Enticed by the fact that Clay wrote poetry and was thus a “fellow-littérateur,” A. J. Liebling, the fabled chronicler of the demimonde, ventured down to West 28th Street, where Cassius was training. The writer had seen Clay box in the Rome Olympics and did not give him high marks. “Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water,” he observed. But the fact that Clay was a man of verse who could recite his poetry while doing sit-ups without breaking cadence astounded him. “He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way,” he speculated. “I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.”31
Liebling captured Clay’s light, whimsical quality—the way he glided through his training regimen, skipping rope without a rope, toying good-naturedly with his sparring partners, talking nonstop at record speed. Nothing about Cassius smacked of a traditional pugilist. He even dressed like a nineteenth-century man of letters from the school of Oscar Wilde. After his workout he retired to the locker room and reappeared in a snuff-colored suit and lace-front shirt, the sort Liebling had seen in shop windows on Broadway but had never “known anyone with nerve enough to wear.” The overweight, sharp-eyed journalist had spent much of his life around boxers and their retinues and had lived in France and England, but he had not met anyone quite like Cassius Clay.32
Clay, he judged, might just be the fighter who could save boxing, a “new Hero,” coming along “like a Moran tug to pull it out of the doldrums.”33
A COLD FEBRUARY wind lashed New York on the night of the bout, making it feel even colder than the fifteen-degree temperature. And for all of Clay’s ballyhoo, only a smattering of people showed up at the Garden—Liebling wrote that the attendance was “so thin that it could more properly be denominated a quorum. . . . Only fans who like sociability ordinarily turn up for a fight that they can watch for nothing on television, and that night the cold had kept even the most gregarious at home.”34
As Clay moved to the center of the ring for the referee’s instructions, he saw a boxer very different from the ones he had been fighting. Unlike Miteff or Besmanoff, Banks carried no excess weight around his middle. He was as tall and as heavy as Clay, and only a year and a half older. But where Cassius’s face was round, Banks’s was thin, with a long pointed chin. His body was hard and muscular, with “the kind of inverted-triangle torso the pro-proletarian artists like to put on their steelworkers,” wrote Liebling. His record was 10–2, and his career was on the upswing.
At the bell, Clay glided across the ring like a ballet dancer, his high, white buckskin boots seeming to barely touch the canvas as he moved toward Banks, who fought out of a crouch, advancing toward Cassius like a crab with one pincer out front and the other close to its body. “Wrapped in certitude,” Clay circled, jabbed, moved, and talked, nimbly avoiding Banks’s slow maneuvers. For a minute or so it looked like a contest between a skillful matador and an awkward bull.
Then, for only a moment, the matador took his eyes off the bull and the fight took a sudden, dramatic turn. Forcing Banks into a corner, Cassius carelessly left himself open and Banks lashed out with a hard left hook. It was a solid punch, knocking him to the canvas for the first time in his professional career. In Clay’s corner Dundee turned pale, as if he had just dropped an heirloom Ming vase.
At the count of two, Clay got up, appearing more embarrassed than hurt. At that moment, when it was most needed, he demonstrated his professionalism. He was cool. He didn’t charge Banks in a fit of anger or back away from him. Instead he boxed smartly, “cuff, slap, jab, and stick, the busy hands stinging like bees,” observed Liebling. It was Banks who became overly excited, throwing wild punches and receiving punishment for his efforts. By the end of the round he was spitting blood and was bone-tired from throwing and missing haymakers.
For the rest of the fight Clay was in complete control. His speed frustrated Banks, who fought defensively, “like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.” As Banks’s legs tired, his face became his primary defensive weapon. Near the end of the second, Clay floored him with a hard right hand. And in the third, Cassius continued the punishment, cutting Banks’s eye so badly that the ring doctor had to examine it at the end of the round.
The physician permitted the fight to continue, but it did not last long. Clay had predicted he would end it in round four, and so he did. A quick flurry of punches staggered Banks, rendering him defenseless. That was enough to convince the referee to stop the contest. Afterward, Banks tried to explain what had happened: “Things just went sour gradually all at once. . . . You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”35