All Alone With The Future

A white man who has known Cassius Clay for several years visited the world heavyweight champion at his Miami home and came away shaking his head dolefully. "I got there kinda late in the afternoon," the man said, "and it looked like a lawn party was going on. Clay was surrounded by little kids, eight or 10 of 'em, all Negroes, little children on his lap, little girls climbing all over him, and he was nuzzling them and kissing them—big sloppy kisses. And all around him were his yes-men—his brother Rudy leading the pack and laughing at everything he said. Cassius started a joke and Rudy broke up at the first line, and I asked him what he was laughing about, the joke had just started. Rudy said, 'Oh, I know this is gonna be so funny!' And Sam Saxon was there giving Cassius that 'Yes, suh, yes, suh.' And there were colored men from downtown telling him how he's the greatest fighter that ever lived and Clay agreeing for all he was worth. And it made you wonder just how much approval, how much attention does this boy need?

"It was like that movie, The Great Man, except that the movie didn't have all those references to that children's game called Black Muslims. Sitting around talking about how they won't eat pork, shrimp, how lobster's the swine of the sea. You go out there to his place and you see all that, and it's like being on a pirate ship with an insane captain and a broken compass. And then you realize all of a sudden, 'Holy Mother! That's where the heavyweight championship lives!' "

Whatever chance there might have been for Clay to return to the world of reality seems to be slipping quickly away. Every day Cassius pulls the constricting tentacles of the Nation of Islam more tightly around him, permitting and even encouraging the Muslims to get him up in the morning and put him to bed at night. He goes through life like a man under voluntary house arrest. The valuable financial advice offered to him gratis by the businessmen of the Louisville Sponsoring Group is spurned. The excellent legal counseling offered by lawyers for the Group is rejected in favor of "personal" lawyers of the proper color. The list of Muslim camp followers, paid out of Clay's own pocket, grows longer and longer. The result is that Clay is dead broke.

Worst of all the current Clay tendencies is his reluctance to take instruction from his trainer, Angelo Dundee, perhaps the wisest head in the business. At the Chuvalo fight in Toronto, Dundee said Clay "listened a little," but a steady stream of technical advice was loudmouthed from his corner by Saxon, Clay's personal bodyguard, a man who knows as much about boxing as you do about the Holy Qur'an.

"The fact is, Clay has no trainer," says a veteran member of the entourage. "You don't feel you're a trainer unless you correct your man's mistakes, unless he does what you're telling him. Angelo says you don't have to tell Clay much. But Clay don't listen to nobody no more. He always was bad about that, but now he's impossible."

When the Louisville Sponsoring Group first took over Clay's contract in 1960, he was sent to San Diego to study under the master. Archie Moore, but in a few weeks Moore was on the telephone to a member of the Group. "I think I'm gonna have to ask you to take the boy home. My wife is crazy about him, my kids are crazy about him and I'm crazy about him, but he just won't do what I tell him to do. He thinks I'm trying to change his style, but all I'm trying to do is add to it."

The Group member told Archie that Clay needed a spanking.

"He sure does." Moore said, "but I don't know who's gonna give him one, including me."

A few years ago, one of Clay's sparring partners, a heavy hitter himself, tried to get Cassius to improve his defenses. "I said to him, 'Champ, pull your left hand in, it's out too far.' He looked at me and he said, 'I got my own style. Nobody tells me nothing.' Then I hit him with a beautiful left hook, and I told him, 'Listen, you know why I hit you? 'Cause I want to teach you a lesson to keep your hands up.' And then he tells me, 'You come on, do it again. Just keep boxing! Don't tell me how to box.' So I hit him with another beautiful left, I never will forget it. But it didn't teach him nothing!"

To be sure, Angelo Dundee was able to bring refinements to Clay's style, but the lessons were taught the hard way, by indirection and applied psychology, and it is doubtful that another trainer would have had the patience.