Busload of memories from Ali-Liston II

For a brief moment, the Maine community of Lewiston was in headlines across the world. For a briefer moment, the reason that reporters from everywhere swarmed into the town resounded in a knockout punch at the end of Muhammad Ali's right hand.

The recipient, the fearsome Charles ''Sonny" Liston, lay on the canvas, a first-round victim, while Ali pranced and customers booed, wondering what happened before many of them reached their expensive seats. Few had seen the not-very-imposing punch.

''My man is king of the world!" Ali's wife at the time, Sonji Roy, screamed at ringside.

Indeed he was, retaining the planetary heavyweight championship that he, at 23, had lifted from Liston 15 months earlier at Miami Beach. It was a long journey that Ali made from his cinder-block home in Miami to Lewiston in May, 40 years ago -- May 25, 1965.

Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., was hardly the beloved figure in 1965 that he is today. He was a showoff (maybe the original trash-talker), who incurred wariness, even hostility, by adopting an Islamic name and embracing the faith of a Chicago-based sect called the Nation of Islam -- better known as ''Black Muslims."

But how in the world did he wind up in Maine, other than rolling there in his cherished bus he called ''Big Red"?

The story begins on an uproarious Friday evening at Boston's City Hospital in November 1964. Our town's picaresque boxing promoter, Sam Silverman, had wangled production rights of the Ali-Liston rematch for Boston Garden on the following Monday. Sam was smoking bigger cigars than ever, relishing the coup of his career. But it didn't happen.

After lunch I had walked Ali from his Back Bay hotel to an art gallery on Newbury Street to look at a portrait of himself painted by local artist Marion Steele. You could get around in that way then without attracting a crowd. Not many people recognized him. Yet a few hours later, he was in the hospital with a bellyache that hurt Silverman more than Ali.

Though some immediately branded it a publicity stunt, Ali was genuinely ill with a strangulated inguinal hernia, requiring routine surgery. An annoyed Liston, of mysterious age, probably around 40, growled, ''I knew he'd hurt hisself, talkin' so much."

Silverman scrambled to reschedule for the Garden. In vain. By that time, District Attorney Gary Byrne had seen a publicity opportunity. Nobly declaring that ex-hoodlum Liston was unfit for Boston consumption, having mobsters in his background, Byrne chased the fight from the city.

Where to go? New promoters, figuring that a low-population area would free the big cities for closed-circuit TV ticket sales in large buildings and theaters, cared little for the live gate. They chose an unlikely Lewiston hockey rink, St. Dom's Youth Center.

By May, Ali was pronounced fit again for pugilism, and Chicopee was chosen as his training base, reasonably secluded so he could be protected. Some considered him a marked man after the recent murder of Malcolm X, defector from the Nation of Islam. It was presumed to be a job ordered by the Nation, and suspected that followers of the charismatic preacher, Malcolm, would try to retaliate against the most prominent of the Nation: Ali.

Traveling circus
Although it would have been easier to fly north from Miami, Ali cared not for airplanes. But he was very fond of the reconditioned 10-year-old passenger bus he'd wheedled out of his management group of Louisville, Ky., businessmen. Prior to the first title fight, he asked ''for two things when I beat that Big Bear Liston -- a red Cadillac convertible and a red bus." They assented, believing, like nearly everybody else, that Ali had no more than a slight chance.

But once the fight was won and the bus purchased, management vetoed the fighter's plan to paint his controversial new name on the bus sides. A compromise made the logo ''World's Heavyweight Champion."

Determined to drive the bus, carrying sparring partners, his valet, and a few guests to Chicopee from Miami, Ali flunked out promptly on a trial run, misguiding ''Big Red" into a ditch. Management decreed a new driver, a little fellow named Otis 5X. The name puzzled me. Why not just plain Otis X? ''Four other Otises got to the name guy before me."

Ali had invited me and three other writers (Ed Pope of the Miami Herald, George Plimpton, and Mort Sharnik of Sports Illustrated) to ride on the bus. The invitation came through Angelo Dundee, Ali's longtime trainer. ''See you on the bus, Angelo," I said.

''Are you crazy?" he said. ''I'm flying. Who knows when they'll get there with Ali in charge?"

Even if he couldn't read a road map, Ali's directions showed a good-heartedness that I hadn't recognized before. No turnpikes or main roads. He had Otis 5X following the back streets, the wrong side of the tracks, stopping in black neighborhoods where the kids came running. He would get off the bus, trumpeting, ''Yes, it's me in your town," and begin shaking hands, kissing babies and old ladies, making faces. It was the Ali road show, a brief connection with a star that those kids are probably telling their grandchildren about.

The fun turned sour in a North Florida town called Yulee, a pause for food at a diner at about 2 a.m. We four whites went in with Bundini Brown, Ali's witch doctor who had coined the champ's war cry, ''Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!" The waitresses ignored us. Other patrons glared.

I went to the manager at the cash register, saying we'd like to be served.

''Not with that boy with you," he replied.

''Isn't that against the law, sir?"

''Not here."

''But isn't this the United States?"

''Not yet," he said.

At that moment, Ali burst in, grabbed Bundini and started yelling.

The manager tried to be civil, saying, ''I have to live here. You're passing through. If you'll get on the bus, we'll take some sandwiches to you."

They press onAs we wandered through Georgia, things were better. We could eat if we stopped at a chain establishment such as Howard Johnson's. Somehow we wound up on a narrow country road in Cumberland County, North Carolina, shepherded by the bodyguards in ''Tomato Red," the Cadillac. Their frantic honking startled the snoozing bus occupants to calamity. The bus was smoking, on fire, and grinding to a halt.

Turned out that Otis 5X had neglected to get a grease job, and the bearings were burned out. While the Cadillac went in search of help, Pope and I hitchhiked to Fayetteville. At a Western Union office, filing stories of being stranded with the champ, we had a scoop.

Nine hours later, the bodyguards showed up with a bus from Trailways, and a professional driver, who said no thanks to Otis 5X.

Trailways was swift and direct. The fun was over. Differing from the rest of us who dreamed of rescue by airplane, the champ was adamant. ''Give me them buses," he said. ''When they catch fire, it is not 30,000 feet to the ground."

When the time came to leave Chicopee and head for Maine, the town's chief of police, Henry Kulig, was greatly relieved of the responsibility. ''We're glad nothing happened to Clay," he said. ''If he got cut, we'd bleed."

Lo and behold, a rehabilitated Big Red was back in action, along with a reappointed Otis 5X, for the five-hour jaunt to the Maine headquarters.

''Be among those who dare to dare!" Ali dared those of us who had started out from Miami to be with him again. He was referring to a newspaper story planted by the fight's press agent, the imaginative Harold Conrad. There wasn't much interest within or outside of Lewiston, and ticket sales were lagging.

Conrad told a columnist that the Malcolm X faction had stolen an anti-tank gun from a National Guard armory and would be waiting along our route. Dundee was worried, urging his protege to forget the bus, and travel by auto in the middle of the night.

''The king cannot sneak around," Ali frowned. ''We go, we dare." (With surreptitious police protection.)

Making sure my insurance was paid up, I boarded. Nice to see Otis 5X again. He got us there. Big Red, coughing but gallant, somehow made a horrendous curve that caused boxes from the overhead rack to tumble with loud bangs. Everyone covered up, but it was just anti-sleep, not anti-tank.

The rest, including the one-punch fight, was anticlimax. Regulars of the New York fight crowd couldn't wait to escape Maine. The abundance of fresh air and blue sky made them uncomfortable. ''Too quiet, unhealthy," said one of them, ''Gaspipe" Vaccola.

Was it a phantom punch that maintained Ali as champion? No. Fortunately I had a good seat, and I saw the short, stiff right to the jaw that crumpled Liston. Certainly a legit knockdown. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott messed up the count, but it didn't matter.

The question is: Did old Sonny, looking up at the taunting Ali, decide this was no time to rise? No one will ever know.

A member of Ali's entourage, Stepin Fetchit, the elderly movie comic, said, ''It was the 'Anchor Punch.' It sinks anybody. Jack Johnson, the great champion, learned it to me, and I learned it to Ali."

Lewiston survived the Anchor Punch, calls for an investigation of the one-rounder, an invasion of aliens, and the war among those who called the champ either Cassius Clay or Muhammad Ali -- or both. And the town has probably forgotten them all.

I survived Big Red and Ali's navigation.