Clay knew he was the draw. The gates for the Archie Moore, Charlie Powell, Doug Jones, and Henry Cooper fights had proved it. But he was reckless in the ring. If Cooper had caught him early in the fourth, rather than just before the bell, Cassius might not have survived the round. The thought gave pause to his sponsors. Clay was now ranked second in the world, and he would advance to first after Liston defeated Patterson. The Louisville Sponsoring Group saw no reason for him to face another contender. The risk was just too great. Besides, before the end of the year, LSG lawyer Gordon Davidson wrote a sponsor, Clay “could earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 through public appearances and exhibitions.” It seemed that every week he received an offer to perform on a television variety show or make some other appearance. Frank Sinatra wanted Cassius for a major part in a movie. For the small screen, Jack Benny promised to write an entire script about him if he appeared on his show, the producers of Mr. Ed promised similar star treatment, and executives for Talent Scouts and other television programs requested his services.25
To be sure, Davidson did not want any of the appearances “to prevent Clay from stepping into the ring with Liston with the best possible conditioning and training, and thereby give him the best possible opportunity to defeat the ‘Ugly Bear.’” But he supported marketing “the boy’s national image” as a show business personality. Should Liston defeat him, Davidson argued, Cassius could still make money as “a comic star.”26
But Cassius was living two lives. Publicly trained by a white man and managed by a consortium of white millionaires, he was also privately advised by Malcolm, Rudy, and a small group of trusted Muslims. His career demanded that he work with the one group, while his psyche depended on him living with the other. Whenever a reporter probed near the heart of the matter, he asserted his independence. Tom Wolfe recalled hearing a phone conversation in New York between Cassius and some man who wanted to set up a business deal. When the man asked to talk to Clay’s manager, Cassius exploded: “I don’t have no manager. I got a trainer and he’s in Florida. I’m my own boss. I got backers, they put up the money, but I’m the boss, I’m the onliest boss.”27
This theme—“who made me is me”—was nothing new. But since moving closer to the Nation, Clay had grown more inwardly self-confident and outwardly self-aware. In a conversation with Alex Haley, Malcolm took credit for Cassius’s maturation. “In general,” he said, “I taught him that ninety percent of success would depend upon how alert and knowledgeable he became to the true natures and motives of all the people who flocked around him.”28
Clay absorbed these lessons well. After spending time with the fighter for an Esquire profile, Wolfe concluded that Cassius’s “chief mental asset” was that “he is quite aware, even supersensitive at times, to other people’s motives. He is aware of the newspapermen’s motives, his backer’s motives, his trainers’ motives, autograph hunters’ motives, and even the social motives of sophisticated white New Yorkers he has seen only at a glance.”29
Suspicion of white men colored Clay’s awareness. When he returned to Louisville a week after the Cooper match, he avoided his white sponsors and spent time on the West Side, entertaining black youngsters and joking with old friends. When a white reporter asked him why he didn’t follow Dundee’s instructions and try to knock out Cooper in the third round, he replied angrily, “I’m the boss in the ring, not Angelo or my backers. They’re boss outside the ring, handling money and that stuff. They’ve got the easy job.”30
Without an upcoming match consuming his time, Clay was free to travel with Rudy and attend more Nation of Islam functions. Doing so, he risked that a journalist might see him at a mosque and reach the obvious conclusion, and it was only a matter of time until the inevitable came to pass.
On July 2, Bruce Hills, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, spied a tomato-red Cadillac convertible in an alley behind the Nation’s University of Islam. He waited, and soon Cassius, Rudy, and another man came out the back door and got into the car. Clay was dressed in conservative Muslim attire and wearing a star-and-crescent NOI membership pin. Since Cassius’s Kentucky driver’s license had been suspended for repeated traffic infractions, Rudy got behind the wheel and Cassius climbed into the backseat. Two automobiles filled with “glowering Black Muslims, determined to protect the heavyweight pretender from questions,” flanked the Cadillac. But Hills and his driver were determined to get the story, even if it meant a high-speed chase.31
Out of the alley onto 54th Street, then to Lake Park and finally to Stony Island, the reporter in his own car dogged Clay, conducting a dangerous, rolling interview. He asked the obvious question: “Are you a Black Muslim?”
For a block, Cassius considered the question before responding, “No,” only to promptly amend his answer to, “I don’t know.” After another second or two he added, “I’m for the Black Muslims.”
“Do you believe everything they advocate?” Hills asked.
“Listen, I’ve looked real hard at every organization that’s for the black man. This is the greatest one I’ve found.” Then, raising his voice above the roar of traffic, he emphasized, “The Black Muslims are the sweetest thing next to God.”
As the interview continued, Cassius explained that he was in favor of “anything good that can happen for the black man,” but that he would not participate in any southern demonstrations. “I don’t want anybody to sic dogs on me,” he said.
Before Rudy turned onto the Skyway and headed toward the Indiana border, Hills asked another question: “Are you afraid your identification with the Black Muslims might hurt your boxing career?”