The Big Bear Plays With A Cub

"By staying alive?" someone asked.

The brothers whooped, and Henry Clark flashed a mouth loaded with gold. "No, by moving all the time," said Henry. "By punching all the time, by never giving him a chance to get set where he can do me harm. Not that he could. I saw him fight Bill Joiner. He was something awful. He's old, man; even his scowl is old."

( Liston stopped Joiner in seven rounds on May 23, in Los Angeles, and a week before it happened a West Coast promoter telephoned Angelo Dundee in Miami. "Get your Mel Turnbow ready," said the promoter. " Liston is stirring up a lot of interest out here, and I want to put him in with Turnbow three weeks after the Joiner fight." Three hours after the Joiner fight the promoter called back. "Forget it, Angie," he said. " Liston stunk out the joint. He's had it. No legs, no punch, no nothing. They even threw things in the ring.")

Henry Clark shifted his big body around—he's 6'2�" and 215 pounds—and watched the first of the spectators wandering in. "Yeah, and if Liston wants to see something really tough, let him go to Baton Rouge, where I lived," he said. "There you're either a sheep or a wolf, and you might say I was the leader of the wolves. I always was kind of big. All them little sheep had to pay 50� a week for protection—and you know who was doing the collecting. Walk across that town you either run or fight. And I didn't run. After I got to where I was whipping three or four guys at a time, I wasn't even getting a bad look."

More people began drifting in, and finally Liston arrived. He saw Clark and turned on his scowl. Clark laughed. Liston's scowl blackened, but he walked away, as though puzzled by the new world of big, muscular youngsters who laugh when they should be trembling.

For Clark, Liston trimmed to 219 pounds, three less than he was against Joiner and the other five nonentities he has beaten—people like Elmer Rush, Bill McMurray and, Lord, Gerhard Zech—since beginning his comeback. He looked trim and well-conditioned, and for the first nine minutes of Saturday's fight he did manage to stir small memories of the Big Bear of the pre- Muhammad Ali days. But when he hit, it was without the numbing power that had made him so fearful in the past. "Phew," said Dundee, who did the color for Howard Cosell on ABC's Wide World of Sports telecast, "he hit Clark some shots that should have torn his head off. Real bombers. But nothing happened. Right there is the tip-off."

For Clark, the first three rounds were brutal. Liston set a savage pace, and Clark made it easy by walking straight in or backing straight out. "I just wanted to let him know who was boss," said Liston. Clark was having enough problems trying to find out who was boss in his corner: his brother Richard, who was not a fighter, or his manager Joe Herman, who was first a fighter and has been a manager since 1914.

"Stay 'way from him. Don't get hurt. Don't let him hit you," said Richard.

"Get in and fight, for God's sake," said Herman. "Richard, shut up! Henry, throw some punches, do something."

"Stay way away," said Richard.