King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Boxing, Sports, Olympics, Biography
ISBN: 9780804173629
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

BILL MACDONALD NEVER HOPED TO CONVINCE THE PUBLIC that Clay was a modest fellow in the Louis mold, but he had hoped that the writers would think he could fight. They did not. According to one poll, 93 percent of the writers accredited to cover the fight predicted Liston would win. What the poll did not register was the firmness of the predictions. Arthur Daley, the New York Times columnist, seemed to object morally to the fight, as if the bout were a terrible crime against children and puppies: “The loudmouth from Louisville is likely to have a lot of vainglorious boasts jammed down his throat by a hamlike fist belonging to Sonny Liston.…”

In the later acts of his career, Muhammad Ali would take his place in the television firmament and his Boswell would be Howard Cosell. But in the days preceding his fight with Sonny Liston in Miami, Cassius Clay was not yet Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell was a bald, nasal guy on the radio who annoyed his colleagues with his portentous questions and his bulky tape recorder, which he was forever bashing into someone’s giblets. Newspapers were still the dominant force in sports; columnists—white columnists—were the dominant voices; and Jimmy Cannon, late of the New York Post and, since 1959, of the New York Journal-American, was the king of the columnists. Cannon was the first thousand-dollar-a-week man, Hemingway’s favorite, Joe DiMaggio’s buddy, and Joe Louis’s iconographer. Red Smith, who wrote for the Herald Tribune, employed an elegant restraint in his prose that put him ahead of the game with more high-minded readers, but Cannon was the popular favorite: a world-weary voice of the city. Cannon was king, and Cannon had no sympathy for Cassius Clay. He did not even think he could fight.

One afternoon shortly before the fight, Cannon was sitting with George Plimpton at the Fifth Street Gym watching Clay spar. Clay glided around the ring, a feather in the slipstream, and every so often he popped a jab into his sparring partner’s face. Plimpton was completely taken with Clay’s movement, his ease, but Cannon could not bear to watch.

“Look at that!” Cannon said. “I mean, that’s terrible. He can’t get away with that. Not possibly.” It was just unthinkable that Clay could beat Liston by running, carrying his hands at his hips, and defending himself simply by leaning away.

“Perhaps his speed will make up for it,” Plimpton put in hopefully.

“He’s the fifth Beatle,” Cannon said. “Except that’s not right. The Beatles have no hokum to them.”

“It’s a good name,” Plimpton said. “The fifth Beatle.”

“Not accurate,” Cannon said. “He’s all pretense and gas, that fellow.… No honesty.”

Clay offended Cannon’s sense of rightness the way flying machines offended his father’s generation. It threw his universe off kilter.

“In a way, Clay is a freak,” he wrote before the fight. “He is a bantamweight who weighs more than two hundred pounds.”

Cannon’s objections went beyond the ring. His hero was Joe Louis, and for Joe Louis he composed the immortal line that he was a “credit to his race—the human race.

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