The Sports Writer Who Never Stopped Hating Muhammad Ali – Slate Magazine

Muhammad Ali’s coming out as an athletic, political, and media star happened in 1964, when the boxer, still using his given name, Cassius Clay, beat Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight title. But the persona had been in development. During a victory over Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden a year earlier, the announcer Chris Schenkel called Clay “the man who has captured the imagination of everybody across the country,” and noted that celebrities including Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Toots Shor, and “Mrs. Bob Hope” were there to see him fight. A few days before that bout, Clay won a poetry reading at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village with a 36-line ode. That poem read, in part: “Marcellus vanquished Carthage, Cassius laid Julius Caesar low/ And Clay will flatten Doug Jones with a mightily muffled blow.” At the coffeehouse he also repeatedly proclaimed, “I’m the greatest.”