THE CHINESE BOXES OF MUHAMMAD ALI There are worse things than defeat in the ring, Ali says, and from even worse trage dies people recover. The Fall and Rise of Muhammad Ali is practically instant. And here is where the Lord of Boxing, whose name may also be Allah, may have allowed Ali to blow the technical decision in order to save him for the big allegorical finish. If Frazier had flat tened him in eleven, or even knocked him stiff in fifteen, he may have left too big a hole in Quixote's armor. But Ali lived to fight another day, in other, bigger rings. Yes, Joe Frazier is undisputed champion, but the allegorical Ali lives!—that's the ongoing drama. While Frazier slowly recuperates, Ali is back on television, explaining how he won nine of the fifteen rounds. He's back on the campus circuit, bringing thousands of young white students to their feet cheering poems no longer directed at Frazier but at the white man's presence in Asia. He's our black Johnny Appleseed. He's in pursuit of a buck and in pursuit of the truth, and somehow the expansiveness of his personality bridges contradictions that would undo the normal you's and me's. BY BUDD SCHULBERG
Cassius Marcellus Clay was minus six like the song says. Something about lighting a dense thunder sky. We were when quietly invincible Joe Louis was the way he talked. He's learned a lot, privileged to sit with him in his intro demolishing Max Schmeling and send traveling around the world, being with spective moments, get caught with him ing him back on his shield to the land people—he really feeds off people— in the midst of crowds that threatened of the self-styled master race. The Joe little people, big people—that's his col to crush him to death with their love, Louis of Clay's childhood was another lege. He doesn't learn from books— watch him handle rival hangers-on man, a balding, overweight ex-cham truth is he never really learned to read, with the delicacy of a born diplomat, pion getting a boxing lesson from but he sucks up knowledge, informa and see him swing from playful child Ezzard Charles and a pathetic thump tion, ideas like an elephant sucks up to a man under all the pressures our ing from Marciano. Manager-trainer water. And he trumpets it all out just hyped-up sports world and superstate Angelo Dundee, a fixture in Cassius's like an elephant too." Pentagon can bring to bear on a quix corner from the first fight to the last, "Do you go along with Ali's descrip otic and sensitive nature. remembers Clay as a bubbling sixteen- tion of Ali? Is he the most unusual We have said with conceit (in the old- year-old bouncing into the Louisville fighter you ever handled?" fashioned sense) and also with convic gym and begging to put on the gloves Over the big Cuban cigar in the small tion that, just as a people get the gov with Angelo's flashy light heavyweight Groucho Marx-like face the answer ernment they deserve, so each period Willie Pastrano. Flying up from All's poured forth without a second's hesi in our history seems to create the training quarters last March for the tation. "Not just a fighter, he's the most heavyweight champion it needs to ex latest and greatest Fight of the Cen unusual human being, the most fasci press itself on the platform where body tury, Angelo reminisced about his nating person I ever met—period." language and social currents fuse. This champion. In his voice was the awe In those hectic days before and after seems to have been true of every true one reserves for first meetings with the "The Fight"—the most widely attended knight we have studied in the lists gods. single event in the history of the world from American slavery's heavyweight "There was something special about —we were to enjoy an intimate look at champion Tom Molineaux upward. But him even then," Dundee remembered. the man who created the first $20- never has there been a prize fighter who "Something about the way he moved, million rumble through the force of seemed so to our manner born as Cas two unique qualities: his physical co sius Marcellus Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Budd Schulberg's many books include ordination and his metaphysical per Ali. His career began, appropriately, What Makes Sammy Run, The Harder sonality. A personality as changeable in 1960, in the Camelot days, in the time They Fall, Waterfront, and Some Faces in as a March weather report, a psyche of the Kennedys that welcomed the the Crowd. This article is excerpted from Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali, simple one moment, complex the next, decade, promised it hope, and asked to be published by Doubleday in April. loving, suspicious, overgenerous, self- for sacrifices in exchange for solutions. Copyright © 1972 by Budd Schulberg. protective, with flashes of brilliance The New Frontier. Already antique, SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 21
PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED the words ring with the sound of pew twenty-first, he is, in his own words, Clay defeating Sonny Liston for ter respectfully aged and polished for "the most unusual." Taunted by the the title—" "This fight is the Sunday visitors. Imagine a time before ofays. Jack Johnson taunted back. Ac truth,' Malcolm told Cassius. 'It's the Cross and the Crescent the Bay of Pigs, before Dallas, before cepted by whites who offered him the fighting in a prize ring.' " Watts, before the attempted American national laurels and social responsi ization of Indochina, before assassina bilities that came with the champion tion became an annual horror, Medgar ship, Joe Louis accepted back. Never division but the heavy social order that Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Mar quite an Uncle Tom, he was the Good it entertained? tin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. . . . Joe who knew his place. He was the Watching him dance around the best Before the credibility gap of LBJ. Be hero but never the author of his al and biggest of the amateurs on his way fore the Chicago Convention, before legory. to AAU and Golden Gloves titles, Kent State and Jackson State. Before But the Sixties were a whole differ cognoscenti of the game were more Nixon promised to get us out of the ent number. In a time of prodigies amused than impressed. A heavyweight war by invading Cambodia and Laos turning on their dads—or rather, tun who prances around the ring like a and North Vietnam. ing out their daddies—ready for the lightweight? Look at the way he bends As our only world-famous athlete of bell, ready to take on all comers in and his dancer's waist backward to avoid the Shook-Up Decade just past, C.M.C. out of the ring, was that prodigious being hit! A tough pro would move in a.k.a. M.A. received into his beautiful brown descendant of Henry Clay: Cas- and break his back when he pulled that black body every one of the poisoned sius Marcellus Clay, the Fifth Beatle. kid stuff. That just ain't the way a arrows mentioned above. Wounded by Before we were prepared for the im heavyweight fights. But this was more all those arrows of our social misfor pact—but what were we prepared for than fast tactical footwork; it was ex tune, he refused to die. Hate him for in innocent 1960?—the loud laughing cessive mobility, sometimes physically this or despise him for that, he is still mouth in the handsome Greek god of unnecessary, a new psychological our youth, our conscience, our Mark a head was shouting, "Here I come, weapon—hit and run, jab and dance, Twain of bitterness and laughter. Of ready or not!" And who except his fel befuddle, frustrate, and tire the enemy all our champions, gloved and bare- low teen-agers could have been ready before zeroing in. knuckled, from the end of the eigh for the innovative style that was to Beatle V had begun to create his own teenth century to the dawn of the revolutionize not only the heavyweight pop culture in the ring. Archetype of
SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972
PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED the young athlete in the Age of Aquar Moore will fall in four"—and the an and boxing ability and came up with ius, he bounced happily to Rome for cient light heavyweight, almost thirty the mot, "He c'n run, but he can't hide." the 1960 Olympics, dazzling foreign years older than the quickfooted bard, Bu:: when the fight was over, and the challengers who could not believe a six- suffers the prophecy. job accomplished, it simply wasn't foot-three-inch will-o'-the-wisp. Or a Next we see Clay at, of all places, The Louis's or "our" style to speak the bronze Mercury, for the eighteen-year- Bitter End, a hip Greenwich Village exuberant truth: "Look, I tried to tell old original convinced an adoring audi launching pad for avant-garde talent, you how great I was, and you chumps ence that he was that earlier Roman where he sports a new tuxedo to en wouldn't listen. There's never been deity incarnate, combining speed and gage in poetry competition with a line anything like me in the history of the grace with eloquence, wit, and a mys up of ezra-pounded bards, grooving to world." terious elegance. his impending Garden bout with tough Truth, man. Don't hide behind a lot Home to Louisville he came wearing and highly rated Doug Jones. In a style of well-gee-whizzes like your daddies. his gold medal and his boyish grin, and all his own—call it an infectious boxing Come to think of it, a whole new gen thd white world seemed united with supplement to the anti-over-thirty eration coming of age in the early the black in agreement with his own spirit of the oncoming youth style—he Sixties thought of the preceding gen efflorescent image of himself: the pret laughs off all the old champions. Who's eration as slower, dumber, less musi tiest, the wittiest, the greatest. He Liston? Louis who? To a generation cal, less honest, more hung-up, less strutted the streets of his hometown splitting from its elders and their tra where-it's-at. Every generation wants and paused to admire his reflection in ditions, he's "The Greatest." Under to devour its predecessor, and we have store-front windows. "Look at me—I'm that title he cuts a record of chatter, only to go back two generations to beautiful! An' I'm gonna stay pretty doggerel, and song, and long before conjure the Jazz Age of Fitzgerald and cuz there ain't a fighter on earth fast the hard-eyed experts of the ring think College Humor when bare knees, rum enough t' hit me!" Then he would he's championship material or ready ble seats, ukuleles, bathtub gin, wild dance and throw his lightning combi for Terrible Sonny Liston, his LP is parties, and free verse were creating a nations into the air, or in the direction discovered by teen-agers, including my new life-style almost as horrifying to of a half-scared, half-awed ten-year-old sons, who find in his uninhibited ego- the people who grew up in the nine black brother—he has always been tripping nonsense that indescribable teenth century as the present youth drawn to kids, and especially black pleasure of being different from us, culture is to the parents of Woodstock kids, though this was still 1960 and the yes, and better than us. When my Nation. The key to that sentence is al pattern was all ego-popping ebullience, younger son was playing Clay's platter most. Maybe it's because we're still go a narcissism that might have been ir for the third consecutive time, I tried ing through it, but the intensity with ritating but that was instead irresisti to cross-examine him as to what was so which that Now generation wants to ble because it was so utterly without great about "The Greatest." rip off daddy and mommy (vide: the guile, because it spoke to you with the latest "youth-oriented" epic at your directness of the wild rose who says, Across the generation net the answer neighborhood moviehouse) makes the "Look at me, am I not beauty? Inhale was slapped back into my court in im Scott-Zelda rebellion seem as danger me, am I not perfume?" You could no patient monosyllables, "I dunno. Pop. ous as a game of post office. more resent the natural arrogance of I jus' dig 'im. I think he's cool. I dig the rose than you could the insouciant the way he dances around those older If the child of our times carries a "Look, Ma, I'm dancin'!" of young Cas- fighters and makes 'em miss. And the flower in one hand and a stick of dyna sius Marcellus. Of course a rose also way he rhymes and picks the round. mite in the other, it is because he is an has thorns, weapons concealed for its He makes it more fun than in your day. Oedipus who has read one book too protection. That might have been a And he's not a hypocrite. He knows many of Marcuse (or Che or Fanon) warning as to the deeper nature of the he's 'The Greatest.' So why not say it? and is ready to lay down his guitar and brown deity preparing for his pivotal Why be a hypocrite? Be honest." his strobe light to fight for something role in the epic drama of the Sixties. We retreated strategically, doing a he defines dimly, but deafeningly de verbal imitation of Cassius's defensive mands—a better world, an environ Scene 1, Act I, was deceptively har backbend, sensing the chronological ment that wiU contain and harmonize monious, as truly made epic dramas lightning crackling in the atmosphere. our nuclear genius. demand, festooned with integrated We closed his bedroom door, and he And where does this bring Cassius hero worship and gratitude seemingly went on singing along with Clay. The Clay (as he still called himself in his requited. message was clear: The jib of "our" antechampion days)? To Las Vegas in A group of well-to-do Louisville athletic heroes was cut to modesty. To the hot July of 1963. President Kennedy sports put their money where their every age its style, and "ours" (if we is still safely in the White House. There local pride is and set up a syndicate to had to be consigned to the past) was are some 15,000 U.S. Army "advisers" sponsor Cassius's professional career. for winners to hang their heads in still noncombat in Vietnam. Sonny In return for half the anticipated mock self-deprecation. "Well, those Liston, first a homeless St. Louis waif, profits, they pay him a comfortable guys in front of me opened up a pretty then a tough old jailbird, later a Team weekly salary, with a down payment good hole and I just ran to daylight ster goon, is heavyweight champion of on a tangerine-colored Cadillac, the and got lucky, I guess." Did we ever the world. Yet to burst on the Ameri first of a long line of exotic chariots. hear a broken-field runner telling the can consciousness is a black intelli His first pro test is a win over a tough press, "Look, I'm so shifty and so fast, gence burning with scorn for "the white sheriff, Tunney Hunsaker. Clay's it's impossible for the defense to lay a collective white men" and "the so- fights are performances—put-ons with hand on me"? It's true that Joe Louis called American Negro"—Malcolm X. blood. As he moves up into the big time, was asked one too many times how he Cassius Clay has come to Vegas as he rhymes his predictions—"Archie expected to handle Billy Conn's speed the heir-apparent to the heavyweight SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 23 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED throne. He has just butchered the Brit year-old Cassius with the hindsight spiritual strip poker that reveals all to ish and Empire champion, Henry gained from observing and visiting each, an exclusive deal played in a pri Cooper, in five rounds after having with the twenty-nine-year-old Ali, we vate club off limits even to sympa been saved by the bell himself at the now know that within the beamish boy thetic white players who would join end of four. Proximity to disaster who bantered with Brinkley lurked the the game. hasn't dampened Cassias Clay's love racial anxiety, producing anger as What has all this to do with Cassius affair with Cassius Clay. "He thrives on causatively as boiling water releases Clay in pursuit of Liston's title and his the precipice," says faithful Angelo steam. We follow joyously flamboyant subsequent odyssey? To our minds, a Dundee. "He could give Norman Vin Cassius Clay through his visit to Vegas great deal. We are preparing our cent Peale lessons on the power of for the Liston-Patters«n "fight." And selves not to be surprised when a positive thinking." And it's true that since everything about the transforma young man, making of each boxing the clout of the Cooper hook that put tion of Cassius the Caterpillar into Mu bout his parable, exchanges one image him down has served only to convince hammad the Butterfly is instructive, for another as dramatically but also young Clay that the most powerful we wonder at the meaning of his exis as easily as an actor changes costumes punch in the world can deflect him but tential acts. He invades the casino between scenes. momentarily from his climb to the top where Liston is playing blackjack, calls And make no mistake about it, they of the mountain. He is twenty-one him an ugly bear, invites him to an were scenes in a drama that young Cas years old, and one of his roommates impromptu match to settle the title sius knew he was playing, an allegory is Destiny. The other is his brother here and now, laughs at the scowl that in the Brechtian manner that he was Rudolph Valentino Clay. had frozen the blood of men who had consciously authoring and acting out. When David Brinkley and his TV pro thought themselves brave. On many different levels—the physical, ducer, Stuart Schuiberg, call on the Onlookers were merely amused by the psychical, the religio-political. Clay brothers, they find them stretched the brash kid with the big mouth who From his training camp for the first out on their luxurious beds, bare- seemed to have borrowed his publicity Liston fight Cassius waged an intense chested and barefooted, wearing ex buildups from the wrestlers' division campaign of psychological warfare. pensive slacks. "David Brinkley!" of the classical school of acting. What The old bus Cassius had bought to Cassius cries out, in that natural com wa3 dangerous about Cassius was not move with his entourage was painted edy style that makes his emphatic immediately appreciated: the inten red and white with "World's Most pronunciation of names laugh-provok sity, the concentration, the determina Colorful Fighter" emblazoned across ing without being insulting, "Da-vid tion with which he played. It was this the top, and covered with signs broad Brinkley, you're my man!" Cassius is that separated the fools of Shake casting his low opinion of the cham on the phone to room service ordering speare from mere Middle Ages merry pion: Bear Hunting Season. Liston breakfast. "Orange juice, a couple of makers. Wise kings listened to inspired Will Fall in Eight. Big Ugly Bear. . . . jugs, a box of corn flakes. And milk. fools while foolish kings laughed at the Cassius would invade Liston's training Can you send three quarts? And eggs— exterior apparatus of their jokes. camp, hose him with a torrent of in scramble up a nice batch for us, say The best of fools was a set of delicate sults and threats—poetically alone in about two dozen? Two or three rashers Chinese boxes, and just such a fool was America in thinking he could supplant of bacon and a loaf of toast. What, Brother Malcolm's "so-called Ameri the brooding, dangerous Sonny, who service for six? No, ma'am, this is can Negro," a series of ingeniously was expected to spank the obstrep breakfast for two!" The recent con fitted personalities, each larger one erous Cassius as a stern papa would queror of the British Empire and his concealing and protecting a smaller whup a wayward son. The odds on Lis brother Rudolph Valentino fill the one within until you finally come to ton were eight to one. Of the press who room with their laughter. Then Cassius the true resilient core. Many hundreds were on the scene from every conti turns to Brinkley with those large eyes of years of slavery and now more than nent, we remember not one who gave framed like a movie star's between a century of hypocritical "freedom"— the strident challenger a chance. butterfly brows and high cheekbones. a democracy with the black man still But Angelo Dundee, who somehow "Say, David, will you do me a favor, locked into the steaming cities while managed to remain uninvolved in the let's do the 'good nights' together." And the white man retreats from his day's psychological high jinks and the gath the supercharged contender lapses into work to the flowering suburbs—this is ering morality play, had warned us that a more than passable imitation of Chet the historical imbalance that condi Cassius had the style to outbox and de Huntley. "This is Cassius Marcellus tions all but the most profoundly in feat the ponderous, aging Liston. An Clay in Las Vegas. Good night, David." tegrated (or whitened, Ali might say odd group had believed in Cassius Clay. And Brinkley responds in his patented today) black man to take refuge in his Our teen-aged son David, who sent me sign-off. "And this is David Brinkley. Chinese boxes as a fox hides in the twenty-five dollars he had saved from Good night, Cassius." Clay breaks up. hedge from the hounds. allowances to bet on youth vs. age; He pounds his brother in joy. "Hey, I may have more black friends than Drew "Bundini" Brown, an ancient David, that's out of sight!" 95 per cent of white Americans, and mariner and saloon-keeper with a gift Watching him roll his marvelous sometimes I feel I have succeeded in of gab, almost as seven-tongued as Cas brown body and bark with laughter reaching the box within the box within sius, who was called "assistant trainer" like a frolicking young sea lion, who the box—but I never leave the room but was really the guru-in-residence; would guess that this would be the without a feeling that the brothers left and an unobtrusive black man who same man who was soon to frighten, together will now continue to remove was quite possibly the most remark infuriate, and finally confront the black Chinese box after Chinese box able man, black or white, then living white power structure of America? until at last they are left sitting around in America. This was the acknowledged But looking back on the twenty-one- in their naked souls, like a game of spokesman for blackness in Harlem,
24 SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Ali on canvas following knockdown cussing the atmosphere of racial hatred States, he was also part of a global during fight with Joe Frazler and social violence that the white man family of nonwhites among whom last March—"Wounded by all those had created in America, a rabid intol Caucasians were in turn a minority arrows of our social misfortune, erance that finally had struck down the doomed to eventual defeat. While Cas he refused to die." Chief of State himself. This was too sius was rattling his bear trap and tragically true. A liberal white Presi playing the loud-mouthed fool, while the scourge of Uncle Toms and Negro dent had no business driving in an open white Miami was either disgusted or civil rights leaders who spoke of inte car through a hate-filled Texas city entertained by this shrill showboating, gration and gradual improvements. where his enemies were articulate and a new philosophical and social con This was the rising star of black mili armed. Camelot was in ruins, the boil frontation was taking place that would tancy, the ex-hoodlum, thief, dope ped ing volcano in Harlem was getting prove as crucial to the middle Sixties dler, and pimp who finally, through ready to erupt again, and Malcolm X, as was the Louis-Schmeling debate to the teaching of Elijah Muhammad, had in the moment of greatest travail in a the late Thirties. come to understand his life of ghetto life that sensitively reflected all the "This fight is the truth," Malcolm hustling as the painful preparation for nightmare distortions of the American told Cassius. "It's the Cross and the his eventual role as liberator of his dream, was counseling the challenger Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for more than twenty million brothers suf along lines either totally unfamiliar or the first time. It's a modern crusade— fering a living genocide in white Amer anathema to the sports world. a Christian and a Muslim facing each ica. Born Malcolm Little, he was known Malcolm was not a fight fan; indeed other with television to beam it off in the street as Big Red before he be he hardly knew who Cassius was when Telstar for the whole world to see came even better known as Malcolm X. he met him and Rudolph at the Detroit what happens." The mystical reformed In tracing two centuries of major mosque several years before. Cassius master hustler with the razor-blade prize fights, we can see how inex impressed him then simply as a lika mind was convinced that Allah had tricably they are woven into our social ble, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth brought Cassius to this moment in or fabric. From Molineaux to Louis, our youngster with a contagious quality. der to prove something to black men champions were heroes of related acts But in The Fight of 1964, Malcolm with stunted egos who thought they that served as parables of cultural was convinced that Cassius had invited needed white spiritual advisers. change. But B.C., Before Clay, they had him to Miami to help the young fighter Those who attended the wildest only dimly recognized their roles. Now prove to the world the superiority of weigh-in in the history of the heavy it was A.D., After Dallas, which Malcolm Islam over a white Christianity that weight division thought that Cassius X had called "America's chickens come had brainwashed the Negro com was more in need of psychiatric than home to roost." There was a keen black munity to accept inferior status and spiritual assistance. Minutes before he hatred of all white institutions in Mal servitude. Molineaux had fought mere burst into the ring at the Miami Beach colm's mind when he made the state ly with his fists. Johnson had fought auditorium we could hear the threat ment that Elijah used as the official with his mocking smile and his wicked ened promise of his arrival, like reason for silencing him, pending his tongue. Cassius would fight with weap thunder before a storm. Then he and excommunication from the Black ons never before carried into an Amer Bundini exploded into view, furiously Church. The headline, seemingly a ican ring, his faith in a non-Western pounding canes in angry rhythms on crass post-mortem on the catastrophe religion, as well as his growing aware the floor and shouting their tribal slo in Dallas, had been taken from a con ness that, while he might be part of a gan, "We're coming to rumble. . . . text in which Malcolm had been dis minority 10 per cent in the United Float like a butterfly—sting like a bee!
SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 25
PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED It is prophesied for me to win! I can not be beaten!" In the fight that night, a macabre affair haunted by goblins and doubting Thomases, Cassius confounded his army of skeptics by making Sonny Lis ton suddenly look very slow and very tired. The old bull was winded after two rounds, punching ponderous gloves into the spaces that Cassius had occupied a moment before. At the end of seven rounds Liston hulked in his corner like a rejected Buddha, a worn- out god with a hole in his cheek top pled from his throne by a new religion —while the irrepressible standard- bearer of this new religion leaped around the ring proclaiming to the world he had just conquered symbol ically for Islam, for Harlem, for Bir mingham, for South Chicago, for a bil lion dark-skinned rooters around the globe, "I am the king! I am the king!" Next morning at the press confer ence we discovered another of the Chi nese boxes that make up the complex called Cassius Clay. Or so he had been called until that morning when he an nounced, in a voice with the volume now turned so low he was barely audi ble, that he was giving up his "slave name" and from now on would be known as Cassius X. He chided the reporters for almost Where's the ugly bear?..." For an hour Ali during Frazler fight—"Hate unanimously picking against him and the demonstration went on, with Cas- him for this or despise him informed them that he believed in the sius screaming, lunging at Liston, for tliat, lie is still our youth, religion of Islam, that he believed shaking his fists, bulging his eyes. Cool our conscience, our Mark Twain Elijah Muhammad was his apostle, and of bitterness and laughter." and seasoned Jesse Abramson of the that this was the religion believed in by New York Herald Tribune, trained to more than seven hundred million peo report without involving his emotions, his motel being examined by Dr. Ferdie ple throughout Africa and Asia. Now was for the first time shaken at a Pacheco, who found his blood pressure reporters in the back of the room were weigh-in. "I think they should call it miraculously normal. "A case of self- calling "Louder," whereas the day be off," he said to us. "He's in no condition induced hysteria," diagnosed Pacheco. fore they had feared that Cassius's to fight tonight." Most experts decided As Malcolm said, it was a case of mind vocal gymnastics might burst their ear that Cassius was terrified and suffer over matter. There wasn't a man in the drums. When he stepped down from ing from manic hysteria at the prospect world Sonny Liston was afraid of. But the platform we asked him about his of having to enter the ring with the was this towering dark screamer a immediate plans, and he told us he dour-faced champion. Liston did his human being or a whirling dervish? thought he would travel to Africa, the best to fix him with "the look," a bale What we were seeing, along with all Middle East, and Asia. "They will all ful stare he had perfected during many the other innovations Cassius was want to see the new champion of the years in prison. But Cassius would not bringing to the climactic ritual of the world who believes the way they do," be transfixed like Floyd Patterson. heavyweight championship, were the he said so quietly you had to lean to Screaming like a banshee, pounding new tactics of confrontation politics. ward him to hear it all. "And I will talk the stage with his feet as if possessed, Already a cult figure to the young, he with the leaders and the wise men of he kept up this bizarre performance was applying to the traditional cere those countries." until his blood pressure had bubbled mony of the ring the outlandish be Of the past eight heavyweight cham over the 200 mark and observers were havior of an Abbie Hoffman, a "crazy," pions, six had been Negro, but this was convinced that the next stop was the against which the old-fashioned prison the first black champion to proclaim psychiatric ward. aggression of Sonny Liston could not his blackness, to say to the white While reporters were asking the local aim its cold inner fire. Old-time boxing world, "I don't have to be what you boxing commissioners if they were con purists were disgusted, but there was want me to be," the ideal practitioner sidering calling oft this unequal contest Muslim method in his madness. In that to tap out on the heads and bodies of between a seasoned old champion and hour of simulated rage he had cried, his opponents the message: Black Is this hysterical boy, Cassius was back at "You're the chump and I'm the champ! Beautiful. Q 26 SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972
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^ \ A: PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED companying map of Manhattan showed Booked for Travel David Butwin various areas of the city Guillon consid ered dangerous either day and night or at night only. Generally, people were warned to confine nocturnal strolling Les Dangers de New York to a small rectangle formed by First and Third avenues and 57th and 68th As any traveler knows, you don't have French youths to see the U.S.A. this streets. to paddle up the Amazon or climb Kili summer, reporter Maurice Guillon "Guillon is such a nice, mild-man manjaro to find intrigue and peril. Resi listed some potential dangers of visit nered fellow, I just don't understand dents of large American cities can get ing New York and told how best to it," moaned John MacBean of the New all that at home. New York seems to avoid them. "There are about 20,000 York Convention and Visitors Bureau lead everyone's list as the city where drug addicts in New York. They are the morning the story broke in the you scarcely have to leave your hotel unable to work, but they need $50 to Times. "He was here last March, stayed room to experience a thrill-packed 1100 a day for drugs. So they attack and at the Waldorf, and marveled about it evening of danger and suspense. Now rob anyone, anywhere." To avoid being in a story he wrote. I often take visiting comes the French newspaper L'Aurore mugged, tourists were advised to walk reporters around, so on that trip we to warn that New York is even scarier in the middle of the sidewalk, board went to the Autopub in the General than New Yorkers thought it was. only yellow cabs, and, if possible, retain Motors Building, which I thought a In a recent story aimed at helping the services of a ferocious dog. An ac- zingy thing to do. Then we went to Paddy's Clam House, so a Frenchman could taste Long Island oysters and Maine lobster. He had a terrific time. Then we went up to the top of the Em pire State Building, and it was all icy and beautiful, and I took him back to his hotel. "This time he came by on January thirteenth," MacBean went on, recount ing the details like a detective testifying at a murder trial. "He dropped in and said he was writing an article for the young people who will be coming over in droves with the lowered air fares. He said many French youths are so naive that they need instructions on how to travel. He mainly asked about low-cost housing and meals. I took him to the Ground Floor, which is a very youth-oriented restaurant in the CBS Building. All kinds of porcelain and glass and cute little waitresses wearing smile buttons. He loved it. I just can't believe it, he's such an unassuming man." MacBean and his boss, Charles Gil- lett, executive vice president of the bu reau, come to work each day faced with one of the toughest tasks in the Ameri can labor force: trying to promote New York as a pleasant place to visit. New Yorkers who bad-mouth their own city are the bane of Gillett's life. He particu larly recoils at the one-liners Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson deliver each night in their opening monologues. "No sense of responsibility there," said Gil- lett. "I suppose we could lodge objec tions, but then they'd claim we were trying to curtail their freedom of speech, and, come to think of it, they'd be right." MacBean keeps a file on positive things written about New York. He doesn't cut out negative articles; he How perilous is New Yorlc? The Fulton I Dangereux le Fish Market, above, is hard by the tjour-etlanuit docI(S of the East River, but is perhaps too busy a place for city toughs. Maurice ' Dangereux /a GulUon's map of Manhattan's danger I nui't seulemerrt zones, below, warns young Frenchmen where not to stray without a ferocious dog. 28 SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED