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 THE DAILY ONLINE SPORTS MAGAZINE
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 How Muhammad Ali Changed David Remnick
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."
"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."  annon 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.
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."
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."
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n 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.
o 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.
hen 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. 
or 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: