“I’m the Greatest”

Red Smith (1905–1982)
From American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith

Interesting Links
“How Muhammad Ali Woke Up Sportswriters” (Bryan Curtis, The Ringer)

“Robert Lipsyte Describes How Cassius Clay Met The Beatles” (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Jim Crow’s Playmates,” Red Smith
• “The Strongest Lady in the World,” Red Smith
• “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato,” Pete Hamill
• “Nowhere to Run,” John Schulian

Buy the book
American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith
608 pages
List price: $29.95
Web store price: $15.00

Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) holds court at a diner with fans, friends, and admirers in Miami, March 1, 1964, the week after his defeat of Sonny Liston. (Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images).

Thirty-five years ago Muhammad Ali and Red Smith both came to the end of their respective careers. Ali, of course, had spent the better part of two decades as a professional boxer and was the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world. His last fight was on December 11, 1981, in the Bahamas, where he lost a ten-round decision to Trevor Berbick. Smith had been a sportswriter for fifty years, most famously at The New York Herald Tribune with a final decade at The New York Times. One month after Ali’s last fight, he announced he was scaling back his column from four times weekly to three. “We shall have to wait and see whether the quality improves.” He died of heart failure four days later, at the age of seventy-six.

During the previous twenty years Smith “had a lot to say about Ali—first crankily negative, later largely positive,” notes Daniel Okrent in the introduction to the LOA’s recent collection of Smith’s columns. What particularly turned Smith (like many of his colleagues) against the young boxer, who had recently changed his name from Cassius Clay, was his statement in early 1966 that he would refuse to serve in the army during the Vietnam War. “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up,” Smith wrote, “Cassius makes as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.” He then grudgingly if patronizingly predicted, “Cassius, who can be an extremely attractive young man when he chooses, will be winning and contrite. He has already conceded that he did pop-off out of turn.” Two months later, however, Ali was arrested and convicted for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. military.

Smith did eventually change his mind about Ali. On Christmas Day 1981—two weeks before his final column—he named Ali’s retirement the biggest sporting event of the year.

For boxing, it was the end of an era; for the press and public, it was the curtain scene of an act that had played for two decades. . . . He made himself the most widely known individual in the world, an athlete respected universally; a folk hero, especially to the rebellious youth of the 1960s, when he “didn't have nothin’ against them Viet Cong”; a gag man considered gifted by many; even a short-term diplomat in the State Department. In those areas he was, as he would be the first to admit, “the greatest.”

We present here Smith’s effusive column from February 1964, after the twenty-two-year-old Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight boxing crown and (not for the last time) forced sportswriters around the world—including Smith—to “eat their words.”

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Cassius Marcellus Clay fought his way out of the horde that swarmed and leaped and shouted in the ring. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Nowhere to Run

John Schulian (b. 1945)
From At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Interesting Links
Professional boxing record for Johnny Bratton (BoxRec)

2011 interview with John Schulian (The Faster Times)

Previously from
Story of the Week:
“Cobb Fights It Over Again,” Irvin S. Cobb
“Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato,” Pete Hamill

Buy this book:
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing
A century of great writing • 48 writers, from Jack London and Richard Wright to Katherine Dunn and Carlo Rotella • 517 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $24.50

An original, stubless ticket for the November 13, 1953, fight between defending welterweight champion Kid Gavilan and Johnny Bratton at Chicago Stadium in Chicago. Image courtesy of JoSports, Inc.

In 1950 Sugar Ray Robinson, the reigning welterweight champion, decided to move up to middleweight, and early the next year twenty-three-year-old Johnny “Honey Boy” Bratton assumed the vacated welterweight crown. His triumph was short-lived; within two months Bratton lost the belt to Cuban sensation Kid Gavilán.

The loss was the beginning of the end for a young boxer who had become a local hero while still a teenager. “In nine fights in 1946, Johnny earned $31,000,” a profile in Negro Digest reported. “In the first four months of 1947 he made another $21,800.” Early in his career, this Pentecostal deacon’s son was living a lifestyle beyond the dreams of most young men. “He was 17, owner of a big, black Cadillac, a sport in expensive clothes. He hired a liveried chauffeur to drive his car. . . .” He hung out with Miles Davis, who was only a year older and whose lifelong obsession with boxing originated with their friendship. (“I was crazy about Johnny Bratton,” Davis wrote in his autobiography.) Several sources estimate Bratton’s earnings during his decade-long career at $400,000.

In November 1953 Bratton barely lasted all fifteen rounds in his second attempt to regain the welterweight title from Kid Gavilán—one of the most brutal routs in the history of the sport. Many spectators were shocked that the fight hadn’t been stopped by the twelfth round. The defeat seemed to have altered Bratton permanently. He entered the ring only three more times; his last fight, with Del Flanagan in 1955, was brought to a halt because Bratton appeared "dazed and didn't know where he was." Shattered and penniless, he retired from the sport at the age of twenty-seven—and he spent the next six years in a state mental hospital.

In 1979 John Schulian located the former champion in a dilapidated hotel on the South Side of Chicago and filed the following story for Chicago Sun-Times. Bratton died in 1993 at the age of sixty-five.

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It was a glorious place, the Del Prado Hotel was. If you listen closely, you can still hear the echoes of the young lovers and swaggering big leaguers who used to make its lobby so fresh, so vibrant. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato

Pete Hamill (b. 1935)
From At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Interesting Links

“Pete Hamill receives A. J. Liebling Award,” (Reader’s Almanac)

Biographical profile of Cus D’Amato (International Boxing Hall of Fame)

Interview with At the Fights editors George Kimball and John Schulian (PDF, Library of America)

“Forty years ago, the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, touted as ‘The Fight of the Century,’ linked their legends forever,” (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection:
• “Cobb Fights It Over Again,” Irvin S. Cobb

Buy the Book
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing
From Jack London to Carlo Rotella | 48 writers | 517 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $24.50

This past month, journalist and author Pete Hamill was selected by the Boxing Writers Association of Aerica as the winner of this year’s A. J. Liebling Award, and his work appears in the just-published At the Fights, which collects the very best writing on boxing by forty-eight sportswriters and essayists. A veteran reporter who has written for each of the major dailies and several of the weeklies in New York, Hamill served as editor-in-chief of both the Post and the Daily News. But his first story to appear in print was in a Greek-language weekly, for which he served as art director. It was a profile (published in English) of José Torres, who in 1958 was an up-and-coming fighter training at the Gramercy Gym.

The proprietor of that gym was Cus D’Amato, who during the course of a career spanning more than fifty years “earned a reputation as one of the most forthright and honest men in boxing,” notes the excerpt from The Boxing Register on the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s website. Indeed, that honesty—his animosity toward the corruption that pervaded the sport and his refusal to work with the monopolistic International Boxing Club—undoubtedly hurt him and his fighters both financially and professionally. Yet, in spite of the obstacles, one of the Gramercy Gym fighters, twenty-one-year-old Floyd Patterson, in 1956 became the youngest boxer ever to win the world heavyweight championship. And José Torres, too, would eventually win a silver Olympic medal and the championship in his weight division and, later still, would be an author in his own right.

During the following decades D’Amato endured bankruptcy and was forced to sell the Gramercy Gym—although in 1971 his name re-entered the headlines when basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain briefly toyed with the idea of fighting a match against Muhammad Ali and proposed that D’Amato become his trainer. He opened a new gym in Catskill (outside Albany, NY), where in the early 1980s he met an orphaned teenager from a local reform school who showed promise as a boxer. He eventually became the legal guardian of the youngster, who would win all his  professional boxing matches under D’Amato’s management. D’Amato died in 1985 and Pete Hamill wrote the following tribute. Two years later the young man, Mike Tyson, now barely twenty years old, would eclipse Patterson’s legacy as the youngest boxer ever to become the world heavyweight champion.

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In those days, you had to pass a small candy stand to get to the door of the Gramercy Gym on East 14th Street. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Cobb Fights It Over Again

Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944)
From At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Interesting Links
Dempsey v. Carpentier: the final round, silent film footage (YouTube)

“Who the Heck Was Irvin S. Cobb?,” (Bottles, Booze, and Back Stories)

“Boyle’s Thirty Acres,” (Sluggo Needs a Nap)

Buy this book:
At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing
From Jack London to Carlo Rotella • 48 writers • 517 pages
Save 60%
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $14.00

Also of Interest:
A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
The Earl of Louisiana • The Jollity Building • Between Meals • The Press
Save 20%

On July 2, 1921, the “Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey, defended the world heavyweight title against the French boxer Georges Carpentier at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, a wooden arena built in Jersey City especially for the fight. Tainted by accusations that he had avoided service during the Great War (a jury had exonerated him), the American was hardly the favorite of the nearly 100,000 spectators. 

Instead, the crowd had been whipped into a frenzy of support for Carpentier, a popular World War I hero, whom George Bernard Shaw had called “the greatest boxer in the world,” and the enthusiasm was encouraged by the publicity machine built by the event promoter, Tex Rickard. It worked: the “Fight of the Century” generated the first million-dollar gate in boxing (more than $1.7 million, in fact). The bout was officiated by Joe Humphreys, the sport’s most famous announcer, who would preside over more than 20,000 matches during a storied career. And in the stands of this modern-day “Circus Maximus,” wealthy industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller Jr., William H. Vanderbilt, and Henry Ford mingled with famous celebrities, including singer and comedian Al Jolson, the flamboyant cowboy film star Tom Mix, renowned cartoonist Tad Dorgan, and authors H. L. Mencken and Ring Lardner.

Enter Irvin S. Cobb, who was hired especially for the day by The New York Times to report on the Dempsey-Carpentier fight from ringside. During the first decade of the century, Cobb had become famous as the highest paid journalist in the country. He then secured his status covering World War I for the Saturday Evening Post; early in the war, he was captured by the Germans—and escaped. He later took up the cause of providing relief for black soldiers returning from the war and spent the 1920s fighting the Klan in Kentucky through editorials and activism. During the four decades of his writing career, he became famous for folksy stories set in his hometown of Paducah, for his humorous tales about the fictional Judge Priest (played by Will Rogers in the movie directed by John Ford), and for numerous screenplays and film appearances. In 1941 he published his final book, the best-selling memoir Exit Laughing.

In spite of Cobb’s superstar status as a writer, Mencken brutally belittled the oft-voiced opinion that Cobb was the “heir to Mark Twain” and his writing eventually fell out of favor with readers. Today virtually all of his dozens of books and hundreds of stories are out of print. Cobb’s classic report from the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, offered in full as this week’s selection, is included in the forthcoming Library of America anthology, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, which has just arrived from the printer.

It is recorded that, once upon a time, Aaron Burr, being challenged by Alexander Hamilton, bade Hamilton to meet him over in Jersey and there destroyed his enemy. Yesterday afternoon, also New Jersey history, in a way of speaking, repeated itself, which is a habit to which history is addicted. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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