Chapter 4: Muhammad Ali and Friends Muhammad Ali nee Cassius Marcellus Clay was one of the central figures of my time. I met him for the first time when I was in Chicago in 1962 for the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight. A bunch of us were in the hotel press room writing pre-fight pieces when Angelo Dundee, his trainer, came in with Ali and introduced him around. Dundee could hardly get in a word as the tall, slender youth talked, gesticulated, funned. He recited the poetry that was one of the pungent early attention-getters for him. You couldn't help but be charmed by him. Not surpisingly, though, some of the old walruses of the trade were offended by his brashness. They found his boasting disrespectful. This was difficult to comprehend because braggadocio had always been at the heart of fistiana. The first heavyweight champion of modern times, John L. Sullivan, was famous and revered in story and song for allegedly walking into bars and exulting, "I can lick any man in the house." It is lost in the mist now that Ali was a controversial character even before he became a Muslim. It is hard to believe the verbiage of hate and contempt directed against the then Cassius Clay before his first fight with Liston in Miami in 1964. All this because he was seen as a boastful windbag. Nothing more. I have one huge regret about my pieces out of Miami for that fight. There had already been talk and a story by Dick Schaap in the New York Herald Tribune that Clay was a Muslim or was considering converting to the Nation of Islam under the tutelage of the controversial Malcom X. When I heard that Malcom X was at Clay's motel in, I believe, Miami Beach, I went over. I saw Clay for a moment, but he was on the run. I think I saw Malcom X for an instant in the background, but I did not pursue it. Either I was hesitant or there were so many people about that I couldn't get a handle on the situation and I left. I didn't hang around. Sometimes the best kind of reporting involves nothing more than hanging around.
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Winning isn't everything, but losing isn't anything. |
