RAIN PELTED THE Miami Beach Convention Center on the day of the fight, washing away any chance William MacDonald had of seeing a profit. After paying too much ($625,000) for the rights to the live promotion alone—he had no part of the lucrative closed-circuit television rights—he had compounded the error by scaling ticket prices too high. They ranged from $250 for the Golden Circle seats located just behind the press rows to $20 for seats high up in the arena and far from the ring. High rollers, the sort who came to fights to be seen as much as to see, had quickly bought the Golden Circle seats. And the cheap seats moved briskly. But the tickets for the mid-ranged seats, those priced at $200, $150, and $100, gathered dust in the offices of the Convention Center. MacDonald refused to discount the ducats, hoping that when this inescapable fact sank in, there would be a late rush of buyers. But the hard rain combined with MacDonald’s hard line thoroughly dampened the sales. In the end, MacDonald sold only 8,297 of the 15,744 seats in the arena. Altogether he lost in the neighborhood of $363,000 on the venture.17
The rain and ticket prices were not the only obstacles for the gate. The contest was generally judged by boxing authorities to be a gross mismatch. When Robert Lipsyte was sent to Miami, his elders at the New York Times had only one practical instruction: “As soon as I landed, I was to drive my rental car from the arena to the nearest hospital, mapping the quickest route. My paper didn’t want me to waste any deadline time following Clay to intensive care.” Lipsyte’s seniors in the profession probably already knew the ambulance route. Writing columns about the fight that seemed penned in acid, Jim Murray’s only hope “for Cassius Clay is that he clots easily.” Offering a strategy to the challenger, Murray wrote, “If I were Cassius Clay I would fight him at such a long range he would have to reach me through Western Union.”18
It seemed that the only people willing to go on record predicting a win by Clay were close family members and a smattering of associates of Malcolm X. Meanwhile, the stories about Clay’s connections with the Nation of Islam had worked a public relations miracle: they had transformed Sonny Liston into the sentimental favorite. Long before, Liston had accepted his role as the villain in the morality plays of professional boxing. But Clay’s extreme religious and political opinions had made the champion’s peccadilloes seem almost quaint. In a classic understatement, sportswriter Dan Parker commented, “Liston hasn’t been a popular champion but, since Clay’s yen for the Black Muslim white-hating sect of fanatics was revealed, neither is Cassius a popular challenger.”19
The rain, the ticket prices, the expected mismatch, and the unpopularity of both fighters created a perfect storm for the fight’s promoters. Capping it off, just an hour or so before the fight a local radio station reported that Clay had been seen at the Miami airport purchasing a ticket for a foreign country. Jerry Izenberg, covering the fight for the Newark Star-Ledger, heard the news in a taxi while he was riding to the match. The bizarre twists and turns of the Liston-Clay saga had left even him dizzy. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. No one did. Maybe there would be a fight. Maybe there wouldn’t. Maybe Clay was in Miami. Maybe he was somewhere over the Atlantic, heading who knows where.”20
IZENBERG HEARD HIM before he saw him. When the reporter reached his seat, a familiar voice knifed through the silence in the near-deserted arena. “Keep your left hand up! Keep your left hand up! Move to your right!” Turning around, Izenberg spotted Cassius Clay, dressed in a tight tuxedo and a white ruffled shirt, his eyes trained on the ring, where his brother Rudy was making his professional debut in a four-round preliminary bout. As he watched his brother, Cassius ducked and weaved, rolled with the punches and threw a few in return, agonizing over any blow that connected with Rudy. When the referee raised Rudy’s hand at the end of the contest, Cassius slipped out of the exit and hurried to his dressing room.21
Rudy’s victory seemed to momentarily calm Clay. Dr. Robbins made a perfunctory prefight examination, noting that Clay’s pulse had dropped to sixty-four. But no sooner did he begin to relax than new concerns troubled his mind. Told repeatedly by the Muslims that he could not trust any white man, he fretted that some vast conspiracy of Caucasians was plotting his defeat. Looking at Pacheco and Angelo Dundee, his white corner men, he thought they might be part of the cabal. Angelo, according to Clay’s tortured logic, was Italian, and an Italian must be associated with the mafia, which certainly had a stake in Liston’s keeping the title. After all, it was no secret that the mob controlled Sonny.