Roy Exum
Anyone who knows anything about me will tell you I hated college. I don’t have enough cumulative credits to qualify as a freshman and I guess the biggest reason is because by the time I started I was already having more fun than anybody my age. I was a sports writer at age 17, which was unheard of unless your family owned a newspaper, and while I’ve had thousands of people help me along the way, I taught myself how to write.
For the record, I have been to six journalism classes in my life and every time I was the guest speaker. Becoming good at anything carries a steep price and I can’t tell you how many great stories I have read, then dissected, and later tried to emulate. By far my No. 1 source was Sports Illustrated magazine, which I have read religiously for 60 years, this because their writers – always the best – wrote about stuff that interested me.
When Muhammad Ali died and was buried last week, I could hardly wait for the tribute Sports Illustrated would put together and, oh, it was simply wonderful. Writers Charles Pierce and Richard Hoffer were at their all-time best but … whoa, what do we have here? The back page of the magazine, famously called “The Last Word,” was written by none other than Cassius Clay.
I never knew that just one week before the upstart Cassius would win his first heavyweight title against Sonny Liston, the brash 22-year-old wrote a first-person article for Sports Illustrated. In it he freely admitted why he yelled “I am the greatest!” to the world, infuriated everybody with “I am so beautiful” while wearing unthinkable white boxing shoes, and made such a glaring spectacle of himself.
Believe it or not, it was all a very well-planned and exquisitely-staged act. Cassius Clay realized he could literally harness the fickle crowd’s hate and drive it down America’s throat like a Roman chariot. And, oh, did he ever.
Clay wrote this 52 years ago (Feb. 24, 1964): “I remember one day in Louisville I was riding a bus reading in the paper about Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. It was right after I had won the Olympic gold medal in Rome and had turned professional, and I was confident then I could beat either one of them if I had the chance.
“But I knew I wouldn't get the chance because nobody much had ever heard of me,” he was candid. “So I said to myself, how am I going to get a crack at the title? Well, on that bus I realized I'd never get it just sitting around thinking about it. I knew I'd have to start talking about it—I mean really talking, screaming and yelling and acting like some kind of a nut. I thought if I did that people would pretty soon hear enough of that and insist I meet whomever was champion.
“I would be like Gorgeous George, the (hysterical English) wrestler, who got so famous by being flashy and exaggerating everything and making people notice him,” the Olympian wrote and, by golly jingo, it worked! My God in heaven, Muhammad Ali – he changed to the Muslim name shortly after he beat Sonny Liston – was a world-known icon when he died June 3 at age 74.
Yet over half a decade ago, Cassius laid it out bare: “If I were like a lot of guys—a lot of heavyweight boxers, I mean—I'll bet you a dozen doughnuts you wouldn't be reading this story right now. If you wonder what the difference between them and me is, I'll break the news: you never heard of them. I'm not saying they are not good boxers. Most of them—people like Doug Jones and Ernie Terrell—can fight almost as good as I can. I'm just saying you never heard of them. And the reason for that is because they cannot throw the jive.
“Cassius Clay is a boxer who can throw the jive better than anybody you will probably ever meet anywhere,” he boasted before he proved it to be true. “And right there is why I will meet Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world next week in Miami Beach. And jive is the reason also why they took my picture looking at $1 million in cold cash (that week’s Sports Illustrated cover). That's how much money my fists and my mouth will have earned by the time my fight with Liston is over. Think about that. A Southern colored boy has made $1 million just as he turns 22. I don't think it's bragging to say I'm something a little special.”
Cassius played to his crowd like Elizabeth Taylor batted her ‘shinnies’ at Richard Burton in “Cleopatra.” Are you kidding me? “Where do you think I would be next week if I didn't know how to shout and holler and make the public sit up and take notice? I would be poor, for one thing, and I would probably be down in Louisville, Ky., my home town, washing windows or running an elevator and saying ‘yes suh’ and ‘no suh’ and knowing my place. Instead of that, I'm saying I'm one of the highest-paid athletes in the world, which is true, and that I'm the greatest fighter in the world, which I hope and pray is true.”
Cassius had it figured out to the last detail. “I've been criticized for leaning away from the other man's punches instead of ducking, but I'm not going to change my style. Leaning away is a faster reflex than ducking and I'll go on doing it until somebody proves it's a mistake—and that somebody has got to be another boxer, not a trainer. “
"They also tell me I carry my hands too low—that it's showoff and dangerous,” he readily admitted. “Well, I just answer have you ever seen a mirage on the desert? You walk along looking for a drink of water, and suddenly you see a lake and you jump in. All you get is a mouthful of sand. Mr. Liston will get a mouthful of leather the same way.”
The biggest difference between Cassius Clay, outside of his Olympic medal, and other fighters was simply Clay capitalized on his ‘jive.’
“I said I am the greatest, I am a ball of fire. If I didn't say it, there was nobody going to say it for me. Then people commenced to say, ‘What's that loudmouth talking about?’ and it grew and it grew. And pretty soon other people were saying I'm the greatest, and I said, ‘Didn't I tell you so in the first place?’ And you know what? The more I talked, the more I convinced myself. I believe in myself so much by now it's embarrassing.”
It came with a cost but Cassius Clay could write the check. “Every time I won a fight, I also made a lot of fresh enemies. One thing people can't stand is a blowhard, and the more I blew, the more people would come out to see me get beaten. I said I was pretty (I'm not as pretty as I let on), I said I was fast, I said I was terrific and it got so you couldn't keep people away. And those that got in would yell, ‘Take away his pink Cadillac, the bum,’ and, ‘Bash in his pretty nose,’ and, ‘Button his fat lip.’
"Well, that's just fine,” the 22-year-old laughed. “I don't really care what people say about me personally as long as they buy a ticket to come see me. After they pay their money, they're entitled to a little fun.”
Every time Clay would win, of course, he would purposefully add enemies to his arsenal. “You have just made a whole lot more enemies and every one of them will be back for your next fight. Only then the tickets are going to cost more."
My goodness, the whole story is just too funny. At the end of his narrative he wondered what would happen if, indeed, he lost to Liston the next week. “Folks ask me what I'll do if I win and what I'll do if I don't win, but I don't have the answer yet.
“But I'm not too worried. I think I can make it in something else the same way I've made it in boxing. If things go wrong in the fight, I'll just wait a while. Summertime comes, flowers start blooming, little birds start flying and you wake up, get up and get out. You change with the times.”
* * *
During the week before the fight, Clay taunted Liston unmercifully. He repeatedly called Sonny, an ex-con who learned to box in prison, a "big, ugly bear". The jive drove Liston crazy. : "After the fight, I'm gonna build myself a pretty home and use him as a bearskin rug. Liston even smells like a bear. I'm gonna give him to the local zoo after I whup him … “ Cassius bragged.
And, of course, his banter also flew in the face of the white citizens of America. Pulitzer Prize winner Murray Kempton even wrote this line in ‘New Republic:” “Liston used to be a hoodlum; now he is our cop; he was the big Negro we pay to keep sassy Negroes in line."
Clay, meanwhile, was simply following his well-planned script. “If Liston wasn't thinking nothing but killing me, he wasn't thinking fighting. You got to think to fight." The legendary Joe Louis agreed. “Liston is an angry man, and he can't afford to be angry fighting Clay."
For weeks Clay had loudly boasted he’d take Liston out in the eighth round but Sonny stayed in his corner at the start of the seventh. Several days later the new World Champion would say, “I knew that Liston, overconfident that he was, was never going to train to fight more than two rounds. He couldn't see nothing to me at all but mouth."
And it is that, dear reader, that is the very essence of “throwing the jive.” That is what made Cassius Clay and that is what Muhammad Ali took to his gave.
royexum@aol.com