Sugar and Clay

In the early weeks of 1964, Cassius clay was bragging that he was "The Greatest," that he was going to dethrone Sonny Liston as the world heavyweight champion in their title bout February 25 at Miami Beach.

Not many people took Cassius seriously, but I did.

His big talk was an act, but his ability wasn't. I had been following his career ever since the summer day in 1960 when I drove up in front of my café and a lean, muscular. handsome teenager walked over and shyly stared at me.

"Mr. Robinson?" he said quietly.

"Yeah, kid, that's me," I said. "Why?"

"Mr. Robinson, you don't know me, but I'm on my way over to Rome."

"That's a nice place."

"I'm going there for the Olympics," he said. "I'm on the United States Olympic boxing team. I'm going to win an Olympic gold medal."

"Good luck," I said.

"My name is Cassius Marcellus Clay," he said.

"Cassius what?"

"Cassius Marcellus Clay the Second." he said. "I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. I'm the Golden Gloves champ and the A. A. U. champ. You're my idol, Mr. Robinson, you're the greatest fighter."

"Well, thank you," I said.

"And when I turn pro after the Olympics," he said, "I want you to be my manager."

"That's very thoughtful of you," I said, "but--"

"You're the greatest fighter and if you're my manager, you'll teach me all your tricks. That's why I had to see you before I went to Rome, to get it all set. I've been waiting here three hours."

"Three hours, just to see me?"

"That's right, Mr. Robinson, I want you to be my manager."

"But that's impossible."

"Not now," he said. "After the Olympics, when I'm ab'e to turn pro."

"No, you don't understand."

"Understand what?" he said.

"That I can't manage you. I'm still a fighter myself. That's a full-time thing. I couldn't possibly be lighting myself and managing you at the same time."

"Oh," he said, sadly.

"I'm sure you're a good fighter," I said, trying to cheer him up, "but as long as I'm a fighter myself, I wouldn't be able to (continued on page 303)Sugar and clay(continued from page 205) manage you properly."

"I understand now," he said.

"Good luck in Rome," I said.

"Thank you, Mr. Robinson," he said, "but maybe if you do retire, maybe you'll be my manager then. Mr. Robinson, if you retire, you'll have the time to be my manager then. If you forget, I'll remind you."

"You do that," I said, turning away.

"Thank you, Mr. Robinson," he continued, his big eyes still staring at me. "Thank you, anyway."

"OK," I said. "I've got things to do."

Inside my café, I turned to look at him again. He was on the sidewalk, staring back. I waved and he walked away. Over the years, I had been stopped by some awful pests, but at least this kid was a polite pest.

"If that kid can fight like he can talk," I said to somebody at the bar, "he'll be something."

He soon proved that he could. He won his Olympic gold medal in the light-heavyweight class at Rome. When he turned pro, he kept on winning. He kept in touch with me. He would phone every so often and tell me about his fights and his next opponents, about how he had copied my style.

"You are the king, the master, my idol." he would say, quite seriously.

By now, his mouth was making more headlines than his fists. He was predicting the round that he would knock out his opponent in and making good on the boasts. He was reciting poetry. He was calling himself The Greatest.

"Cassius," I teased him once on the phone, "how come you're The Greatest now? You always told me I was."

"You really are," he said. "All that stuff is just something I say to make people notice me. And it works."

By the spring of 1963, he had talked himself into a main event with a heavyweight contender, Doug Jones, at the Garden. The newspapers in New York were on strike at the time, but that meant he had more time for TV. Once, he was on TV reciting poetry with some beatniks at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. That was too much. That was no way to train for a fight. The next day, I told him that at Wiley's Gym.

"Well, what should I do?" he asked me.

"What you need," I said, "is somebody to watch over you, somebody to keep you happy and relaxed. I know a man like that, Drew Brown, he likes to be called Boudini. He was in my camp a few years ago. I'll send him up to see you. You'll like him. He'll help you."

"Sugar Ray," he said, "if this man helped you, he's got to help me."

He hit it off right away with Boudini.

He liked to laugh and Boudini did things that made him laugh. When he was training for Liston, he and Boudini had an act they'd put on for the writers and photographers.

Boudini would yell, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

Then they'd both shout, "Rumble, young man, rumble," and clay would break up laughing. Boudini had him relaxed and happy, like a fighter should be, but Boudini knew when to be serious. One day, my phone rang at six in the morning.

"Ray." he said, "you've got to talk to Cassius."

"What's die matter?" I said. "What's gone wrong?"

"He ain't doing his roadwork. Just now, he ran two blocks and came home. Yesterday, he did the same thing, he ran a couple hundred yards and quit, said he don't need it. He thinks he's in shape, but he ain't. He ain't running at all."

"I'll talk to him," I promised.

When I phoned Cassius, I didn't want it to sound like I knew anything, so I talked about things in general at first, then I maneuvered to the point.

"How's your training going?" I said.

"Good," he said. "Boudini's my man, just like he was your man."

"How's your roadwork?"

"I'm doin' what I always done."

"Is that enough?"

"Always has been."

"But this time," I reminded him, "you might have to go fifteen rounds. You've got to be prepared to go fifteen rounds. Proper roadwork is the only way you can get ready to go fifteen rounds. How many miles are you running each day?"

"I never count 'em," he said.

"I used to start off with a couple miles--running, jogging, sometimes running backward. The last few weeks before the fight, I'd increase it to three miles, and then to four, and eventually to five miles."

"Five miles a day!"

"No other way to do it, man," I said, "no other way."

"You ran all that?"

"For every big fight," I said.

"Man," he said, all shook up.

"Cassius," I said, "if you believe in me. you'll make sure you do those miles in the morning. But don't do it for me. man, do it for yourself. You're the one who's going in with Liston."

The next morning, Boudini told me later, Clay was like a kid with a new toy. All he wanted to do was run.

After that, Cassius phoned me every day, sometimes twice a day, and told me how he was training. Angelo Dundee was supervising his workouts and advising him, and Angelo is a sharp boxing man. But sometimes a fighter likes to discuss his training with somebody besides his trainer. When Cassius wanted advice, he phoned me.

"And now I got a big question for you," he said one day on the phone. "How should I fight Liston?"

"The same way I fought Jake LaMotta," I said. "The matador and the bull. You can't match strength with Liston, just like I couldn't match strength with LaMotta. He was the bull, but I was the matador and I outsmarted him. You can beat Liston the same way. I'll send you the film of my LaMotta fight and you study it."

"Better than that," he said, "you bring it. You must be here for the fight. You must be with me."

I was between fights, so I agreed. On the flight to Miami, I realized that he had slicked me into becoming sort of his manager after all. He had me advising him on his training and his tactics, as he had asked me to do that day outside my café in 1960. Instead of resenting the way he had charmed me, I was enjoying it. But when I arrived at the pink-stucco home he had rented in the Negro neighborhood of Miami, the scene was unlike anything I'd ever seen for a fighter a few clays before the biggest thing in his life.

Noise, man. Wall-to-wall noise.

His sparring partners, including his brother Rudolph Valentino Clay, were there, and that was good. But some young girls were there, too--foxes, Cassius called them. And some middle-aged men--Black Muslims, I later discovered. All I knew was that there was too much commotion and too much temptation.

"Cassius," I told him when I got him alone, "you've got to clear out these people."

"What for?" he said. "All these foxes keep me goin'. They give me more incentive."

"Man, they'll give you nothin' but trouble. Save your incentive for after the fight."

I wasn't sure that he'd go along with me, but he did. The house quieted down. He got more rest. He had more time to think about how he was going to fight Liston, how he was "going to bait the bear," as he called him. He liked to taunt Liston. One day, he had stopped at the hotel where Liston was training, to shout and yell at him. The day of the fight, I had a talk with him before we left for the weighin.

"When you see Liston," I said, "play it cool. Don't go mouthing off, man. The fight is tonight."

"Don't worry," he assured me. "Everything's gonna be all right. The bear already is in my trap."

The moment he saw Liston, he forgot his promise. He started to shout and yell about how he was The Greatest, about how he was going to beat Liston like he was his daddy. The more he shouted, the wilder he got. His eyes looked like they were going to jump out of his head. I was trying to calm him down; so were Boudini and Angelo Dundee; but nobody had any influence over him. He was like a maniac. The commission chairman fined him $2500. One of the commission doctors pronounced him "on the verge of hysteria." In the midst of the excitement, Bill Faversham, one of the Louisville millionaires who had bankrolled Clay, took me aside.

"Ray," he said, "please do me a favor."

"I'll try, Mr. Faversham," I said.

"What is it?"

"Stay with Cassius the rest of the day."

"You don't want me for that, you want a padded cell."

"Ray, he'll listen to you."

"He didn't here," I replied. "I warned him not to make a scene here."

"But he doesn't listen to us at all."

"All right," I said, "I'll try to calm him down when we get back to the house."

"You're our only hope, Ray," he said.

The strangest thing was, when we got into the car to return to the house, Cassius had cooled off completely. I couldn't believe it. When I finally had him alone in the house, I sat down across from where he was resting in his bed.

"Now, listen, Cassius," I began.

"I'm all right, man," he said. "Calm and collected."

"That's not the point," I said.

"Then what is?" he said quietly.

"If you're not going to listen to me, Cassius, then you don't need me here with you. I'm trying to be your friend, trying to give you advice. But if you're not going to take it, I'm not going to bother to give it. Everything you're going through today, waiting for a title fight, I went through dozens of times. Now, either you listen to me or I leave."

"Sugar Ray," he said slowly. "Sugar Ray, the greatest. I must listen to you."

"All right, then," I said. "When you go into that ring tonight, no nonsense."

"OK, no nonsense," he said. "But that bear turns me on. He thinks he's so tough. And he can't beat me. No way."

"That's just it," I said.

"Just what?" he wondered.

"You've got to prove that he can't beat you in the ring, man, no place else. That's where you've got to make a fool out of him. All this talking don't win you the fight. Nobody at the weighin raised your hand and pronounced you the new champion because you outtalked Liston. You got to beat him in the ring. That's the only place it counts. In the ring."

"Sugar Ray," he said, looking up, "you know what the business is all about."

The rest of the afternoon and in the early hours of the evening, he was perfectly relaxed. He dozed off for a nap. He watched TV and when he saw his antics at the weighin, he laughed so hard he shook. But that night in the dressing room, I had another scare. Willie Reddish, who trained Liston, came in to check the taping on Clay's hands. Reddish teased Clay about the wild weighin.

"Man," Cassius said, "I'll whip you right here and I'll whip your bear in the ring."

Reddish, who had once been a heavyweight, went into his stance and flicked a couple of playful jabs. Clay hopped off the rubbing table and made a big bluff out of going after Willie. He didn't get far. Angelo grabbed him. So did Boudini. And so did I.

"Sit down and stay there," I said.

When I saw the little smile in the corner of Clay's face, I realized he was fooling with Reddish; but I don't think Reddish realized that. When he returned to Liston's dressing room, I'm told he shook his head and said, "That kid is crazy"--crazy like a fox; because when the fight started, he made a mess of Liston. He stuck his jab in Liston's face whenever he wanted to, and he had him bloodied up long before Liston stayed on his stool when the bell rang for the seventh round. I don't know if Liston had a sore shoulder, like he claimed, but I know he had a sore face.

The moment Clay realized that he had won, he started leaping around the ring.

"Eat your words," he shouted at the sportswriters at ringside. "Eat your words."

Virtually all of the sportswriters had rated Clay a braggart instead of a boxer.

When he spotted me in the ringside seats, he yelled, "The matador and the bull."

Now that Clay was the champion, I had a decision to make. Several days before the fight, he had mentioned that he wanted me to join him as an advisor on strategy and theater-TV plans. Meanwhile, I had discovered his leanings toward the Black Muslims. The day after the Liston fight, he announced his conversion. He had been tutored by Malcolm X, then the chief aide to Elijah Muhammad. In his way, Malcolm X was a brilliant man, a true orator. But he wasn't my style. Neither was the Muslim doctrine.

XCassius," I told him, thankful for the excuse, "I'm still a fighter. I just can't get involved with you full time now."

He accepted that and I hustled back to New York. He changed his name to Cassius X and he later changed it to Muhammad Ali. He would phone me every so often, but I went to Europe again. During my trip, he required hernia surgery that delayed his November return bout with Liston. In February 1965, when he was still recuperating, I was in Kingston, Jamaica. When there's snow in New York, it's always nice to arrange a fight somewhere in the Caribbean. When the promoter there heard me discussing my friendship with Clay, he had an idea.

"Call the champ in Miami," the promoter said, "and invite him down to work in your corner as a second."

It was a good stunt. Clay had never been to Jamaica. He was colorful and would add to the crowd and to my percentage. When I phoned him, I told him I'd give him $1000. He was on the next plane, along with his first wile, Sonji, and Boudini. When he strutted down the ramp, he was waving and yelling.

"The greatest second has arrived," he was shouting, "for Sugar Ray--the king, the master, my idol."

He always used the same line, but I loved it. The way he dramatized it, I always had to laugh at it. He was a funny kid. I mean funny comical; but he could be funny weird, too, whenever he preached Muslim doctrine.

"The white man is destroying the world," he would say.

"Don't talk foolish," I said. "You don't make any sense."

"Allah," he said, "Allah is the only one who can save us all. And his prophet is Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the nation of Islam. The last time I saw Elijah Muhammad, in Chicago, he told me to tell you that if you would embrace the Muslim faith, he'd collect seven hundred thousand dollars for you."

"For me--seven hundred thousand dollars?"

"There are seven hundred thousand of us Muslims," he said, "and Elijah told me that each one would gladly contribute a dollar if you joined us and announced that you have embraced the Muslim faith. The great Sugar Ray Robinson, a Muslim."

"But I can't do that," I said.

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"Because I don't believe in the Muslims," I said. "Cassius, a religion is something you've got to believe in. You believe in it, and I respect you for it. I don't agree with you, but I respect your right to believe what you want. To me, any sort of belief in God is good--Catholic. Protestant, Jewish, Muslim. But from a little kid, I've believed in Christianity and in the Bible, life with Jesus Christ. All the Christian religions preach love for your fellow man. But not the Muslim faith. The Muslim faith preaches hate for the white man."

He didn't seem to know what to say.

I continued, "You know your slogan--the white man is a devil, the white devils. That's terrible. You can't live in this world hating people. You can't live without the white man, or the black man, or the red man, or the yellow man. Your hate is wrong. People should be against hate, not with it."

"All right," he said, "but if you ever change your mind...."

"I won't change my mind," I said. "You tell Elijah Muhammad thanks for the offer, but I'm happy the way I am, a Christian believer."

And that ended the conversation.

Although I disagreed with his Muslim faith, somehow I liked him. Most of the time, Cassius Clay is one of the most likable people I've ever known. I hoped that our differences wouldn't ruin our friendship. They didn't. We continued to phone each other quite often. He made a big fuss over me when he trained in New York for his fight with Zora Folley, his last title defense before he refused to enter the United States Army in 1967.

"Sugar Ray," his voice boomed over the phone one night. "You have to work in my corner."

"You have all the good corner men you need," I told him. "You don't want me there, too."

"I worked in your corner in Kingston, Jamaica," he said. "Now you have to work in mine."

To him, it was like a debt. He offered me $1000, the same amount he had earned in Kingston. At the time. I really needed that grand, and he probably realized that.

"All right," I said, "I'll come down to the Garden tomorrow and we'll talk about it."

In the dull gray basement of the Garden, a ring had been set up for Cassius to work in. As I arrived, he was inside the ropes, shadowboxing. When he took a breather, he spotted me.

"The king, the master, my idol," he shouted.

About 300 people were there, watching the workout. When he pointed at me, their heads spun.

"Sugar Ray Robinson," he announced, "The Greatest...."

In a stage whisper, he added, "Except for me," and everybody laughed. His voice boomed again. "Here he comes, the king, the master, my idol! Sugar Ray Robinson! He will be in my corner, advising me of his secrets, when I oppose Zora Folley."

I didn't work in his corner, but he didn't need me. His fast hands and his fast feet were enough. Folley went in the fourth. Cassius is the fastest heavyweight I've ever seen, and his speed would enable him to conquer most of the slowmoving heavyweight champions, like the late Rocky Marciano; Cassius would be too fast and too fancy for Rocky, but his speed wouldn't help him against Joe Louis. Before the second Billy Conn fight, Joe said, "He can run, but he can't hide." It would be the same with Cassius against the ropes, he'd break both his arms. Before he was champion, Cassius was knocked down by Henry Cooper and Sonny Banks. If they could knock him down, Joe Louis would knock him out. I never saw any of the heavyweight champions before Joe Louis, but Jersey Joe Walcott, with his shuffling sideways style, would have given Cassius trouble.

As it turned out, I did give Cassius some advice, but he spurned it.

The night before his fight with Folley, my phone rang at about 11 o'clock. Cassius sounded more serious than I had ever heard him.

"Sugar Ray," he said, "can you come down to see me? Please, I have got to see you tonight--now."

He was staying at Loew's Midtown Motor Inn, across Eighth Avenue from the old Garden. When I knocked on his door, he opened it himself. He was the only one in the room. He handed me a wad of bills.

"Here's your thousand dollars," he said.

"But there's no way I can be in your corner," I said. "I don't have a license as a second."

"Man, you wanted to," he said. "That's good enough."

"What's going on, Cassius?" I said, not thinking that he preferred to be called Muhammad Ali. "Why did you call me here at this hour?" And then it hit me. "I mean, Muhammad."

"Never mind the Muhammad," he said. "You don't have to call me that."

"Well, what's on your mind?" I said.

"You got a fight tomorrow. You should have been asleep two hours ago."

"It's the Army," he said.

"What about the Army?" I asked.

"They want me--soon."

"I know that," I said. "I read about it in the paper last week."

"But I can't go," he said.

"You've got to go," I said.

"No," he said. "Elijah Muhammad told me that I can't go."

"What do you mean, you can't go?" I said, really annoyed.

Sitting there on the bed, his eyes on the floor, he didn't know how to answer me.

"That's what he told me."

"I don't care what Muhammad told you," I continued, "but I do care about you. If you don't go into the Army, you'll go to jail. When that happens, they'll take your title away. When you come out of jail, you won't be permitted to fight. Do you realize that you're forfeiting your entire career? Do you believe in this Muslim business this much, to give up your entire career?"

"Well," he stumbled, "Muhammad told me."

"Then let Muhammad go to jail. When you go to jail, none of those other Muslim leaders are going to jail with you. I know you respect your religion, but at the same time, you must live by the law of the land, wherever you live, you must live by the law."

"But I'm afraid, Ray, I'm really afraid."

"Afraid of what?" I said. "Afraid of the Muslims if you don't do what Muhammad told you?"

He didn't answer me.

"Now, look, Cassius," I said, "I told you what I think. That's all I can do for you. I'm your friend and I'm always going to advise you with what I think is right."

"Thanks," he said quietly. "Thanks for coming."

He stood up and we shook hands. I looked into his handsome face as I left. His eyes were glistening with tears--tears of torment, tears of indecision.

It was the last time I saw Cassius to talk to while he was still the champion. He knocked out Zora Folley the next day, and shortly thereafter refused to be drafted into the Army. That same day, his title was vacated by the New York State Athletic Commission and the World Boxing Association. It wasn't fair. The least the commission and the W. B. A. could have done was wait until his conviction had completely cleared the courts--which still hasn't happened. In any case, the title is Cassius' property. He won it in the ring, and that's the only place he should have lost it.