Sports Poets Society

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/12/american-hunger The Sporting Scene As Muhammad Ali revisits the night he dethroned Sonny Liston, a portrait emerges of a self-invented icon—and the America he remade. “Sometimes he sounds humorous, but sometimes he sounds like Ezra Pound’s poetry,” Archie Moore said of Clay.Photograph by Gordon Parks / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery DAVID REMNICK - The New Yorker By October 5, 1998 On the night of February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay entered the ring in Miami Beach wearing a short white robe, “The Lip” stitched on the back. He was fast, sleek, and twenty-two. But, for the first time in his life, and the last, he was afraid. The ring was crowded with has-beens and would-bes, liege men and pugs. Clay ignored them. He began bouncing on the balls of his feet, shuffling joylessly at first, like a marathon dancer at ten to midnight, but then with more speed, more pleasure. After a few minutes, Sonny Liston, the heavyweight champion of the world...

Muhammad Ali in Chicago, Illinois, March 1974.  (National Archives and Records Administration) https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/importance-muhammad-ali History Now, Issue 23 (Spring 2010) Turning Points in American Sports by Thomas Hauser Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., as Muhammad Ali was once known, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942 —a time when blacks were the servant class in Louisville. They held jobs such as tending the backstretch at Churchill Downs (the famous race track where the Kentucky Derby is held) and cleaning other people’s homes. In Louisville in the 1940s, the highest career goal that most black people could realistically set for their children was that they join the clergy or teach at an all-black public school. Ali’s father, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., supported a wife and two sons by painting billboards and signs. Ali’s mother, Odessa Grady Clay, worked on occasion as a household domestic. "I remember one time when Cassius...