But with New York newspaper writers carrying placards on picket lines, Cassius had to find other ways to spread his message. Before the strike, television news was hardly worthy of the name, mostly providing fifteen minutes of local tragedies, weather reports, and a few game scores. What hard news the telecasters reported was what they read in the morning New York Times. The strike presented them with a challenge and an opportunity. WCBS added fifty thousand dollars to its weekly news budget and hired eighteen news reporters. WNBC expanded from a fifteen-minute newscast to a half-hour. The city turned to television for its news as never before.22
Cassius’s routine played even better on screen than in print. The week before the fight he appeared on The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and once again on The Ed Sullivan Show. Showing no physical evidence of his profession, he was polite, articulate, and handsome, looking and sounding like the anti-boxer. Since the death of Benny “the Kid” Paret, news reports and documentaries had fed Americans a succession of stories about punch-drunk, broken-nosed, down-at-the-heels fighters. But now here was Cassius Clay, looking more like a movie star than a boxer, talking to Johnny Carson, Hugh Downs, and Ed Sullivan, demonstrating complete poise and humor.23
He also made personal appearances designed to attract media attention. On March 7, just before he went on The Tonight Show, he headlined a unique media event. Dressed for the occasion, he ventured down to the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village for a noontime poetry reading contest. He looked as out of place in the legendary coffeehouse as Allen Ginsberg would have appeared in the ring at Madison Square Garden.24
In front of an international audience of writers and curious out-of-towners, a group of poets read their verse. Unimpressed with the poets, Cassius read his own predictable doggerel:
The word’s been passed around
That I’m a very charming guy,
The greatest fighter that ever lived,
And I’ll gladly to tell you why.
My secret is self-confidence—
A champion at birth;
I’m lyrical, I’m fresh, I’m smart—
My fists have proved my worth.25
Laughter and applause punctuated his reading, and the New York Post’s Pete Hamill acclaimed him “the messiah of the poetry racket,” who had “annihilated, with one terrible stroke, the frail world of Beat Poets, Square Poets, Academic Poets, and Zen Poets, anti-poet poets, jazz poets, and lady poets.”26
Throughout the week, Clay worked every angle. From TV shows to standing on street corners and singing his own praises, he did not miss an opportunity to promote himself. His one-man publicity campaign demonstrated that he was just as unique as he claimed. There had been “television boxers” before him, but he was the first boxer who belonged to the television age, the first to understand how to use the medium to project an image and sell an event. Like Chubby Checker, father of the twist dance craze, Cassius realized that fame was just a matter of delivering the same message ten thousand times. A. J. Liebling noted, “The more he bragged, the more of a drawing card he became, although he certainly did not understand the mechanics of this phenomenon.” But Liebling was wrong. Clay fully understood; he knew that his words created a media buzz that produced a honey jar of cash.27
Doug Jones knew it as well. While Clay worked to build the gate, Jones quietly trained. With what one reporter described as “a catfish-style mustache” and another called a “cueball”-shaped head, he had the look of an interesting character, but he said very little to bring attention to himself. Asked if he resented Clay’s constant verbal attacks, he shook his head no. “Let that Cassius keep talking. The more he talks the more money I’ll make.”28
By Wednesday, March 13, the morning of the fight, Clay had had his lengthy say. Unable to sleep, he was up and dressed by six thirty a.m. Slipping unobserved from his room at the Plymouth Hotel, he walked two blocks to Madison Square Garden and looked at the large marquee: tonight—boxing—clay vs. jones. At the ticket booth he saw a smaller sign that read, “Sold Out.” For the first time in six years, all of the Garden’s 18,732 seats were sold out. It was the first time they had ever sold out ahead of time. It was tangible proof of his assertions that he was the savior of boxing, hard evidence that the sport was not dying. It was the stuff of his childhood dreams of fame and wealth.
As he had said earlier in the week, “That Jones! That ugly man! I’ll annihilate him! You know what this fight means to me? A tomato-red Cadillac Eldorado convertible with white leather upholstery, air conditioning and hifi. That’s what the [Louisville Sponsoring Group] is giving me for a victory present. Can you picture me losing to this ugly bum Jones with that kind of swinging car waiting for me?”29