Keeping his mouth shut around Cassius, Angelo learned, was easy. No sooner had Clay stepped off the South Wind than he began singing his own praises. “People say Cassius Clay fights like Sugar Ray,” he told Angelo, as well as anyone within an earshot. Dick Sadler, Archie Moore’s trainer, who had worked with Cassius for a short time in San Diego, had told Angelo if he trained the kid he deserved a Purple Heart with seven clusters. It did not take Dundee long to understand the cryptic warning.3
From the train station Angelo drove to “Colored Town,” where he had arranged for Clay to share a room at the Charles Hotel with a Jamaican heavyweight. Dundee thought that there were two beds in the room, but there was only a double bed for two heavyweight boxers. Furthermore, since Angelo received a discount on the room, the management recouped some of its loss by not installing an air conditioner.4
The spartan, low-rent condition of the room was matched by the neighborhood. Ferdie Pacheco, who would soon become Clay’s “fight doctor” and had a medical practice close to the Charles Hotel, called the area “a hellhole of pimps, hookers, drug dealers, winos, and general bad guys.” It was a no-man’s-land that slept till late in the morning, took a siesta in the afternoon, and then came alive with an adrenaline rush at night. Its after-midnight scene offered a thousand temptations—marijuana from the islands that could knock a smoker on his ass, heroin so pure that it was lights-out with one shot, long-legged “sisters” wearing short, glove-tight dresses, and any sort of alcohol, sex, or adventure that could be dreamt up. This was a place that would test the dedication of any innocent, handsome young man.5
Cassius struggled to get to sleep that first night. He later complained that the worst times of training in Miami were the lonely hours after dark. “I just sit here like a little animal in a box at night,” he told a sportswriter in 1961. “I can’t go out in the street and mix with the folks out there ’cause they wouldn’t be out there if they was up to any good. I can’t do nothing except sit. . . . Here I am, just 19, surrounded by showgirls, whisky and sissies, and nobody watching me. All this temptation and me trying to train to be a boxer. It’s something to think about.”6
The next morning Clay made his way to the 5th Street Gym, where Dundee trained his fighters. In the glory days of prizefighting, four training gymnasiums stood above all the others—Gleason’s and Stillman’s in New York, the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles, and the 5th Street Gym in Miami. Located in South Beach at the corner of 5th Street and Washington Avenue, it was in a neighborhood where nothing good was happening. Increasingly, the money and development were flowing into North Beach, leaving whole sections of South Beach for the derelicts and the druggies. The dilapidated second-story facility featured rotten floors, cracked mirrors, accumulated grime, and the stench of sweat, jock straps, and cigarette and cigar smoke.7
In addition to its foul smell and crusted dirt, the gym suffered from other maladies. Clogged drains in the showers, holes in the plasterboard walls, and chipping paint lent a certain grungy charm to the place, but an infestation of hungry termites threatened the entire structure. They attacked floors, walls, rings, and even chairs and desks. Possibly they were angered, or encouraged, by the heat. Hot and sweltering under its tin roof, fighters training in the gym soon realized that the place had no air conditioning, and large floor-to-ceiling windows added to everyone’s discomfort. Many of the best fighters who trained there were from Cuba and accustomed to such temperatures, but boxers from the North considered the conditions inside the gym inhumane, if not entirely illegal. But to Angelo Dundee, the place was “my little slice of heaven.”8
For the fighters, the gym offered not so much a “slice of heaven” as the chance for salvation. With the windows open, the hot and stale air from the inside mixed with the humid blasts from the outside and the noise of the streets harmonized with the sounds of the gym—men skipping ropes; punching speed bags, heavy bags, and each other; and yelling encouragements and good-natured barbs in English and Spanish. In the 5th Street Gym, white, brown, and black men met in complete equality, fleeing from poverty and even persecution in the pursuit of a dream.