One Last Round with Muhammad Ali
The sumptuous, meaty, 600-page new biography “ALI” by Jonathan Eig for me is a walk down memory lane and a reminder of how much my life intersected with the boxer Muhammad Ali, at a distance, over time, through the media and now through memory.
I didn’t know Ali; I don’t count the few times I met him during visits to his Deer Park, Pennsylvania, training camp. Like many Americans, I first learned about him when he won a gold medal in the heavyweight class during the Rome Olympics in 1960 as Cassius Clay.
Ali’s coming out party as a professional boxer was against Sonny Liston, a prohibitive favorite. Although Liston had a checkered past and was something of thug, he was embraced by many boxing fans as the big, black man who would silence Ali, known as the Louisville Lip. The back story was that Ali was reported to be close to Malcom X and the Nation of Islam. So in the media and the popular imagination the first Liston fight was also a religious fight, a Christian against a Muslim. The drumbeat would only increase when Cassius Clay formally changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
I was in the U.S. Navy at the time and heard a lot of anti-Ali chatter both above and below decks. Much of the talk was racist and nasty. About a hundred of us were listening to the Liston fight on a ship-to-shore connection and this technology as well the pitch and yaw of the ship made the bout difficult to follow. It took us a while to realize that Liston, who was getting pummeled, refused to come out for the seventh round. The immediate cry from some aboard my ship and around the world was that the fix was in. The moans from the fight crowd could be heard again after Ali’s first round knockout of Liston a year later in a rubber match. There was mayhem at the fight, confusion and perhaps a short count. I later watched the fight on video and didn’t see the so-called phantom punch. Nonetheless, forensic examination of the video indicates the punch was real, short and punishing. By the end of 1965, Ali may have been the most disliked man in America,
Author Eig is particularly good when examining Ali’s embrace of the Muslim faith. By his account the conversion didn’t seem to be intellectual or even soulful. The 1960’s were riotous and unsettling times with the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Ali had come under the influence of Malcolm X and then shifted his allegiance to Elijah Muhammed, a decision that Ali later considered one of his greatest regrets. Malcolm X would be assassinated in the spring of 1967 while speaking to the Nation of Islam in Harlem. Elijah Muhammad and then his son would be deeply involved in Ali’s finances, a situation the boxer was warned about on countless occasions.
Many people Eig interviewed characterized Ali as something of a child/man, beautiful to look at, charming to a fault and desirous of every woman he encountered. He was certainly foolish with his money and disregarded the advice of a lifetime of financial advisers. Eig presents little information to suggest that Elijah Muhammad’s interest in Ali was any more than financial. But the author does return again and again to Ali’s fundamental commitment to doing good works and charity, often in the name of Islam.
Another shadow over Ali early his career was possible induction into the Army. In 1966 his draft board reversed an earlier decision and found the fighter fit for military service. Apparently Ali had failed his pre-induction mental exam in 1964. The Vietnam War was heating up, with 6,000 soldiers dying in 1966. Those previously deferred faced reevaluation. Ali told a CBS television reporter that he was, in effect, reluctant to serve in the military and the story attracted national attention. It played into the narrative that Ali was spoiled, selfish and had contempt for the country that had provided a platform for his success.
Ali would go further, explaining he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong. His enemy was not in Southeast Asia; it was the racism he encountered at home. As Eig explains, this was a very solitary decision for Ali, and very American in a way. He received little support from American intellectuals or religious leaders. The country and media turned against him. Most venues in the U.S. refused him a permit to fight. He was forced to go to Canada. A meeting with famous black athletes, including Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Jim Brown and others, failed to change Ali’s mind about military service. Russell would later write in a Sports Illustrated article that Ali “has an absolute and sincere faith …I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.” Russell was prescient.
An all-white jury took twenty minutes to find Ali guilty of draft evasion with a maximum penalty of five years in jail and a ten-thousand dollar fine. His case would linger on appeal until the Supreme Court reversed the earlier court decision in a manner that still seems a little curious. But the country wanted to teach Ali a lesson. Congress extended the draft four more years. Ali was stripped of his title. The media had a field day calling him a coward and a traitor.
I had followed all these events closely. I was out of the Navy and very much an anti-war activist. I spent a lot of time in and around the waters of Vietnam and learned the war was built on a lie and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress was a sham, an underhanded way to give President Johnson the authority to wage war. I was definitely in the minority at my state college where many of the male students enjoyed education deferments from military service and found no contradiction in scorning Ali for his lack of patriotism.
The Eig biography adds many interesting layers to Ali’s life beyond the archetypal boxing stories. These include his suspension from the Nation of Islam, his many marriages, his short Broadway career and his flirtation with some of boxing’s criminal elements. There is no evidence that Ali profited from anything illegal. He just seemed a little hapless and unconscious at times, not fully aware of what he was getting into.
Nonetheless, boxing remained central to the arc of Ali’s life and much of his legacy. I waited anxiously for his fight against Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in March, 1971. This time Ali seemed to occupy a different cultural frame; he was now seen as a kind of folk hero, a cross between Bobby Kennedy and Joan Baez, and “hailed as a defender of truth and a resister of authority.” The Frazier fight brought out the celebrity crowd: Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, the Apollo 14 astronauts, Hugh Hefner, Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Diana Ross and many others. Eig writes that the crowd “was multicultural before anyone used the term, an explosion of pride, a funk fashion show, a drug-addled parade of ego and power.”
The fight lasted for fifteen rounds and was bloody and violent. Frazier knocked Ali down in the fifteenth round, but Ali got up. Frazier won on a decision. The worldwide audience of 300 million got what they paid for.
I think that this was the fight during which I began to worry about Ali. He was close to thirty and unable to move the way he once did. He was more stationary and took many more punches. Computer models have shown that on his return to boxing Ali tended to absorb more punches in shorter periods of time. His opponents tended to outpunch him. Moreover, he was fighting as if to make up for lost time; during one period he fought thirteen times in twenty-seven months, a brutal and dangerous schedule.
He would avenge his loss to Frazier, stopped the supposed invincible George Forman in what was called the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, and beat Frazier into submission during the “Thrilla in Manila.” He would have many more fights, each one revealing the decline of his boxing skills. I couldn’t watch him box anymore. I longed for him to stop. The decline was so obvious; in his movement, his speech and his thought process. It seemed criminal to let Ali continue to fight. I stopped watching boxing completely. This was thirty years ago.
A newspaper correspondent wrote that by the mid-1970s “Ali was losing his relevance as well as his boxing skills. This was the Age of Nixon, not the Age of Aquarius.” Ali was a breath of fresh air in a dull, vulgar sport. Some said Ali was similar to Chubby Checker. “People don’t want to dance to his music anymore.”
Jonathan Eig writes that Ali found another calling after ending his boxing career. He was showing the obvious signs of brain damage but continued to travel the world, as an ambassador and religious envoy, showing his public that he was frail, human and damaged, perhaps like everyone else. The biographer mentions the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 where Ali was to light the Olympic torch. His left arm was shaking from the effects of Parkinson’s and there was a fear that Ali could not complete the task. When he finally lit the cauldron, the crowd cheered because they saw Ali as a rebel again. They saw a man who wasn’t afraid to show his weakness or had any fear of death.
I do know that Ali taught me more about life, death and being a man after he retired from boxing to become the good soul we saw for the last three decades of his life.
