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Cassius Clay's got lots of ability, but he's not The Greatest. He's a guy with a million dollars worth of confidence and a dime's worth of courage. I could have whipped him. In all honesty, I feel it in my bones. Clay can be clobbered, and if you'll pardon an old-timer talking, I am cerrtain I know how.

These days, I get to the fights in most parts of the world, especially when Clay is defending my old heavyweight title. We kid around in training camps a little, and Clay makes speeches and goes into his act, telling folks how he would have fought Joe Louis. I play along. It don't harm nobody. Maybe helps with the action, puts a few dollars on the take.

Fellows come up, asking for autographs, that kind of thing, and tell me I could have licked Clay with the Empire State Building tied to my feet. I don't say anything.

But a man gets thoughts sitting there watching Clay. I see him fooling in the gym, and I seen nearly all his fights, right through from Willie Besmanoff, way back in Louisville, to Cleveland Williams in Houston. Sometimes Clay fights good and sometimes he pulls rhubarbs that should get his head knocked off if the other guy knew his trade like they made me learn mine.

Trouble with Clay, he thinks he knows it all. Fights with his mouth. He won't listen. Me, first thing I learned in the fight gane was to keep my trap shut and my ears wide open, especially when my wise old trainer, Chappie Blackburn, was telling me things for my own good.

We did all right. Seems like I won a championship, so maybe I'm entitled to speak up a word or two of truth after all these years. And the truth in my book is I'm sure I could've put Clay away, and also know how.

Clay says he's got the fastest hands and the fastes feet of any heavyweight who was ever born. That's his opinion and he's entitled to it. The kid has speed and can surely box when he has to. There's nobody around to outbox him, and the opponent who tries is in his grave. Especially in the middle of the ring. With room to move, Clay's a champion, real dangerous. But he doesn't know a thing about fighting on the ropes, which is where he would be if he were in there with me. He's all confused, his feet in knots, and his body wide open to everything.

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I'd see to it that Clay did not stay in ring-center. Out there, I could be the Patsy on the wrong end of the punishment. No, he'd be hit into those ropes as near a corner as I could get him...someplace where, from all I've seen, he just does not know how to fight.

If he stayed on the ropes, he'd get hurt. Sooner or later he'd try to bounce off, and when he did he would get hurt more. That's what the fight game is all about.

I'd press him, bang him around, claw him, clobber him with all I had, cut down his speed, belt him around the ribs. I'd punish the body, where the pain comes real bad. I know; I can still feel the trip-hammers Rocky Marciano hit me with when he knocked me out when he was on his way up and I was on my way out.

Clay would have welts on his body like I did. He would ache, like I did. His mouth would shut tight against the pain, and there would be tears burning his eyes. It is not very funny being under fire from bodypunches, and it wouldn't help Clay any looking for his trainer, Angelo Dundee, to come riding into the ring with the rescue posse.

Those guys in the corner fight good during the intervals, but they can't give you any more fists or any more heart when some guy's caving your ribs in.

"Kill the body and the head will die," Chappie used to tell me. It figures.

Sooner or later, I think Clay would get the message. Get it so good that he'd stop worrying about that face of his and drop his left hand like he did against Mildenberger and George Chuvalo. Those fellows got their openings by accident, and then fouled them up. I would work for it, and I wouldn't reckon to miss when it arrived.

If I goofed with a world title and a million dollars or so in the pot (plus all that television money these days), then I would not have any right to be in there with a smart fighter like Cassius Clay.

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In London, and in most other places I go, people always ask me how Clay would have come through against my old opponents, and we kick the thing around, arguing this way and that.

I think Jersey Joe Walcott would have outgeneraled him. Clay is faster, but old Joe had a better style and better brains. When he dropped the left it wasn't a mistake. It was to feint you on to a right hand that could bring the roof down on your head.

Billy Conn was like lightning. He learned his trade in the small clubs, from welter right through to heavyweight. He could have kept up with Clay because his legs knew where they were going. Only thing is, Clay and Conn would have been running away from each other so fast that there would have been no fight.

Clay, I think, would have hit too fast for Jim Braddock and would have had too many moves for max baer. Maxie packed a punch but never paid enough attention to learning his business the hard way: In camp and round the clubs.

Schmeling could have taken Clay with his right, same way he took me when I forgot to keep my left up after I'd jabbed with it in out first fight.

But, of all my old opponents, the one to give Clay the worst time would have been Rocky Marciano. The Rock didn't know too much about the boxing book, but it wasn't a book he hit me with. It was a whole library of bonecrushers.

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So who would have won if they fought? I think pre-ban Ali would have won by UD because he was too fast for him but Louis would have gotten the better of post-ban Ali. Oh and I think Louis was on drugs when he wrote that Marciano would have given Ali a hard time. Marciano would be lucky to win three rounds against prime Ali.