Authors: Mark Kram
The Clays were strivers, ambitious and makers of plans—without destination or a ladder. They lived in a one-floor, four-room clapboard house on Grand Avenue. Odessa was a cleaning lady in white mansions, while Cassius Sr. was a sign painter, occasionally doing murals in churches for twenty-five dollars and a chicken dinner. The son watched from a distance in the church darkness, better to see the assorted seraphim gaining shape on the clouds. “His crucifixions,” Clay would say later, “like to make me cry.” He once asked Odessa: “Mama, is you white lady, or is you colored lady?” and to Cash: “Why Jesus always white?” A rhetorical stone he would skip across many future Muslim rants. “Because,” his father said, “we supposed not to know who we are, and the white man
thinks
he knows who he is, so he the only one can tell what Jesus is or isn’t. So he
thinks.
”
Neither parent saw himself or herself as poor. Clay didn’t either until he nearly hit bedrock trying to align himself to a desolate, more suitable reality for his Muslim autobiography. He insisted he was a child of the slums, how he was left to roam the streets in tatters, how he was so hungry. His father had to put cardboard in his secondhand shoes. His clothes came from Goodwill. The house was nearly falling down; the roof leaked, the toilet didn’t flush. He and his brother, Rudy, seldom had bus fare for school. I asked his parents one night over drinks in New York about his son’s claim of early poverty. Odessa just smiled placidly, shook her head with resignation; his father said, “Sheeeeeit.”
Odessa was full of laughter, gracious, with an infectious gentleness that often could be seen in Ali. He got his flair, his paradoxes, his quickness to invent new exteriors and much more of a darker nature from his father. Cash was a shape-shifter, a puzzle on the wind. Grab a piece, and you’d have the neglected artist who saw a small facility
as a major talent denied. “I think I’ll paint the Mona Lisa,” he’d say, “and jazz her up some.” He once looked at the tomato cans of Andy Warhol and said: “Ain’t them white folks got some scams, my, my.” He then seemed visibly depressed over some lost opportunity that only he seemed to understand. “This joker can’t hold a candle to me,” he said. Grab several other pieces, and you’d have a thwarted dancer, a singer, and a true romantic who was certain he resembled Rudolph Valentino, screen idol of the twenties.
Cash slipped into many shapes. If he was in a Hindu mood, he’d take a rug, stretch it out under the sign he was working, kneel on it, and begin to chant. As a Mexican he’d sport a sombrero and pretend he was taking a siesta. His longest-running part was that of the Sheik (Valentino’s character), and he strode around with a tasseled hat and a shawl slung over his shoulder. The quick-change roles seemed to provide an exotic, safe haven from frustrations that sapped his spirit. He was a few shades darker than his son, a fact that he would lament or boast about depending on his mood. “Old Cash,” a friend of his said once, “knows a lot ’bout color in a painting, but he sure don’t know what color he is.” When Clay became known and the press came around the house, he was fond of saying: “I’m Arab. Don’t I look like an Arab? Damn sure.”
“Looville ain’t no prize,” the father said. “They just sneakier here about race.” He once put his sons in line at the Kentucky State Fair, saying, “You all are first now. Stand right there. Don’t let nobody get in front of you.” A white lady heard him, and she yelled: “Lookee here, you’re still in the South.” Cash didn’t spare the kids dark tales of rape, the white man’s mendacity, how the whites go to church on Sunday and “hang a black man on Monday.” The stories struck fear into the boy Clay. Like: the Pope’s war against the Ethiopians (Italy in World War II), where “he trapped the Africans. Burned ’em up!” What did the Pope have to do with it? “The Pope! The Pope is the
leader of Rome. He’s the head of the Holy City, man! Got a lot to do with it.” The old man was stuck between hate for the whites and going along; resolution in anything was elusive.
Tension and sudden anger threatened the family at all times. In the presence of his father over the years, Ali was seldom at ease, and not only because he had to stand between his father and the Muslims. He never stopped listening for intonation of behavior that might signal combustion. A family friend explained to Jack Olsen: “There’s more apt to be a violent strain in a smart Negro family than in a dumb one. Dumb ones go their way like animals…just like dumb white ones. But the smart black could feel the pain of what was happenin’ around him, and at the same time there wasn’t a thing he can do about it, ’cept make it worse. Sometimes this passed down to the kids. And every once in a while somebody shakes the whole soda bottle, and it explodes.” Cash’s brother, a top mathematician, committed suicide. Odessa was of Irish descent, and said: “Ain’t a thing I can do about it.”
Police would sometimes show up at Grand Street. One night they found Odessa in a rage. Nothing had been done to her, but Cassius had a bleeding gash on his thigh; he told the cops he had fallen on a milk bottle. They let the incident slide after telling her that she “could take out a malicious cutting warrant.” On another occasion, Rudy flew at the father when he tried to tee off on Odessa, and he had to be sent to live with friends. But Cash was not really a violent man. It was just the gin that sometimes touched him off and heightened the futility caught by the poet Langston Hughes…“liable to be confusion…when a dream gets kicked around.”
Ali liked to recount dreams he had as a young kid, some that left numbing fear, beckoning death, escape, suspense, and the spectacular. In one he was on top of the Empire State Building. “Everybody lookin’ at me. Thinkin’ I’m gonna kill myself. Firemen and police tryin’ to talk me out of it on a loudspeaker. ‘Don’t jump!’ And I say, ‘I’m gettin’ ready.’ So I
jump and stop right in the air. Flap my wings like one of those little birds in Disney movies. Everybody’s faintin’ and screamin’…Oooooooh! Then, I just float down and land on my feet. Then, I wake up.”
His first contact with boxing came when he nearly knocked Joe Martin over after his bike was stolen. He was crying, his body trembling. Martin was a cop and head of the Louisville Recreation Center, one of those anonymous people who often show up early in great careers, who grapple with raw material and point the way. He also had a periodic TV show called
Tomorrow’s Champions
in which he would showcase boxing talent. “No, I can’t fight a lick,” the kid told Martin. “He was all of eighty-nine pounds,” Martin would recall, “and his hands shook as I laced the gloves on him, but when he walked out of that ring he was all smiles.” Three months of training, and he was on his first TV card.
Boxing brought a change in Cassius. No longer did he brood around the house, and adolescent games seemed beneath him; he expected people on the streets to know who he was. “I’d never seen a kid so taken by boxing like him,” Martin said. His education took a step down. He had no interest, he would say, “because there was no future in schoolin’, ’cause I knew too many who had it and were layin’ ’round on corners.” Martin had him for 106 amateur fights and until age eighteen. He noticed much about him. His mind was a jungle of fears. Of ghosts, violence, blood, “you name it,” Martin said. He was emotionally wild before a fight. “He’d build himself up into a regular frenzy,” Martin said, “letting that fear out by tormenting his opponent.” If he saw blood, he’d go in for a clean end; messiness made him queasy. He couldn’t bear air travel. Odessa would fly with him, and she had to stop. He’d say: “Mama, you ’fraid yet?” Odessa recalled. “I couldn’t bear to see him so frightened, his eyes so big and red.”
A light heavy, the young Clay went to the Rome Olympics in
1960. He worked the athletes’ village like a cardinal dispensing to the poor. When he beat the Pole Ziggy Pietrzykowski in the finals, a Russian reporter caught him afterward, found not a revolutionary but a robber-baron capitalist. The Russian wanted to know if he would return to the United States and eat with whites. The young Clay snapped: “Tell your people we got qualified people workin’ on them problems, and if I’m not worried why should you? To me, the U.S.A. is the best country in the world. It may be hard gettin’ somethin’ to eat sometimes, but I ain’t fightin’ alligators and livin’ in a mud hut exactly.” The exchange hit all the wire services, and Clay later said, “Poor old Commie, he went draggin’ off with nothin’ to write the Russians.”
Back in New York, Williams Reynolds, heir to a tobacco fortune, booked him into a suite at the Waldorf, right next door to the Prince of Wales, it turned out. He never heard of him, but he was famous, which was what mattered. He knocked on the door and a butler answered, saying: “We have not requested room service.” Reynolds was trying to get the jump on several other groups of gold-leaf sportsmen back in Louisville. The kid, through Martin, had worked on his estate, where he would claim in the future that he had to eat on the porch with the dogs and work like a slave. Martin kept a close eye on him out there, saying: “He raked a few leaves and mostly pulled the spigot on the milk machine.” Reynolds lost out on the contract to a wealthy group called the Louisville Syndicate. Martin had been trainer in the Reynolds deal. The whole package was checkmated by the father: “I don’t like cops,” Cash said.
Louisville greeted Clay back with a large celebration, and arriving at his house he found the steps had been painted red, white, and blue by his father. His contract with the Syndicate called for a $10,000 signing bonus, a guarantee of $4,000 for two years, generous training expenses, a house at the location he chose to train, and 50 percent of
all earnings. From each purse, 15 percent of his end would go into a pension fund, untouchable until the age of thirty-five. This was new ground for boxing; a young fighter was being treated as more than a side of mutton. A ferret-eyed old manager named Honest Bill Daly observed the changing times and noted: “All Rocky Marciano got from his manager Al Weill was a cup of coffee and a kick in the ass.” The kid gave his parents some money and then bought a pink Cadillac just like Sugar Ray’s.
The Syndicate said they were in no hurry. Clay needed direction and protection, “would not be sacrificed.” They submitted him to the light of Archie Moore, still a fighter, and known as a sharp mind; Alexander the Great meets Socrates. Ali always credited the wrestler Gorgeous George “for my actin’ skill” and approach in the ring. No use telling him that George was a preening semi-idiot, a farcical homosexual in his role. For he’d reason, “They watch him, pay attention, don’t they, and he pretty like me.” But it was Archie who truly shaped him whether he knew it or not. In the future as Ali, he’d often allude to secrets he knew—and never described—about the ring. Archie was never withholding, he brimmed with glorious, verbal monographs of craft.
Moore had a diet passed to him by the Aborigines; really progressive fasting, but that was too commonplace for him. He chewed meat, retained the juices, got rid of the bulk, a “distasteful etiquette but it works.” Floating forever between the light-heavy and heavyweight ranks, he lived with constant weight loss. There were also aspects to his ring technique.
Relaxism,
he said, required slipping into impregnable defense until danger passed against heavy punchers. He called it the “turtle shell,” and Clay used it (naming it Rope-a-Dope) against George Foreman in Zaire.
Escapology
was backpedaling;
Breathology
was conservation of breath. And
Applied Muscular Tension
was the use of feinting and moving to defuse the other man’s tension, a grouping
of striking force. His every move was calculated, a patient search for one moment, where he would drop an eight-inch right hand from a ninety-degree angle. “With five hundred pounds of pressure per square inch,” he would add. Ever the scientist with examining monocle, Archie.
Archie was a man of many parts. His diction was precise, his manner effortless and worldly. He played piano, was an expert pistol shot, a splendid cook who needed three wardrobe sizes as he chased the money well over twenty-six hard, hard years in something like four-hundred fights. He was the first to look different as a fighter, stepping into the ring in blazing colors or looking like a Moorish king. He was the first to make predictions (usually wrong) and to create rhyme. In London he walked the streets in a top hat, striped pants, and tapping a cane. Clay would later make all the papers and the cover of
S.I.
doing the same. On Fifth Avenue he could often be seen wearing a white dinner jacket and white Bermuda shorts. The Syndicate thought Archie would give the kid some maturity, cultivate discipline and presence.
Clay turned up on the Moore grounds outside San Diego in 1960. Archie joked that the place was more suitable for indigent managers. He’d supply them with cheap cigars, get them out of bed “with a black snake whip,” and give them an hour to lie and boast after five miles of roadwork. He’d have a common name for them—bum; that’s what they called the “kids they lived off of.” It was a hot, desolate camp, suitable for Archie, who thought deprivation and isolation cleansing; the place was called the Salt Mine, and the gym was the Bucket of Blood, all of it on a rocky ridge of hills, up which Clay would have to run daily. “The place was hell,” he’d say. He had expected a retreat, perhaps a shaded oasis where he and Archie would sit around eating grapes and contemplating the kid’s infinite future. He instead saw an Archie Moore, divested of his plumery, who looked like a tenant
farmer. Archie handed him some blue overalls. Sometimes, during a break, they sprawled on the rocks, and the old campaigner would discuss ring craft as if he were probing quasars. They talked about comportment, the need to have character, bowing to no man. They didn’t talk about race except when Archie told him about his role in the movie
Huckleberry Finn,
how he resented the word “nigger” in the script and quietly went around the director to get it excised.
He told Clay: “Remember this. People don’t
see.
They hear what others tell them to hear, others shape their opinion. It’s called public relations.” Clay pondered: “You mean I ain’t got nothin’ to say ’bout it!” Sure, Archie said, “with your character. Listen. Ever see a big-name fighter take a beating and the public goes around talking like they didn’t see any beating? You or somebody gets the public on your side. They only see their good idea of you that’s been driven into their minds.”