Editor's note: This account of Robert Lipsyte's experiences with Muhammad Ali was originally published in 2006.
For more of Lipsyte's first-hand account of life with Ali, click below.
Robert Lipsyte was 25, recently spat out of college, graduate school and the Army, serving as the Noon Goon (general assignment) and night rewrite reporter in the New York Times sports department when he got the assignment to cover Sonny Liston's defense of his title against Cassius Clay. It simply wasn't worth the time of a seasoned wordslinger. That decision, says Lipsyte, was the key moment of his career. By the time he turned 29, he became the youngest sports columnist in Times' history, and he went on to a distinguished career in television, as a Young Adult novelist and as a sports and city columnist at the Times where he returned in 1991. Lipsyte's personal affection for Ali is matched by his professional gratitude. Sometimes he thinks that if the real boxing writer had claimed his rightful assignment, Lipsyte would still be the Noon Goon. On the 35th anniversary of the "Fight of the Century" -- the first of Ali's three bouts with Joe Frazier -- Lipsyte reflects on 11 encounters he had with The Greatest that shaped both of their lives.
Miami Beach, 1964
Introducing the Fab Six
The first time ever I saw Ali, I was with the Beatles.
Now that stops conversation. People think: It doesn't get much better than that, a 26-year-old reporter hanging at the iconic center of the '60s, that defining decade of the 20th century. Like waking up with Rosetta Stone herself. Sometimes, reading myself write, I think so, too. Until I remember that on that February day I was clueless.
The New York Times had sent me down to cover Clay's first fight with Sonny Liston, because the paper's boxing writer didn't think it was worth his time. Cassius Clay was a 7-1 underdog.
The Beatles, who were on their first American tour, wanted a photo op with Liston, but the champ didn't think they were worth his time. "Who are these little sissies?" asked Sonny, who trained on the stage of a bright blue community center in northern Miami Beach. So the limo dropped the Fab Four off at the dingy old Fifth Street Gym in what is now South Beach. The Beatles were cranky before they even got up the splintery steps.
Clay was late and the Beatles tried to leave. But they had arrived, a sign of those times, with no hired muscle of their own, and the promotion's security guards pushed them into a locker room. Clay's press agent wanted that picture to boost sagging tickets sales. It was my first day on the story. I'd flown in the night before. My notebook and my mind were empty. Had I really known who these four little guys in matching white terrycloth jackets were, I might have been too shy to push my way into the locker-room with them. The Beatles, I thought then, were just another bunch of pop ups to make teenyboppers swoon. I was a cool scribe.
The Beatles were cursing the photographer who had brought them here, claiming they had been tricked. I introduced myself, a little grandly I think, invoking the majesty of the Times, and John gravely shook my hand, introducing himself as Ringo, and Paul as John. I knew they were putting me on and was faintly amused. I asked for their predictions. We all agreed that Liston would destroy Clay, the silly little over-hyped wanker. Then they ignored me to snarl among themselves, the silly little over-hyped wankers.
Suddenly, the locker-room burst open, and Cassius Clay filled the doorway. The Beatles gasped, and so did I. He was so much bigger than he looked in pictures. He was beautiful. He was laughing. He seemed to glow.
"Hello there, Beatles," he roared. "We ought to do some road shows together. We'll get rich."
The Beatles got it right away. They followed Clay out to the boxing ring like kindergarten kids. You would have thought they'd met before and choreographed their frolic. They bounced into the ring, capered, dropped down to pray Clay would stop hitting them. He picked up Ringo, the bittiest Beatle. Then they lined up so Clay could knock them all out with one punch. They fell like dominoes. That photo op is still a classic.
After the Beatles left, Clay worked out as Bundini hollered, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Later, stretched out on a dressing-room table for his rubdown, he silenced a crabby old reporter from Boston who implied that the fight was a joke by saying, "I'm making all this money, the popcorn man making money and the beer man, and you got something to write about. Your papers let you come down to Miami Beach, where it's warm."
I was thrilled. I thought: He's got our number and he's not afraid of playing with us. Too bad he's going to get his head knocked off. He would have been so much fun to write about as champ.
After his rubdown, Cassius took me aside. I'd like to think he had picked me out of the pack -- years later, he would say, "I always knew you were smart, Bob, because you a Jew and never ate pork, your mind is clear." But I think he had merely spotted me in the locker room. He asked, "Who were those little sissies?"
Stockholm, 1965
Lost in translation
So I hooked up with my Big Story, the one that would define and fuel my career, get me off the rewrite desk and eventually make me a columnist. But after 16 months, I was happy to get away from it. When the Times offered me a summer in Europe covering sports, I ran out to get my first passport, my first American Express card, my first Brooks Brothers suit: Today, I am The Man.
It was not that I wasn't grateful. I had been delighted by Clay's victory over Liston and his declaration the next morning that "I don't have to be what you want me to be, I'm free to be who I want," not the least because it presaged a regime change in sportswriting -- the old farts hated him, couldn't relate, didn't have the access and the chops to hang out with him in hotel rooms and mosques, to interview Malcolm X, to sit all day with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam who changed Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.'s name to Muhammad Ali ("Worthy of All Praise, Most High").
But ... I also felt worn down by the relentless hype of his promoters, the grim-faced dogma of the Black Muslims, the sly manipulations of the champ himself, who played every journalist like a different instrument in his orchestra. When the old guys who beat up on him -- like Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young and Red Smith and Arthur Daley -- came into the gym, he would pretend to be afraid of them until they swelled up like puffer fish. He treated young guys like me as if we were his stenographers. And he could be patronizing, too. Once, when I apologized for the Times' refusal to let me call him Muhammad Ali without first using Cassius Clay, he dropped an arm on my shoulder and said he understood that I was just a little brother of the power structure.
I tried to be tough and fair, but it seemed like cheerleading; whatever I wrote, I was eventually selling tickets to the next fight.
After all, here was this supposed racial hero who lectured on the righteousness of segregation ... and put down decent, brave Joe Frazier as an ugly gorilla.
Here was this sermonizer on family values ... who was bonking his brains out (but then, his leader, the Honorable Elijah, lived in a Chicago mansion attended by pregnant young "secretaries").
And worst, here was this man of peace ... who had turned his back on Malcolm, whom I came to know and respect, and Leon 4X Ameer, a former Muslim who had become my friend. Although Ali was clearly then in at least emotional thrall to the Nation of Islam, his disavowal of Malcolm, his mentor, and of Leon, Ali's bodyguard, was unconscionable and fatal for them. It seems unlikely that the Muslims would have dared murder them if Ali had not publicly made them unpersons.
So when Ali showed up in Sweden, the herring and aquavit came back up into my throat like acid. After a wonderful summer at Le Mans, at Wimbledon, fishing for salmon on the Laerdal River in Scotland, I had managed to file Ali in a corner of my mind, especially now that I was on the vacation phase of the trip, concentrating on getting my wife pregnant. And there he was in my hotel lobby. He was on an exhibition tour, which I could ignore, but he was hilariously controversial, which I could not.
It was about white women.
He said he didn't want to sleep with them.
The Swedish press was offended. Their blondes -- "flicka" was the slang word the newspapers used -- had been good enough for every other black athlete who ever showed up, including Floyd Patterson, whose face was all over Stockholm endorsing a candy bar. The Communist media was particularly incensed; it considered Ali a racist.
He tried to explain that it was about his religion, about his mission to show his brothers that black was beautiful, and his attempt to stay out of trouble. (His childhood memory of Emmett Till beaten and killed for allegedly eyeballing a white woman in Mississippi was never far from his consciousness in those days.)
But the Swedes wouldn't have it. I couldn't tell whether they were thick, whether it was part of the anti-Americanism in Europe (which was mostly focused, ironically, on the Vietnam War) or whether the Swedes really were just the biggest depressives. (There was a joke I loved at the time of a Swedish man coming home for dinner and saying, "Asparagus, sweetie? Again?" and blowing his brains out.)
When Ali spotted me in the hotel lobby, he dragged me up to his room. He seemed down. He always had recharged his psyche with the energy of crowds, but the Swedes had left his battery dead.
"Why do I catch all this hell?" he asked me, almost pleading. "I don't smoke or drink or chase bad women. I treat everybody nice."
I had no answers, but I was willing to listen, and somehow over the next couple of hours, he not only reopened the file in the back of my head but reminded me why I had been so delighted he had won the title. Once he got through his complaining and some Muslimizing (the 7-foot black men in space ships waiting to rescue believers on Judgment Day) he lapsed into the old Clay, re-enacting his mad act at the weigh-in for the Liston fight, reciting my favorite poems ("Me! Wheeeee!"), and explaining in detail about how he could play the fool but really be a wise man.
After a while, he lay back on his bed and his eyelids began to flutter, then close. "So tired, have to think of a new angle ... life is a dream, doody-boo-boo ..."
I tiptoed out, smiling. The Greatest was reeling me back in.
Miami, 1965
Cogitatin' 'bout them Vietcong
We were sitting outside his little rented bungalow, ogling schoolgirls on their way home. On television -- although not on his television -- Senate hearings raged over the war in Vietnam. Sharp political lines were being drawn. A nation was pulling apart while I was writing down Ali's best pickup lines: "Hey, little girl in the high school sweater, you not gonna pass me by today."
I was there to do a feature story on his training for a fight with Ernie Terrell. It was February again, warm there, cold where I lived, and he was big again. In his fight the previous November in Vegas, he had torn the wings off poor Patterson, mocking him for criticizing Islam and for refusing to call him Ali. I was disgusted, but he had gotten me back on the front page.
The phone rang inside the house, and his cook came out. It was a reporter. When Ali came back, he was upset. His draft board in Louisville -- which originally had classified him unfit for service, perhaps as a gift to his white former patrons, the pillars of Louisville -- had just reclassified him 1A, ready for combat. His first response was, "Why me?"
He began to rant. After embarrassing him with a classification that implied he was too dumb or nutty for the Army, how could they suddenly reclassify him without another test? Friends and bodyguards from the Nation of Islam showed up to stoke his mounting fear and fury. He would be called up right away, they said, sent to the front lines, cracker sergeants would drop live grenades down his pants. Ali got wilder. He was heavyweight champ. Why didn't the draft board call up some poor boys? Think of how many guns and bombs his taxes paid for. It was hardly the response of a principled pacifist, I thought, but it was real. How much of the anti-war movement was principle and how much was fear of getting hurt or killed, or even of merely having your life interrupted?
Television news trucks pulled up. Interviewers sensed his anger and provoked him further.
"Do you know where Vietnam is?"
"Sure," he mumbled, but he didn't sound sure.
"Where?"
Ali shrugged. I would have shrugged, too. This went on for hours; it was dusk when a newcomer with a mike asked the same question for the hundredth time: "Well, what do you think about the Vietcong?"
Tired, exasperated, Ali blurted the sound bite that would help define the '60s, a headline sentence that made him simultaneously hated and beloved. He said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."
Everybody in the world except me led with that as if it were a statement. I heard it as a provoked response, the mindless reaction of an ignorant child who didn't yet have a grasp on his symbolic role. I didn't file a story that day. I still think about that. Was I a wise man or a fool?