King of the World

by David Remnick

  After Johnson’s eclipse, white champions held the crown until the early thirties. So obvious was their systematic avoidance of black challengers that the leading black heavyweights fought among themselves for the honor of becoming champion of the race. When Jack Dempsey took the title from Jess Willard in 1919, he quickly assured the nation, at Tex Rickard’s urging, that he would not entertain the challenges of any of the great black boxers of the time, including Sam McVey, Sam Langford, and Harry Wills. Wills and Langford were left to fight each other eighteen times while the official world championship belonged for two decades to a string of Caucasians: Willard, Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Max Schmeling, Jack Sharkey, Primo “the Ambling Alp” Camera, Max Baer, and Jim Braddock.

  The era of unending whiteness finally came to a close with Joe Louis, who beat Braddock in 1937 to capture the heavyweight championship. Louis retained the title until his first retirement in 1948. Some organs of the sporting press were so shocked by the development that they were convinced that Louis had won because of his race, as if he had some sort of unfair advantage. An editorial in the New York Daily Mirror said that “in Africa there are tens of thousands of powerful, young savages that with a little teaching could annihilate Mr. Joe Louis.” Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News, another legendary sportswriter admired for his enlightened views, could think of Louis only as an ignorant, if glorious, brute, a beast who “lives like an animal, fights like an animal, has all the cruelty and ferocity of a wild thing.”

  “I felt myself strongly ridden by the impression that here was a mean man,” Gallico wrote, “a truly savage person, a man on whom civilization rested no more securely than a shawl thrown over one’s shoulders, that, in short, here was perhaps for the first time in many generations the perfect prizefighter. I had the feeling that I was in the room with a wild animal.”

  Louis was the son of an Alabama sharecropper, whose broken family came to Detroit in 1926. Louis never went further in school than the sixth grade—a fact that allowed nearly all sportswriters to deduce that he was a sullen ignoramus. Louis said little in public, but, in fact, this was due mostly to the careful calculations of his black handlers. The team of Jack “Chappie” Blackburn, the trainer and father confessor, and the managers John Roxborough and Julian Black groomed Louis as both a fighter and a public figure. They did not want their fighter to alienate white America—the level of routine racism in the thirties was such that even the Northern press still referred to blacks as “darkies,” “animals,” and “sambos”—and, toward that end, they drew up a set of rules for Louis.

  1. He was never to have his picture taken alongside a white woman.

  2. He was never to go to a nightclub alone.

  3. There would be no soft fights.

  4. There would be no fixed fights.

  5. He was never to gloat over a fallen opponent.

  6. He was to keep a deadpan in front of the cameras.

  7. He was to live and fight clean.

  Louis, in other words, was designed to be the anti-Jack Johnson. His talent was so undeniable and his behavior so deferential that in time he won over even the Southern press, which deigned to call him a “good nigger” and an “ex-pickaninny.” Unlike Johnson, Louis seemed to know his place. He offended no one. He did not flee the country, as Johnson had, he served it. He enlisted in the army during World War II and donated his fight earnings to the government. Of course, at the first opportunity, much of the Southern press was ready to withdraw its peculiar brand of support. When Louis lost to the German Max Schmeling in June 1936, William McG. Keefe of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote that the fight was proof of white supremacy. Keefe was relieved that “the reign of terror in heavyweight boxing was ended by Schmeling.”

  Louis’s revenge match with Schmeling on June 22, 1938—a one-round knockout—was an even more complicated metaphor than Johnson’s defeat of Jeffries. For all Americans, Louis had conquered the specter of the Aryan, the self-declared Nazi superman; once more, he was worthy of white admiration, of Jimmy Cannon’s famous accolade “a credit to his race—the human race.” For black Americans, the celebration was more intense and even subversive. First, there was the satisfaction of seeing at least one black man celebrated by the entire country, even its most glaring racists. The work of nonathletes, of black activists and scholars as distinguished as A. Philip Randolph and W.E.B. Du Bois, was invisible to nearly every white American, but here was an achievement that even the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan could not overlook. The white press would forever be obsessed with Louis’s color—he was “the tan tornado,” “the mahogany maimer,” “the saffron sphinx,” “the dusky David from Detroit,” “the shufflin’ shadow,” “the coffee-colored kayo king,” “the sable cyclone,” “the tan Tarzan of thump,” “the chocolate chopper,” “the murder man of those maroon mitts,” “the sepia slugger,” and, most famously, the “brown bomber”—but they could not attack him as they had Jack Johnson. His behavior, or rather his utter absence of misbehavior, was unassailable.

  Louis was a god in the black communities, including the West End of Louisville. He was a surrogate and a redeemer. “We loved him in our family,” Cassius Clay, Sr., once said. “It doesn’t get bigger than Joe Louis.” In 1940 Franklin Frazier wrote that Louis allowed blacks “to inflict vicariously the aggression which they would like to carry out against whites for the discriminations and insults which they have suffered.” Similarly, the poet Maya Angelou recalls that as a child she was devoted to “the one invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the white man and beat him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so many of our hopes, maybe even dreams of vengeance.”

  The worshipers of Joe Louis ranged from Count Basie, who wrote a song in his honor (“Joe Louis Blues”), to Richard Wright, who covered his fights for The New Masses (“Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite”). In Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King recalled, “More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the victim reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: ‘Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis …’ ”

  BY THE EARLY SIXTIES, AS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT GENERATED varied strands of militant politics, many blacks felt that Americans were paying too much attention to sports heroes and too little to the suffering of millions of ordinary people. On the day of the first Patterson-Liston fight in 1962, Bob Lipsyte covered for the Times a march protesting housing discrimination in New York City. One of the young African-Americans on the picket line told him, “We’re beyond the point where we can get excited over a Negro hitting a home run or winning a championship.”

  But the excitement over sports has been a twentieth-century constant in America. Boxing as a racial metaphor intensified in the sixties. And while Ali may not have read every article written about him, he was deeply aware of his position in relation to both Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. Ali could endure the predictable insults: the newspapers that continued to call him Clay, the epithets of Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young. What grated on him, however, was the disapproval of his childhood hero Joe Louis,

  “Clay will earn the public’s hatred because of his connections with the Black Muslims,” Louis told reporters. “The things they preach are just the opposite of what we believe. The heavyweight champion should be the champion of all people. He has responsibilities to all people.

  “Clay has a million dollars’ worth of confidence and a dime’s worth of courage,” Louis went on. “He can’t punch. He can’t hurt you, and I don’t think he takes a good punch. He’s lucky there are no good fighters around. I’d rate him with Johnny Paycheck, Abe Simon, and Buddy Baer.… I would have whipped him. He doesn’t know a
thing about fighting on the ropes, which is where he would be with me. I would go in to outpunch him rather than try to outbox him. I’d press him, bang him around, claw him, clobber him with all I got, cut down his speed, belt him around the ribs. I’d punish the body, where the pain comes real bad. Clay would have welts on his body. He would ache. His mouth would shut tight against the pain, and there would be tears burning his eyes.”

  Ali could have ignored Louis. By the early sixties, Louis was addicted to cocaine, the victim of bad romances, mental deterioration, and horrific tax problems. To pay his debts, Louis tried to become a professional wrestler, a career that ended the day a three-hundred-pound blob named Rocky Lee landed on his chest, broke two of his ribs, and bruised the muscle around his heart. Ash Resnik, Sonny Liston’s good friend, eventually brought Louis to Caesars Palace to work as a “greeter.” Louis drew a salary and ate and gambled on the house in exchange for hanging around and being Joe Louis. To anyone with a memory and a heart, Louis was a beaten man, and a man who never really recognized his own contribution. “Sometimes,” he once said, “I wish I had the fire of a Jackie Robinson to speak out and tell the black man’s story.” When Louis finally died in 1981 at the age of sixty-six, he lay in state at Caesars Palace.

  It was hard for the proud young Ali to forgive Louis his wounding criticisms. And so Ali answered in kind. He called Louis an Uncle Tom and loudly vowed that he would “never end up like Joe Louis.” In a documentary film, Ali answered Louis’s boxing challenge, saying, “Slow-moving, shuffling Joe Louis beat me? He may hit hard, but that don’t mean nothing if you can’t find nothing to hit. I’m no flat-footed fighter.… Joe Louis had a thing called the bum of the month club. The men that Joe Louis fought, if I fought them today in Madison Square Garden, they’d boo them out of the ring.”

  With time, as Ali no longer needed Joe Louis to confirm his greatness, and as Louis himself grew weaker, the terms of the relationship shifted. Louis recognized Ali’s skills as a fighter, reckoning that he would still beat him, but not as easily as he had disposed of Johnny Paycheck. In the mid-seventies, Ali invited him to his training camp and offered him a gift of thirty thousand dollars.

  When Louis died, a reporter reminded Ali of his earlier difficulties with the great champion. He would hear none of it. “I never said that, not that way, anyhow,” Ali said. “That’s demeaning. Look at Joe’s life. Everybody loved Joe. He would have been marked as evil if he was evil, but everybody loved Joe. From black folks to redneck Mississippi crackers, they loved him. They’re all crying. That shows you. Howard Hughes dies, with all his billions, not a tear. Joe Louis, everybody cried.”

  NO MATTER HOW RUINOUS BOXING IS TO BOXERS, IT IS UNDENIABLE that part of Ali’s appeal derived from boxing, from going into a ring, stripped to the waist, a beautiful man, alone, in combat. It is perfectly plausible that as a basketball player or even as a swaddled halfback, he would have been no less famous and quicksilver. But the boxer represents a more immediate form of super-masculinity, no matter how retrograde. For all his verbal gifts, Ali was first a supreme physical performer and sexual presence. “Ain’t I pretty?” he would ask over and over again, and, of course, he was. Here Ali was fortunate. If he had had the face of Sonny Liston he would have lost much of his appeal.

  When Ali became world champion at the age of twenty-two and announced officially his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, he would never be more sexually magnetic. On the night of the fight, Gloria Guinness, a fixture in the fashion world who covered the first Liston fight for Harper’s Bazaar, later told George Plimpton, “He was simply to die over.”

  And yet, unlike Jack Johnson, Ali was, at first, a very cautious sex symbol. Before he won the title, his experiences with women were, by all accounts, including his own, extremely limited. Ironically, it was just as he was discovering himself as a Black Muslim that he also discovered his sexual hunger.

  “I’m ashamed of myself, but sometimes I’ve caught myself wishing that I had found Islam about five years from now, maybe,” he told Alex Haley. “With all the temptations I have to resist. But I don’t even kiss none, because you get too close, it’s almost impossible to stop there. I’m a young man, you know, in the prime of life. All types of women, white women, too, make passes at me. Girls find out where I live and knock at the door at one and two in the morning. They send me their pictures and phone numbers, saying, ‘Please, just telephone me.’ … I’ve even had girls come up here wearing scarves on their heads, with no makeup and all that, trying to act like young Muslim sisters. But the only catch is that a Muslim sister never would do that.”

  Ali’s social life was so restrained before he won the title that some sportswriters idly suspected that he was a closeted homosexual. (“I mean, we all wondered about a guy who had no dates and was always talking about how pretty he was,” one of them said.) But it was readily apparent to those close to him that he preferred women. In the semifictional autobiography The Greatest, Ali (or, better, his ghost) describes losing his innocence to a prostitute and losing a fight early in his career after unwisely spending the previous night with a woman.

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is certainly true is that Herbert Muhammad introduced Ali to his first real love, an older, more experienced woman named Sonji Roi.

  When Ali was traveling in Egypt in the spring of 1964, Muhammad watched with amusement as the new champion fell in love with yet another pretty waitress. “I got a girl in the States who’s better-looking than she is,” Muhammad told him. Before leaving for Africa, Muhammad had taken a few pictures of Roi at his photography studio. He had a copy of one of the photographs in his briefcase and showed it to Ali. The champion was impressed and hoped Herbert would introduce him to Roi when they got home.

  Sonji Roi was an odd choice for Muhammad, the son of the Messenger, to have made. She was gorgeous and, in the words of Ali’s first Muslim instructor, Jeremiah Shabazz, “two cents slick.” She was a party girl who spent her nights in bars and nightclubs. Ali would not be the first athlete she had dated. Elijah Muhammad’s own sexual behavior was nothing if not hypocritical, but it is odd that Herbert chose a woman so at odds with the Nation’s puritan style. Sonji’s father was killed during a card game when she was two and her mother died when she was eight; she was raised by godparents. She gave birth to a son when she was still in her teens, dropped out of school, worked in nightclubs, entered some minor beauty contests. After she met Herbert Muhammad at his photo studio, he hired her to do phone solicitations for Muhammad Speaks.

  Ali went out with Roi for the first time on July 3, 1964, just five months after he won the title. “He asked me to marry him that night,” she told Thomas Hauser. “I didn’t know if he was serious or not. I didn’t know anything about him. But I was alone in the world. I didn’t have a mother to go home and ask. I had to make the decision myself. After we spent some time together, I felt needed by him. He was strong, but he didn’t know a lot of things. He needed a friend, and what better person than me? I said to myself, there’s nothing else I’m doing with my life. I can do this. I can be a good wife to this man. Somebody has to be there for him, and I saw it as a chance for me to really help somebody. I wanted to be his wife and his best friend. I wasn’t doing it for the money.”

  After their first meeting, Ali and Roi were together all the time, which worried the Muslims in his camp and amused the others. Many years later, married for the fourth time, Ali would admit that his greatest weakness and his most flagrant betrayal of Muslim ideology was his insatiable need for women. Married or not, he had so many affairs that Ferdie Pacheco called him a “pelvic missionary.” The low point of that history would come in Manila before the third fight with Joe Frazier when Ali, married then to Belinda Ali, introduced his lover, Veronica Porsche, as his wife. Belinda then boarded a plane for Manila, and the ensuing row led to divorce and marriage to Porsche. The persistent myth about Ali and sex is that Sonji was his great tutor. “Rumor always had it,” Pacheco said, “that So
nji was an artist who could demonstrate the Kama Sutra in all its rich splendors.”

  “It’s like I’m some sort of sex object, and people still believe it,” Sonji told Hauser. “A couple of years ago, a friend of mine called from the University of Texas. She was taking a psychology course, and called to tell me that I was in one of her textbooks.… The book said how Ali was torn, because he believed in his religion yet he loved me for my beauty and sensuality, and I carried myself in a manner that was unbecoming to the religion, but he was so mesmerized by my sexuality that he had to have me. And if you read this, you picture someone who’s like running around in her underwear. So let me tell you, I didn’t teach him nothing about sex. He knew what to do when I met him. It’s just that I may have made him want to do it.”

  On August 14, 1964, Ali and Sonji married; she took the name Clay, though she agreed to be a good Muslim wife. Ali also cut an agreement with Sonny Liston: there would be a rematch on November 16, 1964, at Boston Garden.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gunfire

  ALI NEVER DOUBTED THAT HIS VICTORY IN MIAMI WAS LEGITIMATE and repeatable. “In Miami I was Columbus,” he would say. “I was traveling to the unknown. I had to be cautious because I didn’t know what to expect. Now I know.”

  But even his closest associates felt a shiver of doubt in their bones. Liston was still so strong and menacing, and Ali was so young, so difficult to understand, that the event, even in retrospect, seemed like a fantasy. Ali’s cornermen and backers ran through the details of the fight—Ali’s easy dominance in the early rounds, his survival fighting blind in the fifth, Liston quitting on the stool before the seventh though he had never been knocked down—and it was still hard to absorb. “You really didn’t think you saw what you saw,” Ferdie Pacheco said. “First it ended up in doubt, because Liston quit. That took the bloom off the rose a lot. It tarnished the victory. All you knew for sure somehow was that this kid had survived. There wasn’t jubilation like Joe Louis winning the title back and all of Harlem and the country celebrating. There was some doubt.”