Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [30]
A light heavy, the young Clay went to the Rome Olympics in 1960. He worked the athletes’ village like a cardinal dispensing to the poor. When he beat the Pole Ziggy Pietrzykowski in the finals, a Russian reporter caught him afterward, found not a revolutionary but a robber-baron capitalist. The Russian wanted to know if he would return to the United States and eat with whites. The young Clay snapped: “Tell your people we got qualified people workin’ on them problems, and if I’m not worried why should you? To me, the U.S.A. is the best country in the world. It may be hard gettin’ somethin’ to eat sometimes, but I ain’t fightin’ alligators and livin’ in a mud hut exactly.” The exchange hit all the wire services, and Clay later said, “Poor old Commie, he went draggin’ off with nothin’ to write the Russians.”
Back in New York, Williams Reynolds, heir to a tobacco fortune, booked him into a suite at the Waldorf, right next door to the Prince of Wales, it turned out. He never heard of him, but he was famous, which was what mattered. He knocked on the door and a butler answered, saying: “We have not requested room service.” Reynolds was trying to get the jump on several other groups of gold-leaf sportsmen back in Louisville. The kid, through Martin, had worked on his estate, where he would claim in the future that he had to eat on the porch with the dogs and work like a slave. Martin kept a close eye on him out there, saying: “He raked a few leaves and mostly pulled the spigot on the milk machine.” Reynolds lost out on the contract to a wealthy group called the Louisville Syndicate. Martin had been trainer in the Reynolds deal. The whole package was checkmated by the father: “I don’t like cops,” Cash said.
Louisville greeted Clay back with a large celebration, and arriving at his house he found the steps had been painted red, white, and blue by his father. His contract with the Syndicate called for a $10,000 signing bonus, a guarantee of $4,000 for two years, generous training expenses, a house at the location he chose to train, and 50 percent of all earnings. From each purse, 15 percent of his end would go into a pension fund, untouchable until the age of thirty-five. This was new ground for boxing; a young fighter was being treated as more than a side of mutton. A ferret-eyed old manager named Honest Bill Daly observed the changing times and noted: “All Rocky Marciano got from his manager Al Weill was a cup of coffee and a kick in the ass.” The kid gave his parents some money and then bought a pink Cadillac just like Sugar Ray’s.
The Syndicate said they were in no hurry. Clay needed direction and protection, “would not be sacrificed.” They submitted him to the light of Archie Moore, still a fighter, and known as a sharp mind; Alexander the Great meets Socrates. Ali always credited the wrestler Gorgeous George “for my actin’ skill” and approach in the ring. No use telling him that George was a preening semi-idiot, a farcical homosexual in his role. For he’d reason, “They watch him, pay attention, don’t they, and he pretty like me.” But it was Archie who truly shaped him whether he knew it or not. In the future as Ali, he’d often allude to secrets he knew—and never described—about the ring. Archie was never withholding, he brimmed with glorious, verbal monographs of craft.
Moore had a diet passed to him by the Aborigines; really progressive fasting, but that was too commonplace for him. He chewed meat, retained the juices, got rid of the bulk, a “distasteful etiquette but it works.” Floating forever between the light-heavy and heavyweight ranks, he lived with constant weight loss. There were also aspects to his ring technique. Relaxism, he said, required slipping into impregnable defense until danger passed against heavy punchers. He called it the “turtle shell,