by Jonathan Eig
“I remember the day I became aware of the Champ,” the writer Walter Mosley said. “My mother was driving me to school after he won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. At a crosswalk a black man passing in front of our car suddenly turned and, raising his fists into the air, announced loudly, ‘I am the greatest!’ I was frightened by the man’s violent outburst, but even then I heard the pride and hurt, the dashed ambition and the shard of hope that cut through him. Cassius Clay’s declaration had become his own. The Black Pride movement was on, and one of its pillars were those four words.”
On the same day Clay clarified his religious views, February 26, 1964, Elijah Muhammad spoke to thousands of Muslims at a Saviours’ Day assembly at the Chicago Coliseum. Muhammad did not address his ongoing rift with Malcolm X, but he did use the occasion to welcome Cassius Clay to the Nation of Islam, and he offered Cassius’s brother Rudy a seat on the dais. Until that moment, Muhammad had reserved judgment on the boxer, perhaps because he thought Clay would lose and also perhaps because the Messenger took a dim view of professional sports.
Elijah Muhammad opposed “sport and play,” said John Ali, who served as national secretary under Muhammad at the time and functioned as the Nation of Islam’s top business manager. But the Messenger overcame his bias in this instance, according to John Ali, because he thought he could protect Clay from the white businessmen who ran boxing and treated black boxers like slaves, casting them aside, penniless and brain damaged, when they could no longer perform.
That may indeed have been Elijah Muhammad’s primary reason to welcome Cassius Clay, but the Messenger no doubt saw additional benefits. Clay had just become one of the most famous black men on the planet — possibly the most famous. He was clean-living, youthful, and handsome — a symbol of strength with a rebellious streak as wide as an interstate highway. Until then, Malcolm X had been the most visible representative of the Nation of Islam, but, in Muhammad’s view, Malcolm was causing too much trouble. Cassius Clay did not have Malcolm’s talent for leadership, but he would attract more attention than Malcolm ever had, and he would cause less trouble, too.
After the Liston fight, Clay drove from Miami to New York, where he took a room at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem.
In an interview with Jet, a magazine with a mostly black readership, Clay announced that he was entering a new phase in life, one in which he would devote himself to religious observance and the pursuit of racial equality. “My mouth has made me the greatest, but nobody can be big in this country if they’re black,” he said. His drive from Florida proved that, he said, when he found himself unwelcome in restaurants along the way and forced to fill up on bologna. He said he was thinking about retiring from the boxing ring and devoting his life to traveling and “seeking a peaceful, workable solution to the race problem.” Another possibility: “I just might run for mayor of New York or something.”
His transition from boisterous boxer to calm spiritual leader proceeded gradually. One day, Clay went to a theater in Times Square to cheer for himself while watching a replay of the Liston fight. On another day, he and Sam Cooke visited the Columbia Records building to record a new song, a raucous version of “The Gang’s All Here,” with Clay interrupting the session at one point to instruct the engineer: “Play that over. I don’t think you’ve got my voice loud enough in there yet. Remember, I’m the loudest.”
On March 2, black newspapers around the country, following up on a report first published in the New York Courier, announced that Malcolm X might soon break with the Nation of Islam and form a new organization with the backing of Clay. Citing an unnamed “insider,” the reporter for the Courier said Clay was “solidly in Malcolm’s corner and would lend the influence of his nation-wide standing to any efforts of his friend to establish a cult of his own.” Malcolm’s ambition, according to the news reports, was “to participate more actively with other Negro groups in every phase of the current Negro revolution,” while Elijah Muhammad had long insisted that his organization avoid political engagement. The same day, Clay told a reporter from the Amsterdam News he was changing his name to Cassius X. The press took this as another sign that Clay would stand in solidarity with brother Malcolm. Elijah Muhammad took notice, saying that Malcolm was “nursing” the young boxer “like a baby,” according to an FBI informant.
On March 4, Malcolm and Cassius toured the United Nations, where Clay told African and Asian delegates he was eager to visit their countries and especially eager to see Mecca. Cassius and Malcolm talked about making the trip together. Perhaps it was Malcolm who first realized that the heavyweight champion could become an important international political figure, but his friend the boxer soon caught on.
“I’m the champion of the whole world,” Cassius said, “and I want to meet the people I’m champion of.”
Two days later, on March 6, Elijah Muhammad announced in a radio address that boxing’s heavyweight champion, Cassius Clay, now a follower of the Nation of Islam, was to receive the honor of a full Muslim name.
“This Clay name has no divine meaning,” Elijah Muhammad said. “Muhammad Ali is what I will give to him as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.”
The last two words of that pronouncement would prove as important as the first two.
In a phone call, Elijah Muhammad told the boxer that his new name carried special meaning. Most members of the Nation of Islam merely replaced their so-called slave names with the letter X, as Malcolm Little had done and as Cassius Clay had intended to do. Only in unusual instances did Elijah Muhammad assign full Muslim names to his followers, and such honors were bestowed in most instances after many years of loyal service. Cassius Clay’s new name was special for another reason as well, as the Messenger explained: the founder of the Nation of Islam, W. D. Fard, had once gone by the name Muhammad Ali, among others. “Muhammad,” he explained, meant worthy of praise. “Ali” meant lofty.
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. had always adored his name. He had said it reminded him of a Roman gladiator, that it was the prettiest name he had ever heard, perfect for the prettiest and greatest heavyweight champion of all time. But now Elijah Muhammad called on him to abandon the name, and the boxer agreed without hesitation.
Malcolm X got the news when the voice of Elijah Muhammad came over his car radio in New York. To Malcolm, Elijah Muhammad’s motive was obvious: the Messenger was in poor health and under attack for his sexual behavior. If he didn’t fight, he might lose the organization he built. Malcolm X already posed a threat, but he would pose a far greater threat with the popular young boxer in his camp. That’s why Elijah was trying to buy his impressionable young follower’s loyalty with a designation of honor that suggested Muhammad Ali would hold a privileged ranking within the Nation of Islam and a special relationship with the organization’s leader. It was a political move. “He did it to prevent him from coming with me,” Malcolm said.
Malcolm wasn’t the only one angered by Elijah Muhammad’s announcement. Cassius Clay Sr. couldn’t understand why his son would abandon a name that was not only easy on the ear but also increasingly valuable. And to trade it for “Muhammad Ali,” a name no one could spell? “They’ve been hammering at him and brainwashing him since he was eighteen,” Cash Clay said. “He’s so confused he doesn’t even know where he’s at.” The Muslims were ruining both of his boys, Cash complained, noting that Rudy, too, had committed to this new faith. “They should run those Black Muslims out of the country before they ruin other fine young people.”
Odessa Clay was angry as well. “They don’t like me because I’m light,” she said, referring to the shade of her skin. She also complained that the Nation of Islam never would have attracted her son if the Louisville Sponsoring Group hadn’t sent him to Miami. Odessa conveniently overlooked the fact that her husband had raised their boys on stories of lynching and rape and the white man’s endless deceit, laying the groundwork for the boys’ rebellion.
Joe Louis joined Odessa in blaming the fighte
r’s white management team for failing to protect their boxer, saying, “They stayed on one side of town and him on the other.” Lyman T. Johnson, president of the Louisville chapter of the NAACP and one of the boxer’s former history teachers, said he was “embarrassed for Clay, who is naïve.” Louisville’s black newspaper, the Defender, expressed concern that the young man’s stance would hurt the integration movement. Martin Luther King, now at the height of his influence, voiced his disappointment, as well: “When he joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X,” King said, “he became a champion of racial segregation and that is what we are fighting against. I think perhaps Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skill and do less talking.”
What the newly named Muhammad Ali and others in the Nation of Islam failed to understand, said Jesse Jackson, who worked alongside Dr. King, is that civil rights activists were not merely fighting for integration; they were not merely fighting for black and white children to be mingled in society. The real fight was to kill segregation, to destroy the laws and customs that forced black Americans to accept second-class schools, second-class jobs, second-class neighborhoods, and second-class lives. “The idea that integration was our goal, that was the white people’s definition of our struggle,” Jackson said. “We were fighting for desegregation, fighting for the right to use public facilities, not just to sit beside white people. We were marching against the humiliation of the fact that your money can’t buy a hot dog, can’t rent a Holiday Inn. It was sense of the dollar dignity. We weren’t fighting just to be with white people.”
Ferdie Pacheco, the doctor who worked in the corner for many of Dundee’s fighters, described Muhammad Ali as an overgrown child driven fundamentally by a desire to be contrarian. “He longs to figure out what the public expects him to do and then do something else, even if it’s the wrong thing sometimes,” Pacheco said. Angelo Dundee agreed: “I think he is involved with these Muslims just because people don’t want him to be.”
White sportswriters — old cigar butts of men, as Norman Mailer called them — were horrified and dismissive. Jimmy Cannon wrote, “The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of mass hate. It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, 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. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.” Boxer Max Schmeling had been a dupe for Hitler and the Nazis, but, according to Cannon, this was worse.
It was not hard to see why a white man of Cannon’s generation might think Ali’s behavior worse than Schmeling’s. Black men in 1964 seemed to be taking over everything, from basketball to boxing to the streets of America’s cities. There had never been such an overtly political athlete in America, and certainly not a black one. “What white America demands in her black champions,” the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver said a few years later, “is a brilliant, powerful body, and a dull, bestial mind — a tiger in the ring and a pussycat outside the ring.” With one mighty roar, Muhammad Ali announced the old rule no longer applied.
Throughout his boxing career, Cassius Clay had worked hard to generate controversy and rankle boxing fans, mostly with the goal of selling tickets and spreading his fame. Now, as Muhammad Ali, he didn’t have to work at all. With his new name and his expressed allegiance to a radical religious group poorly understood by most Americans, he was genuinely distrusted and disliked — and more widely discussed than ever.
Until that point, the Louisville Sponsoring Group had not only taken care of his finances; they had bestowed on him an important endorsement. These white men with southern accents and seersucker suits had helped to moderate his public image, like a wealthy benefactor standing behind a long-haired, dope-smoking artist. They had sent the message to fans and potential business partners that this young man could be trusted no matter how much he mouthed off, that it was all in the name of sport and capitalism. But now, the relationship became complicated in ways the Louisville businessmen could have never imagined and scarcely knew how to discuss. Jules Alberti, the head of the nation’s biggest celebrity endorsement agency, questioned whether the boxer would be a “good label for anybody’s product.”
If those challenges were not enough, the Louisville businessmen still faced legal and ethical questions stemming from the Liston fight. Had it been fixed? The evidence remained inconclusive and at times contradictory. The once indomitable Liston had surely looked old and slow. But if Liston had planned to lose, what about the conspiracy theory going around that suggested he had somehow blinded Cassius Clay prior to the fifth round? And what about that fifth round? The greatest knockout puncher of his time couldn’t knock out a blind man? And what about the finish? The toughest man in the world forfeits his title because of a strained tendon in his arm? None of it added up, and the calculation grew more muddled when word leaked to the press that Liston’s management company, Inter-Continental Promotions, had signed a deal to promote Clay’s next fight and name his next opponent. That gave Liston’s team a financial incentive to see Clay win, and it raised enough suspicion to spur an investigation by the Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate’s Judicial Committee.
After the fight, a memo circulated among members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group confessing that the Louisville businessmen had been given no choice about the rematch clause. “At all stages of the negotiation . . . the Nilons made it absolutely clear that there could be no fight without the guarantee to Liston and Inter-Continental of a return bout if Clay should win the championship,” according to this document, found only recently in the personal archives of one of the members of the group. Since the Nilons and the Louisville Sponsoring Group knew that the World Boxing Association disliked rematch clauses, the two sides agreed to hide the second contract from the WBA. They also agreed that the Nilons would hold some of the money from the first fight in escrow to guarantee that the rematch clause would be honored. “In other words,” the memo continued, “the question of a return bout was a non-negotiable item.”
When the Senate subcommittee met, a lawyer for Inter-Continental admitted that Liston and the Nilons held the right to choose Clay’s next opponent and to promote his next fight, but he insisted there was nothing shady about it. “We were just being smart businessmen,” the lawyer, Garland Cherry, said. “We made the agreement . . . just in case Clay should become champion. It is a legitimate contract.”
When the investigation concluded, the subcommittee found no evidence of a fix. Something stunk, but no one could be sure what it was, and there was always the possibility that it was nothing more than the usual foul odor that hung around boxing.
That still left the Louisville Sponsoring Group in a squeeze, with the Nation of Islam on one side looking to assert control over Muhammad Ali’s career, and the Nilon brothers on the other maintaining the contractual right to decide where and whom Ali would fight next.
Every day brought more troubling news. First, the president of the WBA called for Ali to be stripped of his title — not because of suspicions that the Liston fight had been fixed but because of Ali’s association with the Nation of Islam, conduct “setting a very poor example for America’s youth.” On April 26, 1964, another WBA official warned that a Clay-Liston rematch “would make suckers out of millions of American boxing followers.” Then came a report from the army that Ali had twice failed his pre-induction mental exam, which caused many reporters and boxing fans to assume that the boxer had taken a dive on the test to avoid service. After all, how could so clever a man be deemed too stupid to carry a rifle? How could the world’s greatest professional fighter be designated unfit to fight for his country? The army said there was no evidence the boxer had flunke
d intentionally, and his former teachers at Central High agreed, telling reporters they were not at all surprised at the results.
The test Ali flunked included questions like these:
A man works from 6 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon with 1 hour for lunch. How many hours did he work?
a) 7 b) 8 c) 9 d) 10
A clerk divided a number by 3.5 when it should be multiplied by 4.5. His answer is 3. What is the correct answer?
a) 5.25 b) 10.50 c) 15.75 d) 47.25
Test takers needed to get thirty correct out of one hundred to pass, but Ali didn’t make the grade. He said he had spent fifteen or twenty minutes “scratching around” on a question about apples and then found that he had run out of time for a whole row of additional questions.
“I just said I’m the greatest; I never said I was the smartest,” he told reporters.
A reporter asked what would happen if he passed the test next time; would he ask for exemption from service as a conscientious objector based on his religious beliefs?
“Not as a conscientious objector,” he said. “I don’t like that name. It sounds ugly.”
15
Choice
Muhammad Ali faced a decision: Elijah Muhammad or Malcolm X?
It was a choice that would change the course of the boxer’s life and many others’.
With his victory over Sonny Liston, Ali had become one of the most visible black men in the world. In 1964, Malcolm X appeared in 100 articles in the New York Times. Elijah Muhammad’s name appeared in 31. Although he fought only once the entire year, Muhammad Ali appeared in 203 Times articles (although the paper was still calling him Cassius Clay). Among black Americans, only Martin Luther King Jr., who won the Nobel Peace Prize that year, would receive more attention from the nation’s leading newspaper, with 230 articles containing his name. In addition to newspapers, TV news broadcasts carried reports from the frontlines of the civil rights struggle, with black-and-white images of fire hoses, tear gas, and pointed guns, along with brief snippets of commentary from segregationists and civil rights activists. But those reports were boiled down to a few minutes per night and edited by white men. Editing mattered, and editing helps explain why Muhammad Ali held such power. He defied the white media’s filters better than any black man alive — perhaps even better than Dr. King.
