Cassius Clay
July, 1963
The Best-Paid poet in the world today, to coin a couplet, is a heavyweight lad named Cassius Clay. Although he composes nothing but hymns of self-praise in a shaggy doggerel of trite (and not always true) rhymes, his last verse, a two-line gem, packed Madison Square Garden and 37 closed-circuit theaters, earned him $30,000, and established him as boxing's biggest box-office news since Joe Louis. ("Louis?" says Clay, with characteristic modesty, "I could have decisioned him in his...
