PROLOGUE
In the nineteenth century, there was a place in West Clare known only as ‘The Rock of the Weeping of the Tears’. Entire families journeyed to this awful landmark to say their last goodbyes to a son or daughter, brother or sister, who was emigrating. At ‘The Rock’, they turned back for home, knowing their chance of ever seeing the departing relative again was almost nil. Between 1850 and 1880 around 100,000 people left the county for America in search of improved circumstances, greater opportunity and a better life. The price of passage was around one pound and the haunting memory of the wailing farewell.
The Gradys lived in the Turnpike, an area in Ennis town where families subsisted in one- and two-room single-storey dwellings almost heaped on top of each other. John Grady was a plasterer who rented a house and a small garden with a rateable value of fifteen shillings. Sometime in the 1860s, his son Abe cobbled together the fare for a ticket to the New World and, as with so many of his contemporaries, most likely walked the thirty miles from Ennis to the deepwater port of Cappa near Kilrush.
Back then, huge vessels that ferried cotton from New Orleans to Liverpool used to stop off at Cappa on their way back across the Atlantic. Having replaced the cotton with less bulky manufactured goods in their hold, they had plenty of room to take on passengers
willing to endure the extra hardship of traversing the ocean in a cargo ship. Conditions were uniformly appalling, but it was the cheapest way to travel; it was also an important factor in persuading some of the poorest sections of Irish society to try their luck in Louisiana rather than New York.
Once in New Orleans, it is believed that Abe Grady gradually worked his way up the Mississippi River before finally settling in Kentucky. There, he met and married an emancipated enslaved woman whose name is not known. Around 1887 the couple had a son and called him John Lee Grady, a nod to his paternal grandfather back home in Clare. In 1914 John Lee also married an African-American, Birdie Moorehead, and they had two children of their own. A son named after his father was born in 1915, and on 12 February 1917 Birdie had a daughter, Odessa Lee.
Odessa Lee Grady grew up in Louisville, where she subsequently met, fell in love with and married a sign-painter, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. At 6.35 p.m. on 17 January 1942, in Louisville General Hospital, she gave birth to a son. They called him Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, but by the time he set foot in Ireland for the first time, just over thirty years later, the world would know him better as Muhammad Ali.
THE STRONGEST PUBLICAN IN CAPTIVITY
Theway he told it, Harold Conrad arrived in London from New York on 4 April 1972. Booking into his hotel, he was surprised to discover three urgent messages from a man he had never met. Some guy by the name of Butty Sugrue sounded really anxious for him to get in touch. A former sportswriter, Conrad had carved out a reputation as one of the slickest promoters and publicists in the American fight game. Curiosity suitably pricked, he picked up the phone and rang the local number he had been given. The first thing he heard was a thick Irish accent launching into an elaborate tale about how the man talking had once spent some time with the great Joe Louis and was now in a position to make Conrad a very rich man.
Always intrigued by the possibility of making money, Conrad took a cab to Shepherd’s Bush, where Sugrue and his wife, Joan, ran The Wellington, a sprawling Irish bar. After the preliminary introductions, the mysterious publican cut to the chase with his visitor. ‘Could you get Muhammad Ali for a fight in Dublin?’
‘Against whom?’ asked Conrad.
‘I’ll leave that up to you.’
Conrad got this sort of thing all the time. Every city he passed through, there was some dreamer or schemer who fancied bringing the greatest show in sport to his hometown. Many knew of his credentials in advance and had prepared their sales pitch; others perked up immediately when they realised this was the guy who organised the famous photoshoot in Miami between a young Cassius Clay and the Beatles before the first bout with Sonny Liston in 1964. The man who persuaded Malcolm X to leave town for a few days so that ticket sales for that very fight would not be affected by adverse publicity surrounding the Nation of Islam. In boxing parlance, Conrad was a true heavyweight. His name was on very few posters, but around the gyms that mattered, and in the backrooms where deals were cut, there were not many who could match his credentials.
For him, Sugrue was merely the latest in a long line of people with an eye for the main chance. He had obviously done his homework and knew Conrad was the kind of person who could actually deliver Ali. To be polite, his visitor spun him a standard line about anything being possible once the money was right, and Sugrue, in innocence or mischief, thought he had caught his prey and stuck out his hand.
‘We got a deal, let’s shake.’
Not so fast. Tired of wasting time on chancers with neither the will nor the wealth to finance an Ali fight, Conrad decided to dampen this guy’s ardour. He told him there would be no handshake until the publican could prove he had the wherewithal to come up with the cash. Sugrue didn’t blink.
‘No problem at all, not at all. How much will it take?’
‘Three hundred thousand dollars,’ replied Conrad, knowing full well that Ali was averaging in the region of $250,000 a fight just then.
‘That’s nothing at all, not at all,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
They walked to a nearby branch of the Williams & Glyn Bank where, according to Conrad’s recollection of events, the following dialogue took place inside the manager’s office.
‘Would you tell this man I’m good for $300,000,’ asked Sugrue of the bank official.
‘Yes, Butty Sugrue is good for $300,000,’ he replied. ‘This bank stands behind him.’
Freshly invigorated by that ringing endorsement, Sugrue could not resist enhancing his own position still further.
‘And there’s plenty more where that comes from,’ he said.
Conrad was impressed. Sugrue passed every one of the initial litmus tests designed to expose fantasists and spare himself undue bother. Even when he outlined his terms for the deal, ridiculously one-sided as they were, his would-be collaborator appeared unmoved by the stringent conditions. Sugrue was to cover the expenses of bringing the entire Ali circus to town and, for delivering the fighter to Ireland, Conrad demanded a 50 per cent share of the profits without putting up a single penny himself. Only a man in his unique position could negotiate such favourable terms. It wasn’t everybody who could confidently claim that persuading Ali to travel 3,000 miles to a country he had never visited before was within his remit.
Moments after Conrad warned him to make sure he could produce letters of credit to guarantee the purses, Sugrue wasn’t
even thinking of the enormous financial risks involved. After all, how could the duo possibly fail to make money? The power of radio and television ensured that from the early 1960s Ali enjoyed massive popularity in Ireland, and the opportunity to see him in the flesh for the first and maybe only time would surely be an easy sell.
‘You’ll be thanking the day you met me,’ Sugrue assured his copromoter. ‘We’ll sell out every seat we put up in Dublin.’
All of the above is how Conrad, writing in his rollicking, starstudded memoir a decade later about how the deal was struck to bring Ali to Ireland, described his first meeting with Sugrue. It was a great yarn, well spun by a master storyteller – right down to the sharp dialogue, he wrung every drop for maximum dramatic effect. Except the dates were way off, and as for the details, well … Most of it did happen, in one way or another, just a lot earlier than he remembered and not all in one convenient day. Evincing the light touch of the Hollywood screenwriter he had been in a previous life, times and places were conflated to speed up the plot.
The script doctoring was unnecessary. The actual story was improbable enough.
The record shows that Conrad’s unlikely co-promoter first talked publicly about bringing Ali to fight in Ireland on 7 February 1972 at Lansdowne Road. Sugrue told the Daily Mirror, ‘I met Muhammad Ali at my pub when he was in Britain a few months ago and he promised me then to do this fight for £100,000.’
The first part of that was true and there was photographic evidence to prove it. On a tour of England that was sponsored by Ovaltine, the drink brand, the previous October, Ali had indeed visited The Wellington. His presence was most likely the
handiwork of Henry Cooper, his old ring foe, who was a great friend of Sugrue’s. As well as the mayor of Hammersmith and the local police chief, Conrad was there that night too. At one point in the festivities, Sugrue and Ali even had a one-on-one chat, during which the Kerryman asked Ali to consider a fight in Ireland, the profits from which would go to a charity close to his heart.
‘Like Joe Louis, he is deeply interested in the welfare of the mentally handicapped,’ said Sugrue. ‘So, I put up the idea to him and asked him would he fight in Dublin. He told me he would go anywhere at any time to fight for the mentally handicapped children.’
Whether Ali made any personal assurances about a future bout for any charity in Ireland or anywhere else is open to question, but there is no doubt the idea seems to have been born during that encounter in the pub. Not that this kind of forensic detail mattered to the media in Ireland. They were not convinced by Sugrue’s announcement in March 1972 that the most famous athlete in the world would be coming to Dublin that summer. As if.
‘Can Butty Produce Ali Here?’ asked The Irish Press, the incredulous tone of the headline setting the tone for much of the newspaper coverage about the possibility over the following few weeks.
The cynicism of the fourth estate in Ireland was perhaps wellfounded. A master at garnering cheap publicity, Sugrue enjoyed a reputation as something of a carnival barker, often guilty of delivering less than he promised, forever enmeshed in madcap ventures designed to drive up revenue at one of his establishments. Barely four years had passed since he had last made international headlines. In his second attempt at one of the lesser-spotted world
records, he persuaded Mick Meaney, a Tipperary-born barman at the Admiral Nelson, a pub Sugrue then ran in north London, to spend sixty-one days in a coffin buried at a depth of eleven feet.
It was a classic slice of Sugrue grotesquerie. Before the burial, he organised ‘The Last Supper’, a meal at which Jack Doyle, onetime heavyweight contender turned cabaret act, sang songs to the delight of the London press. Afterwards, Meaney, nicknamed ‘The human JCB’ for his work ethic, was placed in his ‘all-mod cons’ coffin. Watched by large numbers of Irish expatriates wearing solemn black suits and gleaming white shirts, he was then passed through the window of the bar and lifted onto a flatbed truckcum-hearse that took him to his ‘final’ resting place at Mick Keane’s building yard. When Meaney finally emerged from his subterranean abode more than two months later, it was to a kiss from the glamorous figure of Diana Dors and the soundtrack of the London-Irish Girl Pipers. In the manner of successful sports teams, Sugrue duly paraded him through the streets of Kilburn on the back of a lorry. A triumph of sorts.
Questions were subsequently raised about the nature of the enterprise in the House of Commons, a measure of how well Sugrue had sold the stunt to the media and how famous he had become in Britain. It was all a long way, literally and metaphorically, from Gortnascarry, the townland near Killorglin in south-west Kerry where Michael (his official name) was born on 24 July 1924. One of the six children (three sons and three daughters) of Daniel and Anna Sugrue, he earned the sobriquet ‘Butty’ early on due to his short, thick build and prodigious strength.
In his youth, Sugrue was an amateur boxer at a time when budding Killorglin pugilists fought in a ring set up in the fabled
Oisin Ballroom on Iveragh Road. Alongside his brother Tim, known to all as ‘Fly’, he also travelled to compete at tournaments in Caherciveen, Tralee and Castleisland. Around then he started to gain a reputation for being abnormally strong. Popular lore in the area held that his power was down to the amount of goat’s milk he drank in his formative years. English newspapers, prompted by his own anecdotes, later attributed his brawn to an idyllic rural childhood spent chasing wild rabbits and eating them raw.
‘Butty was born underneath Carrantuohill in an era when life in that part of Ireland was as harsh as it was in Italy’s Abruzzi,’ wrote Con Houlihan in the Evening Press. ‘Nature gave him a remarkable physique. When you saw his body, you knew the significance of the word “trunk” – and long hours of heavy labour as a very young boy put iron into muscle and bone and mind. He escaped into the Irish Army and there his river of power was canalized into weightlifting … And in those days he was as shy as he was strong, and no matter how he was coached, he could not convincingly show off.’
variously described as somewhere between five foot five and five foot eight in height, with a few stubborn wisps of hair clinging to his otherwise rapidly balding pate, he was a small, squat man blessed with incredible power. As a young lad during a stint working the peat bogs in Offaly, he entertained larger colleagues by hoisting them over his head and holding them there. In the pre-television era, that gift was remarkable enough for him to eventually parlay it into a modicum of fame. Leaving the turfcutting and military behind, he spent much of the 1940s and early 1950s traversing the country as a headline act with Duffy’s Circus. Most evenings, he entered the ring to the sound of his colleague
Michael Doyle fingering the accordion, the audience gasping the instant they realised the musician was perched atop a chair Sugrue held between his teeth while walking along.
Posters declared him ‘Ireland’s Strongest Man!’ and few quibbled with the billing. Those who did were invited into the spotlight to see if they could match his feats. Usually, he lifted four fifty-six-pound shop weights attached to a steel cart axle (also fifty-six pounds) above his head and then watched the doubters and naysayers fail one by one to replicate his action. Another trick was to sit ten men on a trailer before dragging it around the big top with a rope clenched between his teeth. Typical sideshow fare, the kind of act that the people of a town remembered, and it made Sugrue nationally famous. When the adults repaired to the pubs afterwards, they spent hours figuring out how such a small man could be so strong. At school the next day, kids talked of little else. Over time, his legend grew and grew, and the story about him tugging a double-decker bus across O’Connell Bridge in Dublin with those ever-resilient gnashers became national lore. Of course, it helped greatly that a lot of the more ludicrous yarns about him were true.
In August 1953 Sugrue returned to his hometown for the Puck Fair, Killorglin’s annual three-day bacchanal, where thousands congregate ostensibly to trade livestock but mostly to party. There, the clash between himself and his buddy Jack Doyle, still just about trading as ‘The Gorgeous Gael’ of fistic yore, topped the bill in a wrestling tournament the pair had organised themselves. That Doyle was a native of neighbouring County Cork added spice to the contest, but Sugrue was a far superior grappler and easily won in two rounds. Later, he stripped down to his trousers for a local
photographer and, bare-chested, wrestled King Puck, the wild mountain goat whose anointing as royalty was part of the annual ritual of the festival. The enduring picture of Sugrue grimacing as he got to grips with the animal’s forelegs was of little consolation to the other wrestlers; they spent much of that evening looking for Doyle, Sugrue and the money they were owed. Ireland is a small country, and when somebody welches on a debt like that, however small, the story travels fast and the stench lingers.
Emigrating to London in the early 1960s, Sugrue arrived in a city teeming with Irish and opportunity. A teetotaller, he got involved in the pub business, an industry where his name recognition and flair for promotion brought exiled compatriots flocking to his bars. If his quiet manner and gentle ways belied his illustrious past as Ireland’s strongest man, customers caught glimpses now and then of his remarkable abilities. Troublemakers left his establishments in a hurry. He would not fight anybody, he would just grab them, and once he had gained a substantial hold, the miscreant was bodily lifted from the premises and warned not to return.
Patrons of any renown were treated in a very different fashion. ‘Butty was supposed to be the strongest publican in captivity,’ remembered Paddy Byrne, a Dubliner involved in boxing in London at the time. ‘Part of the attraction was that he used to lift up celebrities on his chest. He had a special chair with a bar that sat across his chest, I saw him lift Henry Cooper up that way one time. The guy had an enormous chest, he was a real pocket battleship.’
In 1964 Cooper was centrally involved in a previous Sugrue attempt to make serious money from boxing. He put together
a variety show to tour Ireland, with Cooper and the ubiquitous Doyle the key ingredients in an evening of vaudeville. After a warm-up act of Irish dancers and showgirls, Doyle, an excellent tenor, belted out a few numbers, and Cooper then fought an exhibition against his brother Jim. Quite a package deal, the production opened well at Dublin’s Mansion House but faltered as soon as it left the capital, and they quickly cut their losses. The failure hardly mattered to Cooper: his manager had insisted his client be paid in advance.
Not long after Horatio Nelson’s Pillar was blown up in O’Connell Street in Dublin in 1966, Sugrue put the word out in London’s Irish community that the head of the statue would be making an appearance in the Admiral Nelson on a certain night. The place was packed to the rafters when the proprietor announced that, unfortunately, some ne’er-do-wells had stolen the head from a wheelbarrow in the backyard the previous evening. Only Sugrue could get away with disappointing people on that scale. In time, that story developed legs, and in a later version, the admiral’s head was supposedly placed on the bar where it was abused by the customers.
For all these misadventures, stunts and half-truths, Sugrue’s friends regarded him as intensely loyal, and he had an admirable history of assisting Irish people in London. ‘My impression of him was of a fella who would do anything he could to help you out,’ said John McCormack, a Dubliner who held the British lightheavyweight title from 1967 to 1969. ‘For instance, I went in one night to try to sell a few tickets for a fight I had coming up. The minute I walked in and met Butty, he said, “Right, John, get up on the stage there.” Margaret Barry, an ould tinker woman who used
to play the banjo, a gruff, black-headed woman, was already up on the stage. And Jack Doyle beside her. Jack used to sing three songs every night for fifteen pounds. Anyway, I go up and take the microphone to tell the crowd when I’m fighting and who I’m fighting, trying to flog a few seats. Then the crowd started to ask me questions and while this is going on, Butty is selling tickets for my fight from behind the bar. Of course, then Jack leans over and says to me, “Listen, I sing three songs here for fifteen pound and the way the time is going now, I’m down to two with your talking, so would you do me a favour and get down ’cause you’re costing me a fiver already!” At that time now, fifteen pound was half a week’s wages, but Doyle was down on his luck, and rather than give it to him into his hand and demean him further, Butty used to get him to sing these beautiful, old come-all-ye’s for it. That was a typical scene in the pub and that was the kind of thing he’d do for a fella.’
Sugrue’s benevolence towards his friend Doyle, an increasingly pathetic alcoholic as time wore on, was more than financial. If Doyle needed a place to stay, he knew his Kerry pal would come through for him. What Sugrue got from the friendship was an entrée into a glitzier space. Once, he accompanied the former contender to Elstree Studios for a summit with Marlon Brando, who had sent his Rolls Royce to ferry them to the set of A Countess from Hong Kong. Both men had been married to Movita, a Mexican film star, and Brando wanted information from Doyle to help him negotiate the terms of his divorce. Sugrue tagged along as security in case the discussion between the ex-husband and the wannabe ex-husband turned ugly. It did not. The trio got on so well that Sophia Loren stood with them that day for a photograph.
John McCormack’s brother Pat, a welterweight also based in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recalled Sugrue’s strength. ‘Butty really did have incredible strength,’ he said. ‘I ended up taking part in a publicity stunt for the Ali fight and I still have the photograph somewhere. Butty lifted myself and Paddy Maguire, a bantamweight from Belfast, clean up off the floor for the photographers. He literally picked us up, one in each hand, inside the pub. For a fellow of his size and at that stage in his life, it was an incredible achievement. We weren’t heavyweights, but there was eighteen or nineteen stones there between the two of us.’
Eye-catching feats, almost always captured on camera, were his currency and his calling card. When his son Ritchie was just fourteen months old in 1960, the Daily Mirror ran a feature on his parents’ claim that he was the strongest child in the world for his age. Aside from getting him to lift an 8lb medicine ball over his head for the journalist, there were pictures of the tyke pushing his own pram, with his mother sitting in it and the brake on. Butty boasted, ‘I’ve every confidence in Ritchie, I reckon by the time he’s 21, he’ll be the strongest man in the world. He’ll be tough enough to let a 1-ton tractor run over his chest.’
For the rest of the decade, Sugrue became such a staple in London tabloids that one columnist affectionately dubbed him ‘the splendid spoofer’. Photographs of somebody sitting on a chair that he was clasping in his teeth, or shots of him grimacing while holding back a revving motorcycle (a stunt he enacted on the Tonight with Dave Allen television show) were regular features in the English press. Yet, his showbiz persona was very different from his private self. Noted for his charity and generosity to those
struggling, he once performed his strong man act for the delighted inmates of Maidstone Prison. He also confessed to a phobia about suffering and could not bear to visit anybody in hospital.
Sugrue was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 1970, following the murder of Eddie Coleman, a former barman at the Admiral Nelson who had become a gangland figure. Riddled with bullets, the thirty-two-year-old Scot’s body was found in a suitcase in the New Forest in grisly circumstances that gripped London. Some years earlier, Coleman had attended one of Butty’s weightlifting classes and wangled a job and accommodation at the pub from him, before starting a romantic relationship with Joan Sugrue. The couple moved out of the Nelson, set up home together and she bore him a child. When she left her lover after less than a year together and returned to her husband, Coleman made regular threatening phone calls to the pub. Three of his criminal associates were later convicted for his murder.
‘I hope Joan and I can live in peace now,’ said Sugrue.
That same year, he pulled together a star-studded evening at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of ‘the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children and St Patrick’s Island’. With the Irish tenor Josef Locke as the headliner, support acts included The Johnstons (featuring Paul Brady), New Faces and an up-and-coming singer called David Bowie, strumming a twelve-string and singing ‘Space Oddity’. Quite the line-up.
The philanthropic dimension to that concert hinted at the breadth of Sugrue’s interests. Wanting to help kids was a typically noble project of his, but the St Patrick’s Island aspect of the fundraising was more dubious. The previous year, in a supposed move to stop it being taken over by hippies, he had purchased
this tiny islet off the coast of north Dublin. He claimed that he would erect a 150-foot-tall statue of Ireland’s patron saint there, as a striking symbol of peace, and that he wanted to build a spiritual and health retreat facility where ‘slim men will grow big and big men will grow slim’. There may have been truth to either or both of those intentions, but not long after the announcement, Mick Jagger had to deny newspaper reports he had bought the sixteen acres, located one and a half kilometres from the mainland, from the Kerryman.
‘I’m not in the business of buying islands,’ said Jagger. ‘What’s more, I have never heard of Mr Sugrue.’
That would have made the Rolling Stone unique, because Sugrue was an extraordinarily adept self-publicist and stories about him were legion. The day he stopped a violent mugging in Dublin city, he claimed to have hurled the six attackers into the River Liffey. He once challenged the combined Oxford and Cambridge boat race crews to a tug of war. They demurred. He regularly called out publicans around the world, offering them £500, and sometimes double that sum, if they came to London and matched his feats of strength. None ever took him up on the offer. His bold effort to stage an indoor version of the Puck Fair at the Admiral Nelson was hampered by the goat being stuck in quarantine at the behest of Her Majesty’s Customs at Fishguard. When the animal, which had been christened Ned Kelly, finally reached London, Sugrue met him at Euston Station and knelt to kiss him for the cameras before hoisting him on a platform thirty feet above Kilburn. For all these legendary antics and impressive tomfoolery, in private conversation the public rogue came across as humble, almost demure.
‘Mr. Sugrue is a very modest man who does not appear to relish recounting past achievements,’ wrote Marie Corr in The Irish Press. ‘However, he is known to have been flung into the River Lee in a tightly sewn-up sack only to appear seconds later swimming for the bank after his Houdini-like escape. In appearance, he is surprisingly low-sized but so powerfully built that he gives the impression that he could outlast a gorilla in a test of sheer brute force. In sharp contrast to his tough physique are Mr. Sugrue’s soft Kerry accent, mild blue eyes and almost old-fashioned courteous manner.’
This then was the picaresque character purporting to bring Muhammad Ali to Ireland, and many of the country’s sportswriters just could not reconcile his colourful past and chequered history of bizarre exploits with his present lofty intentions. Sure, Sugrue had succeeded in bringing Joe Louis on a tour of Ireland in 1966, as a cabaret act, not a fighter, and inevitably bragged that he had lifted the former heavyweight champion in a chair clean off the ground with his teeth. But that promotion lost money and turned into a farce. And while getting a superannuated boxer decades removed from his pomp to sing at The Arch Ballroom in Tallow, West Waterford, was a singular achievement in itself, it was not the same as trying to import the most box-office athlete on earth to fight.
The journalists didn’t believe Sugrue had the chops to pull it off, figuring the whole idea to be kind of preposterous. In his weekly boxing column in The Irish Press, Jim McNeill certainly wasn’t buying into the hype. At all. Despite the fact that Pelé had just played a rather pedestrian exhibition game for Santos against a Drumcondra/Bohemians XI at Dalymount Park, McNeill dismissed
the Ali proposal as ‘sketchy’. Even after Sugrue flew to Dublin to meet with the Irish Boxing Board of Control and to renew his promoter’s licence in the country, positive first steps, McNeill was steadfast in his warning to readers. ‘I do not suggest changing your summer holiday dates in the hope of seeing Ali in Ireland,’ he wrote on 7 March 1972. ‘Ali boxing a “real” fight in Dublin remains an extreme improbability, for the problems in staging such a contest would be truly enormous.’
His colleague Peadar O’Brien went even further, knocking out several jocular pieces mocking Sugrue throughout the month of March and into April, repeatedly slagging off the Kerryman and even promising him two All-Ireland final tickets if he pulled the whole thing off. O’Brien began each mischievous report with the latest in the logistical saga of finding a date (12 July was the initial choice), a venue (Milltown, Tolka Park and Leopardstown Racecourse were all mooted), and an opponent (a litany of names), starting each fresh update with an intro that read, ‘Chapter (insert number here) in the “Will Butty Sugrue Capture Muhammad Ali for a fight in Dublin in July?” continued this morning …’
Sugrue appeared utterly nonplussed by the constant derision and sneering disbelief. Buoyed by his time spent with Louis, nothing could dissuade him from the notion that he could also deliver Ali. In his experience, once the money could be found anything was possible, and it was in this entrepreneurial spirit that he got the process underway. For all his background in strength-based gimmickry and travelling-fair chicanery, he had proved a shrewd enough businessman through the years. The Admiral Nelson and The Wellington were enormous pubs and thriving concerns in his hands, a point backed up by the facile
manner in which his bank manager immediately rowed in behind the Ali proposal from the start. And, most importantly of all, he had Harold Conrad on board. Nobody knew the lay of the land around pulling off an Ali fight and all that entailed quite as well as the suave American.
THE HARDER THEY FALL
Dapper as always, impossibly tall and stately, the impeccably turned-out Harold Conrad cut a glamorous, somewhat incongruous figure as he strolled around the Kings Hall at Belle vue in Manchester on Monday 13 March. As far off-Broadway as the native New Yorker ever liked to stray, the man with the Clark Gable moustache had come to Longsight in the south of the city to run his eyes over Danny McAlinden, a heavyweight with a pro ledger of twenty wins, one defeat, two draws and, crucially, an Irish backstory. Born in Newry, County Down in 1947, he had moved to Coventry shortly before his fifteenth birthday, pieced together a promising fistic career as ‘Dangerous Dan’, and was regarded by many as a future British champion.
The previous year, McAlinden had been brought to America to fight and presumably to dutifully lose to Muhammad Ali’s then undefeated younger brother, Rahaman, on the undercard of the epic with Joe Frazier, the so-called fight of the century, at Madison Square Garden. Nobody showed the Irishman the script, and he staggered his opponent more than once on the way to a unanimous
decision that night. When he might perhaps have been better off preparing for his own contest, Ali watched the action unfold from a back corridor and then strolled to his dressing-room to get ready for his own appointment with history.
Conrad had travelled to the north-west corner of England on this particular evening because McAlinden was now mooted as a possible foil for the older Ali’s proposed bout in Dublin. A consummate pro, it was a measure of the American’s due diligence and how seriously he was on board with Butty Sugrue’s project from the very beginning that he went to these lengths merely to check out the pedigree of a prospect. But it was just as well that he did. McAlinden blew the biggest audition of his life, failing to ignite as he was thoroughly outclassed and eventually stopped in the eighth by American Larry Middleton, then ranked ninth in the division. There would be no dream date for the Irishman with the former world champion. When reporters approached Conrad at ringside that evening, he told them as much.
Forty-eight hours later, Conrad was in Dublin at the offices of the Irish Boxing Board of Control (IBBC), a rather fanciful description of what was actually just part of a room above a bookmaker’s in Talbot Street owned by Terry Rogers, who also happened to be chairman of the IBBC. In Ireland to lend credibility to Sugrue’s attempts to get the locals on board, Conrad was stunned when some reporters privately whispered in his ear that the Kerryman wasn’t exactly reliable and might well be writing cheques he couldn’t cash. The visitor’s only reaction to this information was to smile and to assure them all that contracts had been signed, letters of credit secured and, whether they wanted to believe it or not, Ali would be fighting in Dublin
on a bill put together as a joint venture with the much-maligned Sugrue.
‘I have a personal commitment for Ali to travel to Ireland to box here in early July,’ he said, before posing for a photograph with the grinning officers of the IBBC. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the fight will come off. We will be having definite talks with the Croke Park authorities soon with a view to getting their ground as the venue.’
Described by the press as the agent who handled Ali’s business in Europe, Conrad spoke with authority and standing. An intimate and confidant of the fighter, he knew there were sound financial reasons why he would be prepared to travel to Dublin. In the strange place in his professional life he had now reached, the deposed champion was forced to traverse the globe to put on shows and fill his coffers. No matter the currency, new locations were always welcome. And essential for the business model. Just two weeks after Conrad ambled down Talbot Street, Ali climbed into the ring at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall, wearing a lavishly embroidered silk kimono and carrying a sign predicting he would end his contest with Mac Foster in the fifth round. It was 1 April, and after subsequently watching him secure a unanimous decision at the end of a lacklustre fifteen, many thought the fight a bad April Fool’s joke. Never in any danger of losing, Ali seemed to become bored and disinterested once Foster refused to go down in the face of prolonged early barrages.
More than a year had passed since his defeat by Frazier on 8 March 1971, and while the former champion was no longer in forced exile, he was also no longer the king. Before beginning his post-Frazier rehabilitation against Jimmy Ellis at the Houston
Astrodome on 26 July 1971, he had come within a whisker of signing on for a bizarre bout against the basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. When he learned of the public’s indifference ahead of his next outing – Buster Mathis at the same venue four months later – he seriously suggested to one of the promoters that a fake kidnapping of him might work wonders at the box office. Not quite six weeks after that, just three American sports writers travelled to Zurich to watch him earn an effortless victory over Jürgen Blin, the German ex-butcher whose former profession didn’t quite match his fighting style. By that stage, Frazier still hadn’t returned to the ring, but Ali was having to go further and further in search of a crowd and a living. Maybe Sports Illustrated had been right when the headline on the magazine’s cover story after his defeat at Madison Square Garden declared: ‘End of the Ali Legend’.
‘The whole time I wasn’t allowed to fight, no matter what the authorities said, it felt like I was the heavyweight champion of the world,’ said Ali later. ‘Then I lost to Joe Frazier. And what hurt most wasn’t the money that losing cost me. It wasn’t the punches I took. It was knowing that my title had gone. When I beat Sonny Liston, I was too young to appreciate what I’d won. But when I lost to Frazier, I would have done anything except go against the will of Allah to get my title back.’
Following the defeat of Blin, Ali began 1972 by making a hajj to Mecca, the pilgrimage every Muslim is required to undertake at least once in their life. During that trip, he accompanied his manager, Herbert Muhammad, to Tripoli on Nation of Islam business. A $3 million loan that Libya had earlier agreed to make to the Nation had been slow in materialising, and Herbert correctly deduced that bringing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s
favourite fighter to visit him might speed up the process. While preparing for their audience with the Libyan leader, Ali spent time joshing with Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda and, as he liked to boast, holder of that country’s heavyweight title since 1951. The money finally came through and went towards making the Nation’s Mosque Maryam, on the south side of Chicago, one of the ten largest religious complexes in America.
On a personal level, Ali had a mixed start to the year too. His second wife, Belinda, was pregnant with his first son, Muhammad Junior, who would be born on 14 May; one of his regular girlfriends, Patricia Harvell, was also carrying a child for him; and on 2 March, his first wife Sonji won a court judgement for close to $50,000 in unpaid alimony. Ali wasn’t in any serious financial trouble, but he needed regular money coming in to fund his outgoings. There had been too many idle years. Over the course of his last four fights, the purses had decreased each time from a high of $450,000 against Ellis to a low of $200,000 for waltzing with Foster in Japan. Hardly chicken feed, it was nevertheless a far cry from the $2,500,000 he had earned losing to Frazier and, despite constant speculation about a rematch of mind-blowing financial dimensions, the new champion didn’t look to be in any hurry to put his title on the line.
Conrad knew Ali’s worrisome financial position in grim detail because he had lost good money himself co-promoting the Blin farce, and he envisaged Dublin as an opportunity to recoup that investment. Casting around for a likely opponent, he realised that, after the criticism heaped on Ali for underperforming in Tokyo and for meeting a genuine contender for bum-of-the-month status in Zurich, a fighter with some vestige of credibility was essential to
the success of the Irish promotion. McAlinden wasn’t going to be up to the task, so Conrad called a friend of his in Cleveland, Ohio.
A promoter-cum-manager-cum-matchmaker, Don Elbaum went down in boxing history as the person who introduced Don King to the sport. Back then, he owned 15 per cent of a Detroit heavyweight called Al ‘Blue’ Lewis. With nineteen knockouts and only four losses from thirty-four starts, Lewis was a good puncher who found it hard to get regular fights. Nobody on the way up wanted to take a chance on incurring a blemish on their record, while those already at the top couldn’t be paid large enough purses to outweigh the risk of him knocking them out. Consequently, Lewis struggled to find opponents, and fought only twice in the whole of 1971.
‘We started talking about candidates and I said immediately: “Jesus, it has to be Al ‘Blue’ Lewis,”’ says Elbaum. ‘I told Hal, “This is the perfect fight for him, he’s a double tough guy, he’s big, he’s strong, he can punch and it could be a great fight because he’ll stay in there with Ali.”’
It only remained for Conrad to thrash out a deal with Herbert Muhammad. When the proposal of a fight in Dublin was first put to him, Ali’s manager asked for $250,000 for his fighter. From there, negotiations continued downwards. Conrad pleaded poverty on behalf of ‘the poor people in Ireland’, arguing that a high fee would preclude the ordinary worker from attending the event. He then played his trump card, reminding Muhammad that it was he and he alone who got stung by the financially disastrous Blin fight. Eventually, they agreed $200,000 was a fair amount.
Throughout their discussion, one unspoken factor influenced the way they did business. Conrad was owed a serious favour by
the Ali camp. He wasn’t Muslim. He wasn’t black. Yet few people in the fighter’s inner circle enjoyed the standing he did. When it mattered most, he had proved his mettle. After Ali lost his licence for refusing induction into the US Army in April 1967, nobody worked harder to get him back in the ring than Conrad. Nobody. Sure, his motivation throughout those three and a half fallow years was professional more than personal; the longer the champ was down and out, the more Conrad knew that the first fight back would be as big as they come. To this end, he crisscrossed America and beyond in search of a venue, a town, a politician who shared his view that this event – the one destined for a special place in history – was the one in which to be involved.
‘Conrad’s finest hour may have been his effort on behalf of Muhammad Ali, when the controversial champion was dethroned and driven into fistic exile for his opposition to the vietnam War,’ wrote Budd Schulberg. ‘Conrad was neither an advocate of black power nor exactly a civil rights activist, but he had been instrumental in getting the young Cassius the title shot against Liston and had become one of Clay/Ali’s closest honky friends. He also knew there would be no serious money for the heavyweight title until the usurper, Joe Frazier, proved his right to that title in a shoot-out with Ali. We watched Conrad as he roamed the continent year after year in search of a ring for “The Fight of the Century”.
‘He tried Canada, Baja California, and states beyond the jurisdiction of the self-important bureaucrats who ran the commission. Every time he thought he had it made, someone threw a patriotic monkey wrench into Conrad’s wheel. At last, he helped jawbone a fight in Georgia, of all places, against the perennial white hope
Jerry Quarry, something neither the Honourable Elijah Muhammad [leader of the Nation of Islam], Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, nor the Reverend Jesse Jackson had been able to do. Thanks to Conrad, who even helped set up the ring and personally arrange the chairs that wild night in Atlanta, Ali was on the road back to national acceptance as a world champion.’
The walls of Conrad’s apartment in Manhattan were hung with pictures of him with everybody from Joe Louis to King Farouk of Egypt, and his involvement with Ali represented merely the latest chapter in an extraordinary career. very early in his professional life, he was a boxing writer with the Brooklyn Eagle, and he and Schulberg became good friends knocking around the New York fight scene together. The Oscar-winning author of On the Waterfront subsequently based Humphrey Bogart’s troubled publicist character in The Harder They Fall on his pal.
‘You can imagine how proud I am,’ said Conrad in an interview with Rolling Stone. ‘Bogart, my favourite actor, playing me in the movies! So, one night I’m in a Sunset Strip joint, and I see Bogart sitting at a table. He’s got his head down over his glass, and I say, “Mr. Bogart, my name is Harold Conrad. I just want to tell you how proud I am that you’re playing me in The Harder They Fall. Now, he raises his head, and I can see how skulled he is. His eyes are barely open. I repeat my line about how proud I am. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself!” he says and drops his head back down over the glass … I was never so crushed in my whole life.’
Born in East New York in 1911, the son of Romanian immigrants, Conrad dabbled in several different callings before evolving into one of the sport’s most renowned movers and shakers. Having served as an intelligence officer in the US Army
Air Corps during the Second World War, he worked in public relations in the casino business, the demimonde of legendary 1940s gangsters like Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel. The first time he smoked a joint it was in the company of Louis Armstrong and Dickie Wells backstage at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. His dime novel, The Battle at Apache Pass, sold over a million copies and, during a screenwriting stint in Hollywood, his best-known film was Sunny Side of the Street. No matter the job, every task was performed by him with a certain style and pronounced élan. He often shone as bright as many of the stars he wrangled.
Directing operations around the 1961 clash between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson in Miami, Conrad encountered a precocious nineteen-year-old Cassius Clay for the first time. Having subsequently handled both Patterson–Liston bouts, he played a vital role in keeping things running smoothly in the tumultuous build-up to Clay’s attempt to dethrone Liston three years later. When news broke of Clay’s impending embrace of the Nation of Islam – he had invited Malcolm X and his family to stay with him before the fight – the implications for the box office in Miami were huge. Unless Clay agreed to publicly disassociate himself from Islam, Bill McDonald, the promoter, was going to pull the plug.
Enter Conrad at his most brilliant and diplomatic best, cast in a role that became one of the cornerstones of his legend. He struck a deal with McDonald. If he could persuade Malcolm X to leave town, the promotion would go ahead as planned. Arriving at the house where Clay was billeted, Conrad encountered a frosty reception from a host of Nation of Islam followers in suits and ties.
Ali sets foot in Dublin with Angelo Dundee, Harold Conrad and his brother Rahaman behind him. All images are courtesy of the Irish Photo Archive.
Ali puzzles over a shillelagh gifted to him by Timothy ‘Chub’ O’Connor TD.
Ali at Stewart Hospital Fête, Palmerstown, Dublin. His brother Rahaman is behind him and Dickie Rock is to the right, facing the camera.
Butty Sugrue with his protégé Mick Meaney, who broke the world record for time spent being buried alive.
Ali flanked by a gaggle of excited TDs at Leinster House, including Timothy ‘Chub’ O’Connor (second from left).
Ali with Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Butty Sugrue at Leinster House.