When he heard about the HUAC probe, Muhammad became agitated. Although the Muslims were ardent anticommunists, the government suspected that a tinge of red ran through their teachings. It did not help that two years earlier, in Harlem, Malcolm had met with Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro without Elijah’s approval. Castro had been in New York to condemn the United States before the United Nations. At the time Muhammad had suspected that the meeting would come back to haunt him. But Malcolm maintained, “We will welcome any investigation, we have nothing to hide.”51
Malcolm may have believed that he had nothing to hide, but Cassius Clay did. A month after HUAC announced that it would investigate the Nation, the heavyweight contender appeared in a photograph at the bottom of a page in the September 15 issue of Muhammad Speaks. Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and bow tie, Clay seemed completely comfortable smiling for the camera, as if someone were snapping a picture of him and his brother at a family reunion rather than at a Muslim rally in St. Louis. No one interviewed him for Muhammad Speaks, as athletes received little coverage in the paper. He was not yet considered an important figure in the Muslims’ national agenda, but for the second time in two months he traveled a great distance to hear Elijah Muhammad and to spend more time with Malcolm.52
Clay’s fascination with the Nation evolved alongside his growing notoriety as a boxer. At a time when the government planned an extensive, if unwarranted, investigation into the organization, Clay risked his boxing career by associating with the Nation. Remarkably, the blacks who saw him in Detroit and St. Louis never shared that information with reporters. If a black writer recognized him at one of the rallies or noticed his picture in Muhammad Speaks, or a white writer caught wind of him shaking hands with Malcolm X, it could have ended his career.
Chapter Five
THE WINTER OF BOXING
The boxing game was slowly dying
And fight promoters were bitterly crying
For someone somewhere to come along
For a better and different song.
Patterson was dull, quiet and sad
And Sonny Liston was just as bad
Along came a kid named Cassius Clay
Who said, “I’ll take Liston’s title away.”
—CASSIUS CLAY, EBONY, MARCH 1963
Cassius Clay’s involvement with the Nation was not the only threat to his career. Prizefighting was in a sorry state and was dying in New York. By 1962, everything wrong with the sport—from its endemic mismatches and ring fatalities to its shady characters and fixed fights—was magnified in Gotham. There had been a time when millions of Americans followed the big New York fights of Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano and reporters trumpeted the results on front-page headlines. Now the coverage of boxing had spilled over into the crime pages. The New York Times, as well as such national publications as Sports Illustrated and Time, featured the illegal antics of promoters, managers, and fighters. To make matters worse, Sonny Liston, the most dynamic heavyweight of the early 1960s, had a past so nefarious that he was barred from fighting in the Empire State. Always the bellwether for the sport, the New York fight game pealed as mournfully as a death knell. Boxing needed a heavyweight savior, and no contender was rising more quickly or loudly than the undefeated Louisville Lip. The question was whether he could ascend fast enough to reverse the rapid descent of the sport.
Liston’s face was broad, flat, and impassive, his eyes cold and threatening. Just his look was enough to win most confrontations. But his face suggested something even more sinister. Getty Images
Less than a month after disposing of George Logan in Los Angeles in April 1962, Clay was back in New York for another test. Matched against Billy Daniels, a former Air Force boxer who was 10–0 as a professional, the publicist promoted the contest as a fight between the two finest young heavyweights in America. But Cassius promised to finish him in the fifth round, telling reporters, “I would be embarrassed if he lasted any more.”1
The match was a disappointment. Only 1,642 spectators attended the bout at New York’s historic St. Nicholas Arena, and neither boxer lived up to their hype. Daniels came out in the first and hit Clay with a powerful left-right combination. As the customers “cheered lustily,” Cassius “tottered and blinked his eyes,” then “went on his bicycle” in an effort to avoid further damage. In the second and third rounds, Clay came back. He bloodied Daniels’s nose in the second and cut his right eyebrow in the third. It was a deep, ugly gash, and Daniels’s cut man could not effectively stop the bleeding. In the fourth Clay went to work on the eye, and by the seventh the blood was hampering Daniels’s vision. At that point, the referee stopped the fight.2