American Experience; 1964; Interview with Robert Lipsyte, Sportswriter, part 1 of 2

So why was 1964 such a seminal, such a pivotal year in our history? Well, the 60s began in 1964. Kennedy died at the end of 63, ending the greatest generation. The myth went on, but they were over. And now there was this amazing pivotal year in which I think everything changed. I think America at least went on its head, and I know exactly when it happened. Good. The moment that it happened was the afternoon of February 18, of course 1964, when the Beatles met Caches Clay. And I think that you could make a good case that out of the Beatles and Caches Clay came everything that we need to know, not only about 64, but everything that flowed out of 1964. The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the revolution in music, the generation gap,

everything came, and it all happened at that moment. It's a great idea that that single intersection could stand in for so much. You were there. Well, I mean, that's, yeah, sure. The Beatles had just been on the Ed Sullivan show they were in the beginning of their first American tour. They were in Miami Beach. They were going to do a concert there, and they needed some publicity. It's hard to believe now, but the Beatles needed some publicity. So, they went to have a picture taken with Sonny List and the heavyweight champion of the world. And he took one look at these four little boys. Remember the hair? They were wearing matching white Terry cloth, Cabana jackets. He took one look at them, and he said, I am posing with them, Cicis. So the Beatles was stuffed back into their limo, and as second best, they were taken to

Caches Clay's training camp. If you remember, Caches Clay was fighting Sonny List and for the heavyweight championship of the world. He was going to be destroyed in one round. It was a cultural event more than a prize fight, because this beautiful youth who had been on the cover of Time Magazine for his poetry, not for his boxing, which was a minimal interest. I was going to fight, you know, Grendel's mother, and be totally destroyed. That's what I was sent down to cover the fight, they didn't really, the New York Times, didn't want to waste the time of an expensive reporter. So I'm 26 years old, I go down, and I go to the fifth street gym, which is where Caches Clay trained. This is now in South Beach, but it was a CD part of Miami. I go up the stairs to the gym and there's this hubbub behind me, and he's, you know, little sissy's behind me, and I ask, you know, one of the guys, he said, it's some group,

some group, you know, singers for girls, and they just got kicked out of Sonny List and camp. So we go up, and Caches Clay has not arrived, and the Beatles start cursing, and they turn around, they're not going to wait for some Caches Clay, but the guards push them right up. You can push the Beatles, they push them right up the stairs, and they push all five of us into an empty dressing room, dank, musty wet dressing room, lock the door. They really, Caches' people really wanted that picture of Caches with the Beatles. The Beatles were raging, and they were bang and cursing, and I introduced myself very formally. I'm Robert Lipsleyer through the door at times, and John said, hi, I'm Ringo, and Ringo said, hi, I'm George. I barely, really, barely knew who they were.

But they were actually, they were just, but not happy about this. They were furious, they were cursing and banging on the door, they wanted to get out. I interviewed them about the fight, and oh, you know, listen, it's going to knock that little wanker on his ass. They were out of control, and then suddenly the door bursts open. And there is the most beautiful creature any of us have ever seen. You forget how big Caches' clay was, because he was so perfect, and he glowed, and he was laughing, and he was smiling, and he said, come on, Beatles, let's go make some money. And they followed him out, like kindergarten kids, out to the gym. How was he dressed? He was wearing his, well, he was wearing with his boxing shorts, probably white silk shorts. And of course he was, he was gorgeous, I mean, this beautiful, perfect specimen glowing,

and they followed him to the ring, and as if it had been all choreographed, they lined up. He kind of tapped the first one, they all go down like dominoes, they form a pyramid to try to hit him on the face. Actually it's a YouTube classic, you know, you'll roll it over all of this. It's perfect to see. And then you have to about ten minutes or so. And there's a totally huge number of media there at this point. There's a media there, but it's also a crowd who had paid a dollar or whatever to watch him train. It's a packed gym. So nobody was really expecting the Beatles to show up? No. No. And I didn't quite even know that. I think this is a boxing crowd, tourists, the sports media. I was 26 and I was very young in that crowd. So I think that most of the people really didn't know who they were. And maybe they had heard that they were a success on the insolven show, you know, but I

don't know. But as I said, I barely knew who they were. And but after ten minutes, like a switch goes off and the Beatles leave and Cassius does his training. And afterwards, when he goes back into that dressing room to get his rub down, he beckons me over. We had yet to meet. He beckons me over because he had seen me in the dressing room as the fifth Beatle and he said, so who were those little sissies? But that's the moment. That was the moment when the 60s began, February 18th, 1964, the kind of confluence of two of the great socio-cultural rivers of our time. The Beatles, who by a few months predated the Rolling Stones in America and Cassius Clay, who would soon be Muhammad Ali and would change our attitudes, certainly to sports in

so many ways. What, when you first went down there, what did you think of being assigned to cover Cassius Clay? You know, I was basically a feature writer. I didn't get out all that much. I was having a great career, but I didn't break through yet. I hadn't had too many front page stories. I was ambitious. And the idea of getting out of town was exciting. Although what ameliorated it was the instructions that I got. As soon as I got to Miami Beach to take my rental car and go back and forth a couple of times between the arena where the fight was going to be held in the nearest hospital, because everybody was so convinced that Cassius would, within a round or two, be in intensive care.

So I did that. I actually did that. So I felt that, you know, this is going to be a feature writing assignment, really much more than a sports assignment, which was fine with me. Who was Sonny Liston in the American Consciousness? Sonny Liston was the kind of Negro that we were comfortable with. He was an ex-convict. He was thug-ish. We had this very baleful glare. He really, he could scare you over the telephone. I mean, he was the kind of guy who intimidated reporters at press conferences, just by saying that's a stupid question.

The only reporter who was never intimidated him was a famous progressive columnist named Murray Kempton. And the reason he wasn't intimidated, because he looked like the son of one of the servants that he grew up with in his southern home. So that's who Sonny Liston was. He was a boxer. We were comfortable with him, because he fit the stereotypes. The two stereotypes were either the grateful Negro, like Floyd Patterson or Jesse Owens, or the fearful thug-ish black man that we were scared of, like Sonny Liston, and Jack Johnson, who was the great early prototype. I mean, these were all feelings about Negroes, white people's feelings about Negroes at the time. Most people didn't really know them on that kind of equal social basis. So he fit into that.

He was basically run by the mafia, you know, sports was perfectly comfortable with guys who could get things done, and he had knocked out almost everybody, including the most grateful NAACP kind of Negro, a man in Floyd Patterson before that. So we were very comfortable with Sonny Liston. He was a shame that this beautiful youth, Cassius Clay, had to be sacrificed on the altar of the box office, but we did need to feed calopromptor and ticket sales. So he was the next in line. He was a Christian thrown into the Coliseum. That's so off-base metaphor, he was a Muslim thrown into the Vatican, I lost that, I'm not going there. But that was another aspect that Cassius Clay brought into this, the fact that all the

things that Cassius Clay rejected in American life, Christianity, integration, the war, the good war that we had to fight in Sargonne, if we didn't want to fight it in San Diego. So the point was that he would become, we didn't know this yet. When we knew him as Cassius Clay, all we knew is that he made up this ridiculous dog girl, the shortest, best poem in the English language, me, we, he was delightful, he was fun. The older sports writers didn't like him because he showed a kind of breezy disrespect. They like athletes like Joe Lewis, who was, you know, mumbled and was grateful, I was

slowly going mad with cocaine and schizophrenia. They were comfortable with him and of course, as much as they didn't like him, they were comfortable with Sonny Liston. Did they increase the appeal of Ali for you, young guys? That was the appeal of Cassius Clay for us. It was a very definite generation gap in the days leading up to that fight. They were, you know, those of us in the 20s and 30s who were in Clay's camp, exciting, different, you know, the whole idea, if he could even do well, you know, we'd have other stories. And then all the older reporters who hung around with Sonny Liston, who had Joe Lewis in his camp, Joe Lewis's wife was Sonny's lawyer. So there was a big distinction there.

The odds were seven to one against Clay, which was prohibitive, and he was kind of wonderful little rumors, countercultural rumors out there, including the fact that he was friends with Malcolm X, Malcolm X, who at that time was a boogeyman in White American society and certainly to the government. And what was it about Clay's record up until that moment that made him seem like such a lightweight heavyweight? Well Clay had never... Oh, sorry. You guys hit your counter? Okay. Thank you. So Clay had never lost a fight as a professional. He had been very carefully given handpicked opponents that he could beat. So he really had not had any impressive victory over anybody of any note whatsoever.

So the odds weren't wrong. The odds were accurate in a way. The point was that no halfway decent, let's say, no heavyweight with any kind of ambition of the moment would fight Sonny Liston because he'd just get knocked out, but they needed another fighter. And so here's this guy who was willing to fight, his management was willing to put him up against it, and it looked like a good payday for everybody. It was cynical. But what was Clay's manner with the press leading up to the fight like, I mean, a great footage of it, but his dog were all his own. He was totally accessible. Was that Sonny, won't get the money, or Sonny Handle? Right. You know, if I have to listen to his jive, I'll knock him out in five. I mean, it was endless. Some of which he may have written, but he was accessible. He was open, he was friendly, he was funny, and he was so uncomfortably on the mark.

In one of the conversations we would have in the dressing room after he worked out, some reporter asked, so after Liston knocks you out, because he had, of course, been boasting that he was going to win, after Liston knocks you out, what are you going to do then? He said, oh, well, then I'll crawl across the ring, and I'll say, nobody ever knocked me out twice, and challenge him again. And the reporter kind of got a little angry at that. So this is a con, huh? And just the breeze kind of looked down at him, and he said, you know, you're from way of Boston, right? It's cold up there. It's warm here. The editor sent you down to this warm place, and you are making money, the popcorn man making money, and a ticket guy making money, we're all making money, what are you complaining

about? And of course, this was another good reason why the older reporter had his head in him. I mean, just he got it, you know, he was, has that kind of, you know, wonderful, I guess it's called emotional intelligence now, but he could go right to the heart of what a situation was all about. Did the New York Times have a nickname for him? Gashas Clay? Yeah. Well, that, you know, I didn't know, the columnists, the columnists, author daily, gashas, gashas, the Louisville lip, the mouth of the south, I mean, you know, well, I mean, the point was it was important for them not to take him seriously, because if you took him seriously as a fighter, you'd look silly as soon as Sonny Liston knocked him out. Tell me about the fight, where were you sitting?

Well, I was sitting at ringside, and the gasp when the two fighters approached each other right before the fight, I was that, Clay was bigger than Liston, and we never thought of that before. I mean, this is David and Goliath, and David's bigger than Goliath, and then once the fight began, there was no question that he was in absolute control. Really? Yeah. I mean, if you had sold yourself to the Liston camp, you had to want to believe, which is certainly possible, that Liston was dumping the fight. Clay just moved around him, hit him at will, and except for that, there was a brief moment in the fifth round, when in some plastic substance, probably from Liston's gloves got into Clay's eyes, and he was blinded and wanted to stop, but Angelo Dundee, his trainer, pushed him

back out, and Liston never came out for the seventh round, he had a deep cut under his eye, he had thrown his arm out, you know, it looked like Clay won the fight. Wow, as hard as it is to believe. It was, I can't tell you how thrilled I was, because I knew at that moment that one, I was the boxing rider now, and that was a big deal then. I was the boxing rider, and this was my story for as long as it would last, and it's lasted to this day. You remember your lead? I just remember the first word, which was incredibly. Something like the incredibly, the, you know, the brash, braggart was telling the truth or something like that, I don't really remember, but I do remember being absolutely thrilled.

Not only, thrilled not only for him, but thrilled for myself, and I must say, I mean, it was not full form, I mean, I'm not sure it's full form now, but it was not really full form, but I did have a sense that everything was going to be different now. There was no question that sports was going to be different, but every aspect of like Malcolm X, who I knew a little bit at that time, was obviously going to play a bigger role with Clay, and that was going to have tremendous impact. And this was going to be a guy who was going to open things up. And by the time the fight happened, I figured out who the Beatles were, too. They made a little bit of a splash of their own. What was the post-fight press conference?

Well, there's a great picture, I mean, on your book of you, right down front. He was uncharacteristically subdued and polite the morning after the fight. He more or less said that he had done all these outrageous things, said, oh, he's made these flamboyant action to sell tickets for the fight, but that now, that it was over over, he could be a polite and responsible gentleman champion. At that moment, about three quarters of the press corps left, all the older guys, they had the story, you know. They were right. I mean, they could hold on to their dignity. You know, he had just done this for publicity.

He was a cron man. And maybe the fight was fixed and maybe he had been lucky that it would be a rematch, you know, it would all figure it out, but we were okay for now. But I think the younger reporters, we were really disappointed, you know, I mean, huh? You could be a nice and polite now, this is all over. Our careers are gone. And so we kept pressing. And pressing about the Muslim connection, we knew that he had been flirting with the nation of Islam. And somebody said, are you a card carrying Muslim? And of course, card carrying, even in 1964, had some real residents, you know, card carrying communists was kind of the catchphrase. And she was that mean card carrying Muslim, you know, means I don't fornicate and I don't drink and I don't go to places where I'm not wanted. Well, wait, what do you mean you don't go to places where you're not wanted?

Don't you believe in integration? Integration? No, that's not human nature. Human nature is blue birds stay with blue birds and tigers with tigers and you stay with your own people. And an argument now develops. In general argument with Cache's clave, because most of us are, you know, probably liberal, white, northern, integrationists. And now he's really emerging as a segregationist, a Muslim, and something stops and he says, now I've always thought that this was the beginning of the athletic revolution when he said, I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be who I want. Wow. And he was.

That's great. And you know, when you think of that declaration, it was so 60s. Yeah. He was doing his thing. What is it? He gets into, I guess his Vietnam stuff doesn't happen in 64, it happens later, but Vietnam does happen in 64, did he, was that in the background, could it be, could it be sensed in the culture at that time, who was it beginning to be an issue, Tonkin Gulf Resolutionist has? Absolutely. I don't think that he was really aware of that. On a very superficial level, he was aware of civil rights, which was really more immediate.

I mean, that was the year when Goodman Schwerner and when the three guys were murdered. And I think that, I think that it really come down from Elijah Muhammad, the head of the nation of Islam, not to talk about civil rights. Soon after the fight, Malcolm X left the nation of Islam. And of course, he was now, would become the window and really kind of on a parallel track with Martin Luther King to something that unfortunately never happened. But and Clay moved away from Malcolm in 1964, I've always felt that he left him high and dry to be murdered.

I mean, he kind of removed the protection of the champion, and he had said, Ali had said things like, anybody who doesn't agree with the honorable Elijah should die. Well, that's a message. And so I think that his stepping back from civil rights, you know, was a low key. The Vietnam War thing for him didn't really happen for another year. What happened in 1965? That's when he gets his draft card, right, or his draft. Yeah, that's when he said, I ain't gotten off of him, he goes, yeah, yeah. Not your year. Right. Unfortunately, yeah. I'd like to have everything as much as possible happened. You're part of that world, let me understand the culture that the Beatles and Muhammad Ali now are upsetting.

What was it like in 1964? What was the consensus like? What was the New York Times like as an emblematic place in terms of gender and in terms of lifestyle and in terms of all of those things that Mad Men are now is sort of in a way? Well, I think like a lot of institutions, I mean, can you just come in quick touch up?