But the moment Reddish signaled Felix that his fighter was done, Sonny Liston became just another bruised, bloodied, beaten exchampion, looking older than his age, whatever that was, and sadder than any ex-mob goon ever had. Surveying Liston’s face, which looked “like a melon that had fallen off the back of a truck,” Murray thought “it was possible to feel sorry for this mastodon.”46
Clay’s gate-crashing sprint for the reporters, however, grabbed all the attention away from Liston’s suffering. He pulled away from his handlers, dodged well-wishers, and “climbed like a squirrel onto the red velvet ropes.” Perched above the multitude, he pointed with a still-gloved hand at the working press and commenced a long-repressed harangue. “I am the greatest!” he shouted. “I shook up the world! . . . You hypocrites! You ought to hang your heads. Eat your words! Eat! Eat your words!”
At ringside, Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune took a large bite. He had confidently, even humorously and arrogantly, predicted Clay’s defeat, and now he heard Cassius’s response. “Nobody ever had a better right” to tell reporters to eat their words, he wrote. “In a mouth still dry from the excitement of the most astonishing upset in many roaring years, the words don’t taste good, but they taste better than they read. The words, written here and practically everywhere else until the impossible became the unbelievable truth, said Sonny Liston would squash Cassius Clay like a bug when the boy braggart challenged for the heavyweight championship of the world.”47
Then, bounding off the ropes, Cassius veered toward the center of the ring, where he continued to shout his praises. “I am the greatest! I shook up the world!”
He moved from radio announcers to television commentators, saying the same thing. Trapped for a minute by Steve Ellis and Joe Louis, Cassius announced, “I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived! I’m so great I don’t have a mark on my face. And I upset Sonny Liston and I’m just twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest! I told the world! I talk to God every day! With God with me can’t nobody be against me!”
Ellis worked to ask a question and got a brief response, but Cassius was lost in his own world. “I’m a baaad man! I shook up the world! I shook up the world! I shook up the world!”
Standing in row seven, seat seven, Malcolm X fixed his eyes on the man who shook up the world and talked with God. His God. The black man’s God. Allah. It was part of His plan and Malcolm’s. No longer could the Honorable Elijah Muhammad doubt the greatness of Cassius Clay. Now, in the ebullience of Miami, Cassius had won the most important and symbolic crown in all of sports, and Malcolm’s was the voice in his ear. It must have seemed, at that moment, that Malcolm’s deepest dreams were on the cusp of coming true.
Chapter Twelve
FREE TO BE ME
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Now everyone wanted him, not Sonny Liston. Before the match, experts and casual fans alike thought Cassius would go directly from the fight to the hospital, and that Sonny would head to his own victory celebration. But Sonny got the ride to St. Francis and Cassius, resplendent in a black tuxedo, disappeared.
Outside his dressing room, Dee Dee Sharp waited patiently with her mother. After recording “Slow Twistin’” with Chubby Checker and releasing such hit singles as “Mash Potato Time” and “Do the Bird,” the attractive and coquettish Sharp was at the top of her recording career. During the previous few months she had seen Cassius off and on as their schedules permitted, but their relationship had not yet bloomed into a full-scale romance. She was just one of the “foxes” that seemed to form the wallpaper of his life. George Plimpton suspected Cassius’s use of the word foxes was “half affectionate and half suspicious: he feels that girls can be ‘sly’ and ‘sneaky’ and are to be watched warily.”1
Dee Dee saw herself as more than just another fox, and she had plans to spend the evening with the new heavyweight champion of the world. So she waited, crammed among the other well-wishers who claimed they knew all along that Cassius would win, and every once in a while she would call out to someone squeezing in or out of the dressing room, “Tell Cassius that Dee. . . .” She called him Cassius around the men, but in private she used his middle name, Marcellus. “A beautiful name. I can say it over and over,” she told Plimpton.2
“I shook up the world!” Cassius Clay shouted after defeating Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight title. “I’m a baaad man!” Sitting near ringside, Malcolm X smiled inwardly. He believed that Cassius’s victory was destiny. Associated Press