Clay vs Liston Fight - 30 May 1965

Both Britain and the United States have been given a black eye in the past week by things so seemingly slight as a bridge game and a boxing match.

It is the fate of democracies that are wired for sound by radio, and for sight by the early bird and Telstar, that they are going to be judged from now on not by their national heritage, not by works of art, or their great and gallant men, but by the rowdier heroes and heroines of today.

I have no idea how much harm the so-called fight, between Clay and Liston has done to the United States abroad, but I should guess it's considerable. One of the small but constant shocks I had, tramping around the earth, was to encounter the ignorance, in otherwise well-informed and educated people, of the history and the literature, the folk ways and the traditions of the United States.

For every person abroad who has heard of Thomas Jefferson or Mother Cabrini, a hundred, maybe a thousand, have heard of Cassius Clay or Jane Mansfield. England I think, in spite of the mods and rockers, is comparatively lucky. Prod an American jockey or a cab driver and ask him what England means to him and, offhand, he’s likely to burble something about Shakespeare and Winston Churchill and sure, the Beatles also.

But, prod a Turk or a Greek or a Frenchman, and put the same question about America, and they are liable to mention, a break-neck life, cowboy, supermarket, and commercialism. Look who’s talking; my elder daughter, I well recall, was very scared some years ago to go to England for the first time because she felt that everybody lived in Regency houses and walked around charming pieces by Sheraton and Hepplewhite, spouting Shakespeare and Milton.

I tried to brace her by telling her that she knew more Shakespeare and Milton than the average and had lived with more Sheraton and Hepplewhite than most. I think maybe the time has come to get back to the background of American life in these talks which I deserted a year or two ago, quite deliberately, on the theory that since many European universities, even schools, have got themselves courses in American history and since Hemingway and Faulkner got the Nobel Prize and since the great spate of American plays that went abroad in the '40s and '50s, and the wide publicity given to such superb modern architects as Edward Stone, Philip Johnson, Minoru Yamasaki, or such composers as Charles Ives and Aaron Copeland and so on and so on, I figured that the ground work had been laid, the elementary knowledge of the American tradition had been absorbed.

Apparently, this is a delusion. It's something that has to be done all the time, if only for the people coming up who take in with their schooling not the elements of another nation's culture, but the symbols of its shock value. Around the world I found only one admirable, and admired, symbol of the United States mentioned all the time by ordinary people. And they mentioned it without prodding or cueing.

First time was a cashier in Rome who saw a letter with a Kennedy stamp on it, and shook his head and said, "a good man. He for peace, good for all the world". The next time was in Luxor, a very young man, an apprentice waiter. Seeing some American small change mixed in with the relics of certain other currencies, he held up his hand as you might for silence. He hitched up his white jacket and, from an inner pocket, he took out a handsome coin – and I must say, I think it is our handsomest coin, the eagle on one side on the other, the profile of John Kennedy.

The young Egyptian handled it as, in another land, he might have fingered a rosary. Everybody, he said, feeling for his words very carefully, everybody, cried very much, but especially Egyptians.

Ill fated in his death, the late president has been blessed in the memory he left. I found myself on the long trek grateful not only for what Kennedy was, but almost more grateful for what he has become in the mind’s eye of other nations. He does at the least represent an American symbol that is modern, youthful, graceful and courageous. It's odd, by the way, how we cling to the fantasy of youth – he would now be, yesterday, 48. Mr Nixon is only four years older but nobody talked about his youth. Mr Harold Wilson is only one year older than that, still we go on about Kennedy’s youth, because I think we so earnestly wanted to believe that, as he swore, a new generation had picked up the torch.

Well this is a far cry from the sullen Sonny Lister and the clownish Cassius Clay, and the ghastly disorganisation in Lewiston, Maine. It took less than 24 hours for the protests to come up in Congress. The hardest words were spoken by Senator John Tower from the state of Washington. He described the fight as the nadir of a sport and called for a congressional investigation.Which, I should think, is quite likely to happen.

The house of representatives, by the way, has two bills before it to control monopoly practices in boxing. Massachusetts, which banned the fight after a district attorney began to ask awkward questions of Liston, has received a resolution in the state legislator to proclaim a moratorium on boxing and its televising until there has been a federal investigation into the sport and the way it's run.

In California, an Assembly man introduced on Thursday two resolutions, one calling for a federal investigation, the other asking the Californian attorney general to look into the prospect of withholding from the promoters the money in California that they are entitled to, from movie theatre television. All this indigestion may for once, lead somewhere since the boxing profession itself seem to be more outraged than anybody.

The most offensive debasement of boxing that I have ever seen or read about was not spoken by a bishop, or a pious politician but by Gene Tierney. It’s awfully early to tell what will come out of it, but what seems most likely at the moment is the appointment by Congress of a national government agency like the baseball commission that was created after an unwholly baseball scandal. Boxing would then be run by a commissioner.

While the experts and the people involved are talking along these lines, ordinary people are still gasping and arguing over unexplained mysteries about the actual running of the fight. One could have said ironically, after the fight, that it was a mystery why Liston went down, and a bigger mystery why he stayed down. But after several days, there really is a mystery and the wonder is why it should have occurred to laymen, and not to the experts.

It has to do with the principal or rule on which Liston was declared knocked out. The international boxing rules, not to mention the rules of the main boxing commission also, state quite clearly that the count may not begin until the boxer responsible for the knockdown has retired to a neutral corner.

The referee, poor old Jersey Joe Wilcott who has taken as frightful a verbal beating as Liston did in the record books, was not kneeling there thrashing his forearm over the strangely prostrate body of Liston because he was doing his best to see that the rule was followed – he was waving Cassius, or Mohammed, or whatever he calls himself, away.

By the most straight forward reading of the rules, Liston wasn’t knocked out at all. To be absolutely impeccable, Wilcott should have scissored a signal to the timekeeper not to start, watching the count. For it's a strange professional boxing match in which the count is decided by the time keeper.

In strict truth, the fight is not yet over, which is certainly one of the most awful thoughts of the year. When, about 36 hours late, this point was put to one of the main officials he said that after all Liston was in a pretty bad way, and he was certain to be knocked out sooner or later. Wilcott said that Liston was so badly hurt, how, why, that he would probably have had to be stopped from going on. All that the officials decided to do was change the actual time of the knockout.

Since the playback, the television tape, showed that there had been at least 45 five seconds out, the most unlikely people – old men and maidens – have got into this argument. Nobody is prepared, just yet, to say why the whole exhibition was a disgrace, which I think is an interesting point. Of course, it’s annoying to get ready for one of these things, and sally forth and pay big money – every ticket to the movie houses cost £2.10s, and then be offered only two minutes of so-called entertainment.

I have asked several people, as a reporter not as a dissenter, what was disgraceful about it. Strangely, they cannot tell you but this is, I suspect, only because they sense that they are treading on the soft ground that could suck you into a libel suit. In other words, some people shall we say, don’t like the fact that both the winner and the loser get exactly the same purse for their performances.

Some people don’t like the relations of the boxers with the promoters, some people, therefore, suspect, hint, suggest, that there might possibly be fraud. Even the congressman and the state legislators who rose in over 20-odd states on Wednesday and Thursday proposed their reforms or restrictions or investigations, on the basis of horrors never specified of implied crimes, that nobody knows were committed or attempted.

Still, I can’t remember a sporting event of any kind which has galvanised so much outrage and indignation among its own devotees. The general public was soured on boxing long ago, not through the suspected operations of racketeers so much but because of the number of boxers who have had the bad luck to be killed in the ring. For this reason, more than any other, professional boxing is banned in several states of the union. After last Tuesday, you may be sure there will be many more.

But, I come back to the note on which I began. This fight happened in the United States. It might have happened and gone, in the main, unrecorded, in Spain or Japan or the Lebanon. But it didn’t, it happened here. And coming on top of the dark complexity, of Vietnam, and the adventure in the Dominican Republic, it only fouls up the unpleasant odour in which, I am sorry to say, Uncle Sam finds himself everywhere around the world in my observation, excepting only in Thailand and Australia.

A grim, if patient, American diplomat, looking over a survey of world opinion about his country, said to me a month or so ago, "After 20 years, after we were the conquering heroes, 17 years after we supposedly saved Europe and we’re the good Samaritan, we have kept our word, and done what we said we would if the Communists tried to take over India or French Indochina, and wipe out the Geneva agreements. So we are disliked and distrusted everywhere, except in Thailand, Japan, and Australia.

"Three cheers," he said, lifting a melancholy glass, "for our three allies".

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