Blood Brothers (30 page)

Had Clay made that choice by the early morning hours of February 26? When he ate vanilla ice cream and Malcolm whispered in his ear, had he made the hard political decision that would inevitably alter both men's lives? Was it possible for Jim Brown and Malcolm X to have such different interpretations of Clay's intentions that morning? Given Cassius's avoidance of personal disagreement and his reluctance to say anything in a one-on-one personal exchange that would disappoint a friend, he might have allowed Malcolm to hear and believe what the minister desperately wanted to hear and believe. Or he may have told both Brown and Malcolm versions of the truth and kept the full truth to himself.

Huston Horn of
Sports Illustrated
reported on some of the post-fight events, though he knew nothing about Clay's conversations with Malcolm and Brown. But the thought that Malcolm was even there led to a sagacious conclusion. From Cassius's activities at the Hampton House two things were certain, Horn wrote: “His tastes are just as simple, and his thoughts on life just as murky as they have been for years.”
¹²

S
OMETIME SHORTLY AFTER
two a.m., while Cassius was nodding half-asleep in bed, someone informed him that a score of neighbors were waiting in his yard for him to return to his bungalow. “They are the people I mean something to,” he said before dressing and departing the Hampton House. Once back at his house, he spent fifteen minutes or so shaking hands and signing autographs before announcing that he was calling it a night. He had another press conference in the morning and wanted to get at least a few hours of sleep.
¹³

If Cassius had gotten to sleep, a doubtful proposition, he hadn't been in that state for long when a loud knock at the door disturbed everyone in the champ's bungalow. Three Los Angeles reporters—Brad Pye and Doc Young of the
Los Angeles Sentinel
and Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
—just happened to be driving up in “Colored Town” and by chance saw a single bulb glowing through a frosted glass window.
All three knew Clay, and they seemed blissfully unconcerned about the propriety of the visit.
¹⁴

Stretched out on a couch, wearing only white undershorts and gray socks, Cassius politely ignored the time and the intrusion and said, “Come in.”

This was no scene out of a Hollywood boxing movie, thought Murray. In
The Champion
, the Kirk Douglas character wins the title and immediately moves uptown—the best booze, broads, and clothes that money could buy. In Cassius's low-rent dwelling, however, there were “no crowds in mink and cigar smoke, no clink of glasses, no loud music and louder sycophantry.” There was just the exhausted boxer and a small circle of half-asleep friends.

Tired, occasionally rubbing his stomach, Cassius began to talk, “slowly, like a man on his first visit to a psychiatrist.” He talked about Sonny—“I jes' played with him, jes' played with him, is all.” About Angelo pushing him out of the corner for the fifth round—“This is for the heavyweight championship of the world. Get out there and fight.” But mostly about God and his own providential journey to the title. “I'm not around rich people. I'm the champ now and God wants me to be champ.” God, he believed, had a plan for him.

At two thirty Archie Robinson arrived, looking angry that a white reporter (Murray) was taking up Cassius's time. “What's this? A press conference at 3:30 in the morning?” he said without checking his watch.

“I'm the boss here,” Clay said in a near whisper.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Robinson responded. But the reporters departed nonetheless.

“That man sure puts a pall on a place when he comes in to see Cassius, doesn't he?” Pye said.

“For a fact,” Young answered.

Around Malcolm X Cassius bubbled with life, a mixture of pleasure and mischief. But Archie Robinson prompted a wholly different vibe. It was like
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Cassius seemed like one of them. One of the pod people.

T
HE RESULT OF
the Clay-Liston match shocked reporters. Some even mused in their columns about the possibility that the fight might have been fixed. But the history of boxing is full of upsets, and Clay's
victory over Liston was no more improbable or unexpected than James J. Braddock's 1935 defeat of Max Baer. What was more startling than the result, however, was the traditional day-after press conference with the champion.

During Joe Louis's reign, such events had been relaxed affairs. Joe would show up at Mike Jacobs's Madison Square Garden office, take a seat in the large red leather chair, leaf through the morning's funny pages, eat an apple, and field reporters' questions. Joe never really said much, but he managed to give the sportswriters at least a germ of a story. As often as he tried to explain what it was like to be the most feared fighter in the world, he could never exactly convey how it felt to be Joe Louis.

There was nothing informal or cozy about Clay's late-morning press conference on February 26. Less than twelve hours before, just after defeating Liston, Cassius had enough energy left to take on the press, excoriating them repeatedly “in a rude arrogant speech” for backing the wrong fighter. In several mean, bitter tirades, he'd told the writers that they should hang their heads in shame, repent for their literary transgressions, and beg him for forgiveness. “You hypocrites,” he had shouted. “What are you going to say now?”
¹⁵

Clay's words prompted reporter Jack Kofoed to respond, “He probably never will become a great fighter because a man with his ridiculous egoism isn't likely to learn. This man is neither a credit to the game he plays nor his race.”
¹⁶

His race—it was that, even more than his words, that lent a cutting edge to the conference. That morning, in an article about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims, Mike Handler had reported in the
New York Times
that Clay was “a Muslim and a close friend of Malcolm.” Printed in the journalistically conservative
Times
, a paper that prohibited its reporters from editorializing in their articles, the statement carried added weight. Although it was widely known that Cassius was sympathetic with the Nation of Islam, he had not yet admitted publicly that he had formally joined the organization.
¹⁷

He arrived at the Veterans Room at the convention center punctually at eleven a.m., looking and acting as if he were applying for admission to Princeton University. Dressed in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a white button-down Oxford shirt, he answered
questions in a singularly non–Cassius Clay manner. Instead of displaying his usual 150-watt eyes and P. T. Barnum mouth, he began talking in a quiet voice, his eyes focused on his feet, speaking barely above the sound a soft wind makes rustling through the leaves of a tree.

“Speak louder, Cassius. We can't hear you,” several reporters called out. “In the past no one had to give that sort of urging,” Arthur Daley wrote in his column. Clay's personality pivot shocked him. This was the day for the fighter to crow and preen, to tell the world once again that he was the greatest. Instead, Clay wore “a discernible cloak of humility,” eschewing the sound and fury of the day before and now speaking with a “quiet modesty.”
¹⁸

“I'm through talking,” he began. “All I have to be is a nice, clean gentleman. I've proved my point. Now I'm going to set an example for all the nice boys and girls. I'm through talking.” It was as if the Louisville Lip had died, or had never existed at all. It had just been a role Clay played, a part he created and mastered, but it was not who he was. He did it to breathe life into his sport and to promote his career. “My mouth overshadowed my ability,” he admitted.
¹⁹

He confessed that he did not even enjoy boxing. “I only fight to make a living, and when I have enough money I won't fight anymore. I don't like to fight. I don't like to get hurt. I don't like to hurt anybody.” All he wanted was to be the champion for the people, especially the dispossessed—“the poor folk and the drunks and the bums.” “I just want to make people happy.” The reporters had heard variations of Clay's statements before: the desire to do good, make a difference, get out of the brutal sport before it robbed him of his senses. They were promises other fighters had made and failed to keep.

For a while, Cassius discussed the odd twists and turns of the match. He admitted he had wanted to quit before the fifth round and actually felt sorry for Liston. “You people put too much load on him. You built him up too big and now he has such a long way to fall.” As he talked, the older writers nodded their heads and smiled in agreement. “If he sticks to this pose, he . . . can win a vast amount of popularity,” Daley wrote.
²⁰

Soon most of the sportswriters had what they needed and departed the room to attend Liston's press conference or to file their stories. The bombast and poetry was all an act, they would write, and the real Cassius
Clay was a clean-living, thoughtful young man whose only harm was playing a role too well.

When the room was less than half full, a younger reporter asked an essentially forbidden question. “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” For a moment Clay looked shocked, then angry. The unwritten code of the sports world ruled some questions out of bounds. Unless the athlete raised the subject, reporters did not ask questions about politics, religion, drinking, or marital infidelities. Now someone was asking Clay if he belonged to what most white Americans and some black Americans believed was an extreme religious cult.

Immediately Clay's countenance shifted from quietly respectful to pugnaciously defiant. “Card-carrying, what does that mean?” he challenged. It sounded like he was being accused of belonging to the Communist Party.

Then, without directly answering the question, he defended the Nation of Islam and addressed the expectations of white Americans. “I believe in Allah and in peace. I don't try to move into white neighborhoods. I don't want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not a Christian any more.” As for the Nation: “I go to a Black Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see that there's no smoking and no drinking and their women wear dresses down to the floor. And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn't go there. Well, there must be something in there if you don't want me to go there.”
²¹

Robert Lipsyte's
New York Times
report captured the moment when the worlds of sport and politics collided. “There was a trace of antagonism when [Clay] refused to play the mild and socially uninvolved sports-hero stereotype, and began to use the news conference as a platform for socio-political theory.”

That was exactly what Cassius and Malcolm had discussed—using the title as a venue to address political issues, not as an accomplishment to curry favor with white America. Floyd Patterson made liberal Americans optimistic about the future when he spoke quietly of the need for peace, cooperation, and integration. He played by the existing rules of the sports world, presenting himself as an acceptable role model for black and white youths. Clay refused to play that part in the heavyweight morality play. “In the jungle, lions are with lions and tigers are
with tigers, and redbirds stay with redbirds and bluebirds with bluebirds,” he said. “That's human nature too, to be with your own kind. I don't want to go where I'm not wanted.”

Cobbled from the teaching of Elijah Muhammad and rhetoric of Malcolm X, Cassius had made variations of this speech before, but never as the heavyweight champion, a position of some authority. Taking advantage of the moment, he spoke his mind freely and boldly. He defended Malcolm: “If he's so bad why don't they put him in jail?” He addressed his support for Malcolm's teachings: “I catch so much hell, why? Why me when I don't try to bust into schools or march around or throw bricks?”

Clay's rambling defense of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X was an example of his main point, one that Lipsyte used in his lede the next day. Glancing at the group of mostly white reporters—some angry, others shocked, a few supportive—Clay asserted, “I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be who I want.”

It was a revolutionary statement, announcing his emancipation from the prescribed role for “Negro” athletes. In a shockingly radical declaration that amounted to a manifesto, he said that he was neither a “Negro”, a Christian, nor an advocate of racial integration. He was
black
, a Muslim, and a separatist.
²²

S
HORTLY AFTER THE
press conference ended, Rudy Clay and Sam Saxon arrived together at the Chicago Coliseum for the Saviours' Day Convention. About two thirty, the celebration began with Louis X, Malcolm's replacement as master of ceremonies, introducing a procession of speakers honoring Elijah Muhammad. Rudy was not an impressive orator nor was he considered an important figure in the Nation, but on this day—the day after his brother became heavyweight champion of the world—he found himself center stage, standing at the podium just a few feet away from Elijah. “Cassius sends the greetings of As-Salaam Alaikum to all his Brothers and Sisters at Saviours' Day,” Rudy announced. “He said he'd like to thank each and every one for the prayers they have said for his success in winning the heavyweight title.”
²³

Rudy's speech was part of Elijah Muhammad's carefully orchestrated plan. Placing Clay's brother on the dais, surrounded by the Nation's officials, conveyed a clear message: Malcolm believed that he and Cassius
shared a brotherhood, but Elijah intended to make Cassius and Rudy feel like they were part of the royal family. Muhammad reminded the five thousand followers in attendance, “I have been given the keys to your salvation and I can send you to either [heaven or hell].” When he announced that Cassius belonged to the Nation of Islam, the crowd roared with cheers and applause. Elijah beamed with pride. “I'm so glad that Cassius Clay admits he is a Muslim.”
²⁴