Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [34]
Refusing to fly once more just into his career, Clay was on a train with magazine writer Myron Cope, who was digging into a roast loin of pork. “Poke give me a headache,” he said to Cope. “Doctors tell me poke 90 percent cell parasites. Poke ninety percent maggots.” Cope gulped and said: “Very enlightening.” Clay continued: “You let the poke lay two day, and it gets up and crawls. The hawg is an unclean animal.” Cell parasites? Far from his frame of reference. No doctor told him this; it was verbatim from the Black Muslim tract on pork. Who cared about his distaste for pig? What the press and public would come to deplore was one of the linchpins of his future mythology, his repudiation of the Olympic gold medal.
Just back from the Games, barely dropped off by the mayor’s police escort to his home and planning to purchase half the earth, the kid was suffering spiritual occlusion. The colonially shackled were shouting to him from all parts of the globe. That’s Clay, the budding revolutionist at the time, according to the Muslims. Not the kid who walked around town wearing the medal, who slept with it, already a self-promoter to the bone who went glum if not recognized. The medal was not an object, it was his calling card. Here also was a kid that avoided confrontation on the streets, rock throwing and such, and did not, his father said, even like for a long time “to sleep alone in a dark bedroom.” But suddenly he was deep into an incident that threatened his life, an evolving narcissist who could not stand seeing his face marked in the ring.
With the Hell’s Angels, of all people. After a racial incident, Clay and a friend, Ronnie, got into it with a pair of them. The action shifted to the highway to dueling bikes, then crashes, knives, guns, whizzing chains, and more Hell’s Angels. When the Angels, mind you, fled, and with blood flecking his gold medal, Clay went to the side of the Jefferson County Bridge, tore the medal from his neck, and, with rain whipping his face, threw his prize into the dark Ohio River. Trouble was that the thrown medal is only divulged after he became a Muslim, a nice propaganda touch to show that Clay had been turned long before their arrival by the natural evil of the white race. “The medal,” his father said, “was lost or stolen. Plain and simple.” Bundini Brown said, “Honkies sure bought into that one.” It was wonderful material for the press who liked him, and for those who didn’t. I asked Ali about the medal during a trip to Korea years later. He shrugged it off, his eyes suggesting that it had become a decayed ornament of his myth, or that he was bored with such trivia. “Who remembers?” he said; so much for a scenario that once seemed to make smoke rise from ears.
Frazier and Yank Durham did not have to go it alone. They were soon directed to Bruce Baldwin, who ran a large dairy. “I don’t know,” he told them. “I just sell milk.” Even so, the civic-minded Baldwin said he’d see what he could do. He eventually came up with a plan to sell stock in Joe to anyone who would buy it. Businessmen as well as average people jumped on, the price being $250 a share, and 8,000 shares were sold. The group was called Cloverlay, and when Frazier left them each share would be worth $14,250. Among the partners was Jack Kelly, brother of Princess Grace. The deal called for a job, a draw of a hundred dollars a week against 50 percent of purses, and a loan on a house. Like Clay, he was now a walking corporation, and one that never had holidays. Under the whip of Durham there was no respite, seven days a week in the gym soaking his head in brine and with the cannon voice of Durham banging at his every move. Cocksucker, get that left hand out of