[Ali] is all the sixties were. It is as though he were created to represent them. In him is the trouble and the wildness and the hysterical gladness and the nonsense and the rebellion and the conflicts of race and the yearning for bizarre religions and the cult of the put-on and the changed values that altered the world and the feeling about Vietnam in the generation that ridicules what their parents cherish.
JIMMY CANNON, 1970
[Clay] is an American who doesn’t wish to be an American, a fighter who doesn’t wish to be a fighter for American patriotism. Now, if this man Clay isn’t a genuine freak, one of the freakiest of all time despite his ideal physical proportions and ring skills, then we haven’t had a real freak in boxing.
DAN DANIEL, THE RING, AUGUST 1966
On their way to their epic battle in Kinshasa, Zaire, on October 30, 1974, heavyweight champion George Foreman and former titleholder Muhammad Ali had come to represent different poles in the raging debate over the role of black athletes in American sports and in the larger fields of race relations, politics, and culture. That the two champions were black raised questions about a Cold War narrative that emphasized progress in American race relations so that any talented young person, regardless of race, creed, or color, could achieve the American dream of success. Olympic athletes were expected to fulfill their patriotic duty and vanquish their Soviet and Eastern Bloc foes in symbolic reenactments of the Cold War. Once they achieved professional success, boxers were expected to serve as proper role models for American boys and young men, and this included a willingness to serve in the armed forces. Yet by 1968 the situation had changed dramatically, especially for black men and women in sports. The impact of the civil rights movement, the growing ascendancy of black nationalism, and the virulent anti–Vietnam War movement worked to challenge the assumptions about the role of black athletes in American life. At the center of this social ferment, Muhammad Ali joined the antiwhite Nation of Islam and refused to serve in the armed forces of the United States. Much to the chagrin of the boxing and political establishment, he rejected his role as an American patriotic symbol and assumed the identity of black and Third World hero. Conversely, his future opponent George Foreman seemed his exact opposite: a living example of the American dream. A beneficiary of the Job Corps, a key program in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Foreman symbolized a form of liberalism and patriotic civil rights that appeared to be increasingly old-fashioned as the 1960s flowed into the 1970s. In Kinshasa, the question was not just which individual boxer would win but also which set of opposing political and cultural values would triumph.1
No one meeting these two athletes as youngsters would have predicted that they would play such divergent political roles in the overall scheme of things or that boxing would emerge as a focal point for a national and international debate about such weighty matters. Under his original name, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Muhammad Ali was the product of a relatively stable, two-parent, working-class family. He was born in the segregated black community of Louisville, Kentucky, on January 18, 1942. In the 1950s Louisville prided itself as a border city known for its moderation in race relations. Blacks had the vote and hence a measure of political power to temper some of the harshness of segregation. While schools, parks, neighborhoods, the downtown business district, and places of amusement were largely segregated, because of a strong interracial labor movement and the right to vote, African Americans found more economic opportunities and a better standard of living there than in most Southern cities. Black political power garnered a black park to offset the white one and a separate black college to rival the University of Louisville. In response to Brown v. Board of Education, the city fathers engineered the desegregation of the schools. Neighborhood segregation, however, remained strong. Growing up black in Louisville as the civil rights movement spread across the South, young Cassius could expect some limited economic opportunity, paternalistic white leadership, and a segregated public life to remind him of his second-class status.2
According to several family friends, the Clays were a proud family, descended from slaveholders—Henry Clay on his father’s side and an Irish man named Grady on his mother’s—as well as enslaved women. The family’s apparent stability belied its tumultuous nature, however. As one of Cassius’s early white backers noted: “There was a lot of trouble, bad trouble, between his father and mother . . . but Cassius would bite his tongue before he’d mention it. He had too much pride.” Much of the family’s explosiveness lay with his father, Cassius Clay Sr., a frustrated artist-turned-sign-painter whose artwork decorated many churches and small businesses in Louisville’s segregated black neighborhood. Having witnessed his own aspirations shrink under the weight of discrimination, he took out his frustrations in violent arguments with his wife, the fair-skinned and gracious Odessa, who worked as a domestic for various white families. Cassius Sr.’s drinking and womanizing were sore points in the family. When he drank to excess, he would pick fights with his drinking buddies, his wife, and his sons, Cassius and the younger Rudy. Several times Odessa was forced to bring her husband to court for roughing her up. In one instance, young Cassius tried to protect his mother only to receive a stab wound in his thigh for his efforts. At other times the police picked up Cassius Sr. for reckless driving, disorderly conduct, assault, or battery, always when he was drinking. As an old friend put it, “The father isn’t a criminal or even an evil man. He’s just a frustrated little guy who can’t drink.” As a result, Cassius and his brother, Rudy, grew up in an atmosphere of impending explosion. At the same time, the young Cassius grew up hearing his father pour out his vitriol at a white society that had limited his hopes and dreams as well as those of most black people he knew. Cassius’s father was a proto–black nationalist, though without any formal affiliation.3
Cassius Jr. found sanctuary in boxing, just as George Foreman would over a decade later. At twelve years old his cherished bicycle was stolen. He reported the theft to the nearest policeman, Joe Martin, who ran a boxing program in a nearby church basement. When Cassius threatened to thrash the thief, Martin urged him to learn to box first. From then on Cassius lived, breathed—and talked—boxing. He got up at 5 a.m. for roadwork, went to school, and at night spent hours in the gym. As a boxer he had “something to do every day. Go to the gym, put on my gloves and box.” Although he hung out on the streets, and even belonged to a street gang for a while, he preferred the gym. Boxing became one of the key anchors of his identity.4
Hearing a Rocky Marciano title fight on the radio fed Clay’s dreams of becoming a champion. The other kids made fun of his aspirations and his incessant bragging, but boxing made him “feel like somebody different.” As his reputation as an amateur grew, “pretty soon I was the popularest [sic] kid in high school,” he said. High school and college held no interest because people in his neighborhood who did well in school ended up frustrated and lost on the streets. Poor grades prevented him from graduating, but at the principal’s behest he was awarded a certificate of attendance. Clay could fight but he could hardly read, the latter probably a result of undiagnosed dyslexia. Still, his intense ambition fueled a self-discipline that kept him away from smoking, drinking, and drugs. With the help of black trainer Fred Stoner, who worked on the youngster’s style, and Martin’s entrée with various amateur bodies and local television stations, Clay soon began appearing on Louisville television as he advanced through the amateur ranks on his way to becoming a local hero.5
His distinguished amateur career ultimately led him to the 1960 Rome Olympics, where the six-foot-three boxer won a gold medal as a light heavyweight by beating a Russian and a Pole. The garrulous and handsome Clay also made friends all over the Olympic Village. “With his frilly, hands-down, show boat style he affected as an amateur,” noted Houston Horn in Sports Illustrated, “and the elaborate dance patterns he used to flit away from danger, he cha-chaed through three rounds with the Polish boy and reduced him to bloody defenselessness.” His medal, Horn declared, made him “an international celebrity,” and he spent the rest of his time in Rome making himself “one of the best-known, best-liked athletes in the Olympic Village.”6
After winning his cherished medal, eighteen-year-old Clay followed a conventional Cold War script for American athletes. American and Russian officials understood that international sporting spectacles were perfect settings for their two nations to demonstrate their respective strengths and compete for the allegiance of recently independent Third World countries. In this setting, black and white athletes were expected to be vigorous symbols of an American way of life open to all, regardless of race, creed, or color. The Soviets would attempt to exploit American racial segregation and discrimination, but US athletes were advised to make clear that progress was being made and that racism’s worst aspects were a thing of the past. Clay played his part perfectly, refusing to criticize American society, especially abroad. This made him acceptable in Louisville and across the nation as sit-ins and Freedom Rides raised the question of African American intentions and made many whites anxious about the future of segregation. As Clay recalled about the Olympics, “This Commie comes up [and asks], ‘Now how do you feel, Mr. Clay, that even though you won a gold medal you still can’t go back to the United States and eat with the white folks because you’re a colored boy?’” Clay responded: “Tell your readers we’ve got qualified people working on that problem, and I’m not worried about the outcome. To me, the USA is still the best country in the world counting yours. It may be hard to get something to eat sometimes, but anyhow I ain’t fighting alligators and living in a mud hut.” When the Soviet reporter asked if he really meant it, he replied, “Man, of course I mean it. Who do you think I am? . . . Poor old Commie, he went dragging off without nothing to write the Russians.”7
Clay’s stance earned him praise in the local black weekly, a sign that moderate Negroes (the accepted term for people of African descent during the 1950s and mid-1960s) were also anxious about changes in the city’s racial structure. The Louisville Defender called him “an ambassador of goodwill . . . with his stark honest interpretation of U.S. race conditions.” Amid nationwide racial unrest, Clay’s patriotism earned him praise and produced a sigh of relief from local officials. It also earned him a public reception and television interview with Louisville mayor Bruce Hoblitzell, as well as a celebration at Central High School arranged by Louisville’s leaders. School officials lauded his achievements and his patriotism, and his father was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The mayor also called upon Clay to meet with visiting foreign reporters and dignitaries, to whom he repeated that in the United States he did not have “to live in African mud huts.” As Ali reflected years later, he felt proud to represent “America on a world stage.” “To me,” he said, “the Gold was more than a symbol of what I had achieved for myself and my country; there was something I expected the medal to achieve for me.” Along with his poor school record and his ties to a white policeman, the young Olympic champion seemed like “a good Negro,” one that Louisville and the nation could endorse.8
Just as George Foreman would discover in 1968, Clay found that there was gold in the gold medal for a “good Negro,” acceptable to the larger white community. As a sign of the community’s endorsement, a group of local wealthy white businessmen formed the Louisville Sponsoring Group (LSG) to help guide Clay’s professional career. Initially, the group helped him preserve a safe image amid the racial turmoil of the early civil rights movement. Allied with the Louisville elite, Clay’s first pro fight against white boxer Tunney Hunsacker was billed as a “good deed” benefit for the city’s Kosair Crippled Children’s Hospital. Needless to say, Clay wore trunks adorned with the words US Olympic Team.9
For his professional career, Clay might have chosen mob-connected managers and trainers, as had Sonny Liston, who parlayed his role as an enforcer for the St. Louis mob into a boxing career. During the 1950s and early 1960s the sport was under the control of the International Boxing Club (IBC), a creation of wealthy sportsman James Norris and mob kingpins Frankie Carbo and Frank “Blinky” Palermo. When he became champion, Liston’s mob ties stained his crown, the sport of boxing, and, at the height of the Cold War, the reputation of the United States as a lawful country. Along with the television quiz-show scandals, juvenile delinquency, and mob-run unions, boxing was seen as part of the corruption of the American way of life.10
Clay might have chosen a black management team, as had Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, but black managers still had to rely on white promoters, like Madison Square Garden’s Mike Jacobs. If Clay had to be dependent on white businessmen, a local white management group appeared to him the best choice for a hometown hero. To the public, it seemed that responsible members of the Louisville white elite were in charge. Under this arrangement, Clay became the first corporate athlete in sports, backed by young Louisville millionaires who controlled significant Kentucky industries such as newspapers, distilleries, horse racing, and tobacco. While they hoped to profit by investing in Clay’s professional career, they paid his training expenses and also established a $50,000 trust fund for his future, a $10,000 signing bonus, a guarantee of $4,000 for the first two years, and $6,000 as a draw against future earnings for the following four years. As a result, the LSG came off as paternalistic white knights helping a talented colored boy in need of counsel and control in a sport that was still mob dominated. They wisely chose Archie Moore to train Clay full-time, but when that did not work out, they picked Angelo Dundee as his trainer but kept Clay away from promoter Chris Dundee, Angelo’s brother, because of Chris’s reputed mob ties. All in all, the LSG, composed of the city’s “best” white people, seemed a beneficent influence good for Clay and for the image of the white community of Louisville.11
As Clay ascended the heavyweight ladder, his good cheer, clean-cut good looks, and reputable sponsors helped invigorate a sport dominated by the reclusive champion Floyd Patterson and his sinister challenger Sonny Liston, and reeling from the recent deaths in the ring of Benny “Kid” Paret and Davey Moore. In contrast to the sullen Liston and the desperately shy Patterson, Clay was handsome, open to the press, mob-free—and highly garrulous. Even so, it became clear early on that he was cast in a different mold from other heavyweight boxers, and black fighters in particular. A key symbol of the 1960s cultural explosion, even before he became champion, Clay revolutionized the norms of boxing just as others were challenging conventional wisdom in politics, race relations, and sexuality.
One of the things Clay brought to boxing was a different masculine image of the fighter at a time when young white and black men were beginning to revolt against the expectation that they conform to the rules of the corporation, racial hierarchy, and rigid gender definitions. Instead of slugging it out in the center of the ring as Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, or Sonny Liston did as emblems of tough, raw male power, Clay used his speed, guile, and improvisational skill to outthink and outmaneuver his opponents. As famed artist and boxing fan LeRoy Neiman put it in 1967, Ali “changed the heavyweight concept.” He could not punch like the pile drivers, but he was constantly moving and racking up points: “The fact is that the Big Punch no longer is the major desideratum in heavyweight boxing. The game is counting points, resting heavily on combinations, and placing great reliance on a stiff, steady, punishing jab.” Clay’s punch would not knock a man out, as did Louis’s, but it could cut a man to ribbons and so befuddle him that he never saw the more powerful right cross or left hook. This is what Clay’s assistant Drew “Bundini” Brown meant when he urged him to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!”12
Although six foot three, the young boxer moved like a welterweight, dancing around the ring, peppering his opponents from every angle. Very few big men possessed his agility. This together with his phenomenal speed also allowed him to challenge other ring conventions by holding his left low and leaning his head away from punches. Writer and boxing enthusiast Budd Schulberg argued that this mobility was physically unnecessary, but it added a new psychological weapon: “hit and run, jab and dance, to befuddle, frustrate, and tire the enemy before zeroing in.” Clay’s speed also made him exceedingly difficult to hit. In fact, his willingness to withdraw from danger raised doubts about his toughness, and hence his masculinity, among boxing cognoscenti. Could a boxer who bragged about how pretty he was and how little he got hit get very far in a fistic milieu of bent noses and cauliflower ears? Was he willing to stand and trade punches or would he run at the first sign of trouble? To make the point explicit, Sonny Liston, annoyed by his young challenger’s constant bragging, called him “a faggot,” a lightweight who would fade at the first blow. Charges such as these were rife not only in boxing but in America at large. Along with breadwinning and soldiering, heterosexuality remained a key component of masculinity.13
According to trainer Angelo Dundee, Clay also “changed the way things work” in other ways. “In promoting boxing, he made the fighter the main guy.” In the age of television, his good looks and outrageous manner made him a media star. A good deal had to do with his openness to the press. As Clay put it, “I’m the best friend a reporter ever had because I always give good quotes, changing them around so everybody gets a fresh one.” Even more, he started accurately predicting the round in which his opponent would lose—this began with his two round KO of Lamar Clark, after which he proclaimed, “From now on they all must fall in the round I call.” Jet hailed him as a prophet after he called thirteen out of fourteen predictions correctly in his first seventeen bouts. “I challenged the old system,” he recalled, “in which managers, promoters and owners looked upon fighters as brutes without brains.” In the past, boxers were “seen but not hardly heard on any issue or idea of public importance.” As a result, noted Dundee, Clay became “an attraction, a celebrity. It was something he worked hard at becoming just as hard as he worked at becoming a better boxer and a champion.” Clay proved highly adept at public relations, ever alert to new ways of attracting the attention of the media. Outside the ring, he abandoned the expectation that heavyweight fighters in general and black athletes in particular be modest and silent, letting white managers and promoters do the talking, as had been the style of Louis, Marciano, Patterson, and Liston. In and out of the ring, Clay’s public presence demonstrated that he was not just a physical brute but also an intelligent and articulate human being.14
Three days before a match with Duke Sabong in Las Vegas in 1961, Clay met the outrageous wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner, with his dyed blond hair, flashy robes, and a habit of insulting opponents while touting his own good looks and wrestling skills. To Clay’s surprise, the wrestler drew fans by the thousands who hoped for his defeat. A light went on. The more Clay bragged about himself, the more he sassed his opponents, the more outrageous his self-presentation, he realized, the more fans would come out to see him lose. He began touting his looks and his skills and denigrating those of his opponent: “I’d never been shy about talking, but if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.” Lots of fighters boast, but Clay also took to ridiculing his opponents in rhyme, seemingly making up doggerel on the spot, using the black verbal art of the dozens. Boasting “I am the greatest,” he took charge of his own identity in and out of the ring.15
Indeed, convinced that he knew more about boxing than anyone else, he refused to listen to his trainers, sparring partners, or ring veterans. Clay’s egoistic insistence that he knew best started as soon as the LSG had him train with former light heavyweight champion Archie Moore. Bored with sweeping up and listening to the advice of one of the ring’s wise men, Clay bolted. “I got my own style,” Clay reportedly said. “Nobody tells me nothing.” Or, as he put it on another occasion, “The one who made me is me!” That is how he ended up with Angelo Dundee, the ring veteran trainer who managed to refine his style but through indirection and applied psychology. “You can’t handle him the way you do the usual fighter,” Angelo noted. “You don’t regiment him. He had enough of that. You just have to use indirection.” For example, Dundee noted, at first Clay’s left jab was not a powerful weapon: “A daily nicking at his pride did it. He’ll be the last guy in the world to admit that anybody did it but him, but that doesn’t bother me. He didn’t have a left uppercut. He’s got one now. He was throwing a left jab, but it was a slap. It had no authority.” But, Dundee added, “you have to show him things slowly.”16
With his verbal pyrotechnics rooted in African American oral tradition, his bragging, poetry, his use of black dialect, his acting out of white attitudes and black responses, Clay was more than a fighter—he had turned boxing into theater, with himself as the star. “The ring and the gym, they’re his stage,” noted Dundee. “He’s like a guy going to the Academy Award dinner, only he’s receiving the Academy Award every day! This is the thrill he gets. He’s happy when he’s performing for people. He’s not just like any ordinary fellow.” He was not just an ordinary black fighter either. Unlike Liston or Patterson—and later Frazier and Foreman—Clay was a hybrid black boxer, one not seen before. He was a fighter-poet, fighter-preacher, fighter-comic, fighter–public presence. And he fought like he talked: nonstop action, nonstop lip. He had, in other words, the energy of black and white youth breaking out of the old racial and cultural restrictions and a taste for the theatricality and self-expression of cultural politics that would become more prominent as the decade wore on. While Dundee caught Clay’s new spirit, others were more skeptical. As late as 1966, ring veterans seemed to agree that Clay was one of the best champions, but he did not yet rank among the top fifteen heavyweights.17
In Cassius Clay boxing was witnessing the early 1960s youth rebellion and the development of the generation gap. In fact, in 1962, Clay appeared in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight as a young boxer whose speed and power humiliate an aging pugilist. But the youth rebellion also infused the actual sport of boxing. The most revered name in boxing was Joe Louis, the idol of black—and white—fans during the Great Depression and World War II. Many black parents named their boys after Joe, and just as many hoped that their children would follow in his athletic footsteps. Cassius Clay Sr. was no exception. As Clay’s father explained, his son “came into this world with a good body and a big head that was the image of Joe Louis. . . . That made me real proud. I loved Joe Louis.” While Cassius grew up on tales of Louis, as soon as he turned professional there were signs of discord. Upon winning his first professional bout, he announced, “There’s a lot of things I want to be in the fight game but I sure don’t want to be a Joe Louis, that is I don’t want to have the income tax troubles . . . Louis had.” He would try to be more responsible and save his money, a pledge made easier by the financial oversight of the LSG. As Clay piled up victories and started proclaiming he was the greatest, the proud Louis showed signs of being miffed. Later, when Clay joined the Nation of Islam and refused to serve in the army, the rift between the two champions deepened.18
The full impact of the generation gap lay ahead, but noticeable signs emerged when Clay fought Archie Moore, former light heavyweight champ and one of the sport’s grand “old men.” “The Mongoose” was indeed old, but no one was sure if he was thirty-eight or fifty. As for other talented black fighters, it took him years to get a title fight. At an advanced age he finally won the light heavyweight crown and then, in 1955, went after the heavyweight title against Rocky Marciano but lost in a spectacular slugfest. When Moore fought Clay in 1962, he was at the stage of his career that saw him no longer a serious contender. Rather, Moore was reduced to being an opponent, but still a dangerous one. Moore’s wry sense of humor made him a favorite among sports reporters and fans. Only Clay rivaled Moore’s sense of humor and bravado. Their previous history together made the bout even more significant. Moore had been Clay’s initial trainer as a pro, but the young boxer rebelled against Moore’s regimented training camp.19
Jet dubbed their November 15, 1962, match in Los Angeles “Youth and Ability versus Age and Experience.” For his first big test, Clay unleashed the new elements he had introduced into heavyweight boxing. His bragging, poetry, and predictions made him the fight’s actual promoter. His outrageous verbosity made him the villain; nationally people flocked to closed-circuit theaters to see him get beat by old school Moore, a standard-bearer of humor and sportsmanship who promised he had a “lip buttoner punch.” Young Clay retorted with a poetic prediction: “Archie has been living off the fat of the land / I’m here to give him his pension plan. / When you come to the fight don’t block aisle or door / ’Cause y’all going home after round four.” Young and sleek, Clay easily danced around the paunchy, gray-haired Moore, who fought at a snail’s pace. In the fourth round Clay made his boast come true. He jabbed Moore silly, setting him up for an uppercut. Moore crumbled. As Jet proclaimed, “cocky Clay” beat an “antiquated Moore.” The boxing establishment was forced to admit that Clay’s ring skills just might match his self-promotion. His rankings jumped from seventh to fourth, and he became the hottest box-office attraction in years. Only twenty-one years old, Clay kept demanding a title shot as he cultivated a bad-boy image, though an apolitical and humorous one. When he failed to finish Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden in March 1963 in the predicted round and was forced to grind out a ten-round decision, fans threw peanuts into the ring as a sign of derision; Clay picked one up and ate it. As much as people loved to hate Clay’s bad-boy verbosity and overweening ego, he was still tongue-in-cheek, clean-cut, and trouble-free.20
As he campaigned for a title match with Liston, Clay’s fresh-faced challenge to boxing’s accepted rules invigorated a dying sport. Floyd Patterson seemed a nice-enough fellow, but except for Liston, his manager Constantine “Cus” D’Amato kept him away from tough opponents, especially any with mob ties. In his battles with Liston, Patterson was “the good Negro,” humble and modest, versus the surly, amoral black man from the ghetto, a Bigger Thomas with boxing gloves. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did not want Patterson to fight Liston, fearing the consequences of a black champion with criminal ties, but once the fight was announced, the civil rights organization, like President Kennedy, rooted for Patterson and was horrified when he was humiliated in 1962 and again in 1963 by the former mob enforcer. From the moment he won his Olympic gold medal in 1960, Cassius Clay stepped into this gloomy picture to help establish a new era in boxing. “Whether you like Clay or not,” noted Ring’s Dan Daniel, “the fact remains that he performed for boxing a tremendous benefice similar to that which Babe Ruth achieved for baseball” after the Black Sox scandal had shaken public confidence in the sport. Clay knew how to capture the spotlight. He was “fresh, new, and filled with the liveliness of a new age,” argued Angelo Dundee. “Put them all together and all of a sudden it was the Age of Cassius.”21
Unlike the more sober heavyweights, black and white, Clay turned his title quest into pure theater, in the process taking on the image of a crazy man who would say or do anything unlike brutish Liston or his modest black predecessors. After cutting “Ol’ Henry” Cooper to ribbons as predicted in the fifth round in London, where he wore a crown and royal robe into the ring, he taunted his opponent in the land of good sportsmanship and so earned Great Britain’s ire. Afterward Clay turned toward Liston in earnest. He went “bear hunting,” with taunts and tricks, poems and predictions, of what he would do to another “old man.” After his devastating performances against Patterson, reporters considered Liston invincible. Clay replied, “I’m not afraid of Liston. He’s an old man.” For his twenty-second birthday, Clay had a cake with two figures atop: Clay standing over Liston in victory. Clay also predicted: “Liston will meet his fate in eight.” He topped this with a nastier rhyme, adding a racial edge that would become more prominent after the bout: “Liston did not do as he should / He tried to move in a white neighborhood / If he don’t like black / I know February 25 will find him on his back.” To get Liston to agree to a fight, the young challenger chartered a bus and followed the champion everywhere, including a 3 a.m. surprise visit to Liston’s Denver home. Liston was not amused. Many fans thought Clay was crazy to incite such a vicious man.22
Clay’s rule breaking resonated with the cultural ferment of the 1960s. His underdog battle against Liston in their February 25, 1964, title fight was viewed as a youth rebellion against a ponderous relic of an older generation. Pandemonium erupted at the weigh-in, typically a dull affair during which the two fighters strip to their trunks and step on the scales. Not this time. While officials and the media looked on, Clay unleashed full-scale craziness. Together with his assistant “Bundini,” he started yelling as soon as they entered the room, challenging the ugly bear, taunting Liston unmercifully, shouting “float like a butterfly sting like a bee—Rumble, young man, rumble,” followed by Clay and Bundini roaring in unison. Then Clay lunged at Liston, forcing his handlers to hold him back. The doctor found Clay’s blood pressure off the charts. Onlookers believed that fear had driven him crazy. Back in his hotel his blood pressure was perfectly normal. According to Dundee, it was all “pure theater” designed to rile Liston and show that he was not intimidated by the champ’s prison-yard stare. Because of his “Academy Award rantings,” noted Jet, experts were sure that the “cocky” Clay was “scared to death,” but when the bell sounded, he was completely “cool.” His detractors were left reaching for “salt and pepper to eat their words.”23
Clay’s victory over Liston ushered in a new day for the sport and for American culture. Fans and experts assumed that the challenger had no chance against Liston’s experience and his vicious left hook: Liston was an 8 to 1 favorite. From the start, however, the younger man proved his mettle. As the referee gave his instructions, Clay stared straight at Liston rather than avoiding the fearsome look that had defeated Patterson before their bouts had even started. It was apparent that the challenger was actually taller at six foot three than Liston, who was six foot one, and lighter at 210.5 versus the champion’s 218. Sonny did enjoy a reach advantage, however, which measured 80.5 inches to Clay’s 78. When the opening bell rang, Clay came out dancing, jabbing, moving, and grooving. For four rounds he outjabbed and outmaneuvered Liston, nullifying Liston’s long reach and making him look tired and older as the fight progressed. The fifth round provided real drama. Some of the ointment used on Liston got into Clay’s eyes; he shouted that he could not see and wanted his gloves cut off. At that point, the experienced Dundee pushed his man toward the center of the ring and ordered him to dance. Dance he did, moving constantly away from the desperately lunging Liston, who saw his chance at last. By the round’s end, however, Clay’s eyes cleared and he reasserted his mastery of the tired champ. In the sixth round, Liston appeared hopeless, taking jabs, crosses, and hooks like never before. When the bell rang for the seventh round, Liston remained on his stool, looking too old and exhausted to fight on against a younger, determined whirlwind. Many fans concluded that he just quit and wondered whether the fight was fixed from the start.24
Clay’s sixth round TKO of the invincible Liston “shook up the world” and established him as a different kind of black heavyweight champion. His press conference the next day, February 26, 1964, sparked major national controversy and revulsion. According to precedent, the new champion met with the media to usher in an era of good feelings, good write-ups, and future profits. Still sensitive toward boxing experts who had given him no chance, he ranted at the press. “Eat your words,” he yelled, adding: “Look at me, I’m still pretty! I’m the only one who went bear huntin’ bare handed and shook up the bear. . . . Look at me, the most beautiful champion in heavyweight history. I said I was going to shake up the world, and I did it.”25
Stung by Clay’s rants, plagued by rumors of his religious conversion, and prompted by Malcolm X’s attendance at the fight, white sportswriters demanded to know whether Clay was a Black Muslim. “They don’t call themselves that,” he responded. “I believe in the oldest religion in the world [sic]—Islam, which means peace.” His conversion from Christianity appeared to have racial overtones. “I ain’t no Christian,” he added, “and can’t be as long as my people are beaten, kicked, bitten by dogs and bombed out of Christian churches.” Besides, he said, “I’m the heavyweight champion of the world, but right now there are some neighborhoods right here that I can’t move into.” Then came words that marked him as a different sort of athlete: “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.” Confirming his friendship with Malcolm X, suspended minister of the Nation of Islam, admitting membership in a religion that terrified most whites and many blacks, and announcing that he was free of white expectations as to how he should conduct himself, Clay succeeded in frightening the boxing establishment, boxing fans, and a white America easily scared by racial change.26
Clay’s conversion to the Nation of Islam and his close association with Malcolm X, the charismatic alternative to nonviolent integration stunned the nation. To the new champion, however, the NOI made psychological sense. According to Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, Clay grew up living in fear of his father’s drunken violence and explosive anger against the white world that he blamed for his disappointments. Clay also feared the violence of the white world outside the home. Repeatedly, he heard his father warn against leaving the neighborhood, shopping in white-owned stores, looking at white women, disobeying the police, and—scariest of all—getting arrested. His father repeatedly told stories about whites lynching and burning black men. In 1954, for instance, a black family bought a house in a white suburban Louisville neighborhood, only to have their white neighbors threaten them, burn crosses on their lawn, shoot at them, and ultimately dynamite the house. No one was tried for the crime, and the family was forced to move to the segregated West End, where the Clays and most blacks in Louisville lived, proving Clay Sr.’s warnings that contact with whites would inevitably result in violence. Clay was also seared by the lynching of Emmett Till and the Birmingham riots and church bombings, all of which were examples of white violence and hatred toward blacks, and proof that there was no justice for blacks in white America. In this atmosphere, Malcolm X’s belief in the deep-seated racism of white America and the futility of racial integration was easy to follow. Moreover, in its emphasis on self-discipline, patriarchy, and black pride, the Nation also offered an answer to the anger, violence, and drunkenness that had roiled Clay’s family life.27
Over the course of several years, Clay’s experience as an athlete also accorded with Muslim teachings. It was a staple of NOI doctrine that black athletes and entertainers existed to entertain whites with their bodies rather than their minds and were tolerated as Americans as long as they did not question the country’s racial hierarchy. In other words, like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, they were expected to be fierce competitors on the field or in the ring but quiet away from the fray. This claim resonated with Clay’s experience after the 1960 Olympics. Proud to represent his country, he had expected the gold medal to bring him fame, fortune, and acceptance in white America. Honored by Louisville’s mayor, he was trotted out to visiting dignitaries as a living symbol of improving American race relations. Deep down, however, he felt he was in danger of becoming a black “white hope,” acceptable “as long as he believed what they believed, talked the way they talked and hated the people they hated.” Despite wearing his medal, soon after meeting with the mayor, Clay was insulted by the owners of a local segregated restaurant who ordered him out of their establishment. Deeply humiliated, “whatever illusions I’d built up in Rome as the All-American boy were gone,” he recalled. According to legend, he threw his medal away in disgust, although in fact he may have stopped wearing it and over the years misplaced it. Either way, “My holiday as a White Hope was over.”28
Clay’s renunciation of his “slave name” proved shocking, as did his announcement that henceforth he was Cassius X, the name given him by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Four weeks later, Elijah Muhammad, in a fierce war with Malcolm X for the allegiance of the champion who carried tremendous propaganda power, proclaimed his new acolyte “Muhammad Ali,” which meant “worthy of praise” and “most high.” This seemingly minor act became, as Gerald Early notes, one of “the most startling and contentious symbolic acts in American race relations in the nineteen-sixties.” Many boxers and celebrities, including Joe Louis Barrow, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Jersey Joe Walcott had changed their names, but this sign of his conversion to a religion that preached the need for a separate black nation transformed Clay’s image from “good colored boy” with rebellious tendencies to dangerous black menace. Older white sportswriters, reared on the doctrine that sports should be, and increasingly seemed, color blind, confronted a new champion eager to proclaim his racial pride independent of white and moderate black expectations. When he bragged that he was “pretty,” he echoed nationalist beliefs that “black was beautiful.” In fact, his conversion signaled the realization that black was no longer inferior, as he had been taught by American culture. “I used to think that black was bad,” he declared, and white was good, but “then I found out that black wasn’t bad.” Rejecting the term Negro, Ali defined himself as a black man and insisted of his new name, “[It] freed me from the identity given to my family by slave masters.” Ali’s flamboyant politics of black style and black nationalism and his transformation of subsequent bouts into cultural performances of race brought the personal and the political together and made him an emblem of the antiestablishment counterculture of the 1960s.29
While his religious conversion shocked the nation, the new champion questioned what was wrong with loving his own people. Referring to Liston’s having been prevented from moving into a white neighborhood in Florida, Ali said: “He’s heavyweight champion and he’s catching hell ’cause he wants to integrate. I want to be with my people and I’m catching more hell than he is.” The absurdity was not lost on Ali: “This is real crazy, man, you’re blown up and killed, you’re bit by dogs and washed down the street by water if you want to integrate. And you’re feared and criticized by whites if you don’t want to integrate. What do they want? . . . Why is everybody so shook up by us wanting to get together to solve our problems?”30
Like other NOI followers, he grew critical of black athletes who did not follow his path. “Take those big niggers, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. The whites make ’em rich and in return they brainwash the little Negroes walking around. Liston lives in a white neighborhood, Patterson lives in a white neighborhood . . . I can live . . . anywhere I want, but I live here [Miami] in a slum with my people.” In accepting the Nation of Islam belief in racial separation, Ali challenged the idea that black athletes should succeed only as individuals and lose their identification with the black community. Following Elijah Muhammad’s nationalist teachings, he hoped for “a peaceful, workable solution to the race problem. My goal is to see 22 million Negroes get freedom, justice, and equality.”31
As a vocal member of the NOI especially tutored by Malcolm X, Ali no longer fit the accepted model of the modest, humble black athlete willing to let white managers and coaches speak for him. Speaking his mind in public, he represented a younger generation of black Americans who were no longer willing to placate whites. “I said things that black people thought, but were afraid to say.” In return, the New York Times and many individual sportswriters refused to refer to him as Ali until the 1970s. Older sportswriters and the boxing establishment viewed the Muslims as worse for boxing than the mob was, and their criticism of Ali’s religious beliefs reached fever pitch. Boxing had always been “the red light district of sports,” wrote Jimmy Cannon, the dean of boxing commentators, “but this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of mass hate. As one of Elijah Muhammad’s missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents.” His ties to the Muslims were “the dirtiest in sports since the Nazis were shilling for Max Schmeling as representative of their vile theories of blood.” World Boxing Association commissioner Abe Greene demanded that Clay choose between being champion “or the fanatic leader of an extraneous force that has no place in the sports arena.” In response, he declared: “I don’t steal, abuse anyone or go around snatching pocket books, taking dope . . . but they are trying to take my title away. They are angry with me because I discarded the slave name, Cassius M. Clay for Muhammad Ali.”32
Many older black sports fans, along with civil right workers of all ages, were dismayed by Ali’s rejection of Christianity and integration just as the civil rights movement was achieving legislative victories. Having idolized Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Jackie Robinson, many black sportswriters viewed athletics as the one arena in American life where blacks enjoyed equal opportunity. Victories in the ring by model athletes would convince white Americans of black humanity and show that they had the qualities of self-discipline, good sportsmanship, and self-respect necessary for full inclusion in American society. As a result, many older African Americans were appalled by Ali’s conversion. Charles P. Howard, columnist for Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper, argued that the opposition went deeper. Ali, Howard claimed, was one of the “new Afro-Americans” who were “assertive, cocksure, determined, and of the don’t-fence-me-in type.” Equating the champion with Freedom Riders and sit-in participants, Howard asserted, “He shakes up the good white people as well as the ‘correct’ cullud people.” Deep down, he continued, “They are frightened and shocked at Muhammad and his counterparts among young Afro-Americans for having the crust to break away from everything colored and embrace everything black.” There were indeed some similarities between young civil rights workers and Ali, notably youth, Southern roots, and membership in a generation seared by white racial violence and the lynching of Emmett Till. But while many of them admired Ali’s fighting ability, outspokenness, and racial pride, his defense of racial separation put them off. According to Ebony, many black people disagreed with “Cassius because they say his beliefs are a deterrent to the civil rights fight that is seeking full and equal citizenship for all Americans regardless of race, creed, or color.” Still, just as many young African Americans were drawn to the new champion’s outspoken challenge to white and black authority. Given this split, it would take Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War to make him a full-fledged civil rights hero.33
Just as puzzled as civil rights workers and many moderate African Americans, Ebony magazine defended Ali’s religious freedom as an American constitutional right but was deeply critical of his rejection of integration. Ebony noted that most whites abhorred his religion “not because it preaches segregation of the races, but because it preaches the superiority of the black man.” While most blacks also rejected notions of black superiority, Ali’s religious stance struck a chord with black nationalists who considered pride in all things black and rejection of a hopelessly white supremacist America necessary for black liberation. Still, while the black community supported his religious freedom, most African Americans felt “that he should not use his position as heavyweight champion to preach his beliefs.” Heightening the growing generational split, the magazine asserted that “Joe Louis would have been no better nor any worse a fighter if he had been a Hindu rather than a Christian.” As the Nation of Islam’s most publicized convert, Ali was advised by Ebony to keep his religion to himself.34
Despite the hostility that greeted his conversion at home, Ali’s open defense of his religion made him a Pan-African hero of the global black awakening. Immediately after winning the title, he accompanied Malcolm X to the United Nations, where he declared, “I’m champion of the whole world,” and met with leaders of African and Islamic nations. Shortly thereafter he embarked on a tour of Africa and the Middle East to confer with various heads of state and “learn a little more about my people’s background.” He was supposed to travel with Malcolm X, who had tutored him in his responsibilities toward the “colored” world, but in the deadly split between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, Ali sided with the leader of his religion. Still, no American sports star had ever contemplated such autonomous action. Most who went abroad did so under the State Department aegis to promote the American way as open to all, regardless of race, creed, or color, and to demonstrate that American race relations were improving. Ali’s travels were separate from this mission and instead placed him squarely in the Black Atlantic, which, argues historian Mike Marqusee, “shaped him and he helped to shape and ultimately to project into popular consciousness as never before.”35
At the onset of the Cold War, mainstream black civil rights organizations had downplayed their links to African independence movements and lowered their attack on European colonialism as a crucial corollary of American racial oppression. In Ghana and Egypt, however, Ali reasserted the connection between racism at home and abroad, arriving as a hero critical of the United States and its role in perpetuating white supremacy around the globe. In fact, as Gerald Early asserts, Ali “was the biggest hero of the entire colored world in the post–World War II era” and the best-known Muslim on the planet. Together, “he combined protest and action and exhibited fierce racial pride and extraordinary egotism about his own powers.” For colonial peoples “denigrated because of their color and their supposed ‘inferiority’ Ali’s ego had no small meaning.” In addition, Ali believed that being a Muslim black champion, his public role was a series of duties. Traveling to Africa and the Middle East was part of those duties, although he was criticized in boxing circles for putting them ahead of the obligations of his title.36
Eager to “see Africa and meet my brothers and sisters,” he announced to huge crowds at the Accra airport, “I haven’t been home for four hundred years.” The Ghanaian press provided daily coverage of his visit, even depicting him in native dress, while thousands cheered the new champion, holding aloft signs that read YOU ARE WELCOME HOME KING OF THE WORLD and GHANA IS YOUR MOTHERLAND, CASSIUS CLAY. In a departure from his 1960 vision of Africa as a backward land of mud huts, Ali now told the crowd, “We are glad to be back home to see things for ourselves . . . and then go back to the States and tell our people that there are more things to be seen in Africa than lions, tigers and elephants.” Ali also expressed his pride in modern black Ghanaian civilization, so unlike the United States, where “everything is white—Jesus, Moses and the angels.” To top it off, President Kwame Nkrumah received the champion at a special reception, the first head of state to do so. Afterward Ali told the local press that he had humbled himself before Nkrumah: “I saw in him a dedicated man who is anxious to free Africa and bring about unity.”37
Ali’s reception in Egypt rivaled the one in Ghana, but there he was greeted by tumultuous crowds as a Muslim. “Every individual wants to express his love to this faithful believer champion,” noted Cairo’s Republic, a man “who asks for prayers from every Muslim in our country. Any such strong personality will do anything for the sake of principles.” In return, Ali blamed the world’s ignorance of Egypt’s beauty on “the negative image created by imperialism,” because, he said, “the imperialists know that Egypt is the cradle of Islam and that if its beauty is rightly portrayed it will give a positive image to other Islamic countries.” These popular receptions helped create an image of Ali as a global icon, but they also earned the suspicions of the FBI and the CIA, as both Ghana and Egypt played central roles in the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World countries, which desired to remain independent of the United States and the Soviet Union. In defiance of American policy, the heavyweight champion consorted with leaders critical of the United States while making statements himself that challenged the official image of American life.38
Ali’s trip and his membership in the NOI not only reinforced growing fears that the champion might prove dangerous to national security; it also helped transform Cassius Clay into his identity as Muhammad Ali. According to Osman Karriem, an NOI official who accompanied the champion while visiting a seemingly desolate part of rural Ghana, “there was a beating of drums” announcing their arrival and “then people showed up on the roads,” chanting “Ali! Ali!” The champ was surprised and delighted that even in this isolated spot his name and deeds were the subject of veneration. “I saw the birth of a new human being,” recalled Karriem. “It was like Cassius Clay came to an end and Muhammad Ali emerged.” The incident confirmed his conviction that he was indeed the champion of the whole world, not just of the United States, and that he represented the hopes of oppressed peoples around the globe. Like other Pan-African cultural heroes, he saw himself not as a member of a minority but as part of a black majority. His African trip helped him fuse sports, black pride, and Pan-African popular culture.39
Upon his return to the United States, Ali’s identification with the NOI began to infuse his matches with a religious and political tenor that he would have preferred to avoid. His rematch with Liston, for instance, ran into a buzz saw of bad publicity. Concerned about the influence of the Muslims, the World Boxing Association refused to sanction the rematch, while rumors circulated that followers of Malcolm X might kill Ali in revenge for the NOI’s assassination of their leader. While Ali declared that he was not afraid, the promoters were. Delayed for months because Ali had a hernia, the fight got shuffled around before landing in a tiny gym in Lewiston, Maine. Before a small crowd, the champ came out of his corner, landed a short right hand, and Liston went down for the count. It happened so fast that many sportswriters and boxing fans dubbed it the “the phantom punch,” which implied the match was fixed, although The Ring insisted it was a real knockout blow. The punch no one saw, the one-round knockout, the setting in Maine, and the rumors of Black Muslim violence worked to seriously damage Ali’s reputation. The boxing establishment was not amused.40
Liston, though, did not attack the champion’s religion. In pursuit of a title fight, on the other hand, ex-champion Floyd Patterson publicly criticized Ali’s NOI membership. A soft-spoken Catholic convert with a white wife, Patterson supported the civil rights movement and opposed black separatism. Raised in worse circumstances than Ali, Patterson, a street kid who had been incarcerated at the Wiltshire School for Boys, posed as the antidote to Ali in Sports Illustrated and refused to use his new name. Patterson proposed to “reclaim the title for America” from a champion who, because of his segregationist views, “might just as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan” and had failed in his responsibility to be a fitting symbol of American life for the nation’s youth. The ex-champ’s continued use of “Clay” in particular irritated Ali. According to Dundee, “You called him Muhammad Ali or you lost a friend . . . it was not a topic for taunts or jokes.” In response, Ali unleashed his own verbal onslaught, calling Patterson an Uncle Tom. “The only reason Patterson’s decided to come out of his shell,” he told Playboy, “is to try to make himself a big hero to the white man by saving the heavyweight title from being held by a Muslim.” As punishment, Ali vowed to “put him flat on his back / So that he will start acting black.”41
Their fight on November 22, 1965, became a holy war between Christianity and Islam. Fighting courageously despite a sore back, the much-shorter challenger was no match for the taller champion, who tattooed him endlessly with stinging lefts and rights. All the while Ali derided his helpless opponent for failing to use his “true” name and, rather than knock him out early, preferred to prolong Patterson’s agony until the referee mercifully halted the slaughter in the eleventh round. Ali earned a victory for Allah, but his reputation suffered from what some sportswriters called his “cruelty.” Instead of blaming Patterson for raising the religious issue and recognizing that Ali was unable to knock him out, they focused on Ali as the cruel representative of an ugly, violent black sect. While Ali continued to enliven a dying sport with his great physical and theatrical skills, he also cemented an image as a dangerous, politically naive black man who was doing great damage to himself, to boxing, and to civil rights. It was going to get worse.42
Ali’s membership in the NOI also alienated him from the boxing establishment in very specific ways. In January 1966, at the behest of Ali’s manager Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad), the NOI’s national secretary John Ali, lawyer and promoter Bob Arum, closed-circuit television operator Mike Malitz, and former All-Pro football star Jim Brown, the already-controversial champion formed a new corporation, Main Bout Inc., to gain greater control over the ancillary promotional rights to his matches, including live and delayed broadcasts. Despite a cordial relationship with his Louisville sponsors, after six years Ali sought greater independence and the opportunity to help the Muslims. Key to the new company was the inclusion of Herbert Muhammad and John Ali. This was to begin with the multimillion-dollar bout against Ernie Terrell in Chicago in March 1966. The corporation was racially integrated but controlled by the NOI and its philosophy of economic nationalism. “I am vitally interested in the company,” announced Ali, “and in seeing that it will be one in which Negroes are not used as fronts, but as stockholders, officers, and production and promotion agents.” The entrée of a NOI-connected company alarmed the boxing establishment and led to fierce opposition to Ali.43
In essence, the new corporation attempted to do what black radicals in sports would try a year later—utilize their athletic prominence as a platform to demand greater economic power and profit in sport and address racial oppression in American society. By promoting Ali’s fights, Main Bout also planned to hire more black people to provide related services. In effect, the new company threatened the balance of power in boxing. The white boxing establishment greeted the new promotional entity with hostility, fearing a Black Muslim takeover of boxing. Among peoples of color at home and abroad, the Main Bout episode led to the elevation of Ali’s status as a race man and a race leader in the freedom struggle, and someone subject to the same discrimination as ordinary African Americans. When Ali announced his opposition to the Vietnam War in February 1966, the already-threatened boxing establishment worked to end his boxing career. Boycotts of his fights by veterans groups and politicians abounded, the Terrell match was canceled, and for a year Ali could fight only abroad. When Ali was convicted of draft evasion in 1967, however, Main Bout died an abrupt death, much to the joy of many whites in boxing.
Ali’s religion was controversial, but his opposition to the Vietnam War made him an outcast at home and increased his worldwide popularity as a critic of American foreign policy. Despite being classified initially as 1-Y, or mentally unfit for service, in February 1966 he was reclassified 1-A in response to the expansion of the war and the need for more manpower. Instead of following Joe Louis’s precedent during World War II and serving in the armed forces as a morale builder and symbol of loyalty, Ali astounded the nation by applying for conscientious objector status on the grounds that his religion forbade him from fighting in any wars but holy ones as defined by the Nation of Islam. Judge Lawrence Grauman ruled that Ali’s appeal was grounded in religious doctrine and he recommended CO status. The Justice Department, however, urged the Kentucky Appeals Board to deny the claim, in part because of mounting public criticism of Ali. Of prime concern was the precedent for other Black Muslims to reject military service on religious grounds. L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience: “If that great theologian of Black Muslim power . . . is deferred, you watch what happens in Washington. . . . What has happened to the leadership of our nation when a man . . . regardless of color, can . . . advise his listeners to tell the President when he is called to serve in the armed forces . . . ‘I’m not going.’” Despite the avalanche of criticism, Ali held fast. “I’m a 1,000% religious man,” he declared. “If I thought goin’ to war would bring freedom, justice and equality to 22 million Negroes, they wouldn’t have to draft me.” The draft issue put him at war with the government and the majority of white America, but it made him a hero among the growing ranks of the antiwar young.44
Ali’s antiwar stance challenged the belief that heavyweight champions represented the nation’s fighting manhood and that as American champions they had a duty to put country before race. Indeed, his example raised questions about military service as a central tenet of modern masculinity. In February 1966, shortly before the planned Terrell match, Ali responded to the incessant telephone calls from reporters about whether he would serve if drafted: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” Coming as the war had escalated into full-scale American commitment, the remark encapsulated the thoughts of many young men while also inflaming public opinion. Older sports columnists, already disturbed by the Muslim “invasion” of boxing via Main Bout, attacked Ali as an ungrateful, unpatriotic draft dodger, a symbol of everything wrong with modern youth. Red Smith, the dean of boxing writers, railed, “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.” With public outrage at fever pitch, Ali found himself the scapegoat for the growing youth revolt against the older generation, especially its devotion to duty, deference to authority, and obligation to serve the nation in the anticommunist cause.45
Outraged by Ali’s remarks that “I am a member of the Muslims, and we don’t go to no wars unless they are declared by Allah himself,” as decreed by Elijah Muhammad, the Chicago Tribune labeled the champion a turncoat and condemned the March 1966 Ali-Terrell title fight, to be fought in Chicago. In response to the newspaper’s patriotic tirade, Mayor Richard J. Daley and Governor Otto Kerner denounced Ali as a traitor, and the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars threatened a boycott. Former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, “the Fighting Marine,” fulminated via telegram that Ali had “DISGRACED THE AMERICAN FLAG, AND THE PRINCIPLES FOR WHICH IT STANDS. APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR UNPATRIOTIC REMARK OR YOU’LL BE BARRED FROM THE RING.” With the bout in danger, the Illinois State Athletic Commission summoned the champion to Chicago to submit a formal apology for his “Viet Cong” remarks. After listening to a slew of condescending comments from the commissioners, and their refusal to call him by his new name, Ali defiantly refused to apologize. Those “denouncing me so bitterly,” he later recalled, “had never said a single word against the injustices or oppression inflicted on my people in America. I felt they were saying they would accept me as the World Heavyweight Champion only on their terms. Only if I played the role of the dumb, brute who chimed in with whatever the Establishment thought at the moment even if it was against the best interest of my people or my country.” Whites who disliked his religion, his braggadocio, and his cockiness now had “the one thing they could get together on: a holy, patriotic, crusade.”46
Until he refused induction in April 1967, the champion was still allowed to fight outside the country. He found fans in Toronto, Britain, and Germany for his bouts versus George Chuvalo, Henry Cooper, Brian London, and Karl Mildenberger. In London, in fact, his presence helped invigorate a West Indian movement to organize Great Britain’s “million colored immigrants into a political force.” When Ali formally refused induction into the army in 1967, however, he was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in jail and a $10,000 dollar fine. In response, his enemies wasted no time in punishing him for his sins. The New York State Athletic Commission immediately stripped him of his boxing license, setting off a chain reaction in which every other state sanctioning body followed suit. In addition, the World Boxing Association removed his title and created an elimination tournament to name his successor. The State Department revoked his passport. Only The Ring, led by editor Nat Fleischer, a longtime proponent of boxing as a force for American inclusion, refused to recognize any other champion until Ali had either exhausted the appeals process or been beaten in the ring. The draft issue along with his “controversial” religion finally threatened to put Ali back in his place. He had managed to hit the trifecta, becoming a scapegoat for the three biggest issues roiling the nation—the growing mass disaffection with the war, the freedom movement and urban riots by black people angry about their deep-seated poverty and second-class citizenship, and the youth revolt against the authority of the older generation. By 1968 Ali was the quintessential loud mouth that Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” hungered to silence.47
Not since the days of Jack Johnson had a heavyweight champion proved so unpopular. Unlike Johnson, however, the wrath of the American people was not over miscegenation, since Ali publicly opposed racial intermarriage. Rather, as Ali put it: “My religion is against the war and I am within my legal rights to claim exemption on the basis of being a conscientious objector. If I weren’t the heavyweight champion, all the fuss in American newspapers wouldn’t appear.” Yet few people could accept that the heavyweight champion, a central emblem of American manhood, refused to go to war. Even though Nat Fleischer supported Ali’s right to remain champion until the final court ruling, he could not accept Ali’s refusal to serve: “If he announced his willingness to join the colors, as have thousands of his countrymen regardless of right or wrong attitudes on our war in Viet Nam, he would become a national hero.” His refusal to do so, charged Ring’s Dan Daniel, made him “a freak.” Despite his American birth, Ali renounced “American connections as a professed convert to Islam.” Even more troubling, “here is a heavyweight champion of the world who announces that he has conscientious objections to fighting, a man of combat who wants nothing to do with more serious combat, a fighter who doesn’t want to be enlisted with fighters.” Along with his “talk, boasting, and out and out tomfoolery,” Clay was “an American who doesn’t wish to be an American, a fighter who doesn’t wish to be a fighter for American patriotism. Now, if this man Clay isn’t a genuine freak, one of the freakiest of all time despite his ideal physical proportions and ring skills, then we haven’t had a real freak in boxing.” In essence, Ali had become “a man without a country.” Describing him listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Cooper bout in London, Daniel wondered, “Did Cassius Clay Muhammad Ali, Black Muslim and heavyweight champion of the world, give any thought to that flag as he awaited the summons to action?”48
Ali’s antiwar stance deepened the 1960s generation gap to a chasm, symbolized by the overwhelming approval of Joe Louis as a model of sacrifice and patriotism during World War II. Louis had been hired in February 1966 to help Ali prepare for Terrell, but he quit abruptly. According to Dan Daniel, Joe “proceeded to give Muhammad Ali an artistic, logical and altogether unprejudiced going over.” Pictured in uniform saluting the flag during World War II, Louis declared, “Any man fit enough to be champion of the world is fit enough for military service.” The Brown Bomber continued: “Cassius is an American. . . . He earns his living here. . . . When your country is at war you don’t have any place or time for personal regrets.” Not only did Louis criticize “Clay,” he embodied the World War II generation’s belief that American citizenship and American masculinity required military service of all able-bodied males and that the heavyweight champion, as the acme of masculinity, was expected to sacrifice his career as a patriotic duty. Mainstream civil rights groups, moreover, argued that a black champion’s display of patriotism would further African American freedom. In Ali’s mind, however, these gains were limited, and one sacrificed first for religion and race. Ali and Louis thus symbolized two poles of American opinion divided by the generational conflict over the war. A pro-Ali GI put the matter succinctly: Ali “owes loyalty to himself, his race, and to any country that will not only accept him as a champion, but most important, accept him as a Negro.” For many boxing fans, however, a heavyweight champion had to serve his country or incur the wrath of the nation. As Frank Allerdice urged in The Ring, “Drop anti-Americans in all classes. If an American called to the colors can’t fight for Old Glory, boxing and The Ring should consign him to Hell.” In refusing to name “Clay” Fighter of the Year for 1966, The Ring declared that “a boxer who defies the government of the USA to draft him into the Army emphatically” is not “a shining example to the Growing American Boy.”49
While his appeals moved slowly through the courts, Ali worked as a minister for the Nation of Islam and lectured about his case, race, and Muslim philosophy at various universities, for which he received a decent speaker’s fee. From all outward appearances, it looked like he would never fight again. As it was, he was forced to endure three and a half years away from boxing at the height of his career. At the same time, Ali’s principled stance gave him “the martyr’s role” and elevated his stature to heights no one could have imagined before his conviction. As he told Sports Illustrated: “I either have to obey the laws of man or the laws of Allah, God. I’d rather die a Muslim. Six hundred million Muslims are with me to see if I am punished in this land of religious freedom. . . . I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my own beliefs.” To many African Americans his treatment at the hands of the government, the boxing establishment, and white America was no different from the treatment endured by the average black person. They might not agree with his religion, but they could see that his freedom of religion was being transgressed and that he was being punished for standing up and speaking out for his principles. That was something black men had been punished for throughout American history by violent lynch mobs.50
At a time when radical civil rights and antiwar activists were putting their bodies on the line, Ali did the same by his willingness to give up his boxing career, go to prison, and lose millions rather than give in to what he considered unjust authority. The reality that Ali refused to compromise and take the easy way out—serve in a noncombatant morale army unit, thereby retaining his title, as did Joe Louis in World War II—was convincing proof that he was no longer the embarrassing “Louisville Lip.” Now Jet and other black publications portrayed him as the highest embodiment of black manhood. According to the radical black journal Freedomways: “In taking his stand as a matter of conscience, the world heavyweight champion may be giving up a small fortune, but he has undoubtedly gained the respect and admiration of a very large part of humanity. That, after all, is the measure of a Man.” As Ali put it when the furor first arose, “One thing I ain’t is a Uncle Tom. I’m a warrior. I’m a warrior on the Battleground of Freedom.” He was becoming a key figure in the freedom movement alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael in redefining black manhood as a willingness to challenge the authority of white America.51
Because most mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League supported the war or like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) remained silent, and as both political parties were pro-war, Ali’s opposition to Vietnam proved a major boon to the antiwar movement and raised his public stature as a man of principled conviction. As the world heavyweight champion in a tough and brutal sport, he could not easily be dismissed as “cowardly” or “unmanly,” despite many charges to that effect. As a black American, moreover, he helped legitimate opposition to the war more widely by eroding the movement’s lily-white image. In fact, Ali’s actions may have contributed to Martin Luther King’s decision to openly oppose the war. In a sermon delivered in response to Ali’s stance, King praised him for “giving up fame. He is giving up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what his conscience tells him is right. No matter what you think of Muhammad Ali’s religion, you have to admire his courage.” While the NAACP and the Urban League remained hesitant, and Joe Louis continued to blast his lack of patriotism, other prominent African Americans began to express support for the champion. Former baseball star Jackie Robinson, for instance, wrote in his syndicated column “that there are many writers who like Negroes who ‘stay in their place.’ . . . Of course, by backing up his words with deeds, Clay or Ali has clearly demonstrated where his ‘place’ is.” For the more radical members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality, Ali’s antiwar stance now made him a hero of gigantic proportions because he was willing to defy the government and go to jail for his beliefs—as they also were. Black Power advocates had a defiant black masculine hero who merged nationalist ideas at home with anti-imperial impulses abroad.52
Among athletes Ali’s status grew after he met with a group of black sports figures who sought to probe his sincerity. Jim Brown, All-Pro running back of the Cleveland Browns; Bill Russell, star center and coach of the Boston Celtics; UCLA basketball player Lew Alcindor; and members of the Green Bay, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Washington, DC, football teams, met with Ali at the behest of Herbert Muhammad to see if he would accept a compromise to his antiwar views and agree to serve in a noncombat morale unit, as Joe Louis did in World War II. By the end of the hours-long meeting, the champion refused to waver. In a glowing article for Sports Illustrated, Russell expressed admiration for Ali’s sincerity. “I know what I must do,” Russell quoted Ali. “My fate is in the hands of Allah, and Allah will take care of me.” As “a Black Muslim and because he refuses to compromise his principles it will be difficult for him to get a fair trial,” said Russell. Challenging the common view that the Black Muslims were manipulating a naive Ali, Russell concluded that Ali’s position was sincerely rooted in his religion and that he was being hounded for his religious beliefs. “The hysterical and sometimes fanatical criticism of Ali is, it seems to me, a symptom of the deeper sickness of our times,” Russell noted. He professed not to worry about Ali. “What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”53
In his various speeches, Ali went farther than other mainstream civil rights leaders in linking the struggle for justice at home with his position against the war overseas. In this he challenged the Cold War civil rights bargain that promised progress against racial discrimination at home in exchange for loyalty to the United States in its global battle with the Russians. His linkage of the Vietnam War with domestic racism reinforced the Black Power view that racism was a form of domestic colonialism and that American peoples of color were the equivalent of the Vietnamese. When Martin Luther King’s SCLC launched demonstrations against housing segregation in Louisville, Ali agreed to take part, despite his separatist views, since the civil rights action was taking place in his own hometown. Speaking to the demonstrators he made clear that his antiwar stance involved a broader racial picture of the world. It made no sense for American blacks to kill brown-skinned Vietnamese, he told the crowd, when black people in Louisville “are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights. No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.” Acknowledging that he would lose millions of dollars by refusing to serve in the armed forces, he argued in tones reminiscent of Malcolm X: “The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my people and my religion, my people and myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.” Making his position crystal clear, the champion added: “I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”54
While his actions and his views gained him support among radical forces in the civil rights and antiwar movements, they also made Ali one of the most hated Americans of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the most divisive figure in American sports. The price of his actions was enormous. Stripped of his title and sentenced to five years in jail, he was forced to watch from the sidelines as new figures, such as Joe Frazier and George Foreman, emerged to take his place atop the heavyweight division. Yet even in exile his example helped spur an even-wider athletic revolt among black athletes. His return to boxing would once again bring the central political and cultural issues of the era into the ring.