Clay walked away. “He scared the shit out of him; you better believe it,” Conrad said. Cassius agreed: “[That] big ugly bear scared me bad.”38
But Cassius returned for the title fight, determined to upstage Liston and Patterson. When the announcer introduced him before the match, he slipped gracefully between the ropes, shook hands with Patterson, and started to walk toward Liston. Halfway there he froze in mock horror, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and fled the ring. The pantomime drew laughter and applause.
“‘Our boy’ stole the show completely,” Gordon Davidson wrote a member of the LSG. As it turned out, the fight itself proved no competition for the Cassius Clay Show. In another one-sided match, Liston again knocked out Patterson in the first round. A reporter for Time summed up the contest: “Like a man killing a rabbit with a stick, he clubbed the hapless challenger to the canvas—gracelessly and methodically, his sulphur-and-obsidian eyes betraying neither pleasure nor anger.”39
To the dismay of sportswriters, Liston seemed indestructible, a fighter who was likely to hold the title for years. “He’s here for keeps,” noted Jim Murray. “It is like finding a live bat on a string under your Christmas tree.” And sportswriters believed that there was no one in boxing who could get rid of him. Liston, commented columnist Arthur Daley, was “arrogant, surly, mean, rude and altogether frightening.” And “nobody,” not even the “Loudmouth from Louisville,” had a chance against him.40
Cassius, however, did not think that Liston was invincible. After the fight, he was loud and obnoxious, at one point grabbing the TV-theater microphone and announcing his intentions to closed-circuit viewers. It was all, Daley thought, a bit shabby. “The exceedingly likable Clay is lousing up his public relations by his boasting and it’s high time he eases off and let his fists serve as his spokesman. Unfortunately, they don’t speak anywhere near as eloquently as his vocal cords.”41
Yet Clay’s ongoing vaudeville routine was going exactly as planned. By mid-1963 he thought of himself more as an entertainer than a boxer, identifying with Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley more than Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. When Tom Wolfe interviewed him, he referred to himself as a “show-business figure.” “I don’t feel I’m in boxing anymore. It’s show business.” When it was showtime, his “150-watt eyeballs” lit up and he went into his act. “He wants to be thought of as a man who does the clown act consummately well, which is to say, an actor,” Wolfe observed.42
He aspired not to Liston’s title but to Elvis Presley’s. He wanted to be the king—king of the world. Pursuing that goal, after attending the title fight he went to Columbia Studios in New York to cut a spoken-word LP entitled I Am the Greatest. Cassius claimed that he wrote “everything on the record” and predicted it would outsell comedian Vaughn Meader’s enormously popular spoof of the Kennedy family. In truth, the LP was a collaborative production, filled with sophisticated comic material written by Gary Belkin. When they first met, Belkin was shocked by Clay’s reading problems. Clay was in fact an undiagnosed dyslexic, and Belkin judged him “a functional illiterate” and set about composing lengthy poems to go with Cassius’s basic couplets.43
People assumed that Clay wrote such poems as “I Am the Greatest” and “Will the Real Sonny Liston Please Fall Down,” and that he actually came up with the line that he was so pretty that his “face should be considered a natural resource” and preserved by the secretary of the interior, as opposed to Liston, whose face “should be appropriated by the Bureau of Wildlife.” But he did not create his material any more than Presley wrote the hundreds of songs he recorded. What Clay provided was the Louisville Lip character, and during the production of the record he worked diligently to weave the material into his persona. He memorized poems, questioned the comic material, and helped shape the finished product. That many of the cuts became permanent routines in his repertoire demonstrates how carefully and successfully he played his part.