Blood Brothers (9 page)

He was a self-made product, and he knew it. Frequently, he said, people he knew approached him saying, “Cassius, you know
I'm
the one who made you.” Maybe all they had done was give him a lift to the gym or a piece of advice. But they wanted to make sure that Cassius did not forget them when he started to write his name on the back of large checks. Number one on the list of the claimants was his father, who talked endlessly about the sacrifices
he
made and privations
he
suffered to allow his son to reach his dreams. Cassius understood his father's motivations: “If I had a child who became rich and famous, I know I'd want to cash in too, like my daddy, and I guess more teen-agers ought to realize that they owe their folks.”
¹⁴

Yet the truth of the matter was that his father did not make him. “When you want to talk about who made me,” he told a reporter, “you talk to me. Who made me is
me
.”
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“There's only one Cassius Clay,” Dundee said. “Thank God.” Cassius was as unique as Coca-Cola, and like the Atlanta soft-drink maker, he branded and marketed himself. Often when fighters trained they advertised the training camp or a hotel where they worked out. Sonny Liston frequently wore Thunderbird Hotel T-shirts, giving a plug to the Las Vegas hotel. Grossinger's, the popular Catskills resort, was another favorite of boxers in training, and the name adorned such heavyweights as Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson.

Shortly after he began training at the 5th Street Gym, Cassius started wearing crisp white T-shirts with his name printed in the front in bold red Spencerian script, reminiscent of the Coca-Cola logo. No other athlete in America exercised, ate, and slept in a shirt branded with his own name. Clay was years ahead of his time. The shirts revealed a conscious effort not only to market his name but also to inscribe that name onto the landscape of American popular culture through the art of self-promotion.
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He had a genius for marketing himself. In September 1961
Sports Illustrated
started work on their first feature about Clay, assigning Huston Horn to write the piece and Flip Schulke to contribute a full-page photograph. For most of a week Schulke trailed Clay, snapping pictures of him training in the 5th Street Gym, eating with friends, and mingling with the residents of Overtown. During a lunch at the Famous Chef Café, Cassius told Schulke that he wanted to broaden his base of appeal. “I want to get into
Life
,” he said. Schulke, who had recently shot some underwater photos for the magazine, replied, “I really don't know how I can get you into
Life
.”
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The next day when Schulke arrived at the Sir John Hotel, Cassius jumped into the pool, splashing around and throwing punches in the water. The photographer was intrigued by the trail of bubbles the punches made. They looked like the tail of a comet and reminded him of the underwater waterskiing photos that had appeared in
Life
. When he mentioned it, Cassius immediately invented a story telling the photographer that the underwater work was part of his training regiment. It increased his punching power and hand speed. He had learned it from an old trainer, he said.

Schulke came to the Sir John Hotel the following morning carrying scuba gear and an underwater camera to photograph Clay's unusual
workout. Standing on the bottom of the pool in a perfect fighter's pose, throwing punches that created contrails of bubbles, Cassius smiled and mugged for the camera. The results were terrific, and
Life
published them in the September 8, 1961, issue of the magazine, several weeks before the
Sports Illustrated
feature appeared.
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Clay's ability to take Gorgeous George's shtick and make it his own, his intuitive understanding of precisely what reporters wanted and needed, and his ingenuity in breaking into
Life
magazine all attested to his decision not only to reinvent himself but also to redefine how others saw him. He would not be another Floyd Patterson, quiet, dignified, fearful of making a false step or offending white America. Nor would he be another Jackie Robinson, speaking out about civil rights. His search was for autonomy in a country that had historically denied black men that basic freedom.

In this sense he identified with James Baldwin, the black writer who defied every simple definition. “I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and to polish me off that way,” he wrote in his personal manifesto,
The Fire Next Time
. “And yet, of course, at the same time, I
was
being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a ‘thing,' a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way.
And it does not matter what the gimmick is
.”
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Cassius's gimmick—and his mask—was the Louisville Lip persona. “I'm the boldest, the prettiest, the most superior, most scientific, most skillfullest fighter in the ring today,” he told Howard Tuckner of the
New York Times
. “Man, it's great to be great.” Tuckner responded by calling him “a professional loudmouth” and a “windbag.” But it was Clay who determined and defined the conversation, “aware that the world may despise, but never ignore, a braggart.” Since, as Cassius said, “Floyd Patterson's got nothin' to say, and Sonny Liston can't say anything,” he would determine the future of boxing. Whatever Americans, white or black, desired, he would be the man in the glass booth. All eyes would follow him.
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That is, as long as he continued to win.

T
HE BOMBAST OF
Clay's pronouncements were not reflected in his matches, which he won in a workmanlike, unspectacular fashion. On July 22 he fought Alonzo Johnson in a
Fight of the Week,
out-pointing the slick, defensive boxer in a sleepy ten-round contest. Defeated but unimpressed, Johnson told reporters who asked if Clay was ready to take on contenders, “He won't beat them boys.”
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Dundee agreed, at least for the time being, he wanted nothing to do with “them boys.” On October 7 he put his fighter in the ring against Alex Miteff, an overweight, worn-out journeyman in the twilight of his career. Making Clay's chances even more certain, Miteff, in the argot of the trade, was a bleeder. “The slightest blow to his nose or eyes taps a stream of blood which cannot by damned by Vaseline or medicated cotton swabs,” noted a sportswriter.
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Dundee expected that Clay would win a sanguinary victory, and he wasn't disappointed. Not long after the fight started, Clay's punches opened old scars on Miteff's face. By the sixth round the Argentine fighter was having trouble seeing through the blood and swelling around his eye, leaving him practically blind to Clay's punches. Then midway through the round, Cassius landed a short, hard right—the hardest of his career, he said after the match. Miteff fell, rolled over once, struggled to his feet, and stumbled toward a corner “in the determined important walk of a drunk.” As Clay moved forward, the referee stepped between the boxers and stopped the fight.
²³

After the Miteff fight, Dundee looked for another old, slow, and unimaginative opponent for his young, swift, and creative prodigy. Willi Besmanoff was perfect. The squat German heavyweight had survived internment in Buchenwald as a youth during World War II. After turning professional in 1952, he engaged in almost fifty matches before coming to America four years later. Soon
The Ring
ranked him among the top ten heavyweights. However, by the late 1950s he was losing more than he was winning, and by 1961 he was well advanced into the twilight of his career.

Clay realized as much. To make the fight more interesting he added a new wrinkle—a prediction. “Besmanoff must fall in seven,” he told a reporter. It was an audacious statement, an earthquake moment in the history of self-promotion. When asked to predict an outcome of a match, fighters usually mumbled that they would do their best. Some,
of course, predicted victory, which, after all, was just an indication of confidence. But Clay predicted a round, a show of specificity that bordered on crystal-ball soothsaying.
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And Cassius fully understood the power of his prophecy. It was magic, imbued with supernatural power, and as such magnetically charged. Why did people come to watch him fight? “They want to see that
round
. People are superstitious. It's the
round
that gets them. They don't come to see me win. They come to see that
round
.” It was, he believed, an example of man's mystical hunger. “People run to priests. They pray and shout in church. People is spooky-minded. They look at the moon. They wonder about numbers. Preachers say Jesus called them but they got no proof. I got proof. The round I call is the round they must fall.”
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The fight certified Clay's sagacity. It was no contest. By the sixth round Besmanoff was bloody and disoriented, looking “like a man caught in the middle of a busy street,” wrote one reporter. Cassius could have finished the German off in the fifth or sixth round, but he carried him to the seventh. Then, in the predicted round, he knocked Besmanoff out cold.
²⁶

The fight was over, and so was Clay's time in boxing's minor leagues. In the year since he traveled to Miami to train with Dundee, he had put on muscle and weight, honing his technique and learning his craft. He had fought in preliminary matches and main event bouts before small to medium-sized crowds and on television. His record was a perfect 10–0, with seven ending in knockouts or technical knockouts. He had fought half of his matches in his hometown, but now it was time to move on.

In a feature article,
The Ring
called him the “Bonus Boy of Boxing,” claiming he looked like the “Rookie of the Year.” “Right now he has shown that he has the ability to handle the top grade men, but how he would do against the ranking fighters, is something which has to be answered.” To be sure, some critics assailed his boxing style and promotional antics, but perhaps no pugilist had risen as quickly and as spectacularly. He had appeared on the pages of
Sports Illustrated
and
Life
, been the subject of hundreds of newspaper stories, and appeared in a feature film. He was ready, Dundee now felt, for “
THE BIG TIME
.”
²⁷

B
Y
J
ANUARY
1962 Cassius had become impatient, veering in a more independent direction. Increasingly his rhetoric mixed humor with mean-spirited jabs at other heavyweights. He complained to reporters that he was frustrated by the slowness of his advancement up the heavyweight division. He grumbled, “I'm tired of being fed on set-ups. I can't get a title shot by knocking out a bunch of has-beens and novices, mostly fighters who are over the hill.”
²⁸

Although Dundee was in no hurry, for the right opportunity, he was willing to take a modest risk. In February he accepted a fight against a tall southpaw from Detroit named Lucien “Sonny” Banks. Normally, Angelo would have avoided a boxer like Banks. Too inexperienced to be predictable, awkward, left-handed, and hard-hitting, he was the sort of boxer who made anyone he fought look bad. In his stumbling, free-swinging style, he recalled legendary trainer Whitey Bimstein's description of another untutored fighter: “Nobody never learned him nothing.” And because of his elbows and head advances, he often cut opponents.
²⁹

Angelo accepted the fight because it would give Clay national television exposure and would be staged at Madison Square Garden. The Garden was the summit for a boxer, as holy to the sport as Jerusalem and Mecca are to the faithful. Its landmark marquee jutted out between 49th and 50th Streets on Eighth Avenue like a square chin waiting to be punched. In its prime in the 1930s, the Garden was just a few blocks away from Stillman's Gym and the Neutral Corner saloon, as well as a seedy collection of drugstores selling bandages and wrapping gauze, hock shops trafficking in fake diamonds and watches, and a few fleabag hotels that rented rooms by the half hour. Even more rundown by 1962, these blocks on Eighth Avenue still reigned as the undisputed center of the world of pugilism, although the sport was falling out of favor with younger sports fans.

Undaunted by the shabbiness of Eighth Avenue and the state of boxing, Cassius was determined to restore the Garden and the sport to its glory days. A publicist's dream, he was like a windup toy: just give the key a turn and point it in the right direction. A few days before the fight he addressed a crowded luncheon of the Boxing Writers Association, boasting that he would save the sport as Joe Louis once did. As
for his upcoming fight, he promised, “If I don't beat Banks I'll take the first plane out of the country.” There had never been a heavyweight who looked so young, talked so fast, and smiled so brightly. To writers new to Cassius's shtick, it had the feel of a perfect New York spring day, fresh and scrubbed with a hint of naughty fun.
³⁰

Enticed by the fact that Clay wrote poetry and was thus a “fellow-littérateur,” A. J. Liebling, the fabled chronicler of the demimonde, ventured down to West 28th Street, where Cassius was training. The writer had seen Clay box in the Rome Olympics and did not give him high marks. “Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water,” he observed. But the fact that Clay was a man of verse who could recite his poetry while doing sit-ups without breaking cadence astounded him. “He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way,” he speculated. “I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.”
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