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enough so that my folks rewarded me when I was 12 by buying me a brand new bicycle. Cost almost $60, my mom says."

     One day, though, the bike was stolen. Properly resentful and definitely not backward, Cassius reported the theft to a policeman. This policeman, Joe Martin, also happened to be the boxing instructor in a community gym run by Louisville's Department of Recreation. He went through the motions of notifying his precinct superior about the theft. But he liked the bounce and forcefulness of the kid and quickly envisioned him as a candidate for his boxing classes. He told him about the gym.

     Within 24 hours, Cassius, along with his younger brother, Rudolph Valentino Clay, turned up at the gym. They applied themselves there. And the bike was completely forgotten. As testified to by Cassius' mother, her boys haunted the gym from then on.
     
     Joe Martin recalls Cassius had been around the place for the better part of a year before he showed authentic boxing potential. "By then I could see it, he had more speed and determination than the average. He always talked a real good fight."

     Clay's earliest competition was in a juvenile version of the Golden Gloves on local Louisville TV. He made an impression on watchers and he eventually moved up to full-scale Golden Gloves. He became a pillar of Louisville's teams in inter-city matches. Fighting every two weeks. In Kentucky Golden Gloves, he won six championships. In 1960, with the Olympics on the horizon, he took the national Gloves' heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden.

     For the record, Cassius' total of fights as an amateur came to 187. He lost only seven.

     In the Olympics at Rome, he boxed as a light heavyweight (178 pound limit). His speed of hand and capacity to keep an attack going clearly made him the cream of that crop. In the semi-finals he beat Tony Madigan, an Australian "career-amateur" who had boxed in this country. In the finals, he buzz-sawed a Polish finalist into bloody, one-sided defeat.

     When he returned from the games, the inevitability of a pro career prompted a flock of offers. One with Billy Reynolds, wealthy Louisville business figure, included Joe Martin as an advisor. This Cassius' father barred. Then came a new deal from Reynolds, which set up a committee of 11 backers, all but one important Louisville folks. Eight are millionaires. The current president is William Cutchins, president of Brown-Williamson Tobacco. William Faversham, son of an actor of the same name, is Cassius' manager of record.

     The syndicate's arrangement with Clay provides for him to get 50 percent of his purses. The syndicate pays all expenses. He gets $500 a month in cash. Fifteen percent of the rest is put into a pension fund which will start accruing to him when he is 35. The remainder is deposited in the account from which his monthly payments are deducted.

     At the outset he was paid a $10,000 signing bonus and guaranteed $4,000 for the first two years.

     To supervise and direct Clay's boxing, the group hired Angelo Dundee, experienced, even-tempered veteran of corner-direction and gym instructor. Constantly effervescent, Cassius would have worn out any trainer of lesser inner poise. "I swallow a lot, I have to," Dundee explains, "but it's worthwhile, He's a great young fighter. I get along with him by humoring him. Whatever I want to make him do, I kid him into thinking it's his own idea to start with"

     Dundee takes credit for sharpening Clay, but not for making him. "He still breaks a lot of boxing rules, he stands up too straight and he takes a lot of unnecessary chances by backing away and into the ropes. But he has blinding speed and he hits harder than most people realize. He also takes a better punch than they think he can".