Clay became for the early 1960s what Joe Louis had been for the mid-1930s, a singular, transcendent force in the world of sports. In the Depression, sportswriters had competed to pin a tag on Louis, coining such monikers as the Dark Destroyer, the Tawny Tiger, the Chocolate Cobra, the Ebony Assassin, the Saffron Sandman, and, of course, the Brown Bomber, among scores of others. Virtually all referred to his skin color and destructive power. Clay’s nicknames included the Louisville Larruper, the Mighty Mouth, the Mouth That Roared, the Marvelous Mouth, Claptrap Cash, Cash the Brash, and, most famously, the Louisville Lip. They suggested neither his race nor fighting ability but alluded to the tenor and volume of his verbiage. In an age of celebrity, when fame was conferred on the loudest self-promoters, Cassius Clay was reaching for the moon.12
He even dressed the part. Aware of his audience, fashion was important to him. “If the women come, the men got to follow, ain’t that so?” he asked a reporter. So his ring attire was clean and light—white shoes with three coats of polish, white satin trunks, and a white satin robe. To complete the look, he spread a thin coat of Vaseline on his arms and torso “to make me look real musclely.” He appeared almost ethereal as he danced, light-footed, in his corner before the bell and glided toward an opponent. As much as possible he tried to take the pain out of fighting—at least the pain he suffered. “Women don’t like the sight of blood . . . so I make sure they don’t see none of mine by not getting hit.” For him, boxing was a sport of speed and grace, not shuffling and slugging.13
He was a self-made product, and he knew it. Frequently, he said, people he knew approached him saying, “Cassius, you know I’m the one who made you.” Maybe all they had done was give him a lift to the gym or a piece of advice. But they wanted to make sure that Cassius did not forget them when he started to write his name on the back of large checks. Number one on the list of the claimants was his father, who talked endlessly about the sacrifices he made and privations he suffered to allow his son to reach his dreams. Cassius understood his father’s motivations: “If I had a child who became rich and famous, I know I’d want to cash in too, like my daddy, and I guess more teen-agers ought to realize that they owe their folks.”14
Yet the truth of the matter was that his father did not make him. “When you want to talk about who made me,” he told a reporter, “you talk to me. Who made me is me.”15
“There’s only one Cassius Clay,” Dundee said. “Thank God.” Cassius was as unique as Coca-Cola, and like the Atlanta soft-drink maker, he branded and marketed himself. Often when fighters trained they advertised the training camp or a hotel where they worked out. Sonny Liston frequently wore Thunderbird Hotel T-shirts, giving a plug to the Las Vegas hotel. Grossinger’s, the popular Catskills resort, was another favorite of boxers in training, and the name adorned such heavyweights as Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson.
Shortly after he began training at the 5th Street Gym, Cassius started wearing crisp white T-shirts with his name printed in the front in bold red Spencerian script, reminiscent of the Coca-Cola logo. No other athlete in America exercised, ate, and slept in a shirt branded with his own name. Clay was years ahead of his time. The shirts revealed a conscious effort not only to market his name but also to inscribe that name onto the landscape of American popular culture through the art of self-promotion.16
He had a genius for marketing himself. In September 1961 Sports Illustrated started work on their first feature about Clay, assigning Huston Horn to write the piece and Flip Schulke to contribute a full-page photograph. For most of a week Schulke trailed Clay, snapping pictures of him training in the 5th Street Gym, eating with friends, and mingling with the residents of Overtown. During a lunch at the Famous Chef Café, Cassius told Schulke that he wanted to broaden his base of appeal. “I want to get into Life,” he said. Schulke, who had recently shot some underwater photos for the magazine, replied, “I really don’t know how I can get you into Life.”17
The next day when Schulke arrived at the Sir John Hotel, Cassius jumped into the pool, splashing around and throwing punches in the water. The photographer was intrigued by the trail of bubbles the punches made. They looked like the tail of a comet and reminded him of the underwater waterskiing photos that had appeared in Life. When he mentioned it, Cassius immediately invented a story telling the photographer that the underwater work was part of his training regiment. It increased his punching power and hand speed. He had learned it from an old trainer, he said.
Schulke came to the Sir John Hotel the following morning carrying scuba gear and an underwater camera to photograph Clay’s unusual workout. Standing on the bottom of the pool in a perfect fighter’s pose, throwing punches that created contrails of bubbles, Cassius smiled and mugged for the camera. The results were terrific, and Life published them in the September 8, 1961, issue of the magazine, several weeks before the Sports Illustrated feature appeared.18