While Clark County voters were going to the polls on September 1, Muhammad Ali left his home in Philadelphia to fly to Atlanta for what he hoped would be a new beginning.
After defending his title against Liston in 1965, Ali had fought eight more times. But it was his politics, not his pugilism, that he was becoming known for best. On a swing through Europe in 1966, he declared that he would no longer answer to the name Cassius Clay and announced he did not care to sleep with white women because for “black to be beautiful,” it couldn’t be diluted by white blood. In a 1966 Chicago Tribune profile headlined “Champion Changes from Hero to Bum in Six Years,” reporter Robert Markus asked what had happened to the most popular American at the Rome Olympics in 1960. “What happened in the intervening years to turn Cassius Clay . . . into a renegade, despised by his countrymen?”
And all of this was before Ali received the April 28, 1967, notice inducting him into the armed services.
It wasn’t the first draft notice Ali had gotten. He had received one in 1963, too, but he showed up for his medical exam acting so crazy that he got classified as 1-Y, which meant he was qualified only in the event of a war or national emergency. Still, as his star continued to climb, the draft board kept an eye on him, and in 1967 he suddenly found himself bumped up to 1-A, which made him immediately eligible to serve. “How could they do this to the champion?” he asked. “The taxes from my fights alone pay salaries for 200,000 soldiers a year.”
Ali could easily have done what Joe Louis did in World War II and become a celebrity soldier, fighting exhibitions to entertain the troops. The Army might have even let him fight a real title bout or two. But he wanted none of it. His lawyers filed for an exemption, first arguing hardship, then that the war violated his beliefs as a Muslim minister. After a four-fight swing though Toronto, London, and Germany, Ali returned home to find that the U.S. Justice Department, wary of recognizing the Nation of Islam and eager to make an example of him, was preparing to charge him with violating the Military Selective Service Act.
At a news conference in which he announced he had no intention of serving in Vietnam, Ali vowed that his “conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn’t put no dogs on me. They didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? How am I going to shoot them . . . little babies and children, women? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
On June 20, 1967, a federal jury voted to do just that. But the U.S. attorney in Houston, Morton Susman, tried to soften the blow by arguing for leniency. He reminded the judge that the defendant, who came dressed in a silk suit and alligator shoes, was an Olympic hero who’d only adopted his Muslim faith after defeating Liston for the title. “In my opinion . . . this tragedy and the loss of his title could be traced to that,” Susman said, adding that justice would be served if Ali received less than the five-year maximum sentence. But they were in Texas and the judge, not persuaded, gave him the five years.
While Ali’s lawyers appealed his conviction, the fighter stayed in the public eye, lecturing on college campuses, where his message of religious pacifism played to students of all colors, and starring in a short-lived black power musical on Broadway. He was at his most fiery, though, when he sat down for an interview with a new magazine, The Black Scholar. “I’m supposed to be . . . walking around somewhere broke,” he began, taunting those who expected a more chastened tone. “But I surprised them; I’m doing better. . . . I’m not depending on the white power structure and that boxing game for survival. . . . Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich. Beat up on each other and break each other’s noses, show off like two little monkeys for the crowd, killing each other for the crowd. And half of the crowd is white. We’re slaves in that ring.” In an echo of the walks he took through Las Vegas’s Westside with Wilbur Jackson, he lamented “the tragedy of the life of the black man today” and exhorted the magazine’s readers to “go on and join something. If it isn’t the Muslims, at least join the Black Panthers.”
Whether Ali’s disavowal of boxing was an honest reflection of his faith or a shrewd way to make himself more valuable remained to be seen. But it had its intended effect. The Ring magazine published a weighty cover story that announced it was abandoning its three-year campaign to keep Ali recognized as the heavyweight champion. It was hard to argue with the choice of Joe Frazier as “Clay’s legal and indisputable successor to the title.” He’d fought the fight of his life against the other contender for Ali’s vacated WBA title, the Kentuckian Jimmy Ellis, at Madison Square Garden. As The Ring’s publisher, Nat Fleischer, wrote: “If, as many skeptics predict, Clay changes his mind about quitting the ring and the lush paydays which would become available to him if he were cleared by the Supreme Court, Cassius would have to appear as the challenger and emphatically not as the champion.”
As a result of the declaration, The Ring rewrote its rankings in this order:
World Champion: Joe Frazier, Philadelphia, Pa.
1. Leotis Martin, Philadelphia, Pa.
2. Jimmy Ellis, Louisville, Ky.
3. Mac Foster, Fresno, Calif.
4. Oscar Bonavena, Argentina
5. Sonny Liston, Las Vegas, Nev.
Behind the scenes, though, Ali was pressing his managers to get him back into the ring. Three years without a steady means of support was a long time, and all the campus lectures in the world couldn’t replace the payday of a title fight. Ali made the mistake of admitting as much to Howard Cosell in April 1969 when he said he hoped to return to boxing to pay off his debts. His candor earned a sharp rebuke from Elijah Muhammad, who issued a statement saying, “We, the Muslims, are not with Mr. Muhammad Ali, in his desire to work in the sports world for the sake of a ‘leetle’ money.” To get back into the Prophet’s good graces and end the yearlong suspension that prevented him from talking to other Muslims, Ali told The Black Scholar that he deserved the punishment for doubting “that my God and what I believe can’t take care of me.”
Ali’s managers arranged exhibitions everywhere from a bullring in Tijuana to a rodeo park in an all-black community in Tulsa. But as soon as a deal looked imminent, something went wrong. Florida’s governor, Claude Kirk, seemed happy to let Ali come to Tampa until the Tribune’s editorial writers stirred up their readers by announcing, “We object conscientiously.” Nevada’s governor, Paul Laxalt, reportedly signed off on a deal for Ali to fight in Las Vegas until Howard Hughes raised bloody hell on the grounds that it was both immoral and unpatriotic to aid Ali’s return. Ali went as far as agreeing to a twenty-four-hour trip to Toronto to fight Frazier in which he would post a $100,000 bond and be escorted by U.S. marshals. But a federal judge torpedoed the deal.
Ali thought he was close when the city council in Charleston, South Carolina, voted to let him hold a charity benefit in their city. Even ABC’s Wide World of Sports signed on to cover it. But that, too, fell apart when the state’s powerful Democratic congressman, L. Mendel Rivers, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, balked at celebrating a draft dodger and pressured the council to withdraw its approval.
“We were coming down here to help these black youths learn boxing,” Ali said before boarding his flight home. “But all this scufflin’ has been humiliating and insulting. I don’t want to bother anybody so I’m leaving.”*
—
Leroy Johnson hadn’t followed these developments closely. The first African-American to get elected to Georgia’s state legislature in nearly a century really wasn’t much of a sports fan. But he was politically wired. And when one of Ali’s interlocutors reached out to him through a mutual friend, seeking any influence he could wield to get a fight held in Atlanta, Johnson discovered that Georgia was different from the other states where Ali had been denied in one key respect: it didn’t have a state athletic commission. Instead, fights were the purview of local authorities. That meant that the board of aldermen would be in charge of issuing licenses in Atlanta.
That was remarkably good news for Ali, since Johnson’s influence on the board ran deep. In a matter of a few weeks, he met with all the important politicians in his state to soften the ground, making the case that times were changing and Atlanta could be in the vanguard of a New South. By licensing Ali, the city could make a statement about its people and their commitment to progressive politics.
It was a canny, constructive argument. When Johnson finished making his rounds, he’d done what none of the politically connected promoters who’d worked for Ali had succeeded in doing: he’d gotten him a license to fight.
Ali was skeptical when Johnson asked him to come to Atlanta for an introductory press conference. After what he’d already been through, he didn’t want to be embarrassed again. But Johnson insisted that this wouldn’t be a repeat. They had the backing of the city, no matter what any court said about his draft case. Even so, Ali arrived at the Atlanta Municipal Airport in a subdued mood. Johnson and a white businessman named Harry Pett were there to meet him, and when Pett was asked why Atlanta didn’t seem to be roiled by the same protests that followed Ali elsewhere, he beamed and said, “Atlanta is too busy to hate. It’s the finest city in the world.”
From the airport, Ali was driven to a Marriott downtown where reporters were gathering for a press conference. They weren’t told that he was in the building, and he went to one of the upstairs rooms, where a speakerphone was set up for him to listen in on the proceedings. Promoter Robert Kassel led the event, and as he teased out the drama, Ali waited . . . and waited . . . for what everyone had come to hear: that the board of aldermen had issued a license. Atlanta was welcoming the champ back.
Or, at least, kind of back. For his first public event, Kassel arranged for Ali to get eight rounds of practice against three unheralded heavyweights in the gym of Morehouse College. Noting the sentimental irony of the choice, Jet magazine observed: “Morehouse is the site where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was buried and now it is a place where Ali is resurrected.”
The fans who filled the gym the next evening were as curious as Ali to see what he had left. All the puttering that he’d been doing around his house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, had added twenty-five pounds to his former fighting weight, and his coal-fired eyes were buried under puffy cheeks. “I’m just as anxious as anybody to see what I can do,” he told reporters. “I think this will tell me just how off I am.”
Writing in The Ring, Joe Louis’s former trainer, Mannie Seamon, sounded a skeptical note, writing that “Clay was a fine fighter in his time. But take him out of the field in which he won and defended the heavyweight championship and he has to be flawed. To begin with, Cassius needed a big ring in which to make his mobility count most. He needed a ring with a lot of padding. He required a ring with tight ropes.” Recalling his first fight with Sonny, Seamon observed, “Clay had some serious flaws in his style and method. But in his time and against this field, these flaws did not show up to cost him in any way. A great fighter has to observe certain laws of leverage and balance. Clay won despite ignoring this, in some cases to a great extent.”
The new-model Ali wasn’t any humbler than the old one. Although the gym in Atlanta trapped every last degree of the Georgia summer heat, he entered it as if he were floating on ice. Wearing a short white robe, he coolly waved to a crowd that included Martin Luther King Sr. and his family, then threw off the robe and got down to business. His first opponent, Rufus Brassell, a career sparring partner, seemed happy that his assignment was merely to last two rounds, long enough for the ex-champ to test out a couple of jabs and a swift one-two combo. In another two-rounder, Ali threw a few punches at the Miami heavyweight Johnny Hudgins. But as Sports Illustrated writer Martin Kane observed, “It disappointed the crowd that Ali was giving them so little action, and at the end of the first round of his four-rounder against George Hill there were scattered boos.” Eager to see if he could punch himself out of trouble, Ali let himself get cornered in the second round, then unleashed a fifteen-second flurry of punches in the third, and finally, in the fourth, unveiled the fan-pleasing Ali shuffle before attacking Hill’s body and head.
In the dressing room afterward, Ali sat naked and sweating because of the sweltering heat. Asked to sum up his performance, he said what was obvious to everyone, including Joe Frazier. “I’m not in condition for Frazier yet,” he said.
—
Once Atlanta’s board of aldermen saw that the city hadn’t burned—or even kindled—as a result of Ali’s exhibition, they fast-tracked their approval for him to fight Jerry Quarry at the Municipal Auditorium on October 26. The same day that fight was announced, Joe Frazier announced he was meeting Bob Foster, the light-heavyweight champ, in what everyone assumed would be his final stop before he claimed Ali.
But as much as Ali’s camp was eager to see what he had in his tank, the real tune-up wasn’t going to be in the ring. It was going to be with the closed-circuit technology that promised to turn any fight Ali might have with Frazier into the biggest cash cow in the history of sport.
As Michael Arkush notes in his book The Fight of the Century, the first closed-circuit broadcast in the history of boxing came on June 15, 1951, and featured a bout between Joe Louis, who was then thirty-seven, and Lee Savold, a journeyman Minnesotan on the downside of his career. Roughly twenty-two thousand fans in eight cities paid between fifty cents and $1.30 to see Louis win in six rounds.
A decade later, six hundred thousand fans paid a total of $4.5 million to see Liston knock out Floyd Patterson in the first round of their 1962 fight. A couple of years later they plunked down $4 million to see him fight Ali in Miami, which was particularly impressive, since the oddsmakers were predicting a walkover.
Sonny saw barely a dime of that money. He left Chicago so poor after the feds impounded his gate for fear it would go to the mob that an infamous photo was taken showing him pretending to hitch a ride out of town. In Miami, the IRS impounded another $2.7 million of his closed-circuit revenue, arguing that his Intercontinental Promotions owed at least that much in back taxes.
Ali, by contrast, was coming back at the precise moment that closed-circuit television was about to explode. In the moments before he got into the ring, an intern at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium asked him what he was thinking. As recorded by George Plimpton, Ali said “he was thinking about the people in Japan and Turkey and Russia, all over the world; how they were beginning to think about the fight and about him; and the television sets being clicked on; and the traffic jams in front of the closed-circuit theaters; and how the big TV trucks out in back of the Atlanta arena, just by the stage door, were getting their machinery warmed up to send his image by satellite to all those people, and how he was going to dance for them.”
His fight against Quarry would draw only five thousand fans to the Municipal Auditorium, but it was booked in two hundred theaters nationwide. If he could draw those kinds of numbers with a pair of tune-ups, promoters everywhere were salivating at what a fight with Frazier could do.
But as much as the press was looking toward that matchup, Ali’s camp was focused on the still-dangerous Quarry. Three years younger than the twenty-eight-year-old Ali, and the youngest fighter Ali had ever faced professionally, Quarry had nearly won the heavyweight title twice, coming up just short to Jimmy Ellis in the WBA’s elimination tournament (the one that reassigned Ali’s title) and going seven brutal rounds against Joe Frazier. Ali’s camp was respectful enough of Quarry to write a rematch clause into the deal in case he came up short. But publicly Ali was his usual dismissive self, telling reporters, “Don’t forget, he ain’t never fought the fastest heavyweight in history.”
With only six weeks to prepare, Ali hunkered down with Angelo Dundee at the 5th St. Gym in Miami. Dundee wasn’t unhappy with what he had to work with after the exhibition. Ali might still have been overweight, but his reflexes were intact and he was ready to run. After just a couple of weeks, visitors were stunned to see that he’d dropped two pants sizes and could now knot his necktie through his belt loops. By the weigh-in, Ali was all the way down to 213½, just three pounds more than when he’d fought Sonny in 1964.
On the evening of October 26, Atlanta was buzzing with energy. Men arrived in ankle-length fur coats while their dates wore pearls and, as former NAACP chairman Julian Bond later joked, “not much else.” George Plimpton, who got sent to cover the fight for The New Yorker, wrote that he’d “never seen crowds as fancy, especially the men—felt headbands and feathered capes, and the stilted shoes, the heels like polished ebony, and many smoking stuff in odd meerschaum pipes.”
(Not all the visitors to the city were so dignified. A gang of hoods who sold tickets to a fight-watching party looted their visitors when they arrived, before throwing them into a padlocked basement. One woman who screamed that she had nowhere to move among all the hostages was told, “Dammit, just get on top of somebody.”)
But of all the people in the Municipal Auditorium, no one looked as impressive as Ali. The loose-limbed upstart from Louisville was gone. This version was more manly, more muscular, and, as far as the Californian Quarry was concerned, more menacing. While Ali was warming up in the dressing room, a member of Quarry’s inner circle, Willie Ketchum, tried to break the tension by saying, “I won some money on you once. I bet fifty dollars at seven to one that you’d whup Sonny Liston.” That pleased Ali, who replied, “We’ll give them a good show tonight.” On the way to the ring, he stopped by Quarry’s dressing room to warn him, “You best be in good shape because if you whup me, you’ve whupped the greatest fighter in the whole wide world.”
Still, Ali couldn’t help having butterflies. From the moment that he bounded into the ring in a white robe that had his name embossed on the back in huge red letters, he looked jittery, as if only the sound of his glove compacting bone would calm him down.
At the opening bell, Quarry was the aggressor, leaning in as he tried to find his range. But Ali kept snapping his head back, half boxer, half vaudevillian, establishing a perimeter from which he could operate. His first punch was a lead right, and even though Quarry had trained to anticipate Ali’s ten-inch range, its speed still surprised him. The more frustrated Quarry became with Ali’s advantage, the more weapons Ali unveiled, from jabs to one-two combinations to a five-punch flurry midway through the first round that reddened Quarry’s nose. It took Quarry two and a half minutes before he finally crept out from behind his gloves and connected with a cross.
In the second round, Quarry settled into his game plan, using his huge left hook to scrape at Ali’s ring rust. And by the third he was able to force his increasingly winded opponent into the ropes and a clench. But Ali wasn’t in the mood to rope-a-dope. Sensing the need to finish things fast, he unleashed a pistonlike left that opened the scar tissue above Quarry’s left eye, causing blood to start seeping into it. With predatory precision, he flicked three more punches at the cut, each meeting less resistance than the last. Quarry managed to clear the blood away long enough to find Ali’s ribs. But as referee Tony Perez watched Quarry’s cornermen work over the wound at the break, he decided he’d seen enough.
Quarry was on his feet, ready to get back to business for the fourth round, when Perez waved him off and stopped the fight. “You can’t do that!” Quarry yelled. But before he could mount more of a protest, Ali was on him, smothering him in an embrace. Quarry gently backed down, understanding that the $150,000 he’d been guaranteed, his best payday to date, was for this exact moment.
—
The next day, October 27, the president of the United States emerged from the White House under a baleful sky to make a trip to the downtown office of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. A table had been set up for him that included charts of recent drug seizures and bindles of heroin from those raids. With the stern-faced agents who had made the seizures flanking him, the president was handed a pen and signed into law the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.
The bill allowed narcotics to be divided—or, in the parlance of the law, scheduled—into different classes. The most restrictive category was reserved for drugs that had high potential for abuse and no accepted medical uses. Heroin was at the top of the list.
“The message that drugs can ruin young lives should be stressed in every home, every school, every church,” Nixon said to a roomful of reporters.
Nixon’s hope was that the new law would help him carry a tough law-and-order state like Nevada. But the state’s top Republicans were worried enough about a political Waterloo that they begged the president to sell his domestic drug war in person.
On Halloween, a thousand mostly white Republicans turned out to welcome Nixon when he landed in Air Force One at McCarran Airport. The evening before, in San Jose, his motorcade had been overrun by nine hundred demonstrators who turned out with placards that read “Nixon = Fascist” and “Nixon—Get Us Out Now.” In what United Press International called “the most violent protest he has faced since taking office,” Nixon felt an egg graze his cheek and had to duck into his limousine to escape rocks and bottles. The caravan sped away to the chant, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your war.”
Emerging from his plane at the Hughes Air Terminal in a charcoal-gray suit, Nixon tried to draw a distinction between the young people he saw before him and the protesters from the evening before.
“Violence makes news in the press, but I think young America is getting a bad rap from these violent, radical few,” he said. “Those who carry a peace sign in one hand and carry a bomb or a brick in the other are the top hypocrites of our time. The great silent majority should stand up and be counted in the polling booths throughout this great land.”
Still, the deck was stacked against Nevada’s Republicans. Without their popular governor, Paul Laxalt, on the ballot to counteract the Democrats’ edge in voter registration, they lost every major contest on Election Day. They surrendered the governor’s mansion, several U.S. House districts, seats in both chambers of the state legislature, and the office of the lieutenant governor, which went to a thirty-year-old assemblyman and former amateur boxer named Harry Reid.
The midterm election of 1970 might have started out as a sleepy affair, but it produced two forces that would be powerful staples of American politics for the next half century: Reid and the War on Drugs. It also had a profound effect on Sonny Liston. Because when it came to drawing the attention of federal law enforcement, Sonny was becoming a junkie at exactly the wrong time.