You’re Crazy
if you get in the ring
with him, Riney says,
as we pick up the bags
and turn to leave.
Yeah, Gee-Gee,
he doesn’t fight fair, Lucky chimes in.
He’s liable to have
some rocks
in his gloves, and
I knew they were both right
and for a quick second
I was beginning to have
second thoughts
about boxing him,
until I heard Corky Butler yell
from halfway down the block,
HEY, CASSIUS, IS THIS YOURS?
then launch toward me
the purple lucky rabbit-foot key chain
that Teenie had hooked
to the spotlight clamp
on the handlebars
of my stolen, brand-new
red Schwinn bicycle.
Cassius Clay vs. Corky Butler
JULY 26, 1958
Corky was shorter
than me
but I swear he looked
like what a giant earthquake
would look like
if it boxed
and planned
on killing someone.
I bounced
on my side of the ring,
shuffled my feet,
smiled for the crowd,
recited the Lord’s Prayer,
anything to hide my shaky knees
and the fact
that I was scared
to death.
Behind my corner
was Cash bragging,
Bird, with her eyes closed
like she did at most
of my fights,
my brother
plus all the cats
from the neighborhood,
and some classmates
standing ringside,
cheering me on.
The bell rang
and I came out throwing jabs,
quickly moving
out of the way
of his mile-a-minute sledgehammer punches
’cause if just one of them landed
I’d have been out
for the count.
In the second round,
he musta swung
fifty times, but
couldn’t connect
’cause he couldn’t catch me,
plus he started getting tired,
and a little slower.
He chased me
around the outdoor ring
and each time
he got close enough
I just ducked,
tagged him real good,
and kept moving.
Then, outta nowhere,
he quit.
That’s right.
Before the end
of the second round
of our showdown,
Corky Butler,
the baddest bully in Louisville,
screamed, This ain’t fair, then
ran out of the ring
with a black eye
and a bloodied ego.
ROUND NINE
Sometimes, I think I knew Cassius better than I knew myself. I could tell that all the seeds of his greatness were already in him back in Louisville. He was bound for big things. I knew it. A lot of people did.
Unless you were around him back then, it’s hard to imagine his dedication to boxing—his preparation, his focus. When he was getting ready for the National Golden Gloves competition, Rudy and I trained with him every single day. We ran with him, jumped rope with him, shadowboxed with him. Naturally, he left us in the dust. And after we were both worn out, Cassius just kept going.
But there were times when Cassius wore even himself out. Like the time he fell asleep in the Nazareth College library. I know what you’re thinking—a library is the last place you’d expect to find Cassius. But he wasn’t there to read. It was his night job. For sixty cents an hour, he dusted the shelves and waxed the tables and chairs. No doubt he learned how by watching his mother clean houses. But one night he was so exhausted from training that he just put his head down on one of the tables and drifted off. Funny, there’s a sign in that library, still today, that says, Cassius slept here.
As the trip to Chicago got closer and closer, Cassius kept his eye on that Golden Gloves championship. Along the way, he’d gotten knocked to the mat a few times, but you could never keep him down. That’s a lesson I learned from Cassius—and I hold it close to this very day. My idea was always to be a writer. And believe me, I’ve had my share of rejections and failures. But I always got back up—just like Cassius taught me—and kept on writing.
In June, I sat with the Clay family when Cassius graduated from Central High School. Some of the teachers had said Cassius shouldn’t get his diploma because he hadn’t passed English. He still owed Mrs. Lauderdale a term paper. But the principal, Mr. Wilson, was in Cassius’s corner. He said to the teachers, “One day our greatest claim to fame is going to be that we knew Cassius Clay, or taught him.” So Mrs. Lauderdale told Cassius he could give an oral presentation instead of writing a paper. It didn’t come as much of a shock that Cassius decided to talk about his adventures as an amateur boxer. He made Rudy and me sit on his front porch while he practiced that speech over and over—and got better each time. We all knew Cassius wasn’t a great writer. But he was a world-class talker. And of course, he passed.
When they called his name at graduation, Cassius got a standing ovation. You couldn’t hear yourself with how loud that applause was. That got Mrs. Clay crying. After the ceremony, Cassius hugged her for a solid five minutes. He was always a good son, a good brother, a good friend.
Years later, after one of his historic fights, a bigtime sports reporter asked him what he wanted to be remembered for. This is what he said:
“I’d like for them to say, he took a few cups of love, he took one tablespoon of patience, one teaspoon of generosity, one pint of kindness. He took one quart of laughter, one pinch of concern, and then he mixed willingness with happiness, he added lots of faith, and he stirred it up well. Then he spread it over a span of a lifetime, and he served it to each and every deserving person he met.”
I make my living as a writer. I wish I’d written that.
So, what about that Golden Gloves championship fight in Chicago? What do you think happened? Did Cassius get knocked down one more time? I’ll never forget that night. I saw it all, live, from the front row.
The way I see it, that’s the night everything really began. The night it all got real.
At Central High School
I got sent
to Mr. Wilson’s office
a lot
for talking
in Miz Raymond’s class
while she read Invisible Man
for keeping raw onions
and garlic
in my pockets
for trashing
the devil’s food cake
for her birthday
and asking her why
did angel food cake
get to be white
for drawing a portrait
of her
without her wig
for not doing the homework
’cause I was too busy
training at Columbia Gym
from four o’clock till eight
and sparring at Fred Stoner’s gym
from eight till midnight
for daydreaming
about what combinations
I was gonna throw
at the Golden Gloves:
Jab
Step
to the left
Duck
Step
to the right
for not wanting
to be
invisible.
The Principal
Clay, you have a unique set of gifts.
I do believe you
will one day be
a boxing champion, he’d say,
but if you’re gonna make it
out of high school,
I’m gonna need you
to get your mind right.
Then he’d give me
a history lesson,
like Granddaddy Herman used to.
You know, a lot of people sacrificed
for you to be exceptional, Cassius.
If you’re gonna be the greatest,
best to start acting like it.
Then he’d start reading
Invisible Man
or whatever book
we were reading,
picking up
where Miz Raymond left off.
And I’d listen.
Talking Trash
It’s hotter
than a Texas parking lot
in this joint,
yelled a burly fella
who was also training
for the ’59 National Golden Gloves.
This hot ain’t squat, Mr. Big Shot,
I hollered back, still hitting
the speed bags.
These fists I got are meteors,
super-hot,
burn you up like kilowatts,
knock you outta this world
like an astronaut.
Cassius, you a lightweight.
You don’t want
no parts of me, he growled
from the ropes.
You may have scared
that nasty Corky fella, but
you don’t scare me.
I’m a real monster.
I’m King Kong,
and I’ll tear ya limbs off,
stick ’em in that running mouth
of yours.
You right about King Kong, I shot back,
’cause you one big, ugly sucker,
and I don’t want
no parts of that ugly.
The place went ape crazy,
laughing with me,
at him.
He came out of the ring,
charging like a bull,
till one of his trainers
cut him off,
called him CHAMP,
then told me,
Loose lips sink ships.
I don’t care if he is
a heavyweight, I hollered.
Tell that CHUMP
Cassius Clay don’t panic,
I’ll take him down
just like the Titanic.
After Winning
my second Louisville tournament trophy,
Joe Martin told me
I was ready
for Chicago again,
for the National Golden Gloves,
said I was moving
like a mustang,
finally keeping
my head
and my fists up,
throwing jabs
swift and easy,
and that I should
take a day off,
rest my body,
give my mind a workout,
before the trip,
so he sent me
to the YMCA
to watch fight films
and study the greats.
Cassius, immature boxers imitate,
mature boxers steal, he said, laughing.
So that’s what I did.
Jack Johnson vs. Tommy Burns
DECEMBER 26, 1908
John Arthur “Jack” Johnson,
aka the Galveston Giant,
was big and strappy,
a hard-as-coal brute
who knocked out everybody
he fought, except
Tommy Burns, the heavyweight champion,
who refused to fight him,
until Johnson chased
and stalked him
around the world
for nearly two years,
buying ringside seats
to his fights
just to heckle
and hound him
into the ring.
For fourteen rounds,
I watched the Goliath Johnson
toy with Burns like
he was David
without a slingshot.
In the first couple minutes
of each round,
Johnson taunted him,
laughing at Burns’s blows,
sometimes even making jokes
to the fans sitting
ringside,
and at the end
of each round
he’d punish Burns
with a barrage
of powerful punches
that over time
just crushed him.
I never got to see
round 15,
and neither did
the 2,000 people
standing
inside Sydney Stadium
in Australia,
’cause Johnson lifted Burns
off his feet
with an uppercut
that demolished him
so handily,
the local police
turned off the film cameras,
rushed into the ring,
stopped the fight,
all so no one ever got to see
John Arthur “Jack” Johnson,
aka the Galveston Giant,
become
the first black
heavyweight champion
of the world.
The Brown Bomber
Granddaddy Herman
and Papa Cash
used to argue
over everything—from
whether it was gonna rain
that day to
who got to eat
the last piece
of fried chicken—but
the one thing
they never disagreed on
was the best
heavyweight boxer
in history.
Joe Louis Barrow,
aka the Brown Bomber
from Detroit,
wasn’t flashy,
stayed pretty quiet
in and out
of the ring,
but boxed loud,
fought with short,
powerful counterblows
like Jack Johnson, only
his were faster,
more precise combinations.
He let his fists
do the talking,
and boy did they HOLLER.
Louis had a right cross
that could probably level
Superman.
One punch
was all he needed
but he always threw
a flurry, battering each
of his 51 opponents
in knockouts
as heavyweight champion
until he met
the BROCKTON Bomber.
Joe Louis vs. Rocky Marciano
OCTOBER 26, 1951
Rocky was four inches shorter,
looked up
to Joe Louis
as a god,
but when they got
into the ring,
it was just two mortals—one young,
one aging—going at it.
The match was brutal.
I only watched
it once
’cause who really wants
to see
their hero
get older,
get slower,
get knocked
off their pedestal
by the new guy.
Rocky was a swarmer,
a slugger,
and a brawler
who liked to crouch
and strike
from down under,
which he did
against Louis
for eight long rounds,
and it wasn’t pretty.
The next morning,
a sports reporter wrote
in the New York H
erald Tribune:
Rocky hit Joe
a left hook
and knocked him down.
Then Rocky hit him
another hook
and knocked him out.
A third and final blow
to the neck followed
that knocked him
out of the ring.
And out of
the fight business.
That was Joe Louis’s last fight
and probably the biggest
of Rocky Marciano’s
record-breaking
49–0 career
as a professional boxer.
Sweet as Sugar
While I wait
for the front-desk clerk
at the YMCA
to load
the Sugar Ray Robinson
highlight film,
Lucky reads out loud
from a biography
we checked out
of the library.
Walker Smith Jr.
was fifteen
when he changed
his name,
when he borrowed
his older friend
Ray Robinson’s birth certificate
so he could box
in a tournament
for boys eighteen
and older.
When the film starts,
we watch
in awe
as Sugar Ray dances
around the ring,
destroying
fighter after fighter
with a sweet, deadly
knockout left hook
that wipes the mat
with his opponents
one hundred and seventy-three times,
almost half of them
before the first round
even ends.
I’m gonna slay like Sugar Ray, I say,
jumping up,
mimicking
his fancy footwork
and sharp jabs.
Bon Voyage
Momma throws me
a party fit
for a king,
but won’t let
me, Rudy, Lucky,
Riney, Small Bubba,
and Big Head Paul
eat till all my aunts, uncles,
and cousins show up,
and Cash gets back
from Aunt Coretta’s
with the desserts.
Finally, he blows the horn
for me to come out
and help him