Barbara Heilman

In the old days the stock car tracks, except at Darlington, S.C., were dirt. Stock car racers were presumed to be all hellers and certainly were all poor. They were said to run whisky and they drank a lot of it, and they would drive all night to pull up at a starting line and go.

It was, no matter what you have read or heard, an enormously exciting fight. It matched the classic contenders for a heavyweight championship of the world—a beautiful, controlled boxer against a man who could hit with deadly power. The fight—Clay against Liston—restored balance and intelligence to the concept of boxing. The boxer, using his skills with aplomb and courage and forethought, confounded and defeated the slugger.

About an hour and a half after he had won the heavyweight boxing title on a moist Miami night last week, Cassius Clay was driven to a Negro motel where he ate ice cream in a dish and hammed it up while a tall man in glasses snapped his picture. The ice cream was vanilla, the photographer a Black Muslim leader named Malcolm X, and taken together they pretty much summarized the new world champion: his tastes are just as simple, and his thoughts on life just as murky as they have been for years.