Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [53]
What a singular character Sonny was. When he lived in Denver, a priest named Father Murphy befriended and counseled him. He drew this conclusion: “I don’t know about Clay. Floyd Patterson wants to be reborn. Sonny just wants to be born. Period.” Before he was kicked out of Philly, he went to his manager, George Katz (behind him the goniff Blinky Palermo), for advice. The optimist told him: “Be nice, Sonny. It’s nice to be nice.” His lawyer Morton Witkin once wanted to see how long Sonny could sit without speaking. Witkin threw his hands up after forty-five minutes and said: “All right, what’s on your mind?” Sonny walked out.
An incident that is still vivid is when Joe Flaherty, doing a piece for Life, and I were with him in Los Angeles. A young hippie approached his Cadillac, gave Sonny a medal with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph scratched on it. “Those cats are right,” Sonny said. “Don’t worry about a fuckin’ thing in the world.” We glided past the presidential campaign headquarters of Robert Kennedy. What did he want to be president for, Sonny wondered, with all that money? What would Sonny do with such a fortune? He leaned back and dwelt upon the question, Rodin’s thinker. “I’d buy me the finest pussy in the United States of America.” He cut short his reverie, by now with a dreamy look, and Charles Sonny absently thumb-flicked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph into flight formation on Wilshire Boulevard.
No point in lingering on Liston 2 with Clay, unless you have a facility with Egyptian glyphs. Clay scratched a right hand to Sonny’s head, a light cuff if anything, not a punch that would cause him to drop like a bale of cotton almost instantly in the first round. Clay stood over him, angrily motioning for him to get up. Why not? This was the second time his play had closed in the bushes, and it brought shouts from eager reformers in Washington. People have gone cross-eyed looking for that punch on film; there is none unless you, in the interest of Ali’s legend, desperately want to see one. Liston 1 is the fight for the magnifier. It should have been the frontispiece to his greatness, the first unimpeachable challenge to his throne; it wasn’t.
No one gave Clay a shot against Liston in Miami on February 25, 1964; he was a 7–1 dog. Overnight, Sonny became America’s cop, an idea that didn’t sit too well with him. “Sheeee-it,” he said. “I’m nobody’s good guy.” Even the fight establishment wanted Sonny to win. Clay and the Muslims would be impossible in deals. So what if Sonny was a blight? Horror plays well at the box office, too. What does Clay know about Sonny? He knew he had a crack-of-doom right hand and was no sloth on his feet. He also knew he was a mob favorite. What did Sonny know? Those Muslims again. “You see any Moooslems,” Sonny asked Willie Reddish just back from Clay’s dressing room. “You see any guys with bullet heads, dark suits?” An S.I. colleague, Bud Shrake, would later see Sonny move toward the ring with “real tears in his eyes.” There had been demented Clay psychodramas at the weigh-in (tactical con, said Muslims and entourage, “absolute fear,” remembered Sugar Ray). While dressing, Clay’s eyes stayed fixed on the water bottle; he feared being poisoned. Rudy (later Rahman) was in charge of the water. Abruptly, Clay went over, emptied the bottle.
In the ring, Sonny was all wasted energy, stumbling moves and wild swings, not the fighter who pawed away a jab, then clubbed home a right hand; Clay jabbed him with impunity, opening a cut on Sonny’s cheek. Chaos broke out in Clay’s corner after the fifth. He was shouting that he’d been poisoned, “I’m blind!” Muslims streamed into the corner, got in Dundee’s way. Near forfeiture, the little Dundee hurled Clay toward the