“They”—whoever “they” were—were out to get him, Cassius reasoned. But how? Doping him by making him ingest some odorless, tasteless, colorless, debilitating drug seemed a logical guess. It had happened before. Fixers had doped water bottles, oranges, and towels to drug a fighter. And all day Cassius had received calls from Black Muslims warning him to beware of the “white devils.” Shouldn’t he at least consider the possibility? As he waited in the dressing room, weaving a web of suspicions, the water bottle assumed an ominous presence. He dumped out the water and refilled it himself, taping it shut and assigning Rudy to make sure no one got near it. But Rudy had just won his first pro fight, and his attention lagged behind his intention. When Cassius noticed this, he again emptied, filled, and taped the bottle. “He did that three or four times,” recalled Pacheco.22
Cassius was nervous. For all he had said about his opponent being a chump, boxing authorities claimed that Sonny Liston was one of the two or three greatest—maybe the best—heavyweight champions in history. Big, mean, and vicious, he had hurt most of his opponents, knocking out the finest boxers in the division. Even as masseur Luis Sarria rubbed Clay’s shoulders, Pacheco noticed that the fighter was tight. “He was just a kid, and that night he had no idea if he could really do what he had been saying he could do all along.”23
Almost providentially, someone knocked on the door. Malcolm X came into the dressing room, exuding a sense of cool confidence. Malcolm, Cassius, and Rudy faced east toward Mecca, bowed, and prayed, praising Allah and blessing his name. Then Malcolm repeated a variation of what he had been saying since coming to Miami. It was more a prophecy than a pep talk. “The fight is the truth. It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in the prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern Crusades—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!” This was destined to be a historic moment. “Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”24
When he had completed his mission, Malcolm walked back to his seat near ringside, stopping briefly to chat with the singer Sam Cooke, who was seated close to Malcolm in row seven.25 He moved to seat number seven, a “lucky seat.” Seven, along with twelve and twenty-one, were the three numbers that Elijah Muhammad taught were special for the Asiatic black man. The date of the fight also had significance. It was the twenty-fifth day of February. Two plus five equaled seven. And the following day would be the thirty-fourth Saviours’ Day convention. Again, three plus four equaled seven. Believing fully in the power and meaning of numbers, Malcolm must have smiled, at least inwardly. “I took this to be Allah’s message confirming to me that Cassius Clay was going to win,” he later told Alex Haley.26
WHEN CASSIUS, WEARING a stylish thigh-length white robe, slipped through the ropes into the ring, the Convention Center looked as if it were an experiment in economic segregation. The Golden Circle seats were practically full, celebrities packed next to each other and to other wealthy ticket holders willing to pay top dollar just to sit close to them. And far from them, up high in the hinterlands of the arena, sat the twenty-and fifty-dollar patrons. Between the two classes of spectators was a cordon sanitaire, row after row of hundred-to two-hundred-dollar seats that were so sparsely populated that they looked as if they had been designed as a physical barrier.
In his corner, Cassius was nervous, like a person who had ventured too far out on a high limb. When he met Sonny in the middle of the ring for the referee’s instruction, he later admitted, “I was scared. Sonny Liston was the greatest fighter of all time . . . and he was fixing to kill me. It frightened me, just knowing how hard he hit.”27
Meanwhile his opponent came into the ring as unfeeling as a rock. His head had been partially covered by the hood of his white robe, but when the fighters met in the center of the ring and Sonny removed the hood, he fixed Clay with a malevolent stare. In the previous three years Liston had fought four times, winning three by knockouts in the first round and once by knockout in the third round. Barry Gottehrer wrote in Sport magazine that Liston commanded the center of the ring: “A former convict, a onetime union goon, and a man who seemed drawn to violence, Liston . . . had assumed the aura of a superman, a destroyer who came to kill.”28
Clay’s trepidation was understandable. Most boxers know fear; the greats rise above it and execute their fight plans anyway. Cassius planned to exploit Sonny’s age and overconfidence. He knew that Liston expected another short fight and had not wasted much energy training. Clay’s plan was to make Liston chase him, fighting in spurts and circling constantly to his left, away from Liston’s lethal left hand. Clay later recalled, “I trained to fight the first two rounds, and to protect myself from getting hit by Liston. I knew that with the third, he’d start tiring, then he’d get worse with every round. So I trained to coast the third, fourth, and fifth rounds. . . . I wanted him to wear himself out and get desperate. He would be throwing wild punches and missing. . . . And so I conditioned myself to fight full steam from the sixth through the ninth round. . . .” Cassius thought by the eighth he would have Liston: “I’d cut him up and shake him up until he would be like a bull, just blind, and missing punches until he was nearly crazy. And . . . when he had thrown some punch and left himself just right, I’d be all set, and I’d drop him.”29