The Greatest: My Own Story by Muhammad Ali & Richard Durham

Author:Muhammad Ali & Richard Durham [Ali, Muhammad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Graymalkin Media
Published: 2015-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

OLD FRIENDS AND DINOSAURS

King Levinsky, in his prizefight prime, must have been a good-looking man. Even if he sometimes acted like that character Lennie I saw in Of Mice and Men, there was something sort of soulful and human about him.

He was in Wolfie’s restaurant one morning when I came in from doing roadwork for the Oscar Bonavena fight, trying to keep up his end of an argument going on near the pastry counter. When he saw me, he said, “Cash! You tell ’em, Cassius. Tell ’em I’m right.”

“What about?” I said, slumping into a chair, avoiding his eyes. A young fighter doesn’t like to look in the face of a scarred, punch-drunk member of the tribe. He might see his own future.

“They ask me why you always win. I tell ’em because you know all about losing.” He paused for me to answer. “You understand, Cassius? You understand how it feels to lose? That helps you keep winning.” His voice was a husky whisper.

I meant to say nothing, but I heard someone laugh. We were the only ones in there who knew about losing in the ring. And nobody else had the right to laugh. I got up and put my arms around the King’s big shoulders and announced in a loud voice, “Ladies and gentlemen. You know who this is? The King. King Levinsky. In his day, one of the strongest. One of the greatest. King Levinsky!”

I kept it up until the customers, the waitresses, busboys and the kitchen staff applauded, and only then did I look directly at his face. There was a glow in it and his eyes were soft.

“You know what it is to lose out there, Cash?”

His voice was even lower now, but one of the customers heard him and shot back: “The Champ ain’t never lost! He ain’t like you!” He was saying it as though he thought the point would flatter me.

The King was looking at me; some doubt was creeping in on our kinship. “Cash, how it feel to lose?”

“Naked,” I said, “and cold.”

“Naked and cold,” he repeated in triumph. “The worse way you can feel. They cut you off from the goddamn world. Nobody’s with the sucker who loses.”

He had moved a chair away from my table and the whole room had stopped to watch him. He put his hands to his head as though shutting off noise in a crowded stadium, bobbing and weaving, chased by some super-strong opponent.

“It’s not the blows, is it, Cash?”

I shook my head. “Not just the blows.”

“The blows, they rim you out. Ribs. Heart. Lungs. Stomach. Kidney. But it’s all them witnesses. Everybody watching you. They make you split to pieces, like a goddamn plate-glass window hitting the sidewalk.” He was reenacting the last fight he’d had in Chicago Stadium. “You sinking down to the floor, bleeding, and they roar him on. They roar him on. He’s turned into a lion and they cheer the lion on . . .”

I got up and pulled

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