“I’m through talking,” he began. “All I have to be is a nice, clean gentleman. I’ve proved my point. Now I’m going to set an example for all the nice boys and girls. I’m through talking.” It was as if the Louisville Lip had died, or had never existed at all. It had just been a role Clay played, a part he created and mastered, but it was not who he was. He did it to breathe life into his sport and to promote his career. “My mouth overshadowed my ability,” he admitted.19
He confessed that he did not even enjoy boxing. “I only fight to make a living, and when I have enough money I won’t fight anymore. I don’t like to fight. I don’t like to get hurt. I don’t like to hurt anybody.” All he wanted was to be the champion for the people, especially the dispossessed—“the poor folk and the drunks and the bums.” “I just want to make people happy.” The reporters had heard variations of Clay’s statements before: the desire to do good, make a difference, get out of the brutal sport before it robbed him of his senses. They were promises other fighters had made and failed to keep.
For a while, Cassius discussed the odd twists and turns of the match. He admitted he had wanted to quit before the fifth round and actually felt sorry for Liston. “You people put too much load on him. You built him up too big and now he has such a long way to fall.” As he talked, the older writers nodded their heads and smiled in agreement. “If he sticks to this pose, he . . . can win a vast amount of popularity,” Daley wrote.20
Soon most of the sportswriters had what they needed and departed the room to attend Liston’s press conference or to file their stories. The bombast and poetry was all an act, they would write, and the real Cassius Clay was a clean-living, thoughtful young man whose only harm was playing a role too well.
When the room was less than half full, a younger reporter asked an essentially forbidden question. “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” For a moment Clay looked shocked, then angry. The unwritten code of the sports world ruled some questions out of bounds. Unless the athlete raised the subject, reporters did not ask questions about politics, religion, drinking, or marital infidelities. Now someone was asking Clay if he belonged to what most white Americans and some black Americans believed was an extreme religious cult.
Immediately Clay’s countenance shifted from quietly respectful to pugnaciously defiant. “Card-carrying, what does that mean?” he challenged. It sounded like he was being accused of belonging to the Communist Party.
Then, without directly answering the question, he defended the Nation of Islam and addressed the expectations of white Americans. “I believe in Allah and in peace. I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian any more.” As for the Nation: “I go to a Black Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see that there’s no smoking and no drinking and their women wear dresses down to the floor. And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn’t go there. Well, there must be something in there if you don’t want me to go there.”21
Robert Lipsyte’s New York Times report captured the moment when the worlds of sport and politics collided. “There was a trace of antagonism when [Clay] refused to play the mild and socially uninvolved sports-hero stereotype, and began to use the news conference as a platform for socio-political theory.”
That was exactly what Cassius and Malcolm had discussed—using the title as a venue to address political issues, not as an accomplishment to curry favor with white America. Floyd Patterson made liberal Americans optimistic about the future when he spoke quietly of the need for peace, cooperation, and integration. He played by the existing rules of the sports world, presenting himself as an acceptable role model for black and white youths. Clay refused to play that part in the heavyweight morality play. “In the jungle, lions are with lions and tigers are with tigers, and redbirds stay with redbirds and bluebirds with bluebirds,” he said. “That’s human nature too, to be with your own kind. I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted.”
Cobbled from the teaching of Elijah Muhammad and rhetoric of Malcolm X, Cassius had made variations of this speech before, but never as the heavyweight champion, a position of some authority. Taking advantage of the moment, he spoke his mind freely and boldly. He defended Malcolm: “If he’s so bad why don’t they put him in jail?” He addressed his support for Malcolm’s teachings: “I catch so much hell, why? Why me when I don’t try to bust into schools or march around or throw bricks?”
Clay’s rambling defense of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X was an example of his main point, one that Lipsyte used in his lede the next day. Glancing at the group of mostly white reporters—some angry, others shocked, a few supportive—Clay asserted, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be who I want.”