My View from the Corner Read online

  But I chose not to take over until after Clay's first pro fight. It has always been my policy not to disrupt an ongoing relationship between a fighter and a trainer. And since the Louisville Sponsoring Group already had a temporary trainer, Fred Stoner of Louisville, in place for this bout, I decided not to attend so that it wouldn't look like I was interfering, which would have been unfair to Stoner.

  Nevertheless, I heard all about that first fight, a six-rounder in front of Clay's hometown fans against someone named Tunney Hunsaker. Billed as "The Olympic Champion Turning Pro in His First Pro Fight," Clay, wearing his Olympic trunks with U.S.A. on the side, won a decision over Hunsaker. According to my sources, Clay had shown great natural talent, apparently the same talent he had exhibited in his sparring session with Paterno, and could—and they repeated, could—be "the goods." I would see.

  In early December 1960 I got another call from Faversham. This time he said, "I'm going to send you the kid." But with Christmas just around the corner, I said, "Not yet, let him spend Christmas home with the family." A few minutes later the phone rang. Again it was Faversham. "Angelo," he said, "the kid wants to fight. He wants to go now. He wants a fight before Christmas."

  To the impatient-to-get-on-with-his-career Clay, "now" meant immediately, this instant, and wouldn't you know it, the very next day he arrived by train. At the time no hotel on the beach would accept blacks; even the drugstore below the 5th Street Gym wouldn't allow blacks at their counter. So after I picked him up I took him over to the Charles Hotel in Over-town, Miami's Harlem, where I had rented him a room. Next door was The Famous Chef, a restaurant where I had made arrangements for him to sign for food. The restaurant would send me the tabs, I would pay them, and the Louisville Group would send me the money to cover them. Not wanting him to be alone, I soon found him a roomie, Allan Harmon, who had just come over from Kingston, Jamaica. But because of the size of the room, the two had to sleep together in one bed. After about a month of sharing room and bed, Clay approached me and complained, "You don't like me much, do you? You put me in a stinkin' room with a guy who stinks!" Apparently, Harmon had an island aroma, something Clay had never experienced before, and it bothered him. "Okay," I said, "I'll make different arrangements." It would be the first—and only—time during our long relationship that I ever heard Clay complain.

  Each and every morning, after doing his roadwork chasing his shadow, Cassius would run all the way from his hotel in Miami across the MacArthur Causeway to the 5th Street Gym—that's double roadwork, if you're counting. One morning I got a call from the Miami Beach police saying they had a tall, skinny kid (he was only about 183 pounds then) who was running across the causeway and who said he was my fighter. At the time, the City of Miami Beach had a law that "people of color" were not allowed in Miami Beach from sunset to sunrise. The police wanted to know if I would vouch for him. Would I? I said it was just Cassius doing his roadwork.

  (Lou Duva had a similar experience with one of his fighters, John John Molina, in Virginia Beach. Seems that Lou had measured the distance from their training headquarters at the Holiday Inn to the first traffic light and told John John to "run to the first red light and back." Well, some two hours later the Virginia Beach police called and told Lou they had someone in custody who claimed to be his fighter and that he was at a different Holiday Inn six or seven miles away looking for him. That someone was John John who later told Lou that he had kept running because "all the lights were green.")

  To many fighters, roadwork is like going to the dentist, something they dread. Floyd Patterson called it "nothing but counting beer cans along the side of the road." Some fighters, like Mike DeJohn, merely went out, splashed water on their faces, and came back, claiming they had done their roadwork. Others didn't want to do it at all. Ray Arcel was one trainer who always did roadwork with his fighters—something I must say I never did. He once had a fighter named Joe Baksi who was in London in 1947 to face the British heavyweight king, Bruce Woodcock. Baksi was reluctant to do any roadwork at all, so Arcel would rouse him out of the sack every morning, come sunshine or rain, which was normally the case in "unmerry olde" England at that time of the year. Anyway, according to Arcel, "This one day was the worst of all. It was drizzling and cold. I woke Joe up and he looked at me with hate in his eyes. I knew I had trouble ahead."

  Baksi decided to put it to his trainer. Determined to make sure this would be the last time Arcel ever ran with him, he ran with the trainer for the first four or four miles, then, with a half mile left in the five-mile run, he stopped and began jumping up and down and shadowboxing. "Then," said Ray, "he looked at me to see if I was dying." But Arcel was wise to Baksi's ploy and said, "Come on, let's finish this last half mile with a sprint." After that Ray had no more trouble with Baksi or his roadwork. Needless to say, Baksi "ran over" Woodcock.

  (In a case of turnaround is fair play, I remember the time I had Carmen Basilio out in Chicago for the second Robinson fight, and Carmen was out doing his roadwork on a cold March morning. Me, I don't do roadwork; I just wait for my fighter to come back. Anyway, there I was standing in front of the hotel, waiting for Carmen to return from his five-mile run, when a patrol car pulls up and the cop in it threatens to run me in for loitering. As I turned to go back into the hotel, who do I see in the back of the car but Carmen, laughing his ass off.)

  But Cassius not only loved doing his roadwork, he knew it was the source of his stamina. So he would run until he was tired, sometimes running backward, and then he'd run some more—across causeways, up and down streets, and even over golf courses, cutting his legs on unseen sprinkler heads dotting the fairways; I'd have to treat his bloodied legs all the time. He used to worry the heck out of me. But bloody legs or not, he would run. Then, after finishing his roadwork, he would bound up the stairs of the gym two steps at a time and mischievously holler, "Angelo, line up all your bums for me ... I'm gonna knock 'em all out!"

  Clay was always his own man. A typical dialogue between the two of us would go something like this: Clay: "I'm gonna run five miles." And I'd say, "That's good for your legs." And then, testing me, he'd contradict himself, saying, "No, I'm gonna rest." And I'd say, "Good, you need your rest." No sense in interfering with a boxer who has his own mind. As long as he did his training, who was I to meddle?

  They tell of other fighters, like old-time great Young Corbett, whose downfall could be traced to the fact that they were allergic to training, never wanting to put aside the good life or the good things for the rigors of training. But not Cassius. He was a workaholic. He would spend hours in the gym, always the first to arrive and the last to leave, punching the bags, sparring with anyone he could, doing his exercises in front of the gym's floor-to-ceiling mirror—preening and flicking jabs at imaginary opponents. For him, it was like going to a picnic.

  Training is the most important part of boxing. It's the laboratory where a fighter's skills and styles are developed. But it's not like a music teacher merely sitting a new pupil down at the piano and instructing that pupil to plunk away at the keys to his or her heart's content. It's more, much more. It's polishing a fighter's assets and filing rough edges, teaching a fighter to develop a style to fit his natural abilities and to correct his faults in the execution. And then to repeat it over and over again, until it becomes instinctive.

  Take Gene Tunney, for example. When he returned from France after World War I, Tunney's left elbow was affected by some form of paralysis. He went up to the wilds of Maine, where, day after day, he would chop wood, using only his left hand. Over time the strength returned to his left arm. He then returned to the gym and, with his right hand tied to his side, worked on the fast bag and what was then called the sandbag, only using his left, keeping at it everlastingly until full strength returned to his once-damaged limb. It was that left that tormented Jack Dempsey in Tunney's two fights with the "Manassa Mauler," a left hand that had been developed in training. Dempsey also developed the most devastating left hook in boxing histor
y by having his right hand tied behind his back while training.

  It's an old boxing adage that "styles make fights." But styles also make fighters, and perhaps the most important part of training is the development of a fighter's style, one perfected by long hours of training in the gym. Every fighter is different. It's not one-size-fits-all when it comes to styles, rather styles are cut from different cloths, each tailored to a fighter's strengths or weaknesses, less manufactured than sculpted.

  All great fighters make it up as they go along, and Cassius was one of the most innovative and imaginative fighters I ever saw. He could imitate the style of any fighter, something very few fighters could do. Sometimes you'd see him imitating the slick moves of Willie Pastrano or Luis Rodriguez, two fighters he watched training at the 5th Street Gym. Other times you'd see him doing his best impression of some of Jersey Joe Walcott's "sand-dancing" moves, or the moves of other fighters whose styles he admired. But the fighter he most imitated was the fighter he most admired, the man he called "the king, the master, my idol," Sugar Ray Robinson. Often when Cassius shadowboxed or sparred, you could hear him acknowledging his debt to Robinson saying, "This is how Ray Robinson used to do it," always accompanying his execution of a Robinson-like move with verbal "bam ... bam ... bams." These moves, and some of the others that Clay mimicked, eventually found their way into his soon-to-be unique style.

  I remember once, just before the Jerry Quarry comeback fight, Clay wanted to come into the ring as Jack Johnson. "Why Jack Johnson?" I asked. "You're in no way like Jack Johnson. Why do you compare yourself to other boxers? You're not like Sugar Ray Robinson; you're not like Joe Louis. You're new, different. You're yourself, and they can't compare to you." And I believed it!

  At this point Cassius's ability and natural stuff were great. I never touched that natural stuff with him. What a fighter has naturally, you can't improve on. You let it alone. You smooth it out, but you never tamper with it. But watching him, I figured he had a couple of things he could use some help on, and I added a few wrinkles. However, training Cassius was not quite the same as training another fighter. Some guys take direction and some don't, and this kid had to be handled with kid gloves. So every now and then I'd subtly suggest some move or other to him, couching it as if it were something he was already doing. I'd say something like, "You're getting that jab down real good. You're bending your knees now and you're putting a lot of snap into it." Now, he had never thrown a jab, but it was a way of letting him think it was his idea, his innovation. Or, "My gosh, you threw a tremendous uppercut. That was beautiful!" Again, he had never thrown an uppercut. It was like going around the mulberry bush. I'd make him think he was the innovator, and after a while Cassius thought it was his own idea.

  He always had to be the inventor, the star. It was sort of like the old joke about the magician who invites a volunteer up from the audience to help him perform a trick. Giving the volunteer a baseball bat, the magician instructs him to hit the magician over the head as hard as he can. The volunteer declines, afraid he'll hurt the magician, but the magician urges him on until finally the volunteer swings, smashing the magician's head. Taken off on a stretcher, the magician finally wakes up in a hospital room three weeks later, looks around, and goes, "TA-DA!" It was like that with Cassius. He would make the suggested move and later go "TA-DA!" as if he had done something magical. And every day thereafter he would repeat his newfound move or punch, proud of himself for coming up with the idea. Later he would say to a reporter, "Angelo never trained me," which was technically correct, at least from his perspective.

  It did not matter that he was cut from a different cloth. Those parishioners in the 5th Street Gym pews, whose knowledge of boxing styles ended sometime after they read a 1930s edition of How to Box, sniffed at his style. To them, he was too this, too that. "He's off balance when he throws his punches," they sneered. Or, "He holds his hands too low." Or, "He pulls straight back to avoid punches, not side to side." Or, "He never throws punches to the body." (Clay only threw belly jabs. His philosophy was always the reverse of Sam Langford's, that if you kill the head the body will follow.) Or, "If I want dancing, I'll go to Roseland." Or any one of a hundred other things they thought were flaws in his style.

  One time, when he was sparring with my boxers, I asked three journalists what they thought about my new kid. The first said that Cassius was too small to face heavyweights. The second complained that he moved around too much and threw too many jabs. And according to the third, Clay didn't have enough power to knock out the big guys.

  But no one had ever seen a heavyweight like this before, one who combined grace and power never seen before in a heavyweight. And his speed more than compensated for what others saw as flaws in his style. One writer, upon seeing Cassius, said, "He's a heavyweight who moves like a bantamweight." His style was not, as the ads of the day said, "Your Father's Oldsmobile," it was all new. And this marvelously flawed boxer with the deceptive style would redefine boxing as we knew it.

  Clay's second pro fight, and the first under my guidance, came on December 27, 1960, against Herb Siler on the undercard of Chris's promotion of the Willie Pastrano–Jesse Bowdry fight. Siler was KO'd by what the Miami Herald described as "a right to the midsection and a left hook to the jaw." Faversham was delighted with the result, and thanked me. "Don't thank me," I said. "I didn't knock out Silas, Clay did." I knew I was only as good as the guy on the stool. And, oh, Clay was pleased too, preening and hollering to the crowd, "I'm gonna be the heavyweight champion of the world." I thought this guy could strut sitting down.

  Twenty days later he knocked out Tony Esperti in three. That was followed another twenty days later, in a preliminary to the NBA light-heavyweight title bout between Harold Johnson and Jesse Bowdry, with a two-minute KO of Jim Robinson. Fourteen days after that, he knocked out Donnie Fleeman in the seventh. His style hadn't changed, but I began to notice some of the little modifications he had added, such as a sharper jab. Especially against Fleeman, who had fifty-one fights and forty-five wins and extended Cassius into the seventh, the first time Clay had gone more than six rounds.

  I really didn't know how much Cassius had progressed until March 13, 1961. That date doesn't appear on his record, but it does on the records of Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. For that was the date of their third title match. Before the fight Johansson's trainer, Whitey Bimstein, asked if I had a fighter who would spar with Ingemar in a public workout for the press. I suggested Cassius, who didn't have a problem sparring with Johansson. The only one who had a problem was Ingo, who never laid a glove on the kid. After two rounds of plodding after him and not landing a punch, Bimstein decided enough was enough and called a halt to the sparring session. It was to serve as an omen for the fight itself, Ingemar getting starched in six.

  It was now time to step up the competition, to begin adding name fighters to Clay's résumé. For that we selected Lamar Clark, a heavyweight who had forty-six knockouts in fifty fights, forty-five of those in a row—including a Guinness Book of Records six in one night. And what better place to take on Clark than Clay's hometown of Louisville?

  Before the fight Clay had come up with a new gimmick, predicting that he would knock out Clark in two rounds. And knock him out in two he did, fulfilling his prophecy. Afterward he told newsmen, "I just had the feeling he must fall. I said he would fall in two and he did.... From now on they all must fall in the round I call." The newsmen ate it up.

  Suddenly Cassius Clay was more than just a boxer, he was an attraction, a celebrity. It was something he worked at becoming, just as hard as he worked at becoming a better boxer and a champion. No stunt was beyond him if it forwarded his name and his fame. I remember the time back in Miami when he went into the pool at the Mary Elizabeth Hotel to pose for Flip Schulke, a photographer who was taking pictures of him throwing punches underwater, even though Clay was afraid of water and couldn't swim. I was scared the damned fool would drown. But it didn't matter to Cassius, who knew a good
PR stunt when he saw it.

  Cassius was always on the alert for other ways to capture the attention of the media, and he found another shtick after meeting and then watching the wrestler Gorgeous George. Coming away from the wrestling matches, Cassius said in wonderment, "I hear this white fellow say, 'I am the World's Greatest Wrestler. I cannot be defeated. I am the Greatest! I am the King! If that sucker messes up the pretty waves in my hair, I'm gonna kill him. I am the King! If that sucker whups me, I'm gonna get the next jet to Russia. I cannot be defeated. I am the prettiest! I am the Greatest!'" And then, with a twinkling smile, Clay said, "When he was in the ring, everybody booooooed, booooooed. Oh, everybody just booed. And I was mad. And I looked around and saw everybody was mad. I saw fifteen thousand people coming to see this man get beat. And his talking did it. And I said, 'This is a g-o-o-o-o-o-o-d idea!'" For Cassius, it was a revelation, a "g-o-o-o-o-o-o-d idea" he would soon embrace, just as he would Gorgeous George's suggestion he wear white shoes instead of black because they made his feet look faster.

  Our next fight, Clay's first ten-rounder, was in Las Vegas against a journeyman out of Hawaii named Duke Sabedong, a strong 6′ 6″, 220-pounder with twenty-seven fights. Before the fight when asked by newsmen if he was "nervous," Cassius had answered, "I'm not afraid to fight, I'm afraid of the flight." Afraid of flying, Cassius had wanted to go by train, a three-day trip I hardly relished. (This was long before the then-Ali, on a plane to England, was told by the stewardess to strap on his seatbelt and he told her, "Superman don't need no seatbelt," to which she answered, "Superman can fly.") Without resorting to the same ruse used by Whitey Bimstein, the trainer of Terry Young, who coaxed his scared fighter aboard a plane for their fight in Honolulu by telling him that Honolulu was in New Jersey and that the flight from New York would only take fifteen minutes, I merely overruled Cassius.