Word: cassius
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...From Cassius Sr. comes the sideshow clown that the Champ's fans know and loathe so well. The father, says Olsen, is a tiny, mercurial man "whose arguments take the form of loud outbursts accompanied by agitated wavings of the arms; he stutters and swallows and backs up and repeats and runs into the bathroom to spit. He has no speech defect except an uncontrollable urge to be heard right now." The Clays have had a stormy marriage, and most family members believe that their battles, which often were refereed at the local police precinct in Louisville, contributed...
...gonna make a lot of money in advertising," says Cassius Sr. "You know, endorsements? So we don't want to spoil that by giving away the names of foods he ate, things he drank. So we'll just say in his life story, 'I believe he was born champion, waiting to be cultivated. And one great cultivation was Pet Milk.'" Mother Clay interrupts. "No, no. We won't name the milk, we'll just say, 'the milk his mother gave him.' Then we can sell advertisements to them later...
Goooooooold Carpets. Son Cassius showed the Clay spirit in 1960 when, after winning the gold medal for boxing at the Rome Olympics, he went home and painted the front stoop red, white and blue. With his first professional victories, he began supporting a huge retinue of flunkies led by his adoring younger brother Rudy. With his conversion to the Black Muslim brotherhood, the retinue expanded to include any Negro with the gall to pass himself off as a Muslim. Duties in the Clay club of sycophants are simple: in return for a free room here or a $100 ringside seat...
There is yet another Cassius, hardly more stable but decidedly more appealing. In Rome, when a Soviet reporter jeered that Clay's new fame would not buy him a seat in any Louisville restaurant, Cassius retorted: "At least I ain't fighting alligators and living in a mud hut!" He had a crush on Olympic Sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who didn't respond. In his strait-laced fashion, he married a cocktail waitress and tried to get her to adopt Muslim ways, but it didn't take; he charged in his divorce suit last year that...
That dream, like the elder Clay's vision of Clay Kitchens strewn around the country, stems from the one rocklike purpose to which Cassius set himself long ago: the achievement of total invincibility. Once he explained to a newsman who asked how it was that the Champ had never drifted into juvenile delinquency. "Kids used to throw rocks and stand under the streetlights," he said, "but there wasn't nothing to do in the streets. I tried it a little bit, but wasn't nothing else to do but the boxing." He still feels that...