They all fall

In the round I call



Fifty years ago today, Cassius Marcellus Clay motor-mouthed himself, quite literally, into the world heavyweight boxing title — or at the least, into the storied title fight, February 25, 1964, against reigning champion Sonny Liston in Miami.

A good two years before his dancing feet and blinding jabs propelled him to boxing glory, the ‘Louisville Lip’s’ mouthy ways had already drawn the attention of the game’s premier writers. AJ Liebling, who after making his bones as a war correspondent wrote brilliantly of boxing in his later years, watched a young Clay, by then an Olympic champion, train for his debut as a professional. “Clay has a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water,” Liebling wrote in a piece for the New Yorker (March 3, 1962; subscription required).

Liebling was ringside, watching Clay train at the Department of Parks gymnasium on West 28th Street, NY, when Clay first gave him a glimpse of his motor-mouth skills. The young boxer was doing sit ups when his trainer, the legendary Angelo Dundee, mentioned that Clay wrote poems, and had just done one on Floyd Patterson. Here is what happened next:

“I’ll say it for you,” the poet [Clay] announced, without waiting to be wheedled or breaking cadence. He began on a rise: You may talk about Sweden [Down and up again] You may talk about Rome [Down and up again] But Rockville Center is Floyd Patterson’s home [Down]

And so on, Clay’s verse and the rhythm of his sit-ups in perfect sync, till he gets to the punch line:

"He cut up his eyes and mussed up his face



And that last left hook knocked his head out of place!”





Clay stumbled on the poetry shtick by chance, circumstance – and told Alex Haley, author of Roots, how in an October 1964 interview for Playboy:



Somewhere away back in them early fights in Louisville, even before I went to the Olympics, I started thinking about the poetry. I told a newspaperman before a fight, “This guy must be done / I’ll stop him in one.” It got in the newspaper, but it didn’t catch on then. Poetry didn’t even catch on with me until a lot later, when I was getting ready to fight Archie Moore. I think the reason then was that he talked so much, I had to figure up something new to use on him. That was when I told different reporters, “Moore will go in four.” When he did go down in four, just like I said, and the papers made so much of it, I knew I had stumbled on something good. And something else I found out was how it had bugged Archie Moore. Before the fight, some people got it to me that he was walking around and around in the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles, saying over and over, “He’s not going to get me in no four, he’s not going to get me in no four”—and the next thing he knew, he was getting up off the floor. I been making up things that rhyme for every fight since.





It may have started as a sideshow, a brash young man acting up, living up to the hype he had so carefully orchestrated around himself. But in time, as the wins accumulated and his ambitions correspondingly soared, he forged his talent for ersatz rhyme into a weapon almost as potent as his fists. In the interview with Haley, Clay recounts an early escapade calculated to upset Liston just when the latter had moved to housing in an upscale, mostly white locality:





I don’t see no harm in telling it now. The first time, it was right after Liston had bought his new home in Denver, and my buddies and me was driving from Los Angeles to New York in my bus. This was Archie Robinson, who takes care of business for me, and Howard Bingham, the photographer, and some more buddies. I had bought this used thirty-passenger bus, a 1953 Flexible—you know, the kind you see around airports. We had painted it red and white with WORLD’S MOST COLORFUL FIGHTER across the top. Then I had LISTON MUST GO IN EIGHT painted across the side right after Liston took the title. We had been driving around Los Angeles, and up and down the freeways in the bus, blowing the horn, “Oink! Oink! Oink!” drawing people’s attention to me. When I say I’m colorful, I believe in being colorful. Anyway, this time, when we started out for New York, we decided it would be a good time to pay Liston a visit at his new house.



We had the address from the newspapers, and we pulled up in his front yard in the bus about three o’clock in the morning and started blowing: “Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink!” In other houses, lights went on and windows went up. You know how them white people felt about that black man just moved in there anyway, and we sure wasn’t helping it none. People was hollering things, and we got out with the headlights blazing and went up to Liston’s door, just about as Liston got there. He had on nylon shorty pajamas. And he was mad. He first recognized Howard Bingham, the photographer, whom he had seen in Los Angeles. “What you want, black mother?” he said to Howard. I was standing right behind Howard, flinging my cane back and forth in the headlights, hollering loud enough for everybody in a mile to hear me, “Come on out of there! I’m going to whip you right now! Come on out of there and protect your home! If you don’t come out of that door, I’m going to break it down!”



You know that look of Liston’s you hear so much about? Well, he sure had it on standing in that door that night. Man, he was tore up! He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to come out there after me, but he was already in enough troubles with the police and everything. And you know, if a man figures you’re crazy, he’ll think twice before he acts, because he figures you’re liable to do anything. But before he could make up his mind, the police came rushing in with all their sirens going, and they broke it up, telling us we would be arrested for disturbing the peace if we didn’t get out of there. So we left. You can bet we laughed all the way to New York.











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