Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [14]
Over the next ten years, they saw each other on occasion, mainly because Ali kept seeking him out. Ali grew on Robinson, though Sugar didn’t like his loud “line of bullshit,” his tendency toward the manic, almost a berserk attitude in a ring. If the ring was art to Sugar, he also knew it to be a very sober matter, and was fond of relating what Jean Cocteau, his friend and fight enthusiast, once told him in Paris when talking of artists. Cocteau looked upon Ray as an artist and said the real artist was always conscious of what was at stake, if only to himself. “The Muses,” he said, “open the door and silently point to the tightrope.” The young Clay didn’t see any of that. Sugar tried to explain it to him once in so many words. “Where? A tightrope?” he asked. “I don’t see any tightrope.” Sugar wanted him to develop a sense of craft, an imperturbable ring presence; Ray himself strode into a ring as if he were going to buy the building, hair pomaded, no sweat, all cool Italian marble. As Ali rose in the ranks, Ray became concerned for him, suspected that he wasn’t emotionally arranged yet for living or his work. He was childlike, easily led, with an innocence that pulled you to him and also made you fear for him. “That boy’s going to get hurt one day,” Sugar told his manager George Gainford.
Despite Clay’s exterior, Sugar sensed that he was often unhappy. He sent Drew Bundini Brown, from his own entourage, to cheer him up. Bundini would stay on with Ali to the end and was the father of “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and almost all the rhyming doggerel that TV loved and made dogs run. Prior to the Liston fight, Clay persuaded Sugar to come to Miami, saying he needed him there to beat Liston, he didn’t know how to take Sonny. Robinson found a camp in chaos, too many people, too much noise, a fighter not paying attention; he’d run two blocks, turn, and come back. Ray didn’t tell him what to do, said only that for big fights he himself never felt secure without running five miles a day. Thereafter, Clay did his five miles, too, with urgency.
Clay wanted Sugar to quit the ring, to stay with him. He said: “Elijah Muhammad will give you seven hundred thousand, collect a dollar from each member, if you become a Muslim.” Ray brushed off the fantasy offer; he didn’t trust Muslims. And there were only twenty thousand of them even with tampered roll keeping. “When are you going to wake up?” he asked Clay. “You can’t be a country boy all your life. Be your own man.” How to beat Liston? With a lot of cape, and then the sword. The matador and the bull, just the way he had done it with Jake LaMotta. “I couldn’t match the strength of LaMotta. I had to outsmart him. Wear him down for the kill. He was a tough bull. Like Liston.” The two watched a film of the LaMotta fight night after night. Bundini took Ray aside one day and said: “Sugar, you right, he just a country boy. I love him. But he’s got a fistful of mean in him the Muslims give him, and he’s gonna be a lot of trouble down the road.”
Ironic, though: Clay had rushed toward the Muslims like an orphan, while the sect saw no utility in him, no gain, despite Malcolm X’s interest. Clay was a Muslim in his own mind, that’s all. Elijah Muhammad had forbade Malcolm to talk to Clay, though he had been cultivated by Muslim underlings working on their own long before Malcolm’s arrival. The Muslim hierarchy barely knew who Clay was, while the troops in Miami filled his head with dogma and privately laughed at the idea of