|
The Beatles got it right away. They followed Clay out to the boxing ring like kindergarten kids. You would have thought they'd met before and choreographed their routine. They bounced into the ring, capered, dropped down to pray that Clay would stop hitting them. He picked up Ringo, the bittiest Beatle. Then they lined up so Clay could knock them all out with one punch. They fell like dominoes then jumped up to form a pyramid to get at Clay's jaw. The five of them began laughing so hard their impromptu frolics collapsed into slapstick. That photo-op is still a classic. After the Fab Four left, Clay jumped rope, shadow-boxed and sparred as Bundini hollered "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Afterward, stretched out on a dressing-room table for his rubdown, Clay pretended to fall asleep as crabby old reporters asked him what he was going to do after he lost. Finally a crabby old reporter from Boston said, "This whole act is a con job, isn't it," and Clay pretended to wake up and he said, "I'm making all this money, the popcorn man's making money and the beer man, and you got something to write about. Your papers let you come down to Miami Beach where it's warm." The Boston reporter shut up. I think that was the moment when I began to wish this kid wasn't going to get his head knocked off, that somehow he would beat Liston and become champion. He would have been such a joy to cover, I thought, and interesting. Malcolm X, his mentor, was somewhere in Miami, and the political, social and religious rumors floating around would fill notebooks for years, not to mention the inside-the-ropes controversy about his unorthodox boxing style. That the older sportswriters – Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Dick Young – disliked him was another plus for my generation; Clay would be our story the way Joe Louis had been theirs. The Brown Bomber, the humble, laconic model of the old guard's proper sports hero, was hanging out in Liston's camp. I was a little sad, for Clay and for me. This clever kid's got our number and he's not afraid of playing with us. He could change sportswriting along with boxing. Too bad he's got no chance. I might be new on the scene, but I'd covered enough Yankees, Mets, Giants and tennis by that time to know that everything out there was the same old black and white while this kid was Technicolor. Too bad he was just passing through, a firefly fad, like those Beatles. We could have had fun. Cassius, poking me, interrupted my reverie of regret. He put his head close to mine and whispered that he had noticed me coming out of the locker-room with the four visitors. "Who were those little sissies?" he said. Robert Lipsyte is one of America's most well respected writers and authors. Perhaps best known for his work at the New York Times, Lipsyte was the Emmy Award winning host of the public affairs show The Eleventh Hour and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of many acclaimed books for young readers including The Contender, The Brave, The Chief and Warrior Angel. His non-fiction work includes: Nigger: The Autobiography of Dick Gregory.
|
Newswire 
