Cassius Clay

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Jack Paar and Liberace welcome Cassius Clay, who was known to sometimes be gassy. The future heavyweight champion (and future Muhammad Ali) was three months from his first bout with Sonny Liston. From a PBS Paar doc.


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From a 1969 Life piece about the interlocutor Oriana Fallaci, who recalls introducing a young Muhammad Ali to her aggressive interviewing style:

Question:

Has anyone actually threatened to break your nose off for something you wrote?

Oriana Fallaci:

Something like it happened with Cassius Clay. I had seen him a couple of times, and I went back to his house in Miami to finish the interview. He was eating a melon. I said, Good Morning, Mr. Clay. He keeps on eating the melon and suddenly belches very loud. I think he is just being impolite and I sit down with my tape recorder. And then oooaaagh. He belches again. A big one. Well, I said, let’s go on anyway. And just at that moment, buurp, buurp, whoops, whoops. I turned to him and shouted, I am not going to stay with an animal like you. And I was undoing my recorder, when he took the microphone and threw it against the wall. My microphone! I saw it flying past my head and I took my fists and bam, bam. Went against him. He stood there. So enormous. So tall. And he watched me in a way an elephant watches a mosquito. Black Muslims suddenly came out of all the doors into the room. Evil. Evil. They began to chant. You came for evil. It was like a nightmare. I backed out to my cab, trying to keep my dignity, but really afraid, and went straight to the airport. After the interview was published, Cassius Clay said he was going to break my nose if he ever saw me again. I said, we’ll see, if he breaks my nose, he is going to jail and we will have beautiful news in the papers. I saw him later in New York. I passed with my nose in the air, and he went by without looking at me.”

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"They say I'm the fastest heavyweight in the ring today. That comes from punching underwater." (Image courtesy of Ira Rosenberg.)

I heard years ago that the young Muhammad Ali made up a bogus story about training underwater for a boxing match in order to get his face in Life magazine. The man was always very gifted when it came to hoopla. I came across the 1960 article, “A Wet Way to Train for a Fight,” on Google Books. Even a quick look at the spread will make it clear why a photo mag was a patsy for such a visual story. Ali hadn’t yet converted to Islam and was still called Cassius Clay. An excerpt from the article:

“The boxer punching up a storm with underwater lefts and rights is as cocky as he is unconventional. ‘Not to be bragging or anything like that,’ says the 19-year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay, ‘but they say I’m the fastest heavyweight in the ring today. That comes from punching underwater.’ Taking a cue from the immortal Ty Cobb, who weighted his shoes in training so that he would feel feather-footed when the season started, Clay goes into a swimming pool and, as these underwater pictures show, does a stunt of submarine shadowboxing. ‘You try to box hard,’ he explains. ‘Then when you punch the same way out of water you get speed. Clay, an Olympic champion before turning pro and winning his first eight fights, has been criticized for talking too much about everything including about how he will win the first world heavyweight title. His answer is to keep on talking–until he gets under water and just makes bubbles.”

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