Tired, occasionally rubbing his stomach, Cassius began to talk, “slowly, like a man on his first visit to a psychiatrist.” He talked about Sonny—“I jes’ played with him, jes’ played with him, is all.” About Angelo pushing him out of the corner for the fifth round—“This is for the heavyweight championship of the world. Get out there and fight.” But mostly about God and his own providential journey to the title. “I’m not around rich people. I’m the champ now and God wants me to be champ.” God, he believed, had a plan for him.
At two thirty Archie Robinson arrived, looking angry that a white reporter (Murray) was taking up Cassius’s time. “What’s this? A press conference at 3:30 in the morning?” he said without checking his watch.
“I’m the boss here,” Clay said in a near whisper.
“Oh, I know, I know,” Robinson responded. But the reporters departed nonetheless.
“That man sure puts a pall on a place when he comes in to see Cassius, doesn’t he?” Pye said.
“For a fact,” Young answered.
Around Malcolm X Cassius bubbled with life, a mixture of pleasure and mischief. But Archie Robinson prompted a wholly different vibe. It was like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cassius seemed like one of them. One of the pod people.
THE RESULT OF the Clay-Liston match shocked reporters. Some even mused in their columns about the possibility that the fight might have been fixed. But the history of boxing is full of upsets, and Clay’s victory over Liston was no more improbable or unexpected than James J. Braddock’s 1935 defeat of Max Baer. What was more startling than the result, however, was the traditional day-after press conference with the champion.
During Joe Louis’s reign, such events had been relaxed affairs. Joe would show up at Mike Jacobs’s Madison Square Garden office, take a seat in the large red leather chair, leaf through the morning’s funny pages, eat an apple, and field reporters’ questions. Joe never really said much, but he managed to give the sportswriters at least a germ of a story. As often as he tried to explain what it was like to be the most feared fighter in the world, he could never exactly convey how it felt to be Joe Louis.
There was nothing informal or cozy about Clay’s late-morning press conference on February 26. Less than twelve hours before, just after defeating Liston, Cassius had enough energy left to take on the press, excoriating them repeatedly “in a rude arrogant speech” for backing the wrong fighter. In several mean, bitter tirades, he’d told the writers that they should hang their heads in shame, repent for their literary transgressions, and beg him for forgiveness. “You hypocrites,” he had shouted. “What are you going to say now?”15
Clay’s words prompted reporter Jack Kofoed to respond, “He probably never will become a great fighter because a man with his ridiculous egoism isn’t likely to learn. This man is neither a credit to the game he plays nor his race.”16
His race—it was that, even more than his words, that lent a cutting edge to the conference. That morning, in an article about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims, Mike Handler had reported in the New York Times that Clay was “a Muslim and a close friend of Malcolm.” Printed in the journalistically conservative Times, a paper that prohibited its reporters from editorializing in their articles, the statement carried added weight. Although it was widely known that Cassius was sympathetic with the Nation of Islam, he had not yet admitted publicly that he had formally joined the organization.17
He arrived at the Veterans Room at the convention center punctually at eleven a.m., looking and acting as if he were applying for admission to Princeton University. Dressed in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a white button-down Oxford shirt, he answered questions in a singularly non–Cassius Clay manner. Instead of displaying his usual 150-watt eyes and P. T. Barnum mouth, he began talking in a quiet voice, his eyes focused on his feet, speaking barely above the sound a soft wind makes rustling through the leaves of a tree.
“Speak louder, Cassius. We can’t hear you,” several reporters called out. “In the past no one had to give that sort of urging,” Arthur Daley wrote in his column. Clay’s personality pivot shocked him. This was the day for the fighter to crow and preen, to tell the world once again that he was the greatest. Instead, Clay wore “a discernible cloak of humility,” eschewing the sound and fury of the day before and now speaking with a “quiet modesty.”18