by Jonathan Eig
Ali’s brother Rudy — also a newly registered member of the Nation of Islam and now going by the name Rahaman Ali, or Rock, as friends called him — had a more romantic explanation: it was true love, he said.
Less than six weeks after their first date, on August 14, 1964, Sonji Roi and Muhammad Ali were married by a justice of the peace in Gary, Indiana. The bride wore a black-and-white checkered sheath dress with an orange scarf. A justice of the peace performed the ceremony because the Nation of Islam had no official wedding ritual. The groom signed the marriage certificate as “Muhammad Ali,” even though he had not legally changed his name. The name had been given to him by Elijah Muhammad, he said, and “anything he do is legal.”
Asked about their plans, Ali said he and Sonji wanted their children to be born “in the hereafter,” not in America. When a reporter asked where the “the hereafter” was located, Ali replied, “Somewhere near Arabia.”
Many parents would be concerned, to say the least, to hear that their wealthy young son had married a woman he’d known for only six weeks, especially if the woman had Sonji Roi’s resume: orphan, single mother, part-time model, dancer, rumored prostitute. But Odessa and Cash Clay adored Sonji. The first day they met, Sonji and Odessa worked together to fry a batch of chicken in Odessa’s kitchen. Sonji was amused to learned that Odessa still called her grown son “tinky baby” or “woody baby,” a play on “little baby.” Soon Sonji was calling Ali her “woody baby.”
Sonji was charming, frank, funny, and, perhaps best of all as far as Mr. and Mrs. Clay were concerned, not a member of the Nation of Islam. It suggested to Ali’s parents that Elijah Muhammad’s control over their son might have limits. It was even possible for the Clays to imagine that their son’s love for Sonji might prove stronger than his love for Elijah Muhammad, and that marriage might open a path leading their boy out of the Nation of Islam.
Cash Clay continued to harp on the Nation every chance he got, which explained in part why his son was paying fewer visits to his parents’ home in Louisville. “I tell him he’s gonna be broke from all those leeches,” Cash told a reporter, failing to mention that he had been leeching too, persuading his son to invest in a nightclub that Cash Clay owned and operated, a place called the Olympic Club, which opened and closed in the course of only a few months as Cash alienated one customer after another.
Ali’s aunt, Mary Clay Turner, said the Clays still hoped that Muhammad Ali would realize the mistake he’d made and return to his family, reclaim his old name, and break free of the Nation. “Why, you have to be almost totally illiterate to be sold that Muslim bill of goods,” Turner said in an interview with Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated. “Cassius is about the cleanest thing in the whole confounded Muslim organization. All the rest of them have scars and smears on their names. If they haven’t once been hustlers, well, they’re hustling now! If they haven’t been robbers, they’re robbing now! This is it, you know I’m not lying! Practically every one of ’em’s been in prison. Cassius falls for all that business about no drinking and no smoking, but he don’t know they drink behind the doors, and cuss, and whip their mamas, and do everything. And they’d kill you just as quick as they’d kill me, and don’t you forget it!”
Ali had options beyond the Nation of Islam. He had met and befriended other activists. On September 4, 1964, with FBI agents listening in, Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the phone. According to the FBI’s wiretap log, Ali assured King “he is keeping up with MLK and MLK is his brother and he’s with him 100 percent but can’t take any chances, and that MLK should take care of himself and should ‘watch out for them whites.’ ” Although it’s not clear what Ali meant when he said he couldn’t take any chances, he was probably worried about angering Elijah Muhammad more than he was worried about angering the white establishment or the FBI. His respect for the Messenger’s authority was overpowering. At one point, Ali told Jack Olsen: “I can’t drive no more. He didn’t want to read about me in no trouble, so he said you can just quit driving, and I had to quit. He’s that powerful. Anything he says, we do. Even the white man — the whole country is scared of him.”
Elijah Muhammad never commented publicly on Ali’s decision to marry Sonji Roi. Nonetheless, the marriage placed Ali at a crossroads. As he began his own family, he had a chance to decide anew what his future might look like. But he elected to maintain the same course where his religion was concerned, telling reporters that his wife had written a letter to John Ali, national secretary of the Nation of Islam, declaring her intention to register as a Muslim. “That was the onliest reason I married her,” he said, “because she agreed to do everything I wanted her to do . . . I told her to be my wife she must wear dresses at least three inches below her knees, she must take off lipstick, she must quit drinking and smoking.”
Those were minor concerns for a man so deeply in love.
“My wife and I will be together forever,” Ali told the press.
Not long after Ali’s wedding, he and Sonny Liston reached an agreement for a rematch on November 16, 1964, at the Boston Garden. The Louisville Sponsoring Group negotiated the contract with Inter-Continental. After four years in the fight business, the Louisville businessmen understood more fully what they’d gotten into, and they were not entirely happy about it. Not only were they being hammered in the press for making an under-the-table deal with Liston and the Nilon brothers for a return bout, but the Nilon brothers still hadn’t paid hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to Ali from the first fight. So, even as the two sides worked out the details of a new contract, the Louisville Sponsoring Group filed suit against Liston and Inter-Continental to force payment from their prior contract. Only in boxing could such arrangements pass for normal.
Ali paid little attention to business matters. Eleven days after his wedding, he was back in Miami to begin training. Some accounts said his weight had ballooned to 240 pounds, while others put it at 225. Either way, he had work to do, so he wore a pair of five-pound work boots and carried pound-and-a-half weights in each hand when he ran. Almost every day after his run he watched film of his first fight with Liston, and after viewing it often enough, he pinpointed the key to victory: It had come down to his ability to dodge Liston’s jabs. Once Liston realized his jabs weren’t connecting, the bigger, slower fighter had tried leading with left hooks, but that hadn’t worked either, because Ali was too fast to get caught by a lead hook. That had left Liston with no options. Unable to play the aggressor, he grew frustrated and fatigued, while Ali slammed away.
If it worked the first time, it would work again, Ali concluded. Liston was like a shark; stop him from moving forward and he would die.
A week before the fight, Ali weighed 216 pounds — 51/2 pounds more than he’d weighed when he’d beaten Liston in Miami to claim the title. But even with the extra pounds, he was perfectly fit. If anything, he appeared to be in even better shape. According to Sports Illustrated, he had grown half an inch to 6 foot 3; his biceps measured 17 inches around, and his thighs were 27 inches, a 2-inch improvement in both places. His waistline was unchanged at 34 inches.
“I’m so beautiful I should be chiseled in gold,” he said.
Liston was in shape for the rematch, too. He knew that he’d taken his opponent too lightly in their earlier match. For the first time in years, Liston had trained as if he might be in for a long fight, running stairs, jogging five miles a day, and working out with a martial arts instructor to improve his speed and agility. He began his workouts in Denver and, then, as the fight drew nearer, moved to White Cliffs, a country club near Plymouth, Massachusetts. He gave up beer and late-night card games. By late October, he weighed 208 pounds —10 pounds fewer than he’d weighed for the first contest. But not everyone thought that a leaner Liston would necessarily be a meaner Liston. “He seemed to shrink in size,” wrote Arthur Daley of the Times, “and instead of looking his announced age of 30 he looked closer to 40.”
On October 26, Liston badly battered one of
his sparring partners, busting a gash between the man’s eyes that required eight stitches to close. The damage buoyed Liston’s mood. Although Ali was undefeated and had beaten Liston convincingly in Miami, bookmakers and boxing writers made Liston the favorite again, this time with nine-to-five odds for those laying bets. Apparently, the experts believed what Liston and his wife and trainers continued to insist: that a bum arm had crippled the fighter in the first go-round. Liston, they reasoned, was too strong and too mean to lose twice. Yes, he’d quit the previous fight, but this time he’d be battling to save his career and reputation. Even Ali acknowledged that Liston would probably put up a better fight this time around, predicting that it would take him nine rounds to win. “I give him three more rounds for being in better shape,” he said.
As champion, Ali had expanded his retinue. He still had his brother, who was there to repeat everything Ali said and tell him how funny it was, and he still had Bundini Brown, who told jokes, wrote poems, and turned up the volume on the TV at Ali’s command. But now, in addition, he had three Muslim cooks, an assistant to the assistant trainer, a chauffeur for his new $12,000 Cadillac limousine, and a mascot. The mascot was Stepin Fetchit, an aging vaudeville comic who was described to the press as Ali’s “secret strategist,” and who claimed to be teaching the young boxer how to throw Jack Johnson’s secret “anchor punch.” This may have been purely fictional but sounded good to writers and to Ali. Fetchit’s real name was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, his father naming him after four presidents. Fetchit was America’s first black movie star, but he had risen to fame playing lazy, shuffling, ass-kissing characters that embodied negative racial stereotypes. He was an unlikely companion for Ali and his proud Muslim comrades.
Some said Ali’s friendship with Fetchit was proof of the fighter’s emotional complexity, while others were less kind.
“To me, he’s just a thoroughly confused person,” Ferdie Pacheco said.
Ali and Fetchit were both great actors, and Fetchit seemed to have a keen understanding of the boxer’s gift for showmanship. Before the Liston rematch, Fetchit said, “People don’t understand the champ, but one day he’ll be one of the country’s greatest heroes. He’s like one of those plays where a man is the villain in the first act and then turns out to be the hero in the last act . . . And that’s the way he wants it, because it’s better for the box office for people to misunderstand him.”
On Sunday, November 8, Ali and his brother attended a Muslim service led by Louis X at a temple in Boston. On November 13, three days before the fight, Ali was unwinding in room 611 of the Sherry Biltmore Hotel. He’d run five miles that morning, but he’d stopped sparring, taking care not to get hurt. The Boston Garden anticipated a sellout, and closed-circuit ticket sales were expected to top $3 million. In the days leading up to the fight, when he wasn’t running or skipping rope or getting a massage from Luis Sarria, Ali spent most of his time in his hotel room, watching movies, listening to music, and joking with his brother, Bundini, Captain Sam Saxon, and others. Reporters came and went. So did members of the Nation of Islam, including Louis X, Clarence X (formerly known as Clarence Gill, one of the leaders of the Nation of Islam’s mosque in Boston and a part-time Ali bodyguard), and John Ali. For dinner that night, Ali ate a steak, spinach, baked potato, toast, and a salad with oil-and-vinegar dressing before turning on a 16-millimeter projector to watch Little Caesar, the 1931 gangster classic starring Edward G. Robinson.
Fifteen or twenty minutes after finishing his meal, at about 6:30 p.m., Ali ran to the bathroom and vomited. Suddenly, he was in terrible pain.
“Oh, something is awful wrong,” he said as he came out of the bathroom.
Someone called an ambulance. Saxon, Rudy, and a few others carried Ali down the hall to a service elevator, through a laundry room, and outside to the ambulance.
Doctors at Boston City Hospital said Ali had an incarcerated inguinal hernia, a swelling the size of an egg in the right bowel, a life-threatening condition that required immediate surgery.
Sonji, who was staying at the home of Louis X, rushed to the hospital. So did Angelo Dundee. William Faversham and Gordon Davidson of the Louisville Sponsoring Group were at the Boston Garden, watching the Celtics play the Los Angeles Lakers, when a police officer found them and told them to get to the hospital right away. Another police officer was sent to the opera house to fetch a surgeon who would go on to perform the operation in white tie and tails.
When it was over and Ali’s life was no longer in danger, the rumors and conspiracy theories started at once: Liston’s trainers had poisoned Ali. The Nation of Islam had poisoned Ali. Malcolm X had poisoned Ali. The mafia had poisoned Ali. Ali was faking the illness because he was afraid to fight.
When Liston got the news that the fight was canceled, he poured himself a screwdriver. He had trained hard, worked himself into top shape, and now he would have to do it again. Score another round for Clay, his tormentor.
“That damned fool,” Liston said. “That damned fool.”
17
Assassination
As he slept one night, an explosion shook Malcolm X’s house. Cold air whipped through a shattered window and flames spread across the living room floor. Malcolm rushed his wife and children through the smoke and out the back door. It was 2:45 in the morning on Valentine’s Day, 1965. Fire trucks screamed down the block, and neighbors stepped outside to see what was happening. Malcolm stood on the street in his pajamas, his fingers wrapped around a .25 caliber pistol.
When the flames were out, police found traces of Molotov cocktails that had been thrown through the living-room window of the modest brick home in Queens. Malcolm was angry — but not surprised. He had been saying for weeks that Elijah Muhammad wanted him dead. In Muhammad Speaks, Louis X had written, “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape . . . such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.”
Muhammad Ali was just as threatening, telling one journalist: “Malcolm X and anybody else who attacks or talks about attacking Elijah Muhammad will die.”
In a televised interview with Chicago journalist Irv Kupcinet, Ali had hurled insults at Malcolm. “I don’t even think about him,” he said. “He’s nothing but a fellow who was an ex-dope addict, a prisoner, a jailbird who had no education, couldn’t read or write, who heard about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who took him off the streets, cleaned him up, and educated him enough to go out and debate . . . He is no longer Malcolm X . . . He is just Malcolm Little. Little, nothing.”
Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, pleaded with Ali to help. “You see what they are doing to my husband, don’t you?” she asked during a chance encounter at the Theresa Hotel. Ali put his hands up in the air. “I haven’t done anything,” he said. “I’m not doing anything to him.”
But Ali’s proclamation of innocence rang false. The Nation of Islam had done everything short of offering a reward for the murder of Malcolm X. As the most prominent member of the organization, Ali could have used his power to call for a halt to malicious attacks. He could have intervened on his former friend’s behalf. He chose not to. Indeed, he helped stoke the anger.
On February 18, four days after the firebombing of his house, Malcolm phoned the FBI to tell them, as if they hadn’t noticed, that someone was trying to kill him. In addition to the firebombing, there had been car chases in Los Angeles and Chicago. Now, leaders of the Nation of Islam were arriving in New York, raising suspicion that another attack might soon be launched. Louis X of Boston presided over a meeting of the Newark Mosque No. 25, while National Secretary John Ali checked into the Americana Hotel in New York on Friday, February 19. Two days later, members of the Newark temple made the drive to New York to attend a Malcolm X rally at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. When Malcolm took the stage, one of the men from Newark threw a smoke bomb and leaped to apprehend a pretend thief. “Get your hands out of my pockets!” he shouted by way of distraction as three gunmen crept to the stage.
“Hold it! Hold it! Hol
d it! Hold it!” Malcolm shouted. Suddenly, a shotgun blast ripped holes in Malcolm’s chest. More shots flew. Malcolm toppled backward, the back of his head crashing to the floor. He died almost instantly.
A few hours later, a fire ripped through Muhammad Ali’s apartment at 7036 South Cregier Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. Ali and his wife were at a restaurant having dinner when John Ali called with the news about the fire. How did John Ali know where they were eating unless the couple had been followed? Sonji became suspicious, wondering if the fire had been meant to warn her husband to stay in line.
“That was a strange fire. Real strange,” Muhammad Ali said years later. “I believe to this day someone started it on purpose.”
Two days after that, a bomb nearly leveled the Nation of Islam’s mosque in New York. Soon after, one of Ali’s former bodyguards, Leon 4X Ameer, who had left the Nation of Islam, died in a hotel room from trauma inflicted during an earlier beating. Prior to the beating, Ameer, formerly known as Leon Lionel Phillips Jr., had been talking to the FBI. In one interview with an agent, Ameer said Ali had suffered his hernia during sexual intercourse with Sonji and that Ali’s managers had been embarrassed because they had not been able to “prevent nightly cohabitation” between Ali and his wife in the days leading up to the second Liston fight. Ameer also told FBI agents the boxer was growing tired of the “numerous donations” the Nation of Islam expected him to make. According to one FBI memo, Ameer told Ali “he was foolish to let the NOI [Nation of Islam] ‘milk him.’ ”
None of this caused Ali to publicly question Elijah Muhammad’s leadership. “Malcolm X was my friend,” he said, “and he was a friend of everybody as long as he was a member of Islam. Now I don’t want to talk about him. All of us were shocked at the way he was killed. Elijah Muhammad has denied that the Muslims were responsible. We are not a violent people.”
