KING OF THE WORLD(ISBN=9780375702297)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

KING OF THE WORLD(ISBN=9780375702297)

当前位置:首页 > 传记 > 英文原版书-传记 > KING OF THE WORLD(ISBN=9780375702297)

版次：1
页数：326
字数：
印刷时间：1999年10月01日
开本：大32开
纸张：胶版纸
包装：平装
是否套装：否
国际标准书号ISBN：9780375702297

作者:David Remnick 　著出版社:Random House US出版时间:1999年10月

编辑推荐

By now we all have our notions about what Ali meant -- to his time and to the history of his sport. Of course David Remnick sheds light on these subjects, but where King of the World really shines is in the ring itself. With telling detail, Remnick captures the drama, danger, beauty, and ugliness of a generation's worth of big heavyweight fights. -- Bob Costa

From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

内容简介

Succeeds more than any previous book in bringing Ali into focus. . . as a starburst of energy, ego and ability whose like willnever be seen again.--The Wall Street Journal

"Best Nonfiction Book of the Year"--Time

"Penetrating . . . reveal[s] details that even close followers of[Ali] might not have known. . . . An amazing story." --The NewYork Times

Succeeds more than any previous book in bringing Ali into focus
. . . as a starburst of energy, ego and ability whose like will
never be seen again.--The Wall Street Journal 
 
"Best Nonfiction Book of the Year"--Time 
 
"Penetrating . . . reveal[s] details that even close followers of
[Ali] might not have known. . . . An amazing story." --The New
York Times 
 
On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay)
stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as
an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds
later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion:
He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform
America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of
heroism. 
        No one has captured
Ali--and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated--with
greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of
The New Yorker). In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of
Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and
Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness.
He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and
bone-breaking mobsters; of the baleful Liston and the haunted
Patterson; of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm
X. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed,
grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest
athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time. 
 
"Nearly pulse-pounding narrative power . . . an important account
of a period in American social history." --Chicago
Tribune 
 
"A pleasure . . . haunting . . . so vivid that one can imagine Ali
saying, 'How'd you get inside my head, boy?'" --Wilfrid Sheed,
Time

显示全部信息

作者简介

David Remnick lives in New York City.

在线试读部分章节

HYPE

The promoter of the Liston-Clay fight was William B. MacDonald, aformer bus conductor who had made so great a fortune that he nowgot around in two Rolls-Royces and a fifty-foot cruiser namedSnoozie. MacDonald was born in Butte in 1908, the descendant, hesaid, of generations of sheep thieves. There being few sheep tosteal in Butte, he came to Miami and made his money in the parkingbusiness, then in laundry and dry cleaning, then in restaurantmanagement, trucking, mobile homes, and a mortgage company based inSan Juan. He married a Polish woman named Victoria and, just forfun, bought a stud farm in Delray Beach and a Class D baseball teamcalled the Tampa Tarpons. MacDonald handed out gold cuff links likeChiclets. He lived in a quarter-million-dollar house in Bal Harbourand retained an assistant named Sugar Vallone, late of thebartending trade. His generosity as a father was unparalleled. Hebuilt his daughter a tree house with drapes and carpeting matchingthe main house, and for his daughter's eighth birthday he installeda jukebox in the tree. Bill MacDonald had a good time. He smokedhis cigars and ate his steaks. He played golf and decorated hiswalls with the many marlin he had pulled out of the Atlantic. Onthe golf course, driving his cart, he held a Coke in his right handand a root beer in his left, and steered with his forearms and hisbelly. He was very fat.

MacDonald had enjoyed his experience so far in the boxing business.He made some money, if not a lot, promoting the thirdPatterson-Johansson fight. When he first talked to Chris Dundeeabout a Liston-Clay title bout, it seemed a no-lose proposition.There was money to be made, what with all the big-money touristsand the winter crowds in Miami in February. How could it flop?Liston was already the most fearsome presence in boxing since Louisand Marciano, and Clay, with his mouth flapping, would sell as manytickets as the Miami fire laws would permit. No lose. And soMacDonald, who had $800,000 invested in the fight, serenely peggedthe top ticket at an unprecedented $250.

HYPE 
 
The promoter of the Liston-Clay fight was William B. MacDonald, a
former bus conductor who had made so great a fortune that he now
got around in two Rolls-Royces and a fifty-foot cruiser named
Snoozie. MacDonald was born in Butte in 1908, the descendant, he
said, of generations of sheep thieves. There being few sheep to
steal in Butte, he came to Miami and made his money in the parking
business, then in laundry and dry cleaning, then in restaurant
management, trucking, mobile homes, and a mortgage company based in
San Juan. He married a Polish woman named Victoria and, just for
fun, bought a stud farm in Delray Beach and a Class D baseball team
called the Tampa Tarpons. MacDonald handed out gold cuff links like
Chiclets. He lived in a quarter-million-dollar house in Bal Harbour
and retained an assistant named Sugar Vallone, late of the
bartending trade. His generosity as a father was unparalleled. He
built his daughter a tree house with drapes and carpeting matching
the main house, and for his daughter's eighth birthday he installed
a jukebox in the tree. Bill MacDonald had a good time. He smoked
his cigars and ate his steaks. He played golf and decorated his
walls with the many marlin he had pulled out of the Atlantic. On
the golf course, driving his cart, he held a Coke in his right hand
and a root beer in his left, and steered with his forearms and his
belly. He was very fat. 
 
MacDonald had enjoyed his experience so far in the boxing business.
He made some money, if not a lot, promoting the third
Patterson-Johansson fight. When he first talked to Chris Dundee
about a Liston-Clay title bout, it seemed a no-lose proposition.
There was money to be made, what with all the big-money tourists
and the winter crowds in Miami in February. How could it flop?
Liston was already the most fearsome presence in boxing since Louis
and Marciano, and Clay, with his mouth flapping, would sell as many
tickets as the Miami fire laws would permit. No lose. And so
MacDonald, who had $800,000 invested in the fight, serenely pegged
the top ticket at an unprecedented $250. 
 
MacDonald envisioned a great night, the ring surrounded by movie
people and all the usual hustlers, the big-roll guys. He wanted all
the big faces up close. "A guy calls me, for instance, wants to buy
a hundred-dollar seat for Andy Williams," he told a reporter for
Sports Illustrated. "I tell him Andy Williams's got to be up there
with the big kids. I can't imagine him sitting back there with the
little kids. He's got to be in there with the wheels, not the
hubcaps." 
 
Although MacDonald was not exactly expert in boxing, he was smart
enough to tell the writers he was acutely aware of the possibility
of surprise in the fight. "I figure Clay to win it," he said.
"He'll take the title if he stays away, jabs and runs, but the
little jerk is so egotistical--he's getting hysterical--he thinks
he can punch Liston's nose sideways. It's liable to be a stinky
fight to watch, but if Clay gets by seven or eight he's likely to
win it." One could appreciate the sentiment if not the subtlety of
MacDonald's maneuver. You don't sell tickets when David has no shot
at Goliath. 
 
MacDonald did not expect Liston to get into a verbal war with Clay
before the fight. Liston had become so accustomed to hearing about
himself as the indomitable champion, a seven-to-one favorite at the
minimum, that he trained at the Surfside Civic Auditorium in North
Miami Beach with a smug air of business as usual. In contrast to
Clay's gloriously dismal surroundings at the Fifth Street Gym,
Liston sparred with air-conditioning. An announcer would intone the
next station of the cross--"The champion at the heavy bag"--and
Liston would pound away for a short while. Then his cornermen, led
by Willie Reddish, would rush to him and towel him off as if he
were Cleopatra. Reddish would wing a medicine ball at Liston's gut
a dozen times and then Liston would skip rope to "Night Train," as
he had on The Ed Sullivan Show. 
 
"Note that the champion's heels never touch the board," the master
of ceremonies announced. "He does all this off his toes." 
Liston trained the way Liberace played piano; it was a garish
representation of a boxer at work. If Liston was taking Clay at all
seriously, it was very hard to tell. He would not even deign to
pretend to loathe his challenger. "I don't hate Cassius Clay," he
said. "I love him so much I'm giving him twenty-two and a half
percent of the gate. Clay means a lot to me. He's my baby, my
million-dollar baby. I hope he keeps well and I sure hope he shows
up." Liston's only health concern, he allowed, was for the destiny
of his vaunted left fist: "It's gonna go so far down his throat,
it'll take a week for me to pull it out again." 
 
The columnists may not have liked Liston, but they respected him as
a fighter. They figured him an easy winner over Clay. Lester
Bromberg of the New York World-Telegram said the fight would
"follow the pattern" of the two Liston-Patterson fights, the only
difference being that this would last longer: "It will last almost
the entire first round." Nearly all the columnists were
middle-aged, raised on Joe Louis, and they were inclined to like
Clay even less than Liston. Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times
predicted that the Liston-Clay matchup would be "the most popular
fight since Hitler and Stalin--180 million Americans rooting for a
double knockout. The only thing at which Clay can beat Liston is
reading the dictionary. . . . His public utterances have all the
modesty of a German ultimatum to Poland but his public performances
run more to Mussolini's navy." 
 
At the Fifth Street Gym, of course, Clay was exerting considerable
energy in his post-training-session press conferences. Day after
day he described how he would spend the first five rounds circling
"the big ugly bear," tiring him out, and then tear him apart with
hooks and uppercuts until finally Liston would drop to all fours in
submission. "I'm gonna put that ugly bear on the floor, and after
the fight I'm gonna build myself a pretty home and use him as a
bearskin rug. Liston even smells like a bear. I'm gonna give him to
the local zoo after I whup him. People think I'm joking. I'm not
joking. I'm serious. This will be the easiest fight of my life." He
told the visiting reporters that now was their chance to "jump on
the bandwagon." He was taking names, he said, keeping track of all
the naysayers, and when he won "I'm going to have a little ceremony
and some eating is going on--eating of words." Day after day he
would replay his homage to Gorgeous George when describing what
he'd do in case of a Liston win: "You tell this to your camera,
your newspaper, your TV man, your radio man, you tell this to the
world: If Sonny Liston whups me, I'll kiss his feet in the ring,
crawl out of the ring on my knees, tell him he's the greatest, and
catch the next jet out of the country." Most spectacularly, he
composed in honor of the occasion what was surely his best poem.
Over the years, Clay would farm out some of his poetical work. "We
all wrote lines here and there," Dundee said. But this one was all
Clay. Ostensibly, it was a prophetic vision of the eighth round,
and no poem, before or after, could beat it for narrative drive,
precise scansion, and wit. It was his "Song of Myself": 
 
Clay comes out to meet Liston 
And Liston starts to retreat 
If Liston goes back any further 
He'll end up in a ringside seat. 
Clay swings with a left, 
Clay swings with a right, 
Look at young Cassius 
Carry the fight. 
Liston keeps backing 
But there's not enough room 
It's a matter of time. 
There, Clay lowers the boom. 
Now Clay swings with a right, 
What a beautiful swing, 
And the punch raises the bear, 
Clear out of the ring. 
Liston is still rising 
And the ref wears a frown, 
For he can't start counting, 
Till Sonny comes down. 
Now Liston disappears from view. 
The crowd is getting frantic, 
But our radar stations have picked him up 
He's somewhere over the Atlantic. 
Who would have thought 
When they came to the fight 
That they'd witness the launching 
Of a human satellite? 
Yes, the crowd did not dream 
When they laid down their money 
That they would see 
A total eclipse of the Sonny! 
I am the greatest! 
 
Nearly all the writers regarded Clay's bombast, in prose and verse,
as the ravings of a lunatic. But not only did Clay have a sense of
how to fill a reporter's notebook and, thus, a promoter's arena, he
had a sense of self. The truth (and it was a truth he shared with
almost no one) was that Cassius Clay knew that for all his ability,
for all his speed and cunning, he had never met a fighter like
Sonny Liston. In Liston, he was up against a man who did not merely
beat his opponents, but hurt them, damage them, shame them in
humiliatingly fast knockouts. Liston could put a man away with his
jab; he was not much for dancing, but then neither was Joe Louis.
Liston was the prototype of what a heavyweight champion should be:
he threw bomb after unforgiving bomb. When he hit a man in the
solar plexus the glove seemed lost up to the cuff; he was too
powerful to grab and clinch; nothing hurt him. Clay was too smart,
he had watched too many films, not to know that. "That's why I
always knew that all of Clay's bragging was a way to convince
himself that he could do what he said he'd do," Floyd Patterson
told me many years later. "I never liked all his bragging. It took
me a long time to understand who Clay was talking to. Clay was
talking to Clay." 
 
Very few people would ever know how true that was and how much Clay
feared Liston. One evening, just before signing the contracts for
the fight, he visited Sports Illustrated's offices on the twentieth
floor of the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan. It was
seven-thirty and Clay stood at the window looking out at the lights
blinking along Sixth Avenue and beyond. He was quiet for a long
time. 
 
Finally, the writer Mort Sharnik said, "Cassius, all these things
you're saying about Liston, do you really mean them? Do you really
think you're going to beat this guy?" 
"I'm Christopher Columbus," he said slowly. "I believe I'll win.
I've never been in there with him, but I believe the world is round
and they all believe the world is flat. Maybe I'll fall off the
world at the horizon but I believe the world is round." 
Clay had doubts, but he used those doubts the way a black belt in
judo uses the weight of his assailant. Weeks before the fight, he
approached Liston's manager, Jack Nilon, and said, "You know, I
shot my mouth off to make this fight a success. My day of reckoning
is about to come. If the worst happens I want to get out of there
quick. I'd like to provision my bus and get out of there quick."
Then he asked Jack Nilon for ten thousand dollars for the
provisioning. 
 
"No one could read this kid," Sharnik would say. "It was hard to
know if he was the craziest kid you ever saw or the
smartest." 
Bill MacDonald never hoped to convince the public that Clay was a
modest fellow in the Louis mold, but he had hoped that the writers
would think he could fight. They did not. According to one poll, 93
percent of the writers accredited to cover the fight predicted
Liston would win. What the poll did not register was the firmness
of the predictions. Arthur Daley, the New York Times columnist,
seemed to object morally to the fight, as if the bout were a
terrible crime against children and puppies: "The loudmouth from
Louisville is likely to have a lot of vainglorious boasts jammed
down his throat by a hamlike fist belonging to Sonny Liston. . .
." 
 
 
 
In the later acts of his career, Muhammad Ali would take his place
in the television firmament and his Boswell would be Howard Cosell.
But in the days preceding his fight with Sonny Liston in Miami,
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 for the Herald Tribune, employed
an elegant restraint in his prose that put him ahead of the game
with more high-minded readers, but 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. 
 
One afternoon shortly before the 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 hips, 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, way past his
peak, fought Rocky Marciano, 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 neighborhood and its workmen, the
icemen, 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 to write battle dispatches for The 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 nightclubs
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 nightclub to nightclub, 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 was also a master of the
barstool non sequitur. Very often he would title his column "Nobody
Asked Me, But . . ." and then line up a few dozen choice
thoughts: 
 
"I have more faith in brusque doctors than oily-mannered
ones." 
"You're middle-aged if you remember Larry Semon, the comic." 
"El Morocco is still the most exciting nightclub in the
country." 
"Doesn't Marty Glickman, the sports announcer, sound like an
Atlantic City boardwalk auctioneer?" 
"Guys who use other people's coffee saucers as ashtrays should be
banned from public places. . . ." 
He 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 not many 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 some of Mencken dates, and Cannon
was no Mencken. The wised-up one-liners and the world-weary
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 such as 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 outside 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 one another 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 schnook 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 education, their youth. In
the late fifties, Talese wrote countless elegant features for the
Times and then, even more impressively, a series of profiles in the
sixties for Esquire on Patterson, Louis, DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra,
and 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 was still at the Times and writing about his favorite
subjects, Patterson and Cus D'Amato, he was considered an
eccentric. In the newsroom, Talese wore immaculate hand-tailored
suits; he was, in the words of one colleague, "blindingly
handsome." But for all his outward polish and youth, he approached
his work like a reporter, seeking out ballplayers, getting to know
them. In those days, this was un-Times-like for the sports
department. Daley, who was the dominant columnist since the
forties, derived his prestige from the paper itself; when he won
the Pulitzer Prize, many of his colleagues grumbled and said that
it should have gone to Red Smith at the Herald Tribune or Cannon at
the Post. Daley's prose was flat, but it was the prose that the
Pulitzer committee read, if they read sports at all. Most of the
other sportswriters on the Times were no less imperial: they
carried themselves as if they were The New York Times's ambassador
to the court of baseball or the court of basketball. When Allison
Danzig covered the U.S. Open at Forest Hills he did not deign to
seek out a tennis player for an interview; the player sought out
Allison Danzig. Not a few of the deskmen and reporters were
appalled by the unorthodox presence of Gay Talese, and they could
never figure out why the managing editor, Turner Catledge, had set
him loose on the sporting world. 
 
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. After mulling over a career as a screenwriter or
an English professor, Lipsyte applied for a job as a copy boy at
the Times and, to his astonishment, got it. "They usually said they
hired Rhodes scholars in those days," he said. As a copy boy,
Lipsyte admired Talese for his sense of style and innovation, for
his ability to squeeze a distinct voice onto the uniform pages of
the Times. Lipsyte made the staff at twenty-one when he showed
hustle: one day the hunting and fishing columnist failed to send in
a column from Cuba, and so Lipsyte sat down and, on deadline,
knocked out a strange and funny column on how fish and birds were
striking back at anglers and hunters. 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 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 Clay 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, Red Smith, so many of
them, were appalled. They didn't see the fun in it. And, above all,
it was fun." 
 
A week before the fight, Clay stretched out on a rubbing table at
the Fifth Street Gym and told the reporters who gathered around,
"I'm making money, the popcorn man making money, and the beer man,
and you got something to write about." 
 
The next day, Lipsyte heard that the Beatles would be dropping by
the Fifth Street Gym. The visit had been arranged, of course, by
the eternally hip Harold Conrad, who was publicizing the fight for
MacDonald. The Beatles were in Miami to do The Ed Sullivan Show.
Liston had actually gone to their performance and was not much
impressed. As the Beatles ripped through their latest single, the
champion turned to Conrad and said, "Are these motherfuckers what
all the people are screaming about? My dog plays drums better than
that kid with the big nose." Conrad figured that Clay would
understand a bit better. 
 
Lipsyte was twenty-six, a card-carrying member of the rock and 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 Beatles arrived. They were still in the mop-top phase, but they
were also quite aware of their own appeal. Clay was not in
evidence, and Ringo Starr was angry. 
"Where the fuck's Clay?" he said. 
To kill a few minutes, Ringo began introducing the members of the
band to Lipsyte and a few other reporters, though he introduced
George Harrison as Paul and Lennon as Harrison, and finally Lennon
lost patience. 
"Let's get the fuck out of here," he said. But two Florida state
troopers blocked the door and somehow kept them in the gym just
long enough for Clay to show up. 
"Hello, there, Beatles," said Cassius Clay. "We oughta do some road
shows together. We'll get rich." 
The photographers lined up the Beatles in the ring and Clay faked a
punch to knock them all to the canvas: the domino punch. 
Now the future of music and the future of sports began talking
about the money they were making and the money they were going to
make. 
"You're not as stupid as you look," Clay said. 
"No," Lennon said, "but you are." 
Clay checked to make sure Lennon was smiling, and he was. 
 
The younger writers, like Lipsyte, really did see Clay as a fifth
Beatle, parallel players in the great social and generational shift
in American society. The country was in the midst of an enormous
change, an earthquake, and this fighter from Louisville and this
band from Liverpool were part of it, leading it, whether they knew
it yet or not. The Beatles' blend of black R&B and Liverpool
pop and Clay's blend of defiance and humor was changing the sound
of the times, its temper; set alongside the march on Washington and
the quagmire in Vietnam, they would, in their way, become essential
pieces of the sixties phantasmagoria. 
 
For most of the older columnists, however, this PR-inspired scene
at the Fifth Street Gym was just more of all that was going wrong
in the world, more noise, more disrespect, more impudence from
young men whom they could not hope to comprehend. "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 style-making cult of the bored young."

显示全部信息

KING OF THE WORLD(ISBN=9780375702297)下载

KING OF THE WORLD(ISBN=9780375702297)

发布书评

相关图书推荐