Liston said that it didn’t bother him. But it did. He had traveled a long way from a sharecropper shack in Arkansas and the whippings of a cruel father. He had survived the streets, prison, and the police of Missouri and Pennsylvania. Unable to read or write, he preferred violence as his medium of expression. But as journalist Jerry Izenberg noted, “Sonny was illiterate, but he wasn’t ignorant or stupid or unfeeling.” There was a sort of dignity to his sullen, brutal life. He accepted who he was and the fact that people regarded him as a thug. As the heavyweight champion of the world, he did not ask for love or popularity. Still, he thought he deserved some semblance of respect. That, of course, was precisely what Cassius Clay denied him. Socially and culturally, Cassius transformed the title fight into a contest about many things—beauty, age, law and order, and race—but dignity was not on the list.49
There was hardly a quiet corner of Liston’s life that Cassius did not invade. For instance, Sonny designed a training program with the production qualities of a Las Vegas show. Setting up shop at the Surfside Civic Arena, overlooking the sea in North Miami Beach, he charged fifty cents to watch him train. The sessions struck George Plimpton as well worth the modest cost. They began with a twenty-minute “official” film of Liston’s destruction of Patterson in Las Vegas. When the film ended, an assistant removed the screen, revealing the champion, standing still and expressionless in a ring elevated on a stage. The combination of his immobile face, massive body, and fearsome reputation sent ripples of applause through the audience. Only then did Sonny begin his workouts. He shadowboxed, gliding across the ring with a sparring partner, each throwing punches, bobbing and weaving, feinting and ducking, but never making the slightest contact during their choreographed performance. Next he punched a speed bag with a rat-a-tat-tat syncopation and the heavy bag with a thud-thud-thud demonstration of rib-breaking power. After pounding the bags, it was time for Liston to receive some punishment. His trainer, Willie Reddish, picked up a fifteen-pound medicine ball and threw it with all his considerable strength at the champion. The ball seemed to explode into Sonny’s stomach, but without the slightest change in expression he trapped it on the rebound. While the exertions exhausted Reddish, they hardly seemed to interest Liston.50
The last exercise was the capstone of the show. To the soulful beat of “Night Train” he skipped rope, man and music in perfect harmony. “Note,” an announcer said, “the champion’s heels never touch the board. He does it all on his toes.” It was almost too much for the spectators to contemplate—the most devastating puncher in the world, perhaps the most powerful fighter in the history of the sport, was also as graceful as a tap dancer.
It was a fine show, and after it was over its star mixed with the audience, answered a few softball questions, and posed for pictures. But from the opening day of the Sonny Liston Revue, Clay threatened to crash the gate. Wearing jackets with “BEAR HUNTING” on the back and carrying walking sticks, members of Cassius’s camp watched Sonny train, creating an uneasy feeling in the champion’s quarters. Cassius also spoke often about invading Liston’s plush digs. Liston wasn’t amused. “This guy is some kind of nut,” he said. “They had better stop him or I will. Enough is enough.”51
But enough was never enough for Cassius. On February 7, he made his move. Dressed in a tuxedo and carrying his hand-carved cane, he led a march to the Surfside headquarters. Denied entrance, he hollered and protested, sure that some constitutional principle was at stake. “I’m ready to go to jail if I’m breaking the law,” he asserted. “This is a public place and I have the right to be here.”52
For the generation of sportswriters who had matured during the era of the two Joes—DiMaggio and Louis—Clay’s performance indicated the passing of an age when dignity framed the game. None was more outraged than Jimmy Cannon, the dean of the reverential school of sports journalism. “In the year of the Beatles, it is right that Cassius Clay fights Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world,” he wrote from Miami. “It is the time of the freak on earth. You see it all and watch it happen, but you can’t believe it. It belongs in the territory of dreams. The next war must be between the sane and the insane.” To Cannon, Clay and the Beatles were the essence of modernity—of artists “splattering canvases with gobs and streaks,” of actors who “seem to be reading their lines off pieces of confetti thrown up on a windy day,” of musicians “who repudiate melody,” of “the bored children of the atomic age.”53