Grady and the Champ

Ponder was hardly the only young, poor black kid in Miami who dreamed of becoming the Champ. In the early Sixties, boxing was still the second most popular sport in the nation (behind baseball), and even before Clay came to town, Miami was a hub. The city was full of places to box. On NW 79th Street there was the Little River Auditorium, a small gym that was converted into a boxing arena where every Thursday night 400 or 500 people would pack in for a night of fighting — two four-rounders, two six-rounders, and the main event, an eight-rounder. Sometimes area bars would set up a tiny ring in the back and host fights. One of these jerry-rigged arenas was the bar at the Sir John Hotel in Overtown — better known for prostitution, gambling, and drugs than for boxing. In Liberty City there was the Palace, a dive that occasionally hosted bouts. The best fighters in the world — Sugar Ray Robinson, Luis Rodriguez, Joe Frazier, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter — all passed through Miami.

But Clay's arrival was different. At the time, the 20-year-old wasn't even considered the greatest boxer in Miami. Before coming to town, he had fought only one professional fight, a six-rounder against the police chief of Fayetteville, West Virginia. But that didn't matter: By the time he stepped through the ropes at the Miami Beach Auditorium, Clay was a celebrity.

"He was the most publicized fighter in the world ... because of his brashness, because of his talking," says boxing historian, archivist, manager, and recent hall-of-famer Hank Kaplan, who lives in Kendall and maintains what he modestly dubs "the most comprehensive archive on the planet." Kaplan, who keeps his age a professional secret, grew close to Clay from the beginning.

"I'll never forget this time when he heard me coming up the steps at the Fifth Street Gym," Kaplan recalls, "and he says, 'Hey, Hank, who's the number 10 heavyweight in the world?' I says, 'I don't know. I'll check the ratings. Why?' He says, 'Well, I want him.' That's how he was — it was his second professional fight! He was just being honest; he was so impressed with himself."

Clay was so popular that the gym, which had always charged visitors a small fee to watch boxers train, began to charge double when he was there. The ring, Kaplan says, would be surrounded by spectators, with Clay chatting away within.

But if he was something of a novelty for fans, Clay inspired a kind of mystical awe in Miami's boxers, who were mostly black and poor, fighters like Jerry Powers ("The Prince of Second Avenue"), Bobby Marie, Willie "Cadillac" James, Grady McClendon, and Herb Siler.

They idolized Ali, and being invited to train at the Fifth Street Gym was one step closer to being like him.

"I came right off the streets and came to the gym," remembers Eddie Linder, a lightweight from Overtown who took to boxing to defend himself from the gangs that loitered around his school. Linder, now 60, hangs out every day at the Miami-Dade Park and Recreation Department's boxing center on NW 27th Avenue and 69th Street, where his son Elijah trains. Linder still looks like a fighter — huge shoulders, chiseled arms. "I was so proud, man, when Angelo [Dundee] asked me to train on the beach," he says. "I felt so good, man, I felt like somebody." Like Ponder, he modeled himself after Ali. "I was a good scientific boxer, like Ali," he says. "And I was a good showman. I could put on a good fight for people. I would do Luis Rodriguez style — pop pop pop pop — then I would do Ali style. Sometimes I thought I was doing it better than Ali."

Willie Melton was another local kid who trained with Ponder at Fifth Street. In fact he and Ponder were best friends. A few years after Ponder began boxing, he rented an apartment with Melton at NW 62nd Street and 12th Court. Melton, too, had been drawn to boxing by the desire to become Muhammad Ali. "He was a beautiful guy, man. A nice person, too, you know?" Melton remembers. "We'd practice speed bags at the same time, right hand, left hand. I remember the bell would go, and pa pa pa pa, ba ba ba ba — he'd say, 'You little runt, you think you the Champ?'

"Everybody wanted to be like the Champ — everybody," Melton emphasizes. "Even before he whupped Sonny Liston, he was famous. Who didn't want to be like the Champ?"

Of the scores of local boxers, Grady Ponder was from the start one of the best. He was just 16 years old when he fought his first bout, against a Puerto Rican lightweight named Hector Verdugo, and won easily. He was victorious in his next fight as well, and the next, and the next. By the end of his first year of boxing, he had fought 25 matches and lost only once.