King of the World

by David Remnick

  Once more, Floyd Patterson entered the ring stamped with prestigious endorsements.

  ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIGHT, THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF the assassination of John Kennedy, it rained in the desert, torrential rains that cut down on the walk-up trade at the Convention Center. The gate was around eight thousand, grossing just over a quarter million dollars, though the promoters would be pleased by ticket sales at the theaters, especially in Europe. Ali had wanted a black performer to sing the national anthem; the promoters went with Eddie Fisher. Patterson wore an elaborate red velvet robe into the ring, while Ali wore the sort of white terry-cloth robe one of the old men on Collins Avenue, back home in Florida, would wear to the beach. Ali seemed to approach the affair with a sense not of spectacle and occasion but of grim duty. He was intent on proving to Patterson just how badly he had miscalculated, what a serious mistake he had made in supposing the way to the public’s heart in 1965 was to declare oneself the champion of accommodation.

  “Ali was a beautiful warrior and he was reflecting a new posture for a black man,” said Toni Morrison. “I don’t like boxing, but he was a thing apart. His grace was almost appalling.” Patterson, however, was misreading Ali. He would pay for it now.

  The fight would be painful to watch, and the first round was the worst of all. Like a superb flyweight, Ali darted around the ring, a waterbug skimming the canvas and the ropes. For the entire three minutes he threw not a single serious punch. His intention was humiliation, athletic, psychological, political, and religious. What could have been more demoralizing for Patterson? As Ali danced, as he easily leaned away from Patterson’s lugubrious attempts at attack, the champion taunted the challenger:

  “Come on, American! Come on, white American!”

  Ali was so fast and wanted so badly to rile Patterson that he moved around the ring faking punches, feinting, bobbing, jerking his shoulders, all to make Patterson respond and reveal his reflexive fear.

  Then in the second round, Ali added the jab to this humbling recipe, flicking it at Patterson’s face every time he dared come near.

  “I took a swing at him and missed, and got a muscle spasm, and after that I could not swing without great pain,” Patterson said later. “In fact I could not even stand up straight, and the pain was unlike anything I’ve ever felt, and in the later rounds I was hoping that Clay would knock me out. It is not pleasant admitting this, but it’s the truth.”

  Patterson was not fibbing. His back really was bothering him, and between rounds his cornermen, Buster Watson and Al Silvani, tried to relieve his pain by picking him up and massaging the muscles in his neck and lower back. Patterson moved well enough, perhaps three quarters as well as usual, but that was not near well enough to come close to Ali.

  Round after round, Ali circled Patterson, jabbing, throwing left hooks from the hip, throwing right leads, doing whatever he felt like, and at the same time chattering away at Patterson, taunting him to try harder, to punch harder.

  “Cut the cackle!” the referee, Harry Krause, told him, but Ali did not.

  Ali was beating Patterson badly, hammering him with hooks to the head, and yet he seemed content to keep Patterson on his feet, keep the spectacle going. He would not—or could not—end it. By the sixth round Patterson was so exhausted and battered that after absorbing a left hook he simply dropped to one knee for a few seconds, accepting an official knockdown. But he would not stop, and Ali would not put an end to it. At the end of each round, Ali waved at Patterson in disdain. In the clinches he called him Uncle Tom, Uncle Tom, white man’s nigger.

  “No contest!” he shouted at Patterson. “Get me a contender!”

  “Ali, knock him out for Christ’s sake!” Dundee shouted through the ropes.

  Sitting at ringside, Robert Lipsyte of the Times thought that Ali was treating Patterson the way a cruel child might treat a butterfly, picking off the wings. He used that image to lead his story in the next morning’s paper.

  Harry Krause moved in to stop the fight after the eleventh, but Patterson would not let him. Patterson was still the only man in history to hold the heavyweight title twice, and now he was fighting for it a third time. Krause was not likely to overrule him. It was only in the twelfth round that it became obvious that to allow Patterson to go on would be to be complicit in his permanent injury.

  EPILOGUE: OLD MEN BY THE FIRE

  Three months after Ali beat Patterson, he began his fight with the United States government. An already complicated history with his draft board was about to become more so. In 1960, when he was eighteen, he had registered in Louisville. In 1962, he was classified 1-A. Two years later, just a few weeks before the first Liston fight, he was ordered to go to an army induction center in Coral Gables to take the physical and written examinations given to all draftees. He failed the fifty-minute-long aptitude test, registering a score so low that the army declared his IQ to be 78.

  Afterward, he sheepishly explained that not only could he not get the answers, he did not know how to approach the questions. He was humiliated by the experience, but, as always, tried to undercut it all with humor. “I said I was the greatest,” he told everyone. “Not the smartest.” The army put him at the sixteenth percentile—fourteen points below passing—and reclassified him 1-Y, ineligible for active service. Two months later, with Ali now world champion, the army retested him to make sure he wasn’t feigning ignorance. He wasn’t.

  A couple of years later, after the Patterson fight, Bob Lipsyte came down to Miami to do some feature stories on Ali and cover the start of spring training. “I remember waking up that morning in my hotel and watching a session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on TV, the first really sharp debates on Vietnam,” Lipsyte recalled. “William Fulbright was chairman and he and Senator Wayne Morse were really going at it with Maxwell Taylor, the general. Taylor had that jock certainty that generals had. This was early 1966. The mood in the country was still anti-peacenik, pro-war. The tide had not yet turned. But with this debate you could feel the pulse of something happening.”

  In the early afternoon, Lipsyte drove over to Ali’s house, a low-slung concrete house in a black neighborhood. The two men sat outside in plastic lawn chairs. Ali was training but he was finished working for the day. School had just let out and Ali watched the high school girls go by, commenting on each one in a harmless, pass-the-afternoon sort of way. Several of Ali’s Muslim friends were around—Captain Sam and some of the others—and one came out and told Ali he was wanted on the phone. It was one of the wire services. The reporter told Ali that in the midst of escalating its troop levels in Vietnam, the army had changed its policy: his score on the qualifying exam was now good enough. Ali had been reclassified once more. He was 1-A. He could soon expect a call from his draft board. Did he have any comment?

  “Ali came back outside and his mood had changed completely. He was fuming,” Lipsyte said. “Until that moment, I was thinking how wonderful this was, how you could step into this sanctuary, this time warp, where nothing had anything to do with the war. I’d been in the army, at Fort Dix, where I wrote about brave cooks in New Jersey. I’d been the valedictorian of the clerk-typist school. I was already a Times reporter. My dispatches were so brilliant that The Philadelphia Inquirer called me and asked if I wanted a job. I didn’t really understand the war. I dimly thought Fulbright was right and the war was wrong but I wasn’t into it yet. I was a twenty-eight-year-old careerist sportswriter.

  “Ali knew even less about the war than I did. It wasn’t on his radar screen at all,” Lipsyte went on. “As he kept going back inside for more phone calls and the TV trucks started appearing, the Muslim chorus was chortling. They had all been in the army. They came to the Muslims after hard times, after jail, after the army, and they started telling Ali, ‘Of course, the Man is gonna do whatever the fuck he wants to do with you.’ They told him how some cracker sergeant would drop a hand grenade in his pants and blow his balls off.”

  The calls were coming nonstop
now. This was a big story, evoking memories of other young athletes and pop stars drafted at the peak of their careers: Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Elvis Presley. But this was different, this was Vietnam, a far more ambiguous and confusing event. It was confusing, not least, to Muhammad Ali. By now he was accustomed to being asked about racial politics, but now he was hearing new questions: What do you think of LBJ? What’s your view of the draft? What do you think about the war? What about the Vietcong? For a while, Ali stumbled.

  “Then all of sudden he hit the note,” Lipsyte remembered.

  “Man,” Ali finally told one reporter, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

  The line came and went so quickly that Lipsyte missed it when he sat down to write. “No question that I blew that story.” But enough papers and television stations did pick up the quote that it became the stuff of instant folklore. Eventually, The New York Times, too, ran the quote. As he had been before and as he would be again and again, Ali was the lead actor in his own improvisational American drama. He may not have been able to locate Vietnam on a map yet, and he knew almost nothing about the politics of the war, but when he was thrust into the midst of the national agony, he reacted, as he did in the ring, with speed and with wit: I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

  “It was the moment for Ali,” Lipsyte said. “For the rest of his life he would be loved and hated for what seemed like a declarative statement, but what was, at the time, a moment of blurted improvisation.” As he had before and would again, Ali had showed his gift for intuitive action, for speed, and this time he was acting in a way that would characterize the era itself, a resistance to authority, an insistence that national loyalty was not automatic or absolute. His rebellion, which had started out as racial, had now widened in its scope.

  In the coming days and months, Ali’s phones rang incessantly, with calls not only from reporters, but from people who wanted to express their hatred, to tell him they hoped he’d die. But others called in their support, including the British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell.

  “In the coming months,” Russell wrote to Ali later, “there is no doubt that the men who rule Washington will try to damage you in every way open to them, but I am sure you know that you spoke for your people and for the oppressed everywhere in the courageous defiance of American power. They will try to break you because you are a symbol of a force they are unable to destroy, namely, the aroused consciousness of a whole people determined no longer to be butchered and debased with fear and oppression. You have my wholehearted support. Call me when you get to England.”

  At about the time Ali got Russell’s letter, the government confiscated his passport. From then on, Ali took a fiercely political stand and went from one college campus to the next, speaking out against the war. He learned more about Vietnam and deepened his understanding of what was happening both to the country and to himself. He would not kill Vietnamese on behalf of a government that barely recognized the humanity of his own people. In the short term, the decision not to serve cost Ali everything: his title, his popularity among millions of people, and, undoubtedly, millions of dollars. The members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group knew they were on their way out as Ali’s business management team, but all the same they quickly helped line up cushy ways for Ali to get credit for army service: the reserves, National Guard duty. If worse came to worst, they figured, the army would have Ali put on boxing exhibitions for the troops. This way, they thought, Ali, like Joe Louis before him, could enhance his public image without risking his life and fortune. “But to his credit, Muhammad refused all that,” said the Louisville Group’s lawyer, Gordon Davidson. “This was a real point of principle for him and he wasn’t about to make it easy on himself. He created this sense of himself and he stuck to it.”

  Ali, of course, was instantly denounced by Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Arthur Daley, all those columnists whose notion of how a heavyweight champion should behave had been formed in the Louis years. “Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war,” Red Smith wrote. Various senators and congressmen declared Ali a traitor and a pariah. Even his hometown legislature, the Kentucky state senate, felt compelled to issue a proclamation saying he brought “discredit to all loyal Kentuckians and to the names of the thousands who gave their lives for this country during his lifetime.”

  Over the next year, Ali fought a series of contenders—George Chuvalo, Henry Cooper, Brian London, Karl Mildenberger, Cleveland Williams, Ernie Terrell—while his draft drama played itself out. Ali’s defeat of Terrell, on February 6, 1967, was especially brutal, not least because, like Patterson, Terrell refused to call Ali “Ali.” Terrell accused Ali of thumbing him and fighting dirty in the clinches, which Ali denied. As Ali jabbed Terrell, he chanted “What’s my name? What’s my name?” The columnists who were furious at Ali for his position on Vietnam seized on the Terrell fight, a lopsided fifteen-round decision, as a metaphor for the champion’s evil. “This, the Black Muslims claim, is one of their ministers. What kind of clergyman is he?” wrote Jimmy Cannon in a particularly perverse piece for the New York World-Journal & Telegram. “He agrees with the people who are the enemy of ministers. The Black Muslims demand that Negroes keep their place. They go along with the Klan on segregation. It seemed right that Cassius Clay had a good time beating another Negro. This was fun, like chasing them with dogs and knocking them down with streams of water.”

  All the while, Ali was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, getting the same treatment that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been getting from the bureau for years. J. Edgar Hoover got regular reports on everything from Ali’s travels and phone calls to his appearances on television talk shows. He was now, in the eyes of the bureau, a greater subversive than Jack Johnson had ever been. His legal advisers were certainly giving him little hope; jail was a real possibility and the end of his fighting career almost a certainty. Ali’s lawyer, Hayden Covington, told him, “It looks like trouble, Champ. This isn’t like any case I’ve had before. Joe Namath can get off to play football and George Hamilton gets out because he’s going with the president’s daughter, but you’re different. They want to make an example out of you.”

  As time passed and the government put pressure on him, Ali made his stance firmer, clearer. He would not fight exhibitions for the army. He would not move abroad. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” he said to a reporter for Sports Illustrated. “If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me. I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”

  On the morning of April 28, 1967, Ali appeared at the U.S. Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station on San Jacinto Street in Houston, where he had been summoned to face induction. On the sidewalk, a group of protesters, mainly students but some older people, too, was already there chanting, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” “Draft beer—not Ali!” H. Rap Brown, one of the leading activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was shouting, “Hep! Hep! Don’t take that step!” Brown flashed Ali the raised fist, the black power sign, and Ali answered in kind. Then he went inside to face army induction.

  “It’s hard now to relay the emotion of that time,” said Sonia Sanchez, the poet and civil rights activist. “This was still a time when hardly any well-known people were resisting the draft. It was a war that was disproportionately killing young black brothers, and here was this beautiful, funny, poetical young man standing up and saying no! Imagine it for a moment! The heavyweight champion, a magical man, taking his fight out of the ring and into the arena of politics, and standing firm. The message th
at sent!”

  Ali and twenty-five other potential recruits were told to fill out papers, undergo physical examinations, and then wait for the long bus ride to Fort Polk, Louisiana. In the early afternoon, the recruits lined up in front of a young lieutenant, S. Steven Dunkley, for one last formality. The officer called each man’s name and told him to take another step forward—and into the armed forces. Finally, Ali’s name was called—“Cassius Clay! Army!” Ali did not move. He was called “Ali” and again he remained still. Then another officer led Ali to a private room and advised him that the penalty for refusing the draft was five years imprisonment and a fine. Did he understand? Yes, he did. Ali was given another chance to respond to his name and step forward. Again he stood still. There was no fear in Ali, none of the anxiety he’d felt in those few minutes warming up in the ring before facing Liston for the first time. Finally, one of the induction officers told Ali to write out a statement with his reasons for refusal.

  “I refuse to be inducted into the armed forces of the United States,” Ali wrote, “because I claim to be exempt as a minister of the religion of Islam.”

  Ali stepped outside the building and into a hive of reporters. The protesters were still there, too, and shouted encouragement. But even years later, Ali also remembered a woman carrying a small American flag and shouting, “You’re headin’ straight for jail! You get down on your knees and beg forgiveness from God! My son’s in Vietnam and you no better than he is. I hope you rot in jail.”