(2 of 2)
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.