And no race holds the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength
and there is room for all at the rendezvous of victory and we
know that the sun turns around our land shining over the plot
chosen by our will alone and that every star falls from the sky
at our limitless command.
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
In August 1970, Atlanta became the first American city to license an Ali fight since 1967. It was a testimony to the growing political and economic clout of the city’s black elite, among them Martin Luther King, Sr. and Maynard Jackson. They forced through the measure despite the enraged opposition of Governor Lester Maddox, who tried to get the Justice Department to intervene. It had been hoped that Ali would fight Joe Frazier for the title, but in light of the continuing uncertainties surrounding Ali’s legal position, Frazier’s camp remained noncommittal and Ali signed to fight Jerry Quarry. Meanwhile, the NAACP legal defense fund filed a suit against the New York State Athletic Commission on Ali’s behalf. On 28 September, a federal judge, noting that convicted rapists, robbers and army deserters were currently licensed by the commission, ruled that Ali’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated and ordered his license restored.
In the run-up to the Atlanta bout, the Ali-haters made their presence felt. Gunshots were fired outside Ali’s cabin in the Georgia woods. In the mail, he received a box with the severed head of a black chihuahua and the message: “We know how to handle black draft-dodging dogs in Georgia. Stay out of Atlanta!” On 26 October, Ali made his return to the ring. After the years in exile he seemed more aware than ever of his peculiar representative burden: “I’m not just fighting one man. I’m fighting a lot of men, showing them here is one man they couldn’t conquer. Lose this one, and it won’t just be a loss to me. So many millions of faces throughout the world will be sad.” A 90 percent black crowd watched Ali knock out Quarry (the first white American he’d fought since 1962) in the third round. In attendance were Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Coretta King, Whitney Young and Mary Wilson. “Because of that fight,” Julian Bond recalled, “Atlanta came into its own as the black political capital of America.”
The era of Ali’s return to the ring witnessed an efflorescence of black pride and black culture. The themes of Black Power were echoed in soul and funk music. White performers had turned their backs on the Vietnam conflict and the music of social protest, but black singers, composers and arrangers spoke more passionately and directly about the war than ever before. In 1970, Edwin Starr released his thunderous “War,” and in “Ball of Confusion” the Temptations stormed, “People all over the world shouting end the war, and the band played on.” The next year Marvin Gaye released his musical mosaic of social realism and redemptive religious aspiration, What’s Goin On:
Crime is increasing
Trigger-happy policing
Panic is spreading
God knows where we’re heading
Graphic references to black poverty and oppression, invocations of racial awareness, the call for community responsibility—all regarded as the commercial kiss of death in the early sixties—now became staples of commercial black cultural production. In the hands of Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Bobby Womack and others, social consciousness was transmuted into an art at once sensuous and reflective. Overt political partisanship, Ali-style, remained rare. Nonetheless, in these years, black popular music articulated, disseminated and legitimized themes and feelings that had long been present in African-American culture, but which only a few years before, when broached by Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, had been regarded as entirely alien to American public discourse. And, of course, it did so under the aegis—and for the profit—of a white-dominated recording industry.
This was also the era of the rise of reggae, a unique effusion of the Black Atlantic. The Wailers began by re-working American R&B and soul with Caribbean rhythms and instrumentation, themselves the product of a composite culture that had matured over centuries. Their generation felt the impact of Black Power across the West Indies, where it answered the need for a post-colonial analysis of racial oppression. Influenced by Garveyism, pan-Africanism and the revolts in the Third World, as well as the ferment in North American ghettos (not to mention the transnational mysticism of ganja), Marley and Tosh chronicled the experiences and voiced the yearnings of the Jamaican poor, but placed them in a world context. Like the Nation of Islam, they expressed the desire for collective and individual redemption through the Biblical language of exile and return. Like Ali, in speaking of and for a diaspora, they invoked a vision of universal social justice underpinned by human love. From the margins of the world economy, out of a parochial vernacular, they created a vanguard modern sound which proved hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic and in northern and southern hemispheres.
Even as reggae radiated outward from its home base, the same spirit of Caribbean pride, the same diaspora identity, was carried abroad by the great West Indian cricketers of the 1970s. Under the leadership of Clive Lloyd, they left deference and division behind, and became icons of style and success wherever cricket has a hold on the popular imagination. Viv Richards, the master batsman from Antigua, whose exploits on English wickets gave huge pleasure to Britain’s black communities, was the self-conscious personification of black pride, and openly associated himself with both Rastafarianism and Black Power. Not surprisingly, he frequently cited Muhammad Ali as his inspiration and “role model.”
In America, however, this era of ever more dramatic assertions of black pride and identity was accompanied by a retreat from political organization and engagement. The anti-war movement had peaked. The reduction of American ground troops in the wake of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy blunted domestic opposition, even as US bombers rained destruction on Southeast Asia with unprecedented ferocity. On the civil rights front, legislative progress had ground to a halt. From the late sixties, unemployment was on the rise in the ghettos, which never recovered from the Vietnam War, a war whose reality was receding even then from American consciousness. Amidst the gritty street observation and social criticism, the songs of the time also include wild celebrations of hedonism and invocations of a racial-musical utopia. Funk’s great theme became funk itself—“One nation under a groove.” More and more, the initiative was being surrendered to representations and representatives. It was the era of Hollywood blaxploitation and the rise of elected black officials. In this contradictory environment the second career of Muhammad Ali—from 1971 to 1978—unfolded, coinciding with the zenith, fracturing and decline of Black Power.
Six weeks after his comeback fight in Atlanta, Ali knocked out Oscar Bonavena in the fourteenth round at Madison Square Garden. On 30 December he signed to fight Joe Frazier for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world. Whether measured by the amount of money involved or the scale of global interest, it was at that time the biggest fight in boxing history. Ironically, the promoters and the media owed this bonanza to Ali’s defiance of the draft and exile from the ring. Officially, Frazier was the champion and Ali the challenger; in reality, as Frazier himself acknowledged, he would not be recognized as the true titleholder until he beat Ali. For the fans, the fight promised to resolve one of the most hotly debated questions in world sports: Who was really the best heavyweight?
However, it was not only Ali’s long absence from the ring, but also its causes and context that made this fight compelling to huge numbers of people otherwise indifferent to boxing. By now, Ali had mastered both the rhetoric of race and the symbolic power of the ring. He knew better than anyone how to combine the two to mobilize popular support (and sell tickets).
Frazier’s no real champion. Nobody wants to talk to him. Oh, maybe Nixon will call him if he wins. I don’t think he’ll call me. But 98 percent of my people are for me. They identify with my struggle. Same one they’re fighting every day in the streets. If I win, they win. I lose, they lose. Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an Uncle Tom.
Sixty years earlier, when Du Bois had declared “the blacker the mantle the mightier the man,” it had seemed, even in the black community, a shocking statement. Now, Ali reclaimed the idea in the common parlance of boxing promotion. The irony was that Frazier had grown up among the poorest of the black poor in South Carolina and his skin, as he himself pointed out, was blacker than Ali’s. In calling Frazier “an ignorant gorilla,” Ali used language which, had it come from a white fighter, would have provoked a bitter reaction among black people. “Joe Frazier is too ugly to be champ. Joe Frazier is too dumb to be champ. The heavyweight champion should be smart and pretty like me. Ask Joe Frazier, ‘How do you feel, champ?’ He’ll say, ‘Duh, duh, duh.’” Frazier resented being cast by Ali as another Liston and, these days, is one of the few people willing to say anything uncomplimentary about Ali in public. “Calling me an Uncle Tom; calling me the white man’s champion. All that was phoniness to turn people against me. He was helping himself, not black people. Ali wasn’t no leader of black people.… A lot of people went to the fight that night to see Clay’s head knocked off and I did my best to oblige them.” But this was precisely Joe Frazier’s dilemma: the people who wanted him to beat Ali were the die-hard racists, the love-it-or-leave-it brigade, the people who resented everything Ali stood for. Frazier was a magnificent boxer whose tragedy was that he came along at a time when his only public profile was as a foil to Ali. His bitter complaint against Ali—that the latter stole his blackness from him—reveals how much had changed since the days of Liston and Patterson, not to mention Joe Louis and Jack Johnson. Blackness had become a positive attribute, a selling point for professional sports figures, a key to success on and off the level playing field. It was a tremendous achievement and one that belonged in no small measure to Muhammad Ali.
The poet Larry Neal, one of the key figures in the black arts movement of the time, felt the polarization between Ali as the blacks’ black and Frazier as the whites’ black obscured a much more interesting dialectic between the two men, both of whom, he believed, were necessary expressions of black style. “Frazier is stomp-down blues, bacon, grits and Sunday church.… But Ali is body bebop.” In the event, the fight proved a contest not only of styles, but of will and staying power. It was a brutal battle, the first of three they would contest over the next four years, and after fifteen rounds Frazier emerged victorious. For the first time since 1964, Ali could no longer claim even the unofficial world championship. He had finally been “whupped” in the ring. It was his first professional defeat, and he accepted it with calm dignity. In Pakistan, however, an Ali fan died of a heart attack, the only known occasion, apart from its cricket matches with India, when sporting partisanship has proved fatal in that country. In London, Sivanandan lamented:
Tonight the black world weeps that their king has passed away. But tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow … every black man will become his own king—for that is the legacy that Muhammad Ali leaves.… The civil rights movement had only served to cordon off the black athlete in a Bantustan of sport. It was left to Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to threaten the total release of the negro. Muhammad Ali is the epitome of that release. And it is this that bugs white society. He is not just a prizefighter, he is not even one man. He is many men—and all of them black.
Through all this, the threat of jail still hung over Ali’s head. In July 1970, the federal appeal court had upheld his conviction, and during his fights with Quarry, Bonavena and Frazier he was technically out on bail pending a final appeal. In April 1971, his case finally came before the Supreme Court—the same court which had recently refused to sanction conscientious objection on the grounds of opposition to a particular war. Pressure for Ali’s imprisonment was still coming from southern congressmen, and the Justice Department never relented in its insistence that Ali’s objections to military service “rest on grounds which are primarily political and racial.” The chief justice was Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, and Ali, as Jackie Robinson said, was Nixon’s “pet peeve.” Back in 1969, when the case first came before the Court, only one judge, Brennan, had been prepared to hear it, but the wiretap revelations had given the judges the excuse to defer the matter by sending it back to a lower court. Now, Brennan and others felt that there was no room for further evasion. Given the mood in the country, Ali had to be accorded a hearing in the Supreme Court before he could be jailed.
Thurgood Marshall, who had been solicitor general when the Justice Department initiated the case against Ali, recused himself. Of the remaining judges only three, Douglas, Brennan and Stewart, supported Ali’s appeal; the other five voted to uphold his conviction and send him to jail. Harlan, in his last year on the bench, was sent away to write the majority opinion. His clerk was persuaded by another clerk, who had read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, to reconsider Ali’s claims. At his instigation, Harlan read Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man in America, and as a result became convinced that the Justice Department had misrepresented Ali’s and the Nation’s beliefs. Since Ali was sincerely opposed to all wars, Harlan decided, he should be exempt. The vote was tied four to four. An outraged Burger told a clerk that Harlan had become an “apologist” for the Black Muslims.
A deadlock in the Supreme Court would mean that the lower court judgement would stand. Ali would still go to jail. But Stewart remained anxious about the implications of jailing Ali in the absence of a final decision by the Supreme Court. A compromise was agreed. It appeared that in its arguments to the Court, the government had subtly altered its position. It now accepted both that Ali was “sincere” in his opposition to the Vietnam War and that this opposition was based on religious beliefs (the first two tests of conscientious objection), but it still claimed that he did not oppose all wars (the third test) because he had stated he would fight for his own people in a Holy War. However, that was not what the Justice Department had told the draft board when it considered Ali’s initial appeal against 1-A classification. As a result, it was possible for the Court to rule that the government had given the draft board incorrect advice (as to the sincerity and religious basis of Ali’s objection), which was sufficient grounds for overturning the conviction stemming from that draft board’s decision. The Court could set Ali free, without setting a dangerous precedent. With some reluctance Burger fell into line, conceding the deal “would be a good lift for black people.”
On 28 June 1971, the Supreme Court reversed Muhammad Ali’s conviction and the Justice Department dropped all criminal charges against him. His passport was returned. Ali’s reaction was revealing:
I don’t really think I’m going to know how that feels until I start to travel, go to foreign countries, see those strange people in the street. Then I’m gonna know I’m free.
In August he traveled to Caracas and Trinidad to fight exhibitions. In November he was in Buenos Aires. In early 1972, he flew to Libya with Herbert Muhammad to meet Qaddafi, who in his student days in London had visited Ali’s dressing room in search of an autograph. They negotiated a $3 million interest-free loan for the construction of a new mosque in Chicago. Ali re-emerged as a major spokesman for the Nation of Islam. In December, the cover of Muhammad Speaks featured photographs of Ali and Elijah Muhammad under the headline, “Two Spotlights of the World!”
The Nation of Islam was no longer the dynamic force it had been in the early sixties. The leadership of the black nationalist tradition had passed to other, more radical forces. Yet in the meantime it had become an accepted and even respected institution within the black community. Elijah Muhammad emerged as a kind of grand old man of black pride. Thanks to his status in black America, his wealth and his conservative politics, he even gained the belated recognition of white America. Mayor Richard Daley declared 29 March “Honorable Elijah Muhammad Day in Chicago.” The Messenger told FBI agents that “he believed in law and order … and loved America very much.” But he remained on guard against schismatic factions. One of these was the Hanafi sect, which Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had joined, following Ali’s example in his own way. In January 1973, Nation of Islam members brutally executed five members of the family of the sect’s founder, Hamas Abdul Khaalis.
In 1972, Bob Arum approached Ali with a proposal for a fight in Johannesburg. Initially, Ali and Herbert Muhammad considered the deal favorably, but were dissuaded by anti-apartheid campaigners. The Nation of Islam saw little difference between selling Ali’s talents to white Americans and selling them to white South Africans. At this time, despite the upsurge of black consciousness, black America remained only peripherally aware of South Africa. The Soweto uprising and Olympic boycott of 1976 changed that. Had Ali fought in South Africa in 1972, he would have been profoundly compromised in the long run. That may have meant little to Herbert Muhammad, but, even at his most confused, Ali was aware of the power he drew from his unique symbolic status. Certainly, in retrospect, it’s worth contemplating how much would have been forfeited for the sake of a single big payday.
After his loss to Frazier, many boxing pundits wrote Ali off as a spent force. It was indeed an arduous climb back. Ali fought fourteen bouts between his first and second fights with Frazier, losing only to Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw. (Ali won the rematch six months later.) He fought in Zurich, Tokyo, Vancouver and Jakarta. In Dublin he told reporters that his great-grandfather was an Irishman named Grady (which was true). In January 1974, he once again faced Joe Frazier, who in the meantime had been deposed as champion by the awesome George Foreman. After another twelve grueling rounds, Ali won a unanimous decision. The stage was set for his meeting with Foreman.
In Kinshasa, Ali lived up to and beyond every boast he had ever made. The Rumble in the Jungle is the stuff of legend, and thanks to When We Were Kings the legend has been passed down to new generations. As a feat of athletic genius and a heart-stopping drama, Ali’s against-the-odds victory over George Foreman before a huge crowd of partisan Africans and a global television audience has few rivals in the history of sports. But it was also a symbolic triumph par excellence, a Rasta-style allegory of redemption through suffering, of exile and homecoming. Kinshasa echoed with the most triumphal verse of Ali’s own redemption song, but it was also, in disturbing ways, a triumph of representations over realities.
In 1966, Cleveland numbers runner and part-time club owner Don King beat a man to death with a pistol. He was charged with second-degree murder but the judge, whose links with the Mafia were revealed after his death, reduced it to manslaughter. When the same judge ran for the state court of appeals in 1976, Ali, at King’s request, endorsed his campaign on local black radio stations.
King had listened to the first Ali–Frazier fight in his prison cell. After his release, he met up with Ali’s R&B hero and one-time mentor, Lloyd Price, who had known King since his days on the road in the late fifties and had visited him in prison. The forty-year-old King had resolved to make himself into the first big-time black boxing promoter. He started by staging a fund-raising exhibition for an ailing Cleveland hospital serving a black neighborhood. As a favor to King, Price convinced Ali to spar a few rounds; somehow, King also talked Lou Rawls and Marvin Gaye into singing. Jackie Presser, the Teamster leader, bought up reams of tickets and appeared at King’s side during press conferences. The event helped clean up King’s post-prison image and won him praise in the local media. The hospital, however, never received most of the cash King claimed to have raised and was forced to close in 1978.
Boxing needed a black promoter. King pushed himself through the door, happy to be what he gleefully called “the token nigger.” The chief obstacle to black entrepreneurship—in sports or elsewhere—has never been a shortage of entrepreneurial skills, but of capital. King solved that problem by persuading other people to advance the cash (among them, Mobutu, Marcos and the Mafia). This he managed largely through his uncanny ability to convince fighters to consign their fates to him. In The Life and Crimes of Don King, Jack Newfield recounts King’s outlandish efforts to secure the Ali–Foreman fight. In the end, he managed to bypass Bob Arum, who had the inside track in both fighters’ camps, by sheer bravado, and not least by an appeal to shared blackness. “You’re two super athletes, both black,” King told the hesitant Foreman. “You’ve got to forgo the pettiness. This event is bigger than both of you as individuals. It’s monumental, not just in revenue but in the symbolic impact that will reverberate throughout the world—from a black perspective. This is my promotion! And I’m BLACK!”
In the end, King signed both Ali and Foreman by a process of bluff and double bluff. It’s possible neither fighter thought he’d ever have to honor his signature, because it seemed so unlikely King would ever be able to put together the finance. In fact, King’s search for a bankroll was beginning to seem hopeless when he was contacted by Fred Weymer, who had been implicated in the recent Bernie Cornfeld investment scandal (and as a result barred from the United States). Weymer was now managing Mobutu’s Swiss bank accounts and negotiated with King on his master’s behalf. In return for a commitment to stage the fight in Kinshasa, Risnelia, a Panama-chartered shell company used as a front for Mobutu’s overseas holdings, provided King with two $4.8 million letters of credit, one for each fighter. The deal proved to be Don King’s passport to the top of the boxing business.
By staging the fight Mobutu hoped to strengthen his regime, attract foreign capital and win global prestige. Since his installation as dictator in 1965, ruling through repression and cronyism, he had transformed the Congo into a paradigm of post-colonial civic disintegration. Infrastructure deteriorated, the countryside was depopulated, the cities swelled. In the late sixties, he inaugurated a policy of Africanization, and in 1972 changed his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko, the name of his country to Zaire and the name of its capital, Léopoldville, to Kinshasa. Meanwhile, hunger became endemic in rural areas as Kinshasa swallowed up food supplies and mineral wealth flooded out of the country. Between 1969 and 1976, less than 1 percent of state expenditure was invested in agriculture, the mainstay of the majority. With support from western capital and western governments, Mobutu treated Zaire as a private empire, exploiting it as ruthlessly as the Belgians in the days of Leopold II’s Congo Free State. As his country went to hell, he amassed one of the world’s largest private fortunes.
When as a singer I walk on to the platform, to sing back to the people the songs they themselves have created, I can feel a great unity, not only as a person, but as an artist who is one with his audience.
Paul Robeson
At the age of thirty-two, Ali once again found himself the underdog against an unstoppable powerhouse. “This man is supposed to annihilate me, but ten years ago they said the same thing about Sonny Liston,” Ali reminded the press. “George Foreman don’t stand a chance. The world is gonna bow down to me, because the stage is set.” Responding to a question about Foreman’s daunting punching power, he observed, “What you white reporters got to remember is, black folks ain’t afraid of black folks the way white folks are afraid of black folks.” Still, only the most dedicated wishful thinkers gave the ex-champ any chance against Foreman. Like many Ali fans, I too saw the Rumble in the Jungle as a last, probably forlorn, attempt by my hero to recapture past glory.
In the decade since he had announced “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” Ali had accrued enormous symbolic capital and a genuinely global constituency. In promoting the Foreman fight, he set about mobilizing that capital and that constituency. Foreman had set himself up for his role in Ali’s allegorical drama when he waved that little American flag in Mexico City in 1968. Like Frazier, Foreman became, in Ali’s typecasting, another “white hope,” another inferior specimen of the black male, graceless and witless. In contrast, Ali promoted himself as a representative of all those forces that had risen up over the last decade to challenge white American domination. And he happily linked his fate to theirs.
You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?
Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.
While training in America for the fight, Ali playfully warned reporters, “When you get to Africa, Mobutu’s people are gonna put you in a pot, cook you, and eat you.” Mobutu’s foreign minister complained to Herbert Muhammad, “Mr. Ali’s remarks are damaging our image.” When he arrived in Africa with his personal entourage of thirty-five, Ali acted as if he’d never been there before, waxing lyrical about the cars, skyscrapers, television sets and airplanes flown by black pilots. “I used to think Africans were savages. But now that I’m here, I’ve learned that many Africans are wiser than we are. They speak English and two or three more languages. Ain’t that something? We in America are the savages.” Throughout his career, Ali was always happy to repeat and reshuffle his old routines. It was a method of performance derived from a formulaic oral tradition, but it was also Ali’s way of shaping his own message and communicating it to a vast audience. Sometimes the press complained they’d heard it all before, but this time they didn’t even notice that Ali had said much the same thing about Africa on his first visit, ten years earlier.
Eight days before the scheduled fight, Foreman sustained a cut above the eye while sparring. The bout was postponed from 25 September to 30 October. Both fighters were advised by Mobutu’s regime not to leave the country. Ali put a bold face on his disappointment, but told Howard Bingham he missed America, especially ice cream and pretty girls in miniskirts. The music festival, a celebration of the African diaspora organized by Lloyd Price, could not be postponed. The first night was poorly attended, but the government gave away tickets and the final night drew a huge crowd. When Price himself mounted the stage to perform “Stagger Lee,” Ali was on his feet for one of his old favorites.
Price was never paid for his efforts and learned, as so many did, that his trust in Don King had been misplaced. James Brown thought King a hustler from the start, but played along with the black rhetoric for the sake of the show. In private, Ali squabbled with King, but in public he declared, “Don King is the world’s greatest promoter and if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be fighting here in Africa.”
Inadvertently, in Kinshasa, for the first time since the 1960 Olympics, Ali allowed somebody else to manipulate and package his symbolic value. It was Muhammad Ali’s status and history that charged the African venue with popular significance, but it was Don King who orchestrated this symphony of black representations. Kinshasa became a self-consciously African affair, the acme of what might be called “dashiki-ism” among the black American middle class. Yet there was a disjunction between the Africa embraced by the Americans and the Africa the Africans wanted to project. At one press conference, King appeared in African robes, while Mobutu’s ministers wore suits and ties. The official pre-fight publicity emphasized the city’s gleaming new hotels, freshly painted government buildings and wide, spotless boulevards, as well as the country’s mineral wealth (diamonds and copper) and bright economic prospects. Later, David Frost, hired by King to emcee the closed-circuit TV coverage, was to invoke the dynamism of technological advance by breathlessly repeating at every opportunity that the fight was being broadcast “live via satellite from Zaire, Africa.” But it was through song, dance and above all the physical presence of Muhammad Ali in the streets that the real connections between black America and black Africa were made in Kinshasa. Of all the memorable moments in When We Were Kings, the most haunting are those when Ali is at leisure to interact freely with the African poor, especially the children.
Over the years, reporters who observed Ali with children often remarked that he was a politician in the making. Ali kissed babies, however, not to court popularity, but because among children he could indulge his softness, his delight in play and his love of fantasy. Best of all, among children he could slough off the burden of representation; no one would be trying to read between the lines. His generosity of spirit could be expressed without reserve. In return, the generosity of strangers—the African children, the people in the ghetto streets—sustained and empowered him. Ali liked to say he found “strength” in “the love of the people.” That was more than poetic license. By some complex psychological process, he brought this love into the ring with him, and converted it into strength. He turned the burden of representation into an inexhaustible reserve of patience and determination.
In the scenario Ali constructed for the Rumble in the Jungle, he was not only the underdog, but the representative, in Dylan’s phrase, of all the “underdog soldiers of the night.” Shortly before the fight, he spoke directly to Leon Gast’s camera. Along with much else of value, this footage never found its way into the final film, but it reveals that at this moment of ultimate trial, the consummate test of his career, Ali remembered the teachings of his dead friend, Malcolm X. “I’m fighting for God and my people,” he said. “I’m not fighting for fame or money, I’m not fighting for me. I’m fighting for the black people on welfare, the black people who have no future, black people who are wineheads and dope addicts. I am a politician for Allah.” Then, recalling Malcolm’s great hero even as he prepared to fight under the patronage of one of his murderers, he added wistfully, “I wish Lumumba was here to see me.” Not for the first time, Ali may have said much more than he realized.
Though’t be a sportful combat,
Yet in the trial much opinion dwells
No one will ever know exactly how much of his country’s treasury Mobutu plundered to stage this spectacle. Jack Newfield has chronicled the extravagance. Within four months, the stadium on the outskirts of the city was entirely rebuilt, one hundred phone lines were installed to link the stadium to the satellite station fifty miles away, a new runway was built at the airport and a four-lane highway was laid from the airport to the hotels in downtown Kinshasa. Along the way, billboards obscured the view of squatters’ camps. One of them read, “BLACK POWER IS SOUGHT EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD, BUT IT IS REALIZED HERE IN ZAIRE.”
Fifteen thousand people turned up to witness the weigh-in, where Foreman tried to steal Ali’s thunder by entering in an African robe. The fight itself was preceded by a lengthy exhibition of state-sponsored “tribal” dancing. The Mobutu regime presented this as an affirmation of African tradition on the new global media stage; but it was also, like the fight that followed it, a commercial display of black bodies for the entertainment of a largely white television audience. Over the renovated stadium hung a forty-foot-high portrait of Mobutu, the “lion of Zaire.”
A crowd of 62,000 (overwhelmingly Africans) watched Ali come out attacking in round one. After that, he spent most of his time leaning against the ropes—the “rope-a-dope,” he called it later—and covering his face as Foreman punched away at his body to little effect. Between rounds, Ali led the crowd in its deafening chant: “Ali! Bomaye!” (Ali! Kill him!). Taunting Foreman throughout, soaking up punishment that would have finished off almost anyone else, Ali blunted Foreman’s offensive. Among other things, Ali’s performance in Kinshasa was an astonishing display of canny ringcraft and total ring vision. Contrary to his pre-fight predictions, he hardly danced at all after the first round, but somehow managed to lead the ever-advancing Foreman from one corner of the ring to another. Even as ringside critics puzzled over his tactics, he remained in control. At one point, after taking a fearsome battering in the ribs, he seemed to wink at the TV camera. Never was Ali’s supreme gamesmanship—holding, clinching, pushing, tying up and frustrating Foreman, while always staying just the right side of the law—utilized to better effect. He launched and landed fewer punches than Foreman, but they counted for more: swift, economical and accurate. One might almost call them delicate, were it not for the telltale swellings on Foreman’s face.
With thirty seconds left in round eight, Ali moved out from the ropes and suddenly nailed the tiring Foreman with a perfectly executed left–right combination that sent the champion tumbling to the floor. For a moment, Ali stood over him, bouncing on his toes, fists cocked to deliver more punishment if needed, snarling and supreme, eyes afire with victory. The crowd, the writers, the broadcasters were beside themselves. For once, David Frost got it right when he described the jubilant chaos as “the most joyous scene in the history of boxing!” Years later, the Nigerian poet, novelist and human rights activist Wole Soyinka combined African and American idioms to explain Ali’s strategy and success in Kinshasa:
Mortar that goads the pestle: Do you call that
Pounding? The yam is not yet smooth—
Pound, dope, pound! When I have eaten the yam,
I’ll chew the fibre that once called itself
A pestle! Warrior who said, “I will not fight,”
And proved a prophet’s call to arms against a war.
In exile Ali had learned faith in himself and in the future; he had learned to suffer and to wait, and he had learned that he could prevail against the odds. The early lessons of the Nation of Islam, of self-reliance and group solidarity, had matured into a spirit made indomitable by a combined confidence in himself and in the love of the people. The terrifying fortitude Ali displayed in Kinshasa, and later in Manila, was rooted in the experience of exile and persecution. His sixties tribulations hold the key to his seventies triumphs.
Robert Lipsyte called the Rumble in the Jungle “probably the most mythic moment in world sports.” Ali himself explained its appeal: “People like to see miracles. People like to see underdogs that do it. People like to be there when history is made.” But thanks to Ali’s struggles over the years outside the ring, there was much more to Kinshasa than the thrill of a sporting upset. This was a triumph of intelligence and sheer intensity of personality over impersonal brawn. It was also a triumph for everything and everyone that Ali had stood for and with. All over the world, people—black and white—felt Ali’s triumph as their triumph, the vindication of a historical epoch, “the baby figure of the giant mass / Of things to come at large.”
But it must be remembered that there were others present at this rendezvous of victory. One was Don King. Thanks largely to Ali, he was now set on a fantastically lucrative twenty-year career as the heavyweight division’s premier promoter and possibly the most ruthless exploiter of black talent boxing has ever known. Another was Mobutu Sese Seko, who, fearful of any large gathering of his own people, did not attend the fight in person. Instead, he watched the action on closed-circuit TV with his house guest, Idi Amin. Even as the world’s media swarmed around his capital, the price of copper was plunging, and with it the Zairean economy. “The thirst for money transforms men into assassins,” lamented the Archbishop of Kinshasa, “and whoever holds a morsel of authority or means of pressure profits from it to impose on people and exploit them.”
Mobutu was to retain power for another two decades. And the hopes that the Rumble in the Jungle would herald a new era of reciprocity between America and Africa, mediated by African-Americans, were betrayed. The fight in Kinshasa proved a staging-post in a path of development that would leave Africa at an ever greater economic and political disadvantage. Between 1975 and 1995, debts rose, commodity prices fell, and transfers of wealth from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States grew larger by the year. To Basil Davidson, Mobutu’s Zaire exemplified “a degradation which seemed unthinkable during the early years of post-colonial independence.” Davidson cited the murder of Lumumba as a “turning point” in the “downfall.”
The Rumble in the Jungle was one of several events which fomented a renaissance of black American pride in African origins. Another was the publication, in 1976, of Alex Haley’s Roots. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, James Baldwin found it quite natural to link Haley’s chronicle of enslavement and liberation to the values represented by the heavyweight champ.
Even way up here in the twentieth century, Muhammad Ali will not be the only one to respond to the moment that the father lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.”
The following year, the television series adapted from the book projected black America’s African identity to a huge and highly diverse audience. Themes that had been quietly nurtured by black intellectuals and activists for more than a hundred years suddenly found a place in the mainstream of popular culture. Ali helped prepare the way for this momentous development, which was to give rise to conflicting passions and programs over the next two decades. The popularization of radical pan-Africanism—a response to the global crisis of the seventies—was a resource for the oppressed, but it also provided a cloak for the privileged. It led to a commodification of African culture for the black American market, and at the same time inspired funk and hip-hop artists, poets, dancers and painters. It led to the black American mobilization in solidarity with the South Africa freedom struggle in the eighties, as well as to Louis Farrakhan’s deals with the military despots of Nigeria in the nineties. It was behind the rediscovery (and naming) of the Black Atlantic, and the reification of the “black essence” in Afrocentrism. And all these phenomena are foreshadowed in the career of Muhammad Ali.
In the wake of the Kinshasa fight, even Ali’s old enemies had to admit he was truly “the Greatest.” Ring magazine finally named him Fighter of the Year. Sports Illustrated declared him Sportsman of the Year. In December 1974, he was invited to the White House, where Gerald Ford welcomed him in what was widely seen as a symbol of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate national reconciliation. For the first time since he seized the title from Sonny Liston, Ali began to receive substantial endorsement offers. America had failed to break him, so now it accommodated him.
As it turned out, Ali’s victory in Kinshasa set the stage for his re-appropriation by the establishment and ultimately his own physical decline. The zenith of Ali’s career, in and out of the ring, coincided with the beginning of the retreat of the black freedom movement and the reversal of the gains made by the black community. Saigon may have fallen to the Vietcong, but in Boston and other cities across the country white people were mobilizing against bussing with vigor and venom. Integrated and equal education—the starting point of the modern civil rights movement back in 1954—remained one of America’s empty promises. In the decade following the Rumble in the Jungle, average real earnings for young black males fell by 50 percent, as did the proportion of black males in full-time employment. From the mid seventies, de-industrialization, white flight and cuts in public services pounded away at the social and economic base of the black community, which was further eviscerated by the movement of middle-class blacks out of the ghetto (a movement made possible by the gains of the previous era). The income gap between whites and blacks, which had closed over the previous twenty years, began to widen.
As the wave of protest receded and the drive toward black liberation stuttered to a halt, Ali cut a less threatening figure. “The Ali that America ended up loving was not the Ali I loved most,” Jim Brown told Hauser. “The warrior I loved was gone. In a way, he became part of the establishment.” Ali’s new respectability owed much to events in the Nation of Islam following the death of Elijah Muhammad in February 1975. Days later, at the Savior’s Day convention, Ali and senior figures in the Nation publicly pledged allegiance to Wallace Muhammad, the one-time apostate, as the new supreme minister. Ali was also a member of the five-man board appointed to assist Wallace, along with Herbert Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. Over the next year, Wallace transformed the Nation. Seats were removed from the mosques. Paper-sale quotas were dropped. The paramilitary Fruit of Islam was abolished. Members were urged to register and to vote. Wallace called for a “new sense of patriotism” and for blacks to “identify with the land and the flag.” Mosque No. 7 in Harlem was renamed for its former minister, “Malcolm Shabazz.” Most shockingly of all, whites were admitted.
In October 1976, Wallace announced to his followers that they were no longer the Nation of Islam, but the World Community of Islam in the West. Seven months later, he publicly renounced his father’s claim to divine messenger status and brought the organization’s theology into line with Sunni orthodoxy. Publicly and privately, Ali welcomed Wallace’s reforms. He had always been uncomfortable with the “white devil” theory and through his travels had become aware of the gulf between world Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. However, his old mentor, Jeremiah Shabazz, was appalled and left the Nation in disgust, as did Louis Farrakhan, who founded a second Nation of Islam, re-emphasizing Elijah’s black nationalism and conservative social philosophy. The liquidation of the Nation of Islam proved in the end an occasion for its rebirth, not because of any master strategy on the part of Farrakhan, but because the underlying conditions of poverty and exclusion that gave rise to the first Nation have endured.
After Kinshasa, Ali defended his title eleven times in three and a half years, in the course of which he took his road show to Kuala Lumpur, Puerto Rico, Munich, Bogota and, most famously, Manila, which staged his third and final meeting with Joe Frazier. The bout was preceded by Ali’s now familiar dramatics—he was still “the Greatest” and Frazier was still “the gorilla”—but in the ring the contest was distilled into one of the purest and most testing boxing encounters in the sport’s history. Both fighters exceeded themselves in dishing out and soaking up punishment. In the end, Ali prevailed only by once again summoning hidden reserves of strength and guile. It was to be his final display of boxing genius, and it took a physical toll from which he never recovered.
Among the fifty-strong entourage which accompanied Ali to Manila (compared to the seventeen who came with Joe Frazier) was the young and beautiful Veronica Porche. They had met a year before when Veronica had been chosen as one of the four “poster girls” to promote the Rumble in the Jungle. One evening in Kinshasa, Belinda discovered her husband returning late to the hotel with Veronica, and smacked him. Nonetheless, he continued the affair, and a year later Veronica escorted him to Manila, while Belinda remained at home with the children. The press knew about the liaison, but in those days sports stars’ private lives were protected by unwritten laws. It was only after Ali took Veronica with him to meet Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at the presidential palace that the ill-kept secret reached the public. Marcos assumed Veronica was Ali’s wife and, in the presence of the media, complimented him on her beauty. Newsweek then broke the story of the long-running affair. In uncompromising mood, Ali decided to confront the media’s hypocrisy:
I know celebrities don’t have privacy. But at least they should be able to sleep with who they want. Anybody who worries about who’s my wife, tell them, you don’t worry who I sleep with and I won’t worry about who you sleep with.… The only person I answer to is Belinda Ali, and I don’t worry about her.
The next day, an aggrieved but composed Belinda flew out to Manila, confronted Ali in private (though the shouting echoed through the hotel corridors), then flew straight back to the US. A year later, she filed for divorce, citing desertion, adultery and mental cruelty. In June 1977, Ali married Veronica. They already had one baby and were expecting another. As Ali’s illness grew visible in the early eighties, this marriage also foundered, and the two were divorced in July 1986. That November, Ali married for a fourth time.
In an interview with the champ after the Thrilla in Manila, Playboy had the gall to criticize the Nation of Islam’s double standards toward women. Defending himself and his religion, Ali was angry and confused:
If you can’t protect your women, you can’t protect your nation … if you put a hand on a Muslim sister you are to die . . . horses and dogs and mules walk around with their behinds out. Humans hide their behinds … showing our women disrespect—a man should die for that. And not just white men, black men too.
Ali’s closest friends claim his womanizing began after his break-up with the feisty Sonji. Belinda blamed the Nation’s pervasive hypocrisy for corrupting her husband: “some of them were married and fooling around themselves.… They tried to make him like they were, and they were successful.” Ali himself, like Elijah Muhammad, sometimes cited the Qur’an in defense of his promiscuity. Looking back, however, Ali acknowledges, “It hurt my wife. It offended my religion. It never really made me happy.” He now recognizes as his own two children whose mothers he never married.
As Jeffrey Sammons, one of Ali’s most insightful celebrants, sadly concluded, “Ali did not transcend the sexism of his times, his profession or his chosen faith.” It is also true that black sexism continues to be more harshly judged—at least by many whites—than white sexism. In David Burner’s account of the sixties, JFK’s serial adulteries are passed over as “not uncommon among politicians and men of wealth,” while the offenses of Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael are dwelt upon at length and presented as fatal political flaws. Nonetheless, the racial double standard is no excuse for the sexual one. The reaction to Mike Tyson’s rape of a black, teenage beauty contestant in 1991 demonstrated that in many minds blackness, boxing and violence against women remain frighteningly intertwined, a historic legacy for which Ali must share some blame. Tyson was backed not just by Farrakhan but also by a bevy of Christian ministers, who held him up as the victim and castigated Desiree Washington as the embodiment of feminine wiles, a svelte seductress who got what was coming to her. As with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, the Tyson affair showed how “black pride” could be deployed to crush black women.
As the promoter of the Thrilla in Manila, Don King took credit for the awesome spectacle, though it was Ferdinand Marcos who put up the money (as with Mobutu, it was hard to know which funds were coming from the Marcos family and which from the national treasury). Shortly after the fight, King made an audacious bid to supplant Herbert Muhammad as Ali’s manager, but like everyone else who tried to pry Ali loose from the Muhammad family over the years, he failed and in the process antagonized not only Herbert but Ali himself (not least by bribing people in Ali’s training camp). In May 1976, Ali signed with Madison Square Garden to promote his title fight against Ken Norton at Yankee Stadium. An outraged King claimed he was the “financial victim” of the Nation’s new-found fondness for white people and denounced Herbert Muhammad as a “Judas.”
The young militant Al Sharpton emerged as a champion of King (later, he informed on him for the FBI). Describing the boxing promoter as a hero “of Third World youth,” Sharpton urged blacks to boycott the Ali–Norton fight and even staged a sit-in at the MSG offices. “Has Ali forgotten that it was we who stood by him when he was stripped and vilified? Has Ali forgot that we crowned him the people’s champion when they took his title? Has he forgot that this black promoter brought him and other brothers more money than ever before? Has Ali forgot that the Garden endorsed his demise? His rhetoric says black but the bottom line reads lily white.” But when it came to black rhetoric, no one could challenge King, who described Ali’s deal with MSG as “a case of the slave hurrying back to the slavemaster.” Although the black community ignored King and Sharpton, their stunt demonstrated how Black Power had become detached from its living roots in a black movement for power.
King’s real relationship with the black community he claimed to represent is best revealed by the black fighters he ripped off. Larry Holmes said that King “looks black, lives white and thinks green.” Tim Witherspoon observed, “Don’s speciality is black on black crime.” In the twenty years following his breakthrough in Kinshasa, 100 law suits were filed against King by disgruntled fighters and managers. But the real question about King is not how he managed to swindle and manipulate heavyweight fighters, but how he managed to do the same to the government and the judiciary. It has to be remembered that King prospered not in defiance of but in collusion with the white establishment, from boxing boards to television executives. There was no one who was not prepared to deal with King, if the price was right. In the end, he merely represents in extreme form the malaise that has always infected boxing.
Shortly after signing for the Norton fight, Ali visited Tokyo, where he took part in a hybrid boxing–wrestling match against a Japanese champion. This adventure was primarily a money-spinning gimmick, but it was also one of Ali’s many efforts to make the world in world champion mean more than the world in baseball’s World Series. It proved an undignified spectacle, a humiliating falling-off from the rigor required by a true sporting contest. Curiously, here was Muhammad Ali, the man who had remade the image of the black sports hero, reduced to the depths of Joe Louis’s wrestling exhibitions or Jesse Owen’s races against horses. Ali was better paid, and treated with greater personal respect, but, even so, he ended up compromising his sport and his image.
Ali had always walked the fine line between self-projection and self-parody, but in his later years as champion he grew more careless about the distinction. In this era, the icon of Ali—in books, on posters and magazine covers, in the movies or on television—was ubiquitous. There were suddenly a lot of people making money out of representations of Ali, not least Ali himself. His autobiography, The Greatest, appeared in late 1976. The accuracy of the book is disputed by most chroniclers of Ali’s life today, and Ali himself claims to have read it only after it was published. It is by turns an artful and tedious composition, and it rarely sounds like Ali. But despite the embarrassing paean to Herbert Muhammad with which it begins, it is the last expression of the radical and angry Ali, thanks probably to its writer, Richard Durham, a black nationalist (but not a Muslim), and its editor, Toni Morrison. In the film of the same title, which came out a year later, Ali played himself. Watching him reprise past scenes of defiance, I think of Sitting Bull in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, re-enacting the Little Bighorn for the titillation of an audience ensconced in safety and comfort, an audience no longer threatened by his antagonism.
A curiously revealing avatar of Ali’s personality is to be found in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, which was directly inspired by Ali’s first post-Kinshasa title defense, against Chuck Wepner in Cleveland in March 1975. Don King promoted the low-rated Wepner as a “white hope” and himself as “an equal opportunity employer who wants to give the white race a chance.” Here, the racialization of boxing, so intense and volatile in earlier decades, has become cheap decor, a mere selling point, and a flimsy one at that. (The fight was a box-office flop.) But Wepner’s doomed challenge provided Stallone with raw material for his story of Rocky Balboa, plucked from obscurity to face Apollo Creed, the flamboyant black champion and master of braggadocio, obviously modeled on Muhammad Ali (the film even invokes his rivalry with Frazier). Here, it is the white fighter who is inarticulate, who relies on brute force, and the black fighter who is quick-witted and quick-footed. The transposition of the old stereotypes is a tribute to Ali and a measure of the changes he had wrought in public perceptions. But the film is also a measure of the increasing adaptability of his icon. The drama is set during America’s bicentennial celebrations and the climactic title fight is presented as a celebration of American nationalism. The Apollo Creed character enters the ring in an Uncle Sam hat, bedecked with the stars and stripes (it is Rocky, the “Italian Stallion,” whose ethnicity comes to the fore). Departing even further from reality, the sequels which followed the first film showed the white hero winning and retaining the title, while Apollo Creed was reduced to a standard-issue Hollywood black sidekick.
In 1977, Ali sat for an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait, thus joining Marilyn and Elvis among the artist’s gallery of American “icons.” The champ was astounded to learn how much Warhol was being paid for “an hour’s work,” and Warhol dryly agreed that it was an easy life. In retrospect, the Warhol portrait marks the moment of symbolic appropriation, the transition of Ali from a divisive to a consensual figure. In Warhol’s iconography, Ali became one among an infinite series of celebrity images, all equivalent, all interchangeable. For the best part of two decades, the boxer used the electronic conduits of the burgeoning global media industry to project his personal identity and the messages that sprang from it to a vast new audience. At the same time, this industry used Ali to project its messages, to sell itself and its products. The icon of Ali could not but be transformed in the process.
In February 1978, Ali was vanquished by the young, inarticulate and inelegant Leon Spinks. The fight had been promoted by King’s rival, Bob Arum, who found himself unexpectedly holding the options for the new champion’s next three fights. Arum immediately arranged for a rematch with Ali. King, who needed a way back into the heavyweight title stakes, then conspired with the WBC to strip Spinks of his new title—for the crime of giving Ali, rather than Larry Holmes or Ernie Shavers (who were in King’s camp), first crack at it. A series of eliminator bouts for the “vacant” title was then staged (under King’s aegis). It was a key moment in the fragmentation of boxing authority, which in time would lead to the proliferation of putative heavyweight champions and the decline of the sport’s competitive integrity.
Bob Arum approached Ali about fighting his rematch with Spinks in Sun City, the resort-style capital of the South African puppet state of Bophuthatswana. With South African backing, Arum guaranteed Ali a mind-bending $14 million. Ali was tempted. Despite protests from Arthur Ashe and Jesse Jackson, Herbert Muhammad proceeded with negotiations for the fight, which were only abandoned in the face of tax complications and threats of a closed-circuit television boycott. Ali expressed his own thoughts on the issue in a late-night ramble to Hunter S. Thompson, who tried to persuade the champ that he should take on and beat a white South African in South Africa. Ali considered the proposal. Yes, he was attracted to the idea of the fight, provided that “on that day there’d be equality in the arena.” Then he added another, crucial rider: “If the masses of the country and the world were against it, I wouldn’t go.” He was intrigued by, but also wary of, the symbolic dimensions of such a fight. “What worries me is getting whupped by a white man in South Africa.… That’s what the world needs … me getting whupped by a white man in South Africa.” On the other hand, “If I beat him too bad and then leave the country, they might beat up some of the brothers.” He concluded: “I wouldn’t fool with it. I’m a representative of black people.… It’s too touchy.… it’s more than a sport when I get involved.”
Many thought Ali should have retired after Manila. Many more thought he should have retired after losing to Spinks. Instead, Ali returned to defeat an under-trained Spinks in a poor excuse for a heavyweight title fight. True, Ali had won the world championship for an unprecedented third time, but the triumph seemed a low-rent, recycled imitation of earlier glories. Most Ali fans breathed a sigh of relief when he announced his retirement in June 1979, at the age of thirty-seven. He had been fighting professionally for nearly nineteen years and had been defeated only three times—by Frazier, Norton and Spinks—in fifty-four bouts.
Ali returned to Africa in early 1980. For the first time, he visited the continent as an official emissary of the United States, despatched by President Jimmy Carter to drum up support for Washington’s proposed boycott of the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Ali may have thought his devotion to Islam and his obligations to America had at last coincided, but in Africa he was quickly disabused. In Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal, local politicians and journalists sharply questioned the logic of his stand and his willingness to be deployed as a propaganda tool in the renewed Cold War. Under pressure, Ali backtracked, “Maybe I’m being used to do something that ain’t right,” he admitted at a press conference. “You’re making me look at things different. I’m not a traitor to black people.” At this point, the State Department minder closed the press conference and hustled Ali out the door.
In sharp contrast to previous trips to the African motherland, this mission was a disaster. Ali returned to America perplexed and embarrassed. He had often mused about assuming a leadership role in retirement, and it may be that his disappointment in Africa was one of the factors which drove him back to the ring. It may also have been a need for money, an addiction to the theater of the fight game, or some desire to compensate for the three and a half years he’d lost defying the draft. Most likely, it was a combination of all these factors and others which led Ali to sign with Don King for a comeback bout against world champion Larry Holmes, his former sparring partner. For once, King was forced to put up his own money to finance the fight, which may be one reason it proceeded despite mounting concerns about Ali’s health. Holmes worshipped Ali and tried his best to keep the thirty-eight-year-old living legend upright through eleven rounds without inflicting permanent damage. King was less considerate. He paid Ali $1,170,000 less than his contract stipulated. Ali was forced to sue. King, under pressure to repay the Mafia money he’d borrowed to set up the Wepner fight, could not afford to meet Ali’s claim in full and was desperate to settle out of court. He located Jeremiah Shabazz, now preaching in Philadelphia, and paid him to visit Ali, who was in hospital, undergoing treatment for the mysterious nervous symptoms which had already begun to plague him before his first retirement. Shabazz handed Ali $50,000 in cash, and in return Ali signed a paper releasing King from the remainder of the debt. A few years later, Wole Soyinka described the ageing ex-champ sitting at the ringside watching lesser fighters battle for the title that once was his:
A brief salute—the camera is kind,
Discreetly pans, and masks the double-talk
Of medicine men—“Has the syndrome
But not the consequence.” Promoters, handlers
It’s time to throw in the towel—Parkinson’s’
Polysyllables have failed to tease a rhyme
From the once nimble Louisville Lips.
The shocking thing is not that Ali persisted in fighting, obsessively seeking out the money, glamor and success he had been willing to forfeit in earlier years, but that others allowed him to do so. Without the media, the boxing and licensing authorities, the promoters and investors, Ali would never have had the chance to do such terrible damage to himself. And whenever I hear pundits aver that it was Ali himself who insisted on returning to the ring, that Ali himself would have it no other way, that Ali considers parkinsonism a price worth paying, I am reminded of an early Dylan song (recorded by Pete Seeger in 1963), “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” in which the singer asks an unanswerable question of referees, managers, promoters, spectators, gamblers and writers:
Who killed Davey Moore,
Why’d he die an’ what’s the reason for?
“Not me,” says the boxing writer
Pounding print on his old typewriter,
Sayin’, “Boxing ain’t to blame,
There’s just as much danger in a football game,”
Sayin’, “Fist-fightin’ is here to stay
It’s just the old American way.
It wasn’t me that made him fall.
No, you can’t blame me at all.”
The lesson of the final phase of Ali’s career is an old one. Just as defeats may contain the seeds of victories, so victories may contain the seeds of defeats. For so many years, Ali embodied what C.L.R. James called the “future in the present.” The tragedy is that his body carried the injuries of the past into the future, and that tragedy is inseparable from the institutions and traditions of boxing.
In January 1980, Ali visited Bombay with his then wife, Veronica, on a promotional tour sponsored by Air India and Amul butter. In his suite at the Taj hotel, he expounded his views on religion and politics to two young reporters from The Times of India:
Muhammad went to the Arabians, Krishna to India, Buddha to China, Jesus to the Jews and Gentiles they say. Man has through his intoxication and misunderstanding fought with others. But in reality there’s only one message, the message of wisdom. It was not man’s message, it was God’s message. One reason I converted to Islam was because it was the only religion that I heard say all people are equal and that a man can go to heaven if he lives right and believes what God said.
“But,” interjected one of the reporters, “Marx said that all men are equal.”
“I don’t know him,” said Ali. “Was he a religious man?”
“No.”
“Was he doin’ good for the people?”
“He wanted to, yes.”
“Then I’d say, he’d go to heaven.”
As I finished work on this book, Ali appeared in two new roles on British television screens.
In the first, he was advertising a retirement pension. The advert begins with images of the young Ali, eye-catching as always, the expressive vivacity and verbal energy somehow even more striking than ever in an era of de-valued, over-hyped celebrity. Then we are presented with the speechless figure of Ali today, awkwardly tapping a black boy on the shoulder. “So you can still be the Greatest,” the voice-over insists, “even when you retire.” Yet the tottering Ali of the advert’s final images is clearly no longer the Greatest, and I wonder if the sponsor’s real intention was to make people who remember the sixties feel old and insecure.
The second role was as a silent yet somehow eloquent champion of the campaign to cancel Third World debt. It was hard to imagine a celebrity advocate more suitable to the cause. Watching Ali in this latest guise, I thought: they haven’t quite tamed him yet—either the icon or the man. Just by being there, he had brought the struggles of the sixties where they belong, into the present, as aid and support for the global resistance of the future.