Clay walked into the weighin that afternoon with a two-inch-wide strip of adhesive tape over his mouth, signaling that he was through talking, though he was not done communicating. When Jones stepped onto the scale, Cassius held up four fingers. Doug Jones, a fighter in his prime who had never been stopped, would fall in four, just like old Archie Moore.30
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, as Cassius was resting in his room, he received an unusual visitor. A black man with a mobile face that displayed his every emotion walked into the room, which was easier than it sounds because people were always coming and going around the boxer. He took one look at the cluttered room with clothes, fight equipment, and shoes tossed about haphazardly and began to give orders. “Who takes care of you?” he asked. Clay pointed to a white man seated in the corner, smoking a cigar. The stranger then barked orders at the white man. He said Cassius’s shoes needed polish, suggesting precisely the brand of wax to use, and that the boxer’s socks needed washing, and that the white man better move fast because “a fighter packing people into the Garden up to the rafters and the seats where before there was nothin’ there but pigeons” needed to be serviced just right.31
The stranger was Drew “Bundini” Brown. Like Clay himself, Bundini was a larger-than-life self-creation. He had walked uninvited into the boxer’s world and decided to stay. When Clay left to go to Madison Square Garden in a limousine, Bundini sat in the backseat with him. When the traffic slowed the limo to a crawl, Bundini ordered the driver to maneuver onto the sidewalk. When several policemen came running, Bundini told them that Cassius was in the car and “if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t be out there on duty. Sugar Ray, they let him park on the sidewalk.” Everything he said made sense, and everyone seemed to follow his orders. It seemed only natural that he floated alongside Cassius past the Garden’s entrance and into his life.
Unlike Cassius and Bundini, A. J. Liebling did not float into the Garden. He struggled through a throng of people coming in the opposite direction. “They were coming away from it because the house was sold out—a report that they had refused to believe—and the cops were chasing them out of the lobby, where they were blocking the entrance.” Remembering the meager turnout the year before for Clay’s first New York match, Liebling reflected on the drawing power of this poet boxer, whom he had dubbed Apollo, the god of truth, prophecy, music, and poetry. “Could Paul Valéry have filled the Vel’ d’Hiv,” he wondered, “or Keats Her Majesty’s Theatre?”32
The greatest venue in pugilism bubbled with life, and in the lobby Liebling thought that he saw the life-size bronze statue of Joe Gans, a champion from early in the century, break “into a sweat of excitement.” The reporter had not seen such a high time since the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano sent the great Joe Louis into permanent retirement. Arriving early to his seat in the press row, he watched the Garden fill from the rafters to ringside. Sitting nearest the action and pulling hard for Cassius were the elite of Louisville—Ross Todd and his father, Jouett Ross Todd, up from their winter home in Nassau; Mr. and Mrs. Worth Bingham, down from a skiing vacation in New England; and, of course, William Faversham, Gordon Davidson, and other members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group.33
Not far from the august group of southerners were dignitaries from black America. Legendary baseball player and activist Jackie Robinson sat near tennis great Althea Gibson, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche was not far off. Malcolm X was also perched at ringside, though none of the sportswriters commented about how unusual it was that one of the two most recognizable figures in the Nation of Islam attended the fight. Looking around the Garden, Malcolm realized that all of the people there had come to see one man: Cassius Clay. He had never seen so many people drawn to an event because of a single black man. Not even Elijah Muhammad, he thought, could fill the Garden.34
Malcolm was joined by athletic luminaries and politicians, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, and members of the Joint Legislative Committee on Professional Boxing, down from Albany to get a closer look at the sport’s nefarious activities. They were all there to see if Apollo, a solid 3–1 favorite, would finish the shaven-headed fighter with a catfish mustache in the fourth round.35
It was a curious fight crowd, not so much pro-Jones as anti-Clay. Cassius had played the villain during his promotion of the fight, and the spectators treated him as such as he made his way to the ring. Jeers trailed him as he slid between the ropes. In what Liebling labeled “the most emphatic anti-poetry demonstration in American history,” the spectators registered their disapproval for Clay’s act.36