Sabedong made his most pointed statements with his fists in the ring. From the first round it was clear that Clay was faster and infinitely superior in boxing ability. But the Duke had a few dirty tricks that would have shocked even Gorgeous George. When he got a chance he hit Clay low, on the breaks, and after the bell, and he used his head as a third fist. “I threw a couple of low punches just to let him know I was there,” he later said. “The first time I hit him low, his eyes went as big as saucers. I was going to bite his ear. You know when you are in clinches you get the guy’s ear between your teeth and give it a little tug, that usually would bring water to their eyes.”6
Sabedong’s problem was that he rarely got close enough to Clay to hit low, butt, or bite. Constantly moving, Cassius peppered him with jabs and hooks, landing harder punches occasionally but not often enough to take him out. The fight went the distance, but for Clay it was a learning experience. Professional boxing was not like the amateur version of the sport, where referees passed out penalties for the slightest infractions. In the pro ranks you had to expect the unexpected and protect yourself at all times. Clay departed the Convention Center a wiser boxer. And he left Las Vegas with a new bag of verbal tricks.
BEFORE GORGEOUS GEORGE departed Las Vegas, he talked briefly with Cassius. Clay had gone to the wrestling match, watched the packed house scream insults at the foppish athlete, and met with him afterward in the dressing room. “Boxing, wrestling—it’s all a show,” he told Clay. “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”7
Clay got it. He understood that most beat reporters were less interested in the truth than a good tale. Every day or so they needed a story to file, and they spent their lives scrounging for copy—digging for leads, tracking down facts, conspiring for quotes. “Trouble with boxing today,” Cassius told a reporter after the Sabedong match, “is most boxers don’t want to talk. Say, ‘Yeh, no, yeh, no.’ You writer men ain’t got nothing to write about. . . . Look at Ring Magazine—it loaded with stuff about John L. Sullivan and all them old-timers. Nothing else to write about.”8
He knew the solution to the sport’s woes—it was him. And he expressed it with candid specificity.
Boxing need fighters who talk a lot and kill. Fighter today, he bring two or three girls with him to the fight and go into the ring with his hair all waved silky. In the olden days a fighter go back in the woods and train and drink tea without sugar in it, getting mean. Today, temptation is abroad in the land. There’s more pretty cars these days, and you can get ’em cheap. Everything’s a dollar down, and a liquor store on every corner. Rock ’n’ roll show in town every week. But Cassius Clay go to bed at nine. I’m eating them lima beans, collard greens, okra and tomatoes, and spinach. Man, them are things that stick to your kidneys. Most guys eat crackers and soda pop and expect to stay in shape. But Cassius Clay, he a determined young man. When he lay down on a guy, that guy supposed to go down. So as I see it today, I should be champ when I’m twenty-one. You writ that?9
After his short exchange with Gorgeous George, Cassius became the most vocal and opinionated athlete in America. He sounded off on topics ranging from boxing and diets to music and foreign policy, though rarely did he address racial issues or domestic politics. When he said, “The trouble is boxing’s dying because everybody’s so quiet,” he meant it, and he made it his personal mission to pump some noise into the sport. He lectured on his personal growth—“I’m mature. I’m growing a mustache. I shaved yesterday for the first time.” He rendered an opinion about his similarity to the leaders of communist nations—“Man, the way I been talking, if I didn’t back up my talk I’d have to leave town. I’d have to leave the country. Take a man like Feedel Castro. He say, ‘I gonna do this, I gonna do that.’ Next morning, rat-a-tat-tat—six people die. He do it. . . . So I talk big and that just makes me fight harder.” And, of course, he mentioned his importance to the Fourth Estate—“I’m the best friend a reporter ever had because I always give good quotes, changing them around so everybody gets a fresh one.”10
Some sportswriters thought he was charming and refreshing; others found him conceited and bombastic. When Huston Horn of Sports Illustrated met Clay in 1961, he noted that the boxer was “irrepressible, impish, cocksure and sometimes utterly unbearable.” But it mattered little how they felt about him because they all wrote about him.11