Gee Gee

BLACK IS BEST by Jack Olsen. 255 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

In the past seven years, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. has fought 28 of the best-publicized fights in boxing history. Some of his victims were stiffs, but most of them were decidedly more skilled than Clay's critics would admit. Nobody today denies that he is a superb boxer, but Clay himself beclouded that fact long ago in a great golden haze of self-generated mythology about his life outside the ropes--his ridiculous, irreverent verses, his portentous prophecies, his jazzy clothes, his religion, his wife, the draft board that he dodges as agilely as he ducks a left jab.

With all that, Clay can take credit for having doublehanded led boxing out of its racket-infested ignominy. In 1950, total gate receipts in the U.S. had dropped to a nadir of $4,000,000. Thanks to the class that Clay has brought back to the game, the take in 1966 was nearly $11 million.

All of which still leaves a lot of questions about the Clay in street clothes. In this sharp-eyed biography, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Jack Olsen succeeds with the formidable challenge and produces a portrait of the man that actually makes sense.

Rave On, Samson! Cassius is seen most revealingly in the pages on the Champ's parents. His mother Odessa calls him Gee Gee, in honor of Cassius' first words. An unruffled mistress of the house, she shouts down her husband by yelling, "Rave on, Samson!" Cassius' determined will and his unwavering discipline are strictly the work of Odessa.

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 to young Cassius' wavering hold on his emotions. Today, mother and father hold court in a trim bungalow in Louisville. In the driveway stand two castoff Cadillacs from Cassius, "His" and "Hers." Odessa still tries to keep a semblance of cool around the house, while Old Cassius tromps around thinking up ideas for commercial schemes--food endorsements, perhaps a nationwide chain of "Clay's Kitchens" or "Clay's Whatnot Shops."

"We're 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, all that is required is to applaud the Champ's incoherent ravings on race and his puerile dirty jokes, and to sit quietly when he telephones his mother and spiels out an endless stream of babyhood reminiscences to her.

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 her slacks were too tight. And in his peculiar, affecting way, Clay childishly dreams of lovely Edens: "The type of house I like would be all glass on the front and on one side, like those modern motels you see--Holiday Inns, and I want nothing but goooooooold carpets. When the average person walks in it'll be like being in heaven, dreamland. My children will be born in the hereafter."

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 way.

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