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Writing Ali: A SportsJones Special Section

How Muhammad Ali Changed the Press
David Remnick
SportsJones Magazine
October 29, 1999

The author of "King of the World" talks about how Cassius Clay (and Muhammad Ali) revolutionized the world of Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith

In the later acts of his career, Muhammad Ali would take his place in the television firmament and his Boswell would be Howard Cosell, he of the marvelous adenoids. But in the days preceding his fight with Sonny Liston in Miami in February 1964, Cassius Clay was not yet Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell was a bald, nasal guy on the radio who annoyed his colleagues with his portentous questions and his bulky tape recorder which he was forever bashing into someone's giblets.

Newspapers were still the dominant force in sports; columnists – white columnists – were the dominant voices; and Jimmy Cannon, late of the New York Post and, since 1959, of the New York Journal-American, was the king of the columnists. Cannon was the first thousand-dollar-a-week man, Hemingway's favorite, Joe DiMaggio's buddy, and Joe Louis's iconographer. Red Smith, who wrote gloriously for the Herald Tribune, employed an elegant restraint in his prose that put him ahead of the game with more high-minded readers; Cannon was the popular favorite: a world-weary voice of the city. Cannon was king and Cannon had no sympathy for Cassius Clay. He did not even think he could fight.

Cannon was an honest man in a gamey world. Throughout the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, boxing beat writers would line up at Madison Square Garden on Saturday mornings for a weekly envelope filled with cash – not a fortune, but just enough so that the promoter could be reasonably confident that the reporters would talk up and cover his bouts, just enough to keep them from asking the wrong questions. On some fight nights, the same beat writers might find an envelope on their assigned seats at ringside, too.

The practice of organized graft was not limited to boxing, nor was it considered particularly wrong. It was just part of the business. Ball teams paid for writers to travel with them on the road; owners of racetracks and arenas sent around Christmas presents: televisions, washing machines, tea services. At big events, like a championship fight, publicists and promoters offered up a selection of prostitutes: no charge for the columnists, discounts for reporters. Columnists (Cannon included) would routinely accept free food and drink at nightspots like "21," Toots Shor, and the Stork Club. With arenas and teams and promoters doling out such loot, was it so unreasonable to expect favorable notice? A stray promotional line in a column?

Predictably, not all the voices in the press were convinced that full-scale congressional hearings on boxing were necessary. "Outside the routine business of running the country," Red Smith wrote in December 1959, "the United States Senate has nothing to worry about except the space race, atomic warfare, spiraling living costs, the world march of Communism, Fidel Castro, Bishop Pike's views on birth control, the national debt, unrest in steel and the 1960 elections. In the circumstances, anybody can understand why Sen. Estes Kefauver, a restless spirit, deems it necessary to relieve his boredom by investigating fist fighting." Smith described Frankie Carbo, the mobster who ran the sport, as "the more or less benevolent despot of boxing's Invisible Empire."

So that was the world of boxing even as it overlapped with the rise of Cassius Clay. One afternoon shortly before the Clay-Liston fight, Cannon was sitting with George Plimpton at the Fifth Street Gym watching Clay spar. Clay glided around the ring, a feather in the slipstream, and every so often he popped a jab into his sparring partner's face. Plimpton was completely taken with Clay's movement, his ease, but Cannon could not bear to watch.

"Look at that!" Cannon said. "I mean, that's terrible. He can't get away with that. Not possibly." It was just unthinkable that Clay could beat Liston by running, carrying his hands at his hip, and defending himself simply by leaning away.

"Perhaps his speed will make up for it," Plimpton put in hopefully.

"He's the fifth Beatle," Cannon said. "Except that's not right. The Beatles have no hokum to them."

"It's a good name," Plimpton said. "The fifth Beatle."

"Not accurate," Cannon said. "He's all pretense and gas, that fellow.... No honesty."

Clay offended Cannon's sense of rightness the way flying machines offended his father's generation. It threw his universe off kilter.

"In a way, Clay is a freak," he wrote before the fight. "He is a bantamweight who weighs more than two hundred pounds."

Cannon's objections went beyond the ring. His hero was Joe Louis, and for Joe Louis he composed the immortal line that he was a "credit to his race – the human race."

He admired Louis's "barbaric majesty," his quiet-in-suffering, his silent satisfaction in victory. And when Louis finally went on too long and fought Rocky Marciano long past his peak, he eulogized the broken-down old fighter as the metaphysical poets would a slain mistress: "The heart, beating inside the body like a fierce bird, blinded and caged, seemed incapable of moving the cold blood through the arteries of Joe Louis's rebellious body. His thirty-seven years were a disease which paralyzed him."

Cannon was born in 1910 in what he called "the unfreaky part of Greenwich Village." His father was a minor, if kindly, servant of Tammany Hall. The family lived in cold-water flats in the Village and Cannon got to know the neighborhoods and its workmen, the ice men, the coal delivery boys.

Cannon dropped out of school after the ninth grade and caught on as a copy boy at the Daily News and never left the newspaper business. As a young reporter he caught the eye of Damon Runyon when he wrote dispatches on the Lindbergh kidnapping trial for the International News Service. "The best way to be a bum and earn a living is to write sports," Runyon told Cannon and then helped him get a job at a Hearst paper, the New York American.

Like his heroes, Runyon and the Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger, Cannon gravitated to the world of the "delicatessen nobility," to the bookmakers and touts, the horse-players and talent agents, who hung out at Toots Shor's and Lindy's, the Stork Club and El Morocco.

When Cannon went off to Europe in the mid-forties to write battle dispatches for Stars and Stripes, he developed what would become his signature style: florid, sentimental prose with an underpinning of hard-bitten wisdom, an urban style that he had picked up in candy stores and night clubs and from Runyon, Ben Hecht, and Westbrook Pegler.

After having been attached to George Patton's Third Army, Cannon came home newly attached to the Post. His sports column, which would be the city's most popular for a quarter-century, began in 1946 and was dubbed "Jimmy Cannon Says."

Cannon was an obsessive worker, a former boozer who drank more coffee than Balzac. He lived alone – first at the Edison Hotel, then on Central Park West, and, finally, on Fifty-Fifth Street. He was a cranky egomaniac whose ego only grew with age. He sweated every column. When he wasn't at a ball game or at his desk, he was out all night, wandering from night club to night club, listening always for tips, for stray bits of talk that could make their way into his column.

"His column is his whole life," said one of his colleagues, W.C. Heinz of the New York Sun. "He has no family, no games he plays, no other activities. When he writes it's the concentration of his whole being. He goes through the emotional wringer. I have no idea what Jimmy would do if he weren't writing that column, he'd be so lonesome."

For his time, Cannon was considered enlightened on the subject of race. That is to say that unlike many other columnists he did not make fun of the black athletes he covered, he did not transform their speech into "Amos 'n' Andy" routines. He gave them their due. As much as he adored DiMaggio, a fighter like Archie Moore captured his schmaltz-clogged heart just as easily:

Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds. I don't mean big composers such as Harold Arlen or Duke Ellington. It should be a song that comes out of the backroom of sloughed saloons on night drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns. The guy who writes this one must be a piano player who can be dignified when he picks a quarter out of the marsh of a sawdust floor. They're dead, most of those piano players, their mouths full of dust instead of songs. But I'll bet Archie could dig one up in any town he ever made.

Cannon would begin other columns by putting the reader inside the skull and uniform of a ballplayer ("You're Eddie Stanky. You ran slower than the other guy ...") and elsewhere, in that voice of El Morocco at three in the morning, he would dispense wisdom on the subject he seemed to know the least about – women: "Any man is in difficulty if he falls in love with a woman he can't knock down with the first punch." Or, "You can tell when a broad starts in managing a fighter. What makes a dumb broad smart all of a sudden? They don't even let broads in a joint like Yale. But they're all wised up once a fighter starts making a few."

There are precious few writers of any sort who do not date quickly and journalistic writing, with rare exceptions, dates as quickly as the newsprint it's written on. Even Mencken dates and Cannon was no Mencken. Without making excuses, Cannon's wised-up one-liners and the maudlin sentiment were of a time and a place, and, as Cannon aged, he gruffly resisted the new trends in sportswriting and athletic behavior.

In the press box, he encountered a new generation of beat writers and columnists, men like Maury Allen and Leonard Schecter on the Post. He didn't much like the sound of them. Cannon called the younger men "chipmunks" because they were always chattering away in the press box. He hated their impudence, their irreverence, their striving to get beyond the game and into the heads of the people they covered.

Cannon had always said that his intention as a sportswriter was to bring the "world in over the bleacher wall," but he failed to see that this generation was trying to do much the same thing. He could not bear their lack of respect for the old verities. "They go up and challenge guys with rude questions," Cannon once said of the Chipmunks. "They think they're big if they walk up to an athlete and insult him with a question. They regard this as a sort of bravery."

Part of Cannon's anxiety was sheer competitiveness. There were seven newspapers in those days in New York and there was terrific competition to stay on top, to be original, to get a scoop, an extra detail. But the Chipmunks knew they were in competition now not so much with each other as with the growing power of television.

Unlike Cannon, who was almost entirely self-educated, these were young men (and they were all men) who had gone to college in the age of Freud. They became interested in the psychology of an athlete ("The Hidden Fears of Kenny Sears" was one of Milton Gross's longer pieces).

In time, this, too, would no longer seem especially voguish – soon just about every shnook with a microphone would be asking the day's goat, "What were you thinking when you missed that ball?" – but for the moment, the Chipmunks were the coming wave and Cannon's purple sentences, once so pleasurable, were beginning to feel less vibrant, a little antique.

Part of Cannon's generational anxiety was that he wrote about ballplayers in an elegiac voice. He had plenty of scorn for the scoundrels of sport – Jim Norris, Frankie Carbo, Fat Tony Salerno – but you would never learn from Cannon that DiMaggio was perhaps the most imperious personality in sport or that Joe Louis, in retirement, was going slowly mad with drugs, that to guard himself against imagined predators from the IRS and the CIA he clogged the air-conditioning vents with cotton and smeared his windows with Vaseline.

The new generation, men like Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, Jerry Izenberg and Gay Talese, all admired Cannon's immediacy, but Cannon begrudged them their new outlook, their middle-class upbringings, their educations, their youth.

In the late Fifties, Gay Talese came along and wrote countless elegant features for the Times and then, even more impressive, a series of profiles in the Sixties for Esquire on Floyd Patterson, Louis, DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, the theater director Joshua Logan. None of the pieces were what writers would call "trash jobs" – they were filled with affection for the person and admiration for craft – but they also delved into Patterson's fears, Louis's terrible decline, DiMaggio's loneliness, Sinatra's nastiness, and Logan's mental breakdowns. Talese combined the techniques of reporting and fiction; he filled his notebooks with facts, interviews, and observations, but structured his pieces like short stories.

When Talese left the paper in 1965 to write books and longer magazine articles, he had one inheritor in place, a reporter in his mid-twenties named Robert Lipsyte. Like Cannon, Lipsyte grew up in New York, but he was a middle-class Jew from the Rego Park neighborhood in Queens. He went from his junior year at Forest Hills High School straight to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1957.

Lipsyte wrote about high-school basketball players like Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown. He helped cover the 1962 Mets with Louis Effrat, a Timesman who had lost the Dodgers beat when they moved out of Brooklyn. Effrat's admiration for his younger colleague was, to say the least, grudging:

"Kid, they say in New York you can really write but you don't know what the fuck you're writing about."

If there was one subject that Lipsyte made it a point to learn about, it was race. In 1963, he met Dick Gregory, one of the funniest comics in the country and a constant presence in the civil rights movement. The two men became close friends and eventually Lipsyte helped Gregory write "Nigger," his autobiography.

Even as a sports reporter, Lipsyte contrived ways to write about race. He wrote about the Blackstone Rangers gang, he got to know Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. He covered rallies at which black protesters expressed their outrage against a country that would celebrate blacks only when they carried a football or boxed in a twenty-foot ring.

In the winter of 1963-64, the Times's regular boxing writer, Joe Nichols, declared that the Liston-Clay fight was a dog and that he was going off to spend the season covering racing at Hialeah. The assignment went to Lipsyte.

Unlike Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, and the other village elders, Lipsyte found himself entranced with Clay. Here was this funny, beautiful, skilled young man who could fill your notebook in fifteen minutes.

"Clay was unique, but it wasn't as if he were some sort of creature from outer space for me," Lipsyte said. "For Jimmy Cannon, he was, pardon the expression, an uppity nigger and he could never handle that. The blacks he liked were the blacks of the thirties and the forties, they knew their place. Joe Louis called Jimmy Cannon 'Mr. Cannon' for a long time. He was a humble kid.

"Now here comes Cassius Clay popping off and abrasive and loud and it was a jolt for a lot of sportswriters, like Cannon. That was a transition period. What Ali did was make guys stand up and decide which side of the fence they were on.

"Clay upset the natural order of things at two levels. The idea that he was a loud braggart brought disrespect to this noble sport. Or so the Cannon people said. Never mind that Rocky Marciano was a slob who would show up at events in a t-shirt so that the locals would buy him good clothes. They said that Clay 'lacked dignity.' Clay combined Little Richard and Gorgeous George. He was not the sort of sweet dumb pet that writers were accustomed to.

"Clay also did not need the sportswriters as a prism to find his way. He transcended the sports press. Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith were appalled. They didn't see the fun in it. And, above all, it was fun."

As the fight approached, Lipsyte heard that the Beatles would be dropping by the Fifth Street Gym. The visit had been arranged, of course, by the eternally hip P.R. man, Harold Conrad, who was publicizing the fight for Bill MacDonald. The Beatles were in Miami to do the "Ed Sullivan Show."

Lipsyte was 26, a card-carrying member of the rock 'n' roll generation and he saw that for all its phoniness, a meeting between The Beatles and Clay was a meeting of the New, two acts that would mark the Sixties. The older columnists passed, but he saw a story. The future of music and the future of sports in one room.

The younger writers, like Lipsyte, saw Clay as the "Fifth Beatle," parallel players in the great social and generational shift in American society. For some of the older columnists, the scene was representative of all that was going wrong in the world.

"Clay is part of the Beatle movement," Jimmy Cannon would write famously a few years later. "He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and Batman and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered stylemaking cult of the bored young."

After Clay beat Liston, the greatest upset in boxing history, and became heavyweight champion, he gave a morning-after press conference at the Veterans Room of Convention Hall. He answered all the traditional questions about how he felt, about which fighter he might take on next, about whether Liston was tougher than expected, less tough than expected, or precisely as tough as expected.

The session was, by Clay's standards, remarkably subdued. There was no verse, no monologues, no taunts. "All I want now is to be a nice, clean gentleman," he said. "I've proved my point. Now I'm going to set an example for all the nice boys and girls. I'm through talking."

Loud, ironic applause greeted that declaration and even Clay had to smile. But the thing about Clay was that he never really lied to the press; he believed what he was saying at the moment he was saying it. And at this moment he saw his career as a limited venture.

"I only fight to make a living, and when I have enough money I won't fight any more," he went on.

Finally, a reporter interrupted. Wasn't it true, he wanted to know, that Clay was a "card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?"

Clay recoiled not so much from the idea of breaking news – he had assumed by now that everyone knew he was a convert to the Nation of Islam – but rather from the terminology. "Card-carrying" had the ring of McCarthyism, and "Black Muslim" was a term repugnant to members of the Nation.

"'Card-carrying.' What does that mean?" Clay said. "I believe in Allah and in peace. I don't try to move into white neighborhoods. I don't want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not a Christian anymore. I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want."

That was enough to confirm all the hints that had been dropped in the press: Clay was a member of the Nation of Islam. But whether the press understood it or not, he had also forsaken the image of the unthreatening black fighter established by Joe Louis and then imitated by Jersey Joe Walcott and Floyd Patterson and dozens of others. Clay was declaring that he would not fit any stereotypes not of his own making, he would not follow any set standard of behavior.

And while Liston had also declared his independence from convention (through sheer don't-give-a-damn truculence) Clay's message was political. He, and not Jimmy Cannon or the NAACP, would define his blackness, his religion, his history. He was a vocal member of an American fringe group and America would soon be learning about it.

The sporting press, which barely knew a thing about the Nation of Islam, required more details and so the next morning some reporters descended on Clay and Malcolm X as they were eating breakfast at the Hampton House Motel. If any of the reporters thought Clay would back off from his previous day's statements, they were mistaken.

"A rooster crows only when it sees the light," Clay said. "Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing."

"I'm the heavyweight champion, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can't move into. I know how to dodge booby traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I'm no troublemaker. I don't believe in forced integration. I know where I belong. I'm not going to force myself into anybody's house....

"People brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we're Communists. That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don't carry knives. They don't tote weapons. They pray five times a day. The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don't commit adultery. All they want to do is live in peace."

Just about the only people to react to the news of Clay's conversion with a shrug were the men in his corner. "What's in a name?" Angelo Dundee said by way of Shakespeare. "To me he's still the same individual, same guy. Actually, I didn't know what Muslim was, really, because I thought it was a piece of cloth."

But outside of that small circle of handlers, Clay's conversion was a shock. The leading columnists reacted with outrage.

"The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of hate," Jimmy Cannon wrote. "It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, as one of Elijah Muhammad's missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit.

"I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion."

Cannon's point of racial orientation would always be Joe Louis. Clay's association with the Nation of Islam, Cannon declared, "was a more pernicious hate symbol than Schmeling and Nazism."

Bob Lipsyte's coverage in the Times was of a different order, partly because the paper's news columns did not allow for much opinion, but also because he was of a different generation and possessed of a far different set of experiences, not least his close friendship with Dick Gregory.

"It's true that I wasn't freaked out about the conversion the way Cannon or Smith were," he said, "but you have to remember how scary Malcolm X was to some people, and not just white people. The New York Times, for one, never really knew how many people he could put on the street for a revolution."

Malcolm appreciated the depth and restraint of Lipsyte's coverage and told him so. Back at the newsroom on West 43rd Street, Lipsyte recounted the compliment to one of his editors.

"Well, that's great," the editor said. "Maybe we should put huge ads on the side of all our trucks saying, 'Malcolm X Likes Bob Lipsyte!"'

A couple of years later, after Ali had beaten Liston a second time and then beat Floyd Patterson in a sadistic exhibition of resentment, Bob Lipsyte came down to Miami to do some feature stories on Ali.

"I remember waking up that morning in my hotel and watching a session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on TV, of the first really sharp debates on Vietnam," Lipsyte recalled. "William Fulbright was chairman and Maxwell Taylor and Senator Wayne Morse were really going at it. Taylor had that jock certainty that generals had.

"Now this was early 1966. The mood in the country was still anti-peacenik, pro-war. The tide had not yet turned. But with this debate you could feel the pulse of something happening."

In the early afternoon, Lipsyte drove over to Ali's house, a low-slung house in a black neighborhood. The two men sat outside in plastic lawn chairs. School had just let out and Ali watched the high-school girls go by, commenting on each one in a harmless, pass-the-afternoon sort of way.

Several of Ali's Muslim friends were around and one came out and told Ali he was wanted on the phone. It was one of the wire services. The reporter told Ali that in the midst of escalating its troop levels in Vietnam, the army had changed its mind: his score on the military qualifying exam was now good enough. Ali had been re-classified once more. He was 1-A. He could soon expect a call from his draft board. Did he have any comment?

"Ali came back out and his mood had changed completely. He was fuming," Lipsyte said. "Until that moment, I was thinking how wonderful this was, how you could step into this sanctuary, this time-warp, where nothing has anything to do with the war.

"Ali knew even less about the war than I did, it wasn't on his radar screen at all," Lipsyte went on. "As he kept going back inside for more phone calls and the TV trucks started appearing, the Muslim chorus was chortling. They had all been in the Army. They came to the Muslims after hard times, after jail, after the army and they started telling Ali, 'Of course, the Man is gonna do whatever the fuck he wants to do with you.' They started telling him how the cracker sergeant would drop a hand grenade in his pants."

The calls were non-stop. This was a big story, evoking memories of other young athletes and pop stars drafted at the peak of their careers: Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Elvis Presley.

But this was different, this was Vietnam. Ali was getting accustomed to being asked about racial politics, but now he was hearing new questions: What do you think of L.B.J.? What's your view of the draft? What do you think about the war? What about the Vietcong?

"And all of sudden he hit the note," Lipsyte remembered.

"Man," Ali said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."

The line came and went so quickly that Lipsyte missed it. "No question that I blew that story." But enough papers and television stations did pick up the quote. Eventually, so, too, did The New York Times.

As he had been before and as he would be again and again, Ali was acting as a mirror to American society. He may not have been able to locate Vietnam on a map, he knew very little about the war, but he was thrust into the midst of the national agony and reacted with a moment of intuition and speed. I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

"It was the moment for Ali," Lipsyte said. "For the rest of his life he would be loved and hated for what seemed like a declarative statement, but what was, at the time, a moment of blurted madness."

From then on, Ali took a political stand, insisting that his religion did not permit him to participate in war. Since that afternoon in Miami, he learned more about the war and deepened his understanding of what was happening both to the country and to himself. But he didn't waver.

The members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group knew they were on their way out as Ali's business management team, but, all the same, they quickly helped line up cushy ways for Ali to get credit for army service: the reserves, National Guard duty. If worse came to worst, they figured, the army would have Ali put on boxing exhibitions for the troops. This way, they figured, Ali, like Louis before him, could enhance his public image without risking his life and untold millions of dollars.

Ali was instantly denounced by Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Arthur Daley, all the columnists whose notion of how a heavyweight champion must behave were formed in the Louis years.

"Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war," Red Smith wrote.

Various senators and congressmen declared Ali a traitor and a pariah. Even his hometown legislature, the Kentucky State Senate, felt compelled to issue a proclamation saying he brought "discredit to all loyal Kentuckians and to the names of the thousands who gave their lives for this country during his lifetime."

As time passed and the government put pressure on him, Ali made his stance clearer. He would not fight exhibitions. He would not move abroad.

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?" he said to a reporter for Sports Illustrated.

"If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn't have to draft me. I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. We've been in jail for four hundred years."

With time, the columnists changed with Ali, not least Red Smith. By 1968, like so many other people in the country, Smith had turned around on the war, his views on race evolved. Cannon, too, came to see the world in a slightly different way. A young man, Muhammad Ali, was in large part, responsible for their new view of the American scene.

Writing Ali: A SportsJones Special Section

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David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker and the author of "King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for "Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire."

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