The moment that launched the career of the greatest athlete the world has ever known very nearly didn’t happen. A fear of flying meant Cassius Clay tried to withdraw from the 1960 Olympic Games just weeks before the US team travelled to Rome.

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The 18-year-old from Louisville had been on planes before. He just didn’t like them very much. A rocky flight to California for the Olympic trials cemented his view that, aside from when he was dancing in the ring, his feet should remain on the ground.

In later years he became a master of disguising his fears (of Sonny Liston, George Foreman or Joe Frazier) but the teenage Clay had no qualms revealing he was scared. He asked if he could go to Rome by sea. He asked if he could make his way there by train. When told neither was possible he decided he could do without the Olympic Games. He was destined for greatness with or without a medal dangling from his neck.

In the end it took a meeting with Joe Martin in Louisville’s Central Park to convince him to travel. Martin was the policeman and boxing trainer who told a pepped-up 12-year-old that if he really wanted to deal with the thief who stole his bike, he should first learn how to fight.

“He was afraid of flying,” Martin told an HBO Muhammad Ali special. “We had a rough flight going to California for the trials and so when it came to go to Rome he said he wasn’t gonna fly, and that he wouldn’t go. I said: ‘Well, you’ll lose the opportunity of being a great fighter,’ and he said: ‘Well, I’m not gonna go.’ He wanted to take a boat or something. Anyway I finally took him out to Central Park here in Louisville and we had a long talk for a couple or three hours, and I calmed him down and convinced him if he wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, then he had to go to Rome and win the Olympics.”

So Clay travelled to Rome by aeroplane. But he came prepared. Before departing he visited an army surplus store and purchased a parachute, which he kept strapped on throughout the flight. Accounts differ as to Clay’s behaviour once the flight was airborne. In David Remnick’s King of the World Joe Martin’s son, Joe Jr, claims that during a rough flight Clay prayed in the aisle with the parachute on his back. Others recall Clay distracting himself from his fears by holding forth on the flight and decreeing who among the boxing team would win a gold medal. Obviously he included himself in this select group.

Clay’s credentials as an amateur boxer were there for all to see: 100 victories in 108 bouts, six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, successive light-heavyweight National Amateur Athletic Union titles (1959 and 1960) and two Golden Gloves titles in a row (1959 and 1960).

Before the Games, Sports Illustrated declared that he was the USA’s best hope for a medal in boxing, but there was no real sense that a worldwide star was about to be unleashed. The only hype and fanfare came from Clay himself, but behind the brash statements was a training regime that was anything but amateur. Training began each day at 4am as he pounded his steel-toed work boots through the deadened streets of Louisville. John Powell, who worked at a liquor dispensary, told Sports Illustrated of the shadowy figure who came trudging the streets in the dead of night.

“I’d be sitting on the counter,” Powell said, “and I could see his shadow coming around the corner from Grand Avenue. Clay was on his way to Chicksaw Park. Cold, dark winter mornings. You could see that shadow coming. Then here he comes, running by, with those big old army brogans. He’d be the onliest person in the early morning. And I’d walk outside, and he’d stop and shadowbox. He once said to me: ‘Someday you’ll own this liquor store and I’ll be heavyweight champion of the world.’ Both of those came true, too.”

But first there was Rome to deal with. There is a tendency to talk up the profound impact Clay had as he wandered the Olympic Village shaking as many hands as possible, like a politician on the campaign trail. There is a tendency to say everyone could see they were in the presence of greatness.

In his book, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, David Maraniss writes: “In retrospect, because of the worldwide fame he gained later as Muhammad Ali, there is a temptation to present him as a larger than life figure at the Rome Olympics than he really was. He was ebullient and memorable from the start, but he was not the leader of the US delegation. It was Clay seeking out people, not people seeking out Clay.”

Clay made an impact on the people he met and earned the nickname “the mayor of the Olympic Village”. In his peerless biography of Muhammad Ali, Thomas Hauser recalls one unnamed team-mate saying: “You would have thought he was running for mayor. He went around introducing himself and learning other people’s names and swapping team lapel pins. If they’d had an election, he would have won in a walk.”

As he advanced through the rounds, Clay also became a favourite with the local crowds thanks to a style which, at that stage, was seen as highly unorthodox and, by many of boxing’s old guard, as unnecessarily carefree.

Clay’s opening fight, against the Belgian Yvon Becaus, was stopped by the referee in the second round. He then beat the Russian Gennadiy Shatkov, who had won middleweight gold medal at the 1956 Games in Melbourne, in a unanimous points decision.

In the semi-final Clay faced Australia’s Tony Madigan. Again he triumphed in a unanimous decision but many observers felt Madigan was hard done by. A 2010 article in Louisville’s Courier-Journal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his gold medal has Bud Palmer, a CBS presenter, saying he felt that Clay had been beaten by the Australian.

In the final Clay came up against Zbigniew ‘Ziggy’ Pietrzykowski, “a portly coffeehouse keeper” from Poland who was somewhere between 25 and 28, depending on whom you believe. The fight before the light-heavyweight final also pitched a Pole against one of the US team. Eddie Crook’s victory over Tadeusz Walasek drew furious howls of derision from the crowd packed into the Palazzo della Sport.

Their angry cries reached the dressing room, where Clay was in the final stages of his preparation. “The people made me fight harder than I should have,” he told the Courier-Journal. “When they booed five minutes after Crook’s win and I was the next American in the ring, I knew I had to leave no doubts.”

Such was Clay’s popularity that the crowd’s mood seemed to change as soon as he came to the ring. But a resolution to leave no doubt in the mind of the audience and judges was one thing, but putting it into practice against the more experienced and physically stronger Pole was another, as the British journalist John Cottrell recalled:

“In the first round, it seemed that Clay would be badly mauled. He was confused by his opponent’s southpaw style, took some heavy punishment, and once showed his inexperience by closing his eyes in the face of a barrage of blows. Clay managed to keep out of trouble in the second round, and in the last minute he abandoned his show-off style with the fancy footwork and dropped hands, and stood his ground to throw four hard rights to the head. Even so, he was still behind on points at this stage. ‘I knew,’ he explained afterwards, ‘that I had to take the third round big to win.’



“Clay did finish big. In that final round he suddenly found his top form, moving in and out with expert judgment, punching crisply and with perfect timing. This sharper, better co-ordinated Clay stormed back with a torrent of combination punching which left Pietrzykowski dazed. He no longer relied too much on his left jab, but made equal use of his right to penetrate the southpaw’s guard. Ripping into the stamina-lacking Pole, he drew blood and came preciously close to scoring a knockout. At the final bell, Pietrzykowski was slumped helplessly against the ropes. There was no doubting the verdict. All the judges made Clay the points winner.”

The photograph which shows Clay receiving his medal can, in itself, be seen as a symbol of the changes that were about to take place not just in boxing, but in society as a whole. To Clay’s left stands the bloodied Pietrzykowski, to his right the bronze medallists Giulio Saraudi and Madigan. They are wizened fighters of the old school. Between them, standing tall and gleaming, is Cassius Clay.

WHAT THEY SAID

Coverage of the victory suggests the media did not fully grasp the potential of the 18-year-old standing in front of them. The Guardian merely carried the result in the following day’s paper, while the New York Times carried a brief report of the final on 5 September 1960. The account read:

“Cassius Clay, an 18-year-old Louisville light-heavyweight, gave the United States its third gold medal in boxing tonight when he soundly whipped Ziggy Pietrzykowski, an experienced Polish Olympian, in the 178-pound Olympic final.



“Clay battered the Pole mercilessly in the last round with a flurry of left and right combinations that had his rival groggy. He opened a cut over the Pole’s left eye and almost finished him. It was a unanimous 5-0 decision by the judges. This one went down well with the crowd of 16,000, which also cheered the Pole.



“The 25-year-old Pole, the bronze medal winner in 1956, who has had 231 fights, met his master. It took the American a little while to counteract his opponent’s southpaw style but by the third round he had it figured out. There were no knockdowns.”

The day after Clay won gold, in a piece headlined “The Gladiators”, the New York Times journalist Arthur Daley gives but a passing mention to Clay’s achievement as the article focuses on the gold medal won by Clay’s room-mate in Rome, the light-middleweight Willie ‘Skeeter’ McClure, and other members of the US boxing team, as well as the atmosphere in the arena in Rome.

The mention of Clay reads: “Then Cassius Marcellus Clay of Louisville followed the script of another Cassius and bloodied his Caesar, even though this Caesar bore the rather unappropriate [sic] name of Zbigniew Pietrzykowski. No Roman was he, but a Polish light-heavyweight.”

But by the following May, Daley had realised that the boy in the ring that autumn night could turn out to be something special, and wrote about his blossoming professional career as well as his triumph in Rome. Things appear larger in the rear-view mirror.

“Cassius was easily one of the most popular athletes in the Villaggio Olimpico last summer,” Daley wrote. “He was winning friends and influencing people everywhere. If he craves publicity, he also attracts it with the inexorability of a magnet drawing steel filings.”

Daley’s piece, perhaps unknowingly, anticipated the radicalisation of Clay, who would renounce his slave name after he beat Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world in 1964.

“The proudest of all Olympic champions was Cassius Marcellus Clay, the great-great-grandson of a slave who borrowed the name from his owner, the Cassius Marcellus Clay who was ambassador to Russia and kin to Henry Clay. When the gold chain with the Olympic gold medal was draped around the boy’s neck in the Pallazzo della Sport, there it remained.



“’I didn’t take that medal off for 48 hours,’ said Clay. ‘I even wore it to bed. I didn’t sleep too good because I had to sleep on my back so that the medal wouldn’t cut me. But I didn’t care, I was Olympic champion.’



“He flew back to New York and paraded in his Olympic blazer around Times Square, his Olympic medal still draped around him. Since folks had seen him on television and since he carried his own advertising signs, he was recognised wherever he went and he loved it.”

Others, in the immediate aftermath of the Olympics, focused on Clay’s style, which was not to the liking of traditionalists. In his biography, Hauser lists the “dean of boxing writers”, AJ Liebling, as saying: “I watched Clay’s performance in Rome, and considered it attractive but not probative. Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble over water. He was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact. It is true that the Pole finished the three-round bout helpless and out on his feet.”

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

Clay returned to the US with all the evidence he needed to turn professional dangling around his neck. Dick Schaap, then assistant sports editor at Newsweek, had met Clay along with other US fighters before the Games, impressing them by taking them to Sugar Ray Robinson’s restaurant in Harlem, and Schaap was there to meet Clay at Idlewild airport when he touched down from Rome.

As Schaap recalled in an article – “Muhammad Ali: then and now” – for Sport magazine, together they embarked on an endless night which took in Times Square, where Clay had a phony newspaper printed up which said “Clay signs up to fight Paterson”, they had cheesecake in Jack Dempsey’s restaurant and a drink in the jazz bar across the street, where he sampled his first ever drop of alcohol – literally a drop – which he asked them to put in his Coke.

All the while Clay seemed amazed that people knew who he was. Girls were interested while men just wanted to shake his hand. Of course it helped that he was wearing a sports jacket with USA emblazoned on the back and had a gold medal engraved with Pugilato around his neck.

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Their night ended in the suite in the Waldorf Towers (paid for by a Louisville businessman who hoped to manage Clay) where the Olympic champion spent an hour showing Schaap photographs he had taken in Rome. Eventually, as Schaap recalls, he had to go to bed. “’Cassius,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to explain to my wife tomorrow why I didn’t get home tonight.’ ‘You mean,’ said Cassius, ‘your wife knows who I is, too?’”

The perceived wisdom, largely drawn from Ali’s autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story (which he claimed not to have read) is that Clay later threw his gold medal into the Ohio river after a Louisville restaurant refused to serve him and a motorcycle gang threatened him.

In fact, this story was invented – he simply lost the medal. He admitted years later: “I don’t know where I put that thing.” Ali was issued with a replacement gold medal at half-time in the USA v Yugoslavia basketball game at the Atlanta Games in 1996.

Ali had already made an impact in Atlanta. Shaking, trembling but still majestic, he took the Olympic torch from the swimmer Janet Evans and lit the flame at the opening ceremony. It is as enduring a memory from that Games as any achieved by an athlete.