The Louisville Lip

The beginning of an article written by Huston Horn that was published in Sports Illustrated on September 25, 1961:

The clapboard house at 3302 Grand Avenue, Louisville is a commonplace dwelling one story high and four rooms deep. The ornamental frame of the front screen door was curlicued by hand with a scroll saw, and the concrete steps to the gray front porch are painted in stripes, red, white and blue.

"Don't bother your head about that house," says Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., 19 going on 20, the lyrical young man, lyrically named, who grew up there. "One of these days they're liable to make it a national shrine. Only by that time I'll be long gone, man, living it up on the top of a hill in a house that cost me $100,000. You'll find me out by the swimming pool, and I'll be talking to a bunch of little boys sitting in a circle around my feet. 'Boys,' I'll say to them, 'I was just a poor boxer once, as I reckon you already know. Only I was a very fine boxer, one of the finest that ever lived. And right there's how come I could move out of that little house down there on Grand Avenue and build this big one up here on the hill.'"

Here's one more quote from the same article:

"Like last Sunday," said Cassius, the unashamed, unequivocating materialist, not long ago. "Some cats I know said, 'Cassius, Cassius, come on now and let's go to church; otherwise you won't get to Heaven.' 'Hold on a minute,' I said to them, 'and let me tell you something else. When I've got me a $100,000 house, another quarter million stuck in the bank and the world title latched onto my name, then I'll be in Heaven. Walking around making $25 a week, with four children crying at home 'cause they're hungry, that's my idea of Hell. I ain't studying about either one of them catching up with me in the graveyard."