My View from the Corner Read online

  Maybe the six-plus-hour flight to Las Vegas affected Clay, who connected with few, if any, clean punches in the fight. But he did come away with a unanimous, if unsatisfying, ten-round decision over Sabedong.

  One other thing I remembered about that trip was meeting Joe Louis, then a greeter at Caesars Palace. I reminisced about our first meeting, back in England during the war, and, as a fan, told him how much he had influenced me and my decision to go into boxing. Or something like that; I don't remember the whole conversation. Anyway, a pit boss saw us talking and soon approached me to countersign some of Joe's gambling markers, figuring I was a longtime friend and would stand for him. However, my luck hadn't been much better and, figuring a cosigner was nothing more than a schmuck with a pen, I told him I already had enough of my own markers, but thanks anyway.

  I guess that was in keeping with my reputation as a "soft touch." For years I had been in what might be called the money-lending business, giving handouts to any and all who approached me, especially my fighters. The difference between my way of operating and the way other money-lenders operated was that I didn't charge interest. Moreover, I rarely saw my money again. Fighters would go to Chris and try to hit him up for money, sort of an advance on their purses, but Chris would always tell them: "No way! Go and see Angelo, he's the softest touch in boxing." Hell, one of my old fighters used to come to see me and ask me for $20 every time. One time I asked him why he didn't just ask for $100 and he said, "Then I wouldn't see you as much." It's nice to know I was so popular!

  The next fight for Clay was back in Louisville, against his first ranked opponent, Alonzo Johnson—the same Alonzo Johnson who fought Willie Pastrano twice. And though the fight went the full ten rounds, this time Clay boxed smartly and won nine out of the ten rounds, connecting time and again with clean punches.

  We had two more fights in Louisville against a couple of "worthies" before we could move on to bigger things. The first was against Alex Miteff, a well-worn heavyweight with a name. "He'll go in six," Clay predicted and then delivered on his prediction by banging away at Miteff until the ref, who had had enough even though Miteff hadn't, stopped it in the promised round. Afterward, in his best impression of Gorgeous George, Cassius greeted the assembled press with: "I am the King! I am the Greatest! Nobody can stop me. They'll all fall!"

  Next up on his dance card was Willie Besmanoff. And although he was strong, I didn't figure him to be able to get close enough or have the timing to catch Clay. Cassius thought even less of him, saying, "I'm embarrassed to get in the ring with this unrated duck. I'm ready for top contenders." Then gave his prediction: "He must fall in seven." Besmanoff was so irate at Clay's prefight feather-rufflings that he tried to make a fight of it, lunging at the moving Clay. But every time he did, Clay would move out of range and come back to counter him. By Round Five it had become target practice for Clay as he belabored the confused and defenseless Besmanoff. But Clay was more focused on his prediction than on his opponent and merely used his left jab for the next two rounds while I hollered from the corner, "Stop playing around ... stop playing around ... finish off the sucker." Finally, in the predicted round, Clay got down to business and hit Besmanoff with several strong jabs and straight right hands, the last putting Besmanoff down and out, delivering on his promise.

  Like the steps on the old vaudeville circuit—which were the small time, the medium small time, the big small time, the little big time, the medium big time, and THE BIG TIME—boxing, too, has its stepping-stones. And as Cassius began to look like a champ, at least when he wasn't playing, I felt he was ready for THE BIG TIME, which meant New York.

  When we got to the Big Apple, I felt like Dolly from the Louis Armstrong song, "Hello, Dolly!"—I was back where I belonged. Wandering around my old haunts brought back many memories of my start in boxing, although to tell the sad truth, many of the old places were either shuttered or converted into parking lots. But still one magnificent vestige of what once had been remained, right where I'd left it at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue: Madison Square Garden.

  The Garden, as it was called by those in the fight mob, was at once a plot of land and a mecca, the place all fighters aspired to. I remember Jackie Cranford saying that he knew he had "made it" when he first saw his name on the marquee overhanging Eighth Avenue.

  For Cassius it was a homecoming of sorts, too. Right after winning his Olympic gold, he had paraded around Times Square, Olympic jacket on and gold medal hanging around his neck, to see if anyone recognized the homecoming hero. Few did then, but many did now that he was making his Garden debut.

  We were offered the shot through one of those all-too-frequent occurrences in the world of boxing: a fight between two heavyweight contenders had fallen out the week before their scheduled match and the slot was open. Hustling to fill the open date, Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner had called and offered us the fight, a match against a hard-hitting fighter out of Detroit named Sonny Banks who had eleven KOs in his fourteen fights. I thought it was right for Cassius. Not only was Cassius unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon in his previous ten fights, but Banks, I thought, was perfect for him—my philosophy in making fights for my fighters always being that I believed on my fighter's "worst" night he could beat the other sucker on his "best" one. And I didn't see Cassius having his "worst" nor Banks his "best" at the Garden that night.

  As usual Cassius stood on street corners the week before the fight, almost taking up permanent residence at Forty-ninth and Broadway, waiting to see how many people recognized him. One group who did was the sportswriters, who flocked around him to hear the bottomless well of quotes from the fighter they labeled "The Louisville Lip" and "The Mouth That Roared." And Cassius didn't disappoint them, once again chanting, "The man must fall in the round I call." Then, without taking a breath, he added the tag line: "Banks must fall in four."

  The only things I told Cassius before the fight were that Banks was a converted southpaw with a helluva left hook and that if Banks went to the ropes not to follow him but to keep him in the center of the ring, figuring his bad balance would put him at a disadvantage coping with Cassius's speed.

  From the opening bell the scenario played out exactly as it had in my mind, with Banks winging his left hook and Cassius dancing out of reach, smiling and jabbing. However, I noticed something; Cassius was standing too square, giving Banks too much of a target. Then, wouldn't you know it, midway through the round Banks connected with a long left that came out of nowhere, catching Cassius flush on the jaw. Cassius went down, eyes closed. But, when his butt hit the floor, they opened and lit up. Up at the count of two, he took the mandatory eight count, and then went on the defensive, looking more startled than hurt at being floored. Between rounds I told him no more fancy stuff, and, most important, stop standing square against this guy. Looking into his eyes I knew what a great fighter I had, his recuperative powers equal to any I had ever seen in the ring.

  By the second he was clear-headed and fighting his own fight. And by the predicted round, the fourth, he had Banks in trouble and down. Once again, his prophecy rang true. And afterward, he shouted to one and all at ringside, "I told you ... the man fell in four."

  Next up on Cassius's hit parade, just two and a half weeks after the Banks fight, was Don Wagner. Clay, again dealing in fistic fortune-telling, predicted, "Wagner must fall in four ... he should not go longer than Banks." And true to his prediction, Clay felled Wagner in four after playing with him for the last two rounds just so he could take him out in the prescribed number—a pattern he would repeat time and again, allowing his opponent to stay around just so he could fulfill his prophecy.

  George Logan, Billy Daniels, and Alejandro Lavorante would also fall in the predicted round, and, by July 1962, Cassius's record was l5–0, with twelve KOs. But we had nobody scheduled after Lavorante. That is, until I spotted Archie Moore in the L.A. Auditorium after the Lavorante fight. I told Cassius to challenge him on the spot, call him out right then and there. Gra
bbing the microphone from the TV announcer who was trying to conduct his postfight interview, Cassius went around the ring shouting, "Archie Moore ... I know you're out there." Then, seeing Moore in the audience, he pointed his glove at him and called him out, hollering, "I want you next, old man," and for the first time rhymed his challenge, "Moore will fall in four."

  Granted, it wasn't much of a rhyme, hardly Keats or Shelley or even Ogden Nash for that matter, but, hey, it was a start! According to at least one writer, it may have also been the beginning of rap, saying of Clay's rhymes, "Before there was rap ... there was Ali Rap." Now, as that early day rapper, Clay would go on to concoct those cockamamie rhymes of his, rhymes I helped him with whenever he asked—although my help usually came in the form of lines like, "Have no fear, Angie's here." I still made my contribution, no matter how small. By now the two of us were so much on the same wavelength that we could finish each other's sentences and rhymes, filling in each other's blanks. You might say we were joined at the hip and the lip. (There were times, however, when I couldn't help him. Like the time he wanted to know in which direction east was so he could pray before a fight. He asked the wrong guy. I get lost in the little boy's room.)

  The Moore fight was made almost before the ranting stopped. Originally scheduled for October 23, 1962, it was pushed back when ticket sales were below expectations. The promoter hoped another three weeks of Cassius promoting the fight would increase sales. "You mean another three weeks of listening to him shoot his mouth off?" Moore groused. "That's good because I'm going to develop the 'lip-buttoner' punch, especially designed for that fresh boy," Moore said, adding to the push-me-pull-you insult preliminary to the main event.

  Never one to let a verbal challenge go unanswered, Cassius came back with his own verbal taunt, this one expressed in a poem: "Archie has been living off the fat of the land / I'm here to give his pension plan. / When you come to the fight don't block aisle or door, / 'Cause ya'll going home after Round Four."

  As an afterthought, he added, without thought of rhyme or reason: "If I tag him earlier, I'll just have to hold him until the fourth round."

  The fight itself was far more one-sided than the verbal jousting, with Cassius moving in and out and throwing fast combinations while Archie continued to move forward at a snail's pace befitting his age. Ol' Archie—there's no other way to express it—was at least forty-five years old; some wiseacres suggested he was fifty-two-going-on-Social-Security with 232 professional fights and twenty-eight years in the ring. He looked every day of it too, his hair gray and his elastic pair of trunks (which looked like they were orthopedic trunks made by Omar the Tentmaker) coming up to his nipples to hide his paunch. It was no fight as Cassius landed almost everything he threw in his pursuer's direction while Archie, for his part, landed but one meaningful punch, a sneaky right that caught Cassius near the end of the first round. By the fourth, with Moore tiring, Cassius began landing his combinations, flooring the "Old Professor" for an eight count. As he arose, obviously the worse for wear, Clay belabored him with another series of combinations and the referee stepped in to save the now-helpless Moore, who had come to the end of the line and his career.

  It was yet another win for Cassius. Another promise kept.

  FIVE

  Young Cassius Punches His Ticket to the Top

  Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.

  Boasting has been part of boxing's historic past since the 1890s when John L. Sullivan would boast, "I can lick any sonuvabitch in the house" and then would lay out anyone foolish enough to take him up on it.

  Predictions were something else altogether, usually delivered in a far less boisterous manner, almost with a self-assured, leave-it-to-me confidence. Perhaps the most famous prefight prediction in boxing history was Joe Louis's before his second fight with Billy Conn when, without a boast or a brag, he said, "He can run, but he can't hide" and then proceeded to carry out his prediction by finding the unhidden Conn in the eighth round of their 1940 fight. Louis also predicted his one-round destruction of Max Schmeling in 1938 when writer Jimmy Cannon asked him, "How many rounds do you think it'll go, Joe?" and Louis merely held up his thumb to signify one round, which is all the fight went, two minutes and four seconds of it.

  But perhaps the original copyright holder for predicting a fight's result was Sam Langford, who called his rounds. And his shots. Called "The Boston Tar Baby," Langford fought during the first two decades of the twentieth century and often was able to correctly predict how a fight would end.

  One time while standing in his corner awaiting the opening bell, Langford looked over at his opponent's corner and noticed one of his adversary's seconds slicing up oranges. "What you doin' with all them oranges?" Langford shouted over to the second. "I'm slicing 'em up for my man to suck on between rounds," came the second's answer. "Man, you ain't gonna need them oranges," promised Sam, and he promptly went out and dispatched his opponent before he had even come close to having his between-rounds pick-me-up.

  But Cassius Clay would become the first boxer ever to combine boasting with predictions—and deliver them in rhyme form. He was, as he said unhumbly, "Double 'The Greatest' ... I not only knock them out, I call the round."

  With his knockout win over Archie Moore, Clay thrust himself onto the short list of heavyweight title contenders for the crown won just two months earlier by Sonny Liston. The public was more than somewhat underwhelmed by the prospect of a Liston–Floyd Patterson rematch, what with Liston having taken out Patterson in just two minutes and six seconds of the first round. The only fighter in the title mix who could generate interest in a championship fight was none other than Cassius Clay.

  Clay had looked so good in dispatching Moore that Bill Faversham and yours truly believed he was ready for a shot at the title. And so the campaign for his shot at Liston began. Clay began appearing on national TV, talking the talk, and suddenly the press took note and began beating the drums for a Liston-Clay fight, many of them hoping against hope that Liston would button "The Louisville Lip."

  Because Liston had signed for a return bout with Patterson in the summer of 1963, we were forced to stay busy to maintain our place in the title picture. Our first post-Moore opponent was Charlie Powell, an ex-NFL lineman, who went, as advertised, in three. Next up was Doug Jones, a light heavyweight now campaigning as a heavy and Number Two in the heavyweight rankings, a "useful" résumé-builder to keep our place in the upper tier of heavyweights.

  We arrived in New York for the Jones fight in March 1963 only to find the city in the midst of a 114-day newspaper strike. With the seven city papers quieted, the Garden publicity office was at a loss as to how to publicize the fight. Not so Clay, who made it his personal crusade to go on every TV show, talk on every street corner, and shout to every passing person, "This is unfair to the many boxing fans in New York. Now they won't be able to read about the great Cassius Clay." On and on and on it went, until Cassius, as both a promoter and a self-promoter, had created the Garden's first sellout in thirteen years. Even the pigeons had to move from the rafters to make room for the overflow crowd.

  Every time Cassius saw a TV camera or a radio microphone, he would go into his usual pugilistic poetry, saying over and over again:

  Jones likes to mix,

  So I'll let it go six.

  If he talks jive, I'll cut it to five.

  And if he talks some more,

  I'll cut it to four.

  As Clay circled the ring before the fight, he danced near Jones, close enough to ask, "How tall are you?" Jones responded, "Why do you want to know?" "So I'll know how far to step back when I knock you out in the fourth," said Clay, dancing back to his corner with a smile on his face to await the introductions.

  Before the first round was over, Jones had wiped that smile off Clay's face, landing a right cross to Clay's jaw. All of a sudden his legs wobbled and the crowd came alive, cheering Jones's efforts. After a couple of rounds of Jo
nes landing and Cassius more concerned with making him miss than landing his own punches, I decided something was wrong. Here I must tell you that guys were always giving me hell about Clay not keeping his hands up. So I told him to "keep his hands up" before the fight. Well, while he was keeping his "hands up" out there, he was also getting the hell kicked out of him. I had fooled around with his style and was wrong to do so. He came back to me after the third round and I told him the opposite, "Keep your hands down." And it worked. (Similarly, Emile Griffith, who trained Bonecrusher Smith, had told him before his fight with Frank Bruno to "be patient and wait until he punches." But after nine rounds of watching a too-patient Bonecrusher, Griffith threw up his hands and said, "Do whatever you have to do." And Bonecrusher reverted to his normal style of boxing for the tenth and final round. Doing it his way, he knocked Bruno out.)

  Then, in the fourth, the round predicted by Clay, he began to find his range. But when the bell rang to end the promised round, the 18,732 fans let out a mighty roar. Make that a chorus of boos to express their disappointment that the fighter who had made good on his promises twelve times before had now failed to keep one.

  Usually Clay would turn to me in the corner between rounds and ask if he was winning. After the eighth, I had to tell him "it's close" and that he had to "step it up" and close the show to win. And wouldn't you know it, he did, winning a close decision by just one round on two of the judges' scorecards.

  For the first time in his career, Clay had to stand in the middle of the ring listening to the boos and dodging the assorted flybys—cups, cigars, programs, and other missiles hurled into the ring.

  On the way back to the dressing room I whispered to him, "Well, you told them first that 'Jones likes to mix and you'll let it go six.' Then you said you'd 'cut it to four' ... so by my count, four and six makes ten, see?" His eyes lit up as the idea registered. And that became Clay's cop-out when the press descended on him to find out, in newspaperese, "Wha' happened?"