The Johansson session showed Dundee that it was time to match him against more experienced boxers. Clay stopped Donnie Fleeman, a good club fighter, in the seventh round. Then he fought LaMar Clark, who possessed a gaudy 46–2 record that included a streak of forty-four straight knockouts. Against Clay, however, the heavy-punching Clark was outmatched. Cassius took him out in the second round.
Marv Jenson, Clark’s manager, was impressed. “This guy isn’t very many fights away from a championship as far as I’m concerned,” Jenson said. “He has the fastest hands of any heavyweight I’ve seen any place, including Patterson.” Black sportswriters were even more generous. Evoking the near-sacred “L” word, a Pittsburgh Courier scribe compared Clay favorably with the legendary Joe Louis. And for the first time in his professional career, New York Times feature writer Arthur Daley devoted a “Sports of the Times” column to Clay. Describing him as “a compulsive talker with the engaging personality of a youthful Archie Moore,” Daley wrote, “This good-looking boy is a charmer and is so natural that even his more extravagant statements sound like exuberance instead of braggadocio. On him they look good.”16
WITH COMPARISONS TO Louis and notice in the New York Times, Clay’s career was bounding forward ahead of schedule. After a month’s vacation in Louisville and road trips to visit Wilma Rudolph and other friends from the Olympics, in the late spring of 1961 he once again boarded the South Wind for Miami, where Dundee waited to resume his education. And that was fine with the fighter who viewed any gym as safe territory—an oasis away from the nation’s racial problems and the traps and temptations that waited around every corner of the urban South.
“It’s either get rich in three hours or get poor in eight,” he liked to say: train hard for three hours (or four or five) or get a manual day job for pennies an hour. He had chosen the path to wealth and applied himself totally, and the Louisville Sponsoring Group made sure that, unlike most other fighters, Cassius did not have to get a job to make ends meet. Train and dream, dream and train, from busy days at the 5th Street Gym to lonely nights at the Charles Hotel—these formed the physical and emotional parameters of his life in Miami. Boxing, however, could not satisfy his spiritual life.17
THERE WAS NO avoiding the world outside his hotel and the boxing arena. After all, Cassius was in the South, the land of Emmett Till’s murder and his father’s gruesome tales.
Since he did not own a car, he jogged more than five miles from his hotel to the gym at the south end of Miami Beach. He ran in blue jeans and old military boots. As he crossed the Julia Tuttle Causeway, with the Miami skyline in the distance and a cool breeze blowing across the bay, Clay shadowboxed.
It was a strange sight to the white policeman who thought that a black man running across the highway, furiously punching the air, must be crazy or a thief—or both. In Miami, police frequently harassed blacks on the streets and raided black pool halls and bars. The officer stopped Clay to question him. Sweating and excited, Clay explained that he was running to Angelo Dundee’s gym. The police then called Dundee to verify his story. The trainer explained that “the kid” was his boxer. “That’s Cassius Clay,” he said.18
The episode offered an important lesson for Clay. White policemen didn’t know his name and didn’t care to know it. To them, he was just another “Negro” living across the tracks in the “colored” district of Overtown.
After Clay returned to Miami from his visit home, Dundee upgraded him from the low-rent living quarters at the Charles Hotel to the Sir John Hotel on Little Broadway, a vibrant strip of nightclubs, theaters, diners, and shops. Some of the most famous black entertainers and athletes in America stayed at the Sir John Hotel and the Mary Elizabeth Hotel, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sugar Ray Robinson. These celebrities did not choose to stay at the Sir John or the Mary Elizabeth because these establishments offered the finest accommodations. They had little choice. Blacks could not enter the best downtown hotels unless they waited tables, prepared meals, scoured toilets, or hauled white peoples’ bags. Not even Joe Louis could check into the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.19