Davidson pushed through the crowded room and into the dressing room. He found Clay lying on a rubdown table, relaxed and serene. “Cassius looked like he didn’t have a worry in the world,” he remembered. “Like it was just another day at the office.” Davidson warned Cassius that the boxing commission was going to fine him. “They’re gonna hit you pretty good.”
Clay brushed off the threat like it was a lone raindrop on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.” It was the cost of doing business, he figured, and not worth a second thought. Davidson’s effort to domesticate Clay by threatening him with a fine was as pointless as telling Malcolm X not to express an opinion.
For half an hour, first Davidson and then Faversham talked to Cassius about proper behavior and decorum. All the while, in the Cypress Room, hundreds of reporters and cameramen jockeyed for position for the show. At 11:09, when Davidson led Clay, Bundini, and Sugar Ray out of the dressing room, it seemed like a scene from a Hollywood premiere. The place pulsated with flashes from camera bulbs. Wearing a terrycloth robe and trunks, Cassius moved through the throng toward the weigh-in platform.
Then Liston emerged from his dressing room. Cassius exploded. Excitedly, he jumped up and down screaming, “Hey, sucker, you a chump. Are you scared?” He hollered that he was the real champ, that Liston had not fought anybody, and that he would knock him out. He promised, “Somebody’s gonna die at ringside tonight.” Cassius was uncontrollable. One reporter commented that Sugar Ray and Bundini “patted him on the shoulders as if they were trying to calm a skittish colt” and grabbed him around the waist to keep him away from Liston, but Clay continued to rage and shout and threaten.
Liston observed the scene with cold disinterest. Once he cupped his enormous hands over his mouth and said mysteriously, “Don’t let anybody know. Don’t tell the world.” Know what? That Cassius was crazy? That he was a fool? That he was afraid? Interpretations of his cryptic statement varied.9
The comment threw Clay into an even wilder rage. Watching the action, reporter Mort Sharnik thought that there was no way that the boxer could fight that night. “It looked to me like Cassius was having a seizure,” he recalled. Then he witnessed something strange, something that few others saw. While five or six people in his entourage were struggling to keep Clay from attacking Liston, “he winked at Robinson.” At the absolute center of the chaos, surrounded by cameras, shouting, and confusion, “Cassius was probably having a ball.”10
Weighing 218 pounds, Liston was a few pounds heavier than expected, and at 210? Clay was a few pounds lighter. But the numbers that seemed to matter most were 80 and 120. On the platform, where bedlam reigned, Liston’s resting pulse rate registered 80 beats a minute, up slightly from his normal 72. Clay’s normal rate was 54, but it had rocketed to 120. That alarmed Dr. Alexander Robbins, the attending physician. “Clay is nervous and scared and he’s burning a lot of energy,” he said. Later, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon pressed him to elaborate on the comment, asking, “Could it be that the kid is scared to death, Doc?” Robbins said yes and proceeded to venture well outside his professional competency: “He is hysterical. He has a fear of death . . . a fear of getting killed. He acted like a maniac. He’s definitely out of control. . . . He acted like a man off the beaten path.”11
Clay’s performance at the weigh-in ticked the odds against him up from 7–1 to 8–1. Some observers ventured even odds that he would not even show up for the fight. Most of the four hundred to five hundred onlookers would have agreed with Jim Murray that Cassius looked like a man who had just seen his own ghost. Rumors circulated that he was high on “reefers,” Benzedrine, or both. Most reporters agreed that Clay was too intelligent not to know that the gig was up. “No man could have seen Clay that morning at the weigh-in and believed that he could stay on his feet three minutes that night,” concluded the New Republic’s Murray Kempton.12
THE MIAMI BEACH Boxing Commission fined Clay $2,500 for his conduct on the platform. Hours away from facing the most feared fighter in the world, Clay, many reporters insisted, must be nearly paralyzed with fear. Jimmy Cannon openly questioned his manhood. Cassius was “shaped for a more effete and gayer line,” he wrote, speculating that “the big riddle is will he fall apart in the dressing room?”13