What Happens in Vegas
I can’t represent the Muslims again until I quit sports. I spoke with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and he told me, “If boxing’s in your blood, get it out.” I’ve got a few more things to do before I can get it out of my blood, about four more fights. First is the one with James Ellis down in Houston, and the last one will be with Frazier. Then I will be free to represent the Muslims again.
Muhammad Ali, June 22, 1971
BORN ON WESTMON ISLAND IN Iceland in 1944, Sig Rogich was five when his parents moved to America, eventually settling in Henderson, Nevada. For a financially struggling family it was a fortuitous time to arrive, as nearby Las Vegas was undergoing its first prolonged boom. Rogich worked his way through high school and college busing tables at the casinos and doing stints as a hotel bell-boy along the strip. Before turning thirty, he founded what became the state’s largest advertising agency, made his first million, and was such an influential player around town he once helped Frank Sinatra obtain a gambling license.
Walking through the doors of the state building in Las Vegas on the morning of December 29, 1980, Rogich cut a debonair figure, wearing his usual tailored Italian suit and expensive loafers, and carrying the title of chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. For six years he’d served on the five-member body charged with sanctioning boxing matches and licensing fighters. Since Vegas had essentially become the world capital of the sport in that time, this made the committee arguably the most powerful quintet in the game.
The reach of their impact and significance of their decision-making was hammered home to Rogich when he saw that more than fifty journalists had arrived for the meeting. He knew why they had come. He understood why editors had sent them from all over America. He realized this was no ordinary meeting. On this day he was tasked with presiding over a hearing to decide whether Muhammad Ali would ever climb through the ropes of a boxing ring again.
In the nearly three months that had passed since the thirty-eight-year-old former champion had been resoundingly defeated by Larry Holmes in an improvised arena in the car park of Caesars Palace, his fistic future had hung in the balance. It had been put there very firmly by Rogich’s own comments to the press in the aftermath of that bout.
“I believe we should retire a great champion for his safety and the integrity of the sport,” said the chairman of the commission back in October. “He demonstrated after the fight he should not be fighting again.”
The troubling manner of Ali’s loss that night of October 2, 1980, the sheer lifelessness of his performance, and the disturbing sight of him absorbing so much savage punishment was, many would say belatedly, forcing the commission’s hand. The jig, finally, appeared up.
“Ain’t this something?” said Ali, as he was corralled by reporters on the way into the hearing. “One bad day on the job and they want to fire me.”
If his quip made for characteristically good copy, the case against him was overwhelming. Aside from the damning evidence provided by the ten torturous rounds of the Holmes beatdown, a horror show only ended by trainer Angelo Dundee refusing to let him answer the bell for the eleventh, there were other serious issues to consider. Ali had used thyroid medication before the contest (to excess, he himself would admit), and taken painkillers immediately after it, crucially before the mandatory post-fight urinalysis had even been conducted.
There was then a surfeit of available reasons why the commission seemed bound to ensure the sixtieth fight of Ali’s pro career was also going to be his last. Indeed, recognizing the weakness of his position, and knowing the lay of the land from Rogich’s public statements, Ali’s attorneys had tried to preempt the hearing. In a letter dated December 19, they offered to surrender his license in Nevada, a gesture that would make the adjudication moot and, more importantly for the boxer’s future prospects, not force other states to take their lead from the most influential commission in the sport and effectively retire him.
Rogich and his colleagues didn’t buy this gambit. They were determined to wield their power to call a halt to perhaps the greatest career the sport had ever seen. They countered to his lawyers that Ali’s offer to surrender the license meant nothing if they refused to accept it. And, after a vote, that’s exactly what they decided to do.
So then the hearing began in earnest. A fight film was produced of the Holmes bout, and Ali’s attorneys—Michael Phenner, Michael Conway, and Niels Pearson—began arguing the case on behalf of their client.
Befitting a commission that usually didn’t draw a big crowd, the meeting was held in a small room. However, so many people had shoehorned into it for this case that it soon began to get hot and clammy. As the proceedings dragged on, Ali grew visibly bored by the lawyerly back and forth. He could be seen doodling away on pieces of paper—that is, until he spotted a pair of kids in the public gallery.
Che and Kwasi Cunningham had been brought along by their mother. In this pair, Ali had found himself the perfect distraction from the labyrinthine business at hand. Beckoning them forward to his seat, he began entertaining his newfound audience with magic tricks.
“I’m sitting there watching this and thinking, ‘My God!’” said Patricia Cunningham. “Here’s Muhammad Ali entertaining my kids while the commission is deciding whether or not he can fight. There were all these media and cameras there, and Ali didn’t even look at them. He was just having such a good time with the boys. I’ll never forget it.”
Ali asked the Cunningham lads if they were hungry. They were. So he dispatched a member of his entourage to a nearby McDonalds to bring the boys back some food. Soon, the thick smell of French fries wafted through the overheated room, adding a unique flavor to an already sticky atmosphere.
Although it might have looked as if he wasn’t paying attention, Ali clearly knew what was going on. The morning session had not gone his way, and he used the interval to inform the press he was already considering going down other legal avenues.
“I’ve set aside two million dollars if this goes to court. I don’t feel humiliated, but this is silly,” said Ali. “I’ll take this to the highest court if I have to. They can’t retire me without giving me a chance to prove myself again. Look at all the fighters who were knocked out cold—Earnie Shavers, Ken Norton, John Tate, George Foreman, Joe Frazier—they never tried to retire them. I’m not just some ordinary Negro off the street. I’m the most controversial fighter in history. They can’t railroad me. We’re going to make this a world case. This is going to be a good rumble…bigger than the fight.”
The commission definitely wanted to stop Ali fighting again in Nevada. But, it also definitely needed to avoid the type of costly and embarrassing litigation during which the spotlight would inevitably fall on how and why Rogich and his cohorts had considered Ali fit to fight Holmes in the first place, especially after a two-year hiatus from the ring. That scandalous decision hung like a dark cloud over the entire proceeding.
By the same token, any move to a federal court by Ali’s camp would also necessitate a rigorous independent investigation of the fighter’s health that would surely end his hopes of lacing up gloves anywhere ever again. For the sake of both parties then, a face-saving compromise was badly needed.
A solution was found when Rogich met Gene Kilroy, Ali’s business manager/facilitator, in the men’s room during a break in the afternoon session; the two struck an informal deal. The commission would, after all, accept Ali’s surrender of his license, and the fighter would, in return, promise never to apply to fight in the state again.
“I think everyone had a chance to make their point,” said Rogich, after announcing the decision, demonstrating a talent for spin that he would later put to good use in the presidential election campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “We all must give and take a little. For health and safety reasons, the state acted properly. The decision was best for all parties concerned. This hearing wasn’t held to embarrass Ali.”
Obviously pleased with the deal, Ali shook hands with Rogich and then delivered his own verdict to the cameras.
“They think I can’t fight anymore,” he said. “According to my last performance, I don’t blame them. I don’t have too many fights left. But I didn’t want to go out being retired. I want to be free to make my own decision. If I stop, it’s because I want to stop. Nobody’s going to make me stop.”
And that was the bigger issue at stake. Now that the Nevada State Athletic Commission, for all its presumed power and influence, had effectively washed its hands of Ali, who then possessed the power to make him stop? Who had the wherewithal to save him from himself, especially when there were always going to be others intent on helping him to keep going, no matter the increasingly obvious personal and physical toll it was exacting on him?
The very next morning’s New York Times carried an item about him possibly fighting in Madison Square Garden as soon as February. Within days, there was speculation about him applying for a license to compete in Hawaii. In both cases, the name of the English heavyweight prospect and European champion John L. Gardner was mentioned as the most likely candidate for his sixty-first outing. Talk of that bout had preceded the Vegas hearing.
Indeed, eleven days before the showdown in Vegas, Ali had touched down in London to promote Freedom Road, NBC’s historical mini-series in which he played Gideon Jackson, a former soldier and Civil War veteran who becomes a United States senator. Immaculately turned out in a suit and tie, rain mac draped over one arm, small suitcase in the other, he shadowboxed for some young fans at Heathrow Airport and signed umpteen autographs. Yet, some of the photographers capturing his arrival felt he was a more subdued version of his normally effervescent self.
Prior to the premiere on British television, Ali took a suite at the Dorchester Hotel where he seemed to spend more time talking about his desire to continue boxing, rather than extolling the virtues of acting alongside luminaries like Kris Kristofferson.
“If I am not allowed to fight John L. Gardner, I will call all my people and all my fans to march from Harlem to Manhattan, and from the Washington ghettoes to the Capitol,” said Ali. “We are going to march all over America. I am going to shake up the whole country.”
That threat was delivered with a glint in his eye, and mock-seriousness in his voice. And, at one point, he sounded refreshingly stoic about his future. “I don’t need boxing. What you thought you needed yesterday, you are sometimes shown you don’t need tomorrow.”
Yet, for all that, he couldn’t help but return again and again during his time in England to the lust to continue fighting.
“If you judged all fighters on one performance, you would have to stop a whole lot of them from fighting. Let me fight Gardner and I say that if I lose or look bad beating him, I will get out of boxing. I want to go on because I am the only man in the history of the sport with the chance of winning the heavyweight title for a fourth time. I shall be old in a year or two.”
During his brief stay in London, Ali was typically busy. He visited the House of Commons at the invitation of Martin Stevens, Conservative MP for Fulham, and there was the inevitable parade of visitors to his hotel room. A then up-and-coming Irish actor named Liam Neeson was among those granted an audience.
“We were up in his suite and I remember children being there,” said Neeson. “Ali, he’s famous for it, went straight for the kids and we were all ignored for a few minutes. Eventually, we formed a semi-circle and he was coming around, shaking hands with everybody. My knees were genuinely shaking. You’re going to meet your hero, and I thought, ‘I have to say something to him because I’ll never get the chance in my life again.’ And, as he came up to me, I just went, ‘Man, I love you!’”
Ali also resumed his professional relationship with the legendary English broadcaster, Michael Parkinson. In a lively appearance on Parkinson’s chat show, Ali was forced to defend his desire to continue fighting.
Parkinson: You’ve seen the shambling wrecks that go around, you see them at every boxing occasion. And what people are frightened of is they don’t want that to happen to you.
Ali: What, to be a shambling wreck?
Parkinson: That’s right.
Ali: I’m a long ways from a shambling wreck.
Parkinson: Oh, I’m not suggesting you are now. I’m saying that’s what they’re frightened might happen.
Ali: Let me tell you why they’re frightened. Some people can see farther than others. Some people are pressed with limitations….
If Ali appeared in good fettle while jousting with Parkinson, problems arose during two other interviews he recorded for BBC radio. In the first he recited a poem about how he would win any rematch with Larry Holmes, the usual Ali shtick except listeners struggled to make out what he was saying. In the second, his speech was even more slurred and, as a result, the BBC decided not to broadcast it.
“It was very sad that so much of what history’s greatest fighter said was unintelligible,” said the BBC’s official statement on the matter.
In the face of that rather compelling and objective evidence that all was almost certainly not right, one English reporter asked Ali whether he was punch drunk. “I have heard about people being punch drunk but I do not feel drunk. When you get as great as me, people always look for some sort of downfall.”
He need not have worried unduly. There were plenty of others out there wanting to afford him the chance to continue boxing, wherever and whenever that might happen.
Despite the embarrassment with the BBC and the licensing setback in Las Vegas, Ali began 1981 determined to get back in the ring against Gardner, with the Neal Blaisdell Center in Honolulu in April the most likely time and place.
“If I stop it’s because I want to stop,” said Ali. “Nobody can make me stop.”
That was true. That also became his mantra as opposition to his intentions mounted.
On January 7, he was in Honolulu taking the physical examination necessary for him to be licensed to fight there. At a meeting of the Hawaiian Boxing Commission five days later, Dr. Richard You testified that, in his opinion, Ali was fit to fight if he addressed some health issues before climbing into the ring. He was deemed overweight (twenty-three pounds heavier than when he fought Holmes), had less than normal blood sugar, and minor problems with his kidneys. Otherwise, the fighter was in “good physical condition.”
However, Hawaii managed to wriggle off the hook on a technicality. The commission voted 3-2 to defer Ali’s application for a license until it had received written clarification from the Nevada State Athletic Commission clarifying his exact status as a fighter there. Essentially, they were trying to buy themselves time. A subsequent phone call confirmed the truth of the earlier assertion by Harold Smith, chairman of Muhammad Ali Professional Sports, a company set up in 1977 to promote events using the Ali brand, that he had merely “surrendered” his license in Las Vegas.
The officials were stalling, because five days after the hearing Ali would turn thirty-nine and Hawaii had a law preventing any fighters over the age of thirty-eight from being licensed, thereby rendering any future meeting on the topic moot.
After the decision was announced, Smith had a roaring match with Ed Kalahiki, chairman of the commission and the person who had been the swing vote on the issue. The fact that the Governor of Hawaii, George R. Ariyoshi, had appointed Robert R. Lee to the commission just an hour before the meeting was something the Ali camp regarded as “mighty suspicious.”
“The governor never told me to kill the fight, but I think he knew how I felt about it,” said Lee, two decades later. “Ali was deteriorating and people just wanted to use him and make money off of him. We didn’t know then about his Parkinson’s disease, of course, but you could tell he’d already had enough.”
Incensed, Smith announced his intention to sue the state for an amount of money large enough to deter others from denying his man the right to fight.
“This is a sham,” said Smith. “I feel more sadly for the people of Hawaii and Sam Ichinose [the local promoter of the proposed fight] than I do for Ali. Ali’s big enough. He can go anywhere. It’s Hawaii’s loss, not his.”
Whatever the motivation behind the political chicanery informing the decision, the outcome of it spoke volumes for where Ali now stood. The people who ran boxing in Hawaii, a state that exists literally and metaphorically on the fringes of the American national imagination, were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to host an Ali fight. The prospect of being one of the cities that could be featured in the most storied résumé in the sport, alongside everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Kinshasa, from Manila to Munich, was no longer alluring.
During their deliberations, the Hawaiians had also received a troubling cable from London urging them not to sanction an Ali fight. At its first meeting since the Gardner bout had been proposed, the British Boxing Board of Control (who held the Englishman’s license), was adamant it did not want one of its fighters being the next man to face such a diminished version of Ali.
“The Board’s position is clear with regard to Ali,” said secretary Ray Clark. “We are strongly opposed to Ali continuing boxing. The chairman has stated this previously and the board endorsed this view today.”
The more vehement the opposition became, the louder those around Ali began to shout.
“It’s his fight,” said Harold Smith. “If the fight is made it will take place in one of three places: Kingston, Jamaica; the Bahamas; or Puerto Rico. It definitely won’t take place in the United States, mainly because the media in the United States would be too hard on Ali.”
That much was certainly true, because some in the press were already having fun at his expense.
“Muhammad Ali has arranged to fight John L Gardner,” wrote legendary columnist Red Smith in the New York Times, “if they can find a place where the cops will look the other way.”
Ali turned thirty-nine on January 17, 1981, and many papers across America that morning carried an interview that the Associated Press had conducted with him the previous day. Befitting somebody starting to realize that so many in boxing no longer wished to see him fight, or, indeed, would allow him to do so on their patches, his mood was fiery.
“I’m at war with the factors in boxing that want me to quit. I’m fighting them. I’m going to show them I’m too big for them. I’m not just an ordinary Christian American Negro. I’m a world-accepted Muslim. I’m doing this just for spite, to show them I’m too big to stop.”
Claiming that he’d been contacted by five different countries (Japan was rumored to be in the mix) offering to host the fight, he refused to name them for fear of jeopardizing negotiations. Sounding predictably upbeat about his chances of beating Holmes in a rematch somewhere down the line, he also mused about aging and the fight game.
“The reason that I’m doing this is that I don’t want nobody telling me what I can do or can’t do as far as my occupation is concerned. I might say forget it even before I fight Holmes again. I just want the right to do what I want to do if I want to. A lot of fighters get knocked cold several times and keep on fighting, heavyweights in my division, and they haven’t stopped them. If the authorities won’t accept me, I’ll go to the authorities of other worlds.”
By which he probably meant Puerto Rico. He had previous experience there.
When he fought Jean-Pierre Coopman, the so-called Lion of Flanders, in San Juan in 1976, he was still near his box office peak. Six hundred fans paid $5 each day just to see him train. While the Roberto Clemente Coliseum only held 10,000, another 11,000 Puerto Ricans crowded into a stadium next door to watch a live television feed of him dismantling the overmatched Belgian, finally ending the contest in the fifth round.
But that was five years before. An eternity in boxing. An age in promotional terms, too. Although Ali applied for a license in Puerto Rico and the talk was of an April fight at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium, a baseball diamond, doubts now existed about whether San Juan was that interested. Of course, through all the embarrassing refusals, Gardner remained willing to go wherever was needed for the fight to happen. Well, sort of. He, too, had some reservations.
“As a fan, I think Ali should not box again and not get a license,” said Gardner. “As a professional boxer, I hope he gets his license. This fight could set me up financially for life. If I beat him many would say Ali was an old man and over the hill. But it would still go into the record books, and I would be the only British boxer who had ever beaten the great Muhammad Ali. That is what would matter to me.”
That and the proposed purse of $300,000 (it had shrunk from initial suggestions of half a million), which would make it the biggest payday of Gardner’s life. His had been a plodding career, and he’d only become European champion after the title was taken off Italy’s Lorenzo Zeno, who took a lucrative world title shot against Larry Holmes rather than defend the belt.
“If I personally had my way, Ali would not fight again, but I’m saying that as an Ali fan,’’ said Mickey Duff, adding his voice to those questioning the moral if not financial wisdom of the whole enterprise. “As Gardner’s manager, I have a responsibility to my fighter. Still, if I thought that by saying ‘no’ that would cause Ali’s retirement, I would recommend to Gardner that he not fight Ali. But there are at least two opponents waiting in the wings if Gardner says no, and I think he’s as eligible as anyone else to fight Ali and this might be the fight to convince him to retire before he does get hurt.”
Hawaii and Puerto Rico soon faded from the conversation, and rumors began that Ali had turned his sights on Africa as a potential location. There were reports out of Morocco that he now wished for his “last” fight to take place in an Islamic state, and that Casablanca was the leading contender. Nothing would come of that either.
If January had proved a month when doors were closed in his face all over the planet, there was, amid the steady drip of negative headlines and steadfast refusals, one cameo that reminded everybody what all the fuss was about, why Ali was such a big deal.
Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on Monday, January 19, Joseph Brisbon began to climb the fire escape of a high-rise building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Upon reaching the ninth floor, the twenty-one-year-old eased himself out onto the ledge and shouted that he intended to commit suicide. The police were quickly called to the scene and, as this African-American man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans started to roar in military jargon about the Viet Cong coming to get him, the commotion drew a crowd onto the street below.
The first cops to answer the 911 call tried their best to reason with Brisbon, but soon realized more serious professional help was needed. A psychologist was brought up to the ninth floor to try to persuade him to move back to safety and to reconsider. To no avail. A police chaplain spoke to him at length but, again, there was no convincing the poor man that ending his life was not the best option. Brisbon remained balancing precariously on the ledge for so long that some onlookers on the sidewalk below could be heard laughing and joking about his plight, intermittently shouting up at him, “Jump! Jump!”
This was the scene when Howard Bingham, photographer and Muhammad Ali’s best friend, happened to come upon the crowd. He watched the drama play out for a bit, then approached a police officer and offered to call Ali (who lived nearby) to get him to come over to try to coax this distraught character in from the edge. Bingham had traveled the world with the boxer and witnessed his extraordinary impact on men, women, and children of every creed in every situation. Surely, it was worth a shot. The officer in charge thought not but, undeterred, Bingham took matters into his own hands.
“I went back to my car and called Ali anyway,” he said. “I told Ali there was a guy up here on a building about a mile from his house, and maybe he could get through.”
Minutes later, Ali’s Rolls-Royce came driving the wrong way up Wilshire, lights flashing, and his horn occasionally beeping people out of the way. Initially, the officers busily trying to prevent a man plummeting to the pavement were not thrilled by the fighter’s arrival. In the home of Hollywood, the last thing they wanted was to encourage celebrity involvement in trying to save potential suicides. Unsurprisingly, their first move was to refuse to allow Ali into the building. Then matters on high took a turn for the worse.
“He [Brisbon] said he was definitely going to jump, and actually came close to jumping,” said Sergeant Bruce Hagerty. “We decided to give Muhammad a chance at talking to the man.”
Once he reached the ninth floor, Ali opened a window just yards from where Brisbon was perched and stuck his head out.
“It’s really you!” shouted Brisbon.
It was really him, immaculately turned out in a suit and tie. Now those gathered below were treated to the sight of the most famous athlete on the planet chatting with a man struggling to find a reason to live. Even by the bizarre standards of tall tales in Tinseltown, this was turning into quite an epic drama.
Then, Ali did what Ali had always done best. He instantly connected with somebody in that wonderful way he had about him. He learned quickly that Brisbon was depressed because he couldn’t find a job and had issues with his parents. After chatting from the nearby window, Ali asked if he could move to the stairwell of the fire escape to make it a little easier to talk. For the first time all day, Brisbon agreed to allow someone into his immediate vicinity.
“The police thought he had a gun,” said Ali. “Nobody would go near him. I told him I’m coming out and don’t shoot me. He said, ‘I won’t shoot you, I don’t even have a gun.’ I took his word and walked on out.”
The conversation continued with Ali now standing in the fire escape almost close enough to touch Brisbon, who remained, in every way, on the edge.
“I’m no good,” said Brisbon. “I’m no good.”
“You’re my brother,” said Ali. “I love you and I wouldn’t lie to you. You got to listen. I want you to come home with me, meet some friends of mine.”
“Why do you worry about me?” asked Brisbon. “I’m a nobody.”
“You ain’t a nobody!” said Ali, so moved by the plight of the young man that he started to cry.
“He saw me weeping and he couldn’t believe I was really doing that, that I cared that much about him.”
Ali assured Brisbon he’d help him find a job and he’d even intercede with his parents on his behalf. But, he also warned him that the step he was trying to take had a finality to it.
“If you jump,” he warned his new friend, “you’re going to hell because there’s no way to repent.”
More than once during an encounter that lasted twenty minutes, journalists watching from below were certain that Brisbon was going to go through with his desperate threat. Finally, he clambered back in off the ledge and fell sobbing into the embrace of Ali, the moment captured by the television cameras which, by then, were inevitably in attendance. The pair of them walked back into the building.
As a testament to the powers of Ali, it was a magnificent moment. When all else failed, he leapt into action and saved the day, leading even the staid CBS Evening News to compare him to a “superhero.” Larry Holmes might have exposed the stark nature of his physical decline in Vegas three months earlier, but here was evidence that the charisma, the personality, and the magnetism remained undiminished.
It’s not so much that no other athlete could have pulled it off; it’s that no other athlete would probably even have tried. Supremely confident in his own ability, Ali didn’t seem to give the awful possibility of failure a second thought as he stayed the course with Brisbon. He followed through on a promise made during the negotiation that he would ferry him to the Veterans’ Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, and spent $1,800 of his money paying for new clothes and an apartment for him.
As they left the building together, strolling towards the Rolls-Royce, the remaining onlookers chanted “USA! USA!” in a bizarre endpoint to the episode.
“He knows my address,” said Ali later. “I’ve told people to bring him to me when they let him go. I’ll help him. He knows he’s got a home, my home.”
Among the entourage accompanying Ali into and out of the building that day was Norman Thrasher, a member of the famous Detroit R&B group, The Midnighters. Now known as Norman Bilal Muhammad, Thrasher had embraced the Nation of Islam in the late 1950s and was an old friend of Ali’s. The pair first met when they attended the same mosque in Miami in the early 1960s.
If Thrasher was a familiar presence in the ever-changing crowd that always seemed to orbit Ali, there was a less well-known figure also along for the ride on Wilshire Boulevard. That was James Cornelius, a friend of a more recent vintage who was blown away by what he’d just witnessed.
“Even now I am still awed by how Ali was able to quickly and effectively gain the confidence of that young man,” wrote Cornelius. “I had read stories and I had seen pictures of people being coaxed not to take their own lives, but even in the movies the task is wrenching and time-consuming. But for the Champ, plucking Joe back to reality seemed effortless. He approached the task with the same air and confidence with which he faced his opponents in the ring.”
And, it turned out, Cornelius was determined to be the man to help Ali get back into that ring.