Dundee was earning his wages in Clay's corner, Black Muslims at ringside had reached their own conclusions about the cause of the problem. Izenberg remembered that Captain Sam and Archie Robinson were out of their seats, watching Dundee wipe Clay's eyes while he convulsed in pain. They clearly believed that Dundee was the culprit. Seeing the rising anger of the Muslims, Chris Dundee signaled to his brother Angelo to wipe his own face with the sponge, which the trainer soon did, telling Archie and Sam, “Look! Look! Look!”

But before that demonstration, he had a fighter to motivate. When the bell rang for round five, Cassius said Angelo pushed him forward and shouted, “This is the big one, daddy. We aren't going to quit now! . . . Run until your eyes clear!
RUN
!”