Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Years later, interviewed over lunch at a restaurant in Chicago, John Ali said the Nation of Islam had nothing to do with the assassination. “I was never interrogated,” he said. “I was never charged. People know if we wanted to do it, we could’ve done it.” He paused. “We didn’t do it.”

  Sam Saxon agreed. “I wanted to kill Malcolm,” he said in an interview years later, after changing his name to Abdul Rahman. “But the Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us not to bother him, so we didn’t bother him.” Saxon said he thought the FBI arranged the assassination to stir dissension within the Nation of Islam and to eliminate a man who might have gone on to become a powerful rebel leader.

  Decades later, Ali would say that turning his back on Malcolm was one of the biggest regrets of his life. But at the time, he showed no remorse. After his hernia, Ali enjoyed a long break from boxing. Most mornings, Sonji cooked breakfast while Ali lounged around their Chicago apartment. He would go for walks, often visiting Herbert Muhammad at the office of Muhammad Speaks, and then come home and watch television while Sonji cooked dinner. When they went out at night to the movies or a restaurant, fans would swarm Ali, but Sonji didn’t mind. She would stand back a few feet and let her husband enjoy his admirers until he would remember her and make an introduction, saying, “This is my wife, y’all.”

  Those were the simplest, happiest times, but they were not perfect. Sonji was a skeptic, “the kind that can’t believe in anything just on blind faith, not even God,” as she said. So she asked questions about her husband’s beliefs. Why can’t women wear short dresses? Why do you call white people “devils” when you have so many white friends? Why couldn’t they go out to nightclubs to see white entertainers? A decade later, after they had divorced, Sonji and Ali discussed these questions and others in front of the writer Richard Durham. “You would never answer me yourself,” Sonji complained. “You thought the man should be the only one in the house who really knew what he was talking about, so you would go and ask the Muslim officials . . . You couldn’t understand why little insignificant me would not just go along with the program like the others and ask no questions.”

  To which Ali replied, “You wouldn’t give me what I expected from a Muslim woman.”

  Once, Ali got mad when he saw his wife putting on eyeshadow.

  “You grabbed a wet towel and started scrubbing my face, hard,” Sonji recalled.

  “Did I do that?” he asked. “I’m sorry. If I had known what I know now, we’d still be married. You see, I was like a religious fanatic at first . . . I acted like every difference was a threat.”

  In early March, when he was still recuperating from his hernia operation, Ali traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to watch Sugar Ray Robinson fight Jimmy Beecham at the National Stadium. Although he was almost forty-four years old, Robinson was still active, fighting fourteen times in 1965. At an elegant party before the fight, Ali got angry with Sonji about the orange knit dress she’d chosen to wear. In front of guests, he stepped in front of his wife and yanked the bottom of the dress, trying to make it cover her knees. At first, Sonji thought he was joking. After all, there were no Muslims around, and Ali had not only purchased this dress for her but had helped her put it on earlier that evening. But when he kept trying to yank down the front of the dress, Sonji saw he was serious and became embarrassed. She went to the balcony and cried. When Ali came out on the balcony, he saw a white man staring at his wife in her short dress and his anger bubbled over.

  “I was vexed over that dress,” he told her years later in front of Durham.

  “But you bought that damn dress!” she said. “You picked it! Then you snatch me right off the balcony and drag me straight through the living room, past the guests, past the movie stars, past the bank president, the opera star, past Ray Robinson and everybody. And I’m crying and pulling away and you’re jerking on me and yelling and you’ve forgotten everybody’s looking. You’re yelling and everything! You threw me in the bathroom, came in, and slammed the door. I’m screaming and crying and you’re trying to stretch my dress. And in trying to make my dress long, pulling and snatching on it, you tore it. You tore it bad. So now I’m nearly naked. I’m trying to break away, and you’re fighting me, pulling on my clothes, slapping me. Sugar Ray comes to the bathroom door and starts knocking on it. ‘Let me in, man! Let me in . . .’ He’s yelling through the door like he thought you was killing me.”

  When they got back to Miami, Sonji wrote a goodbye note and left it on her husband’s pillow. When he returned from the gym that day, she was gone.

  Eventually, Ali tracked her down in Chicago, they talked on the phone “eighty-five dollars’ worth,” as Sonji put it, referring to the cost of the long-distance call, until she agreed to give him another chance. She flew back to Florida as Ali resumed training for Liston. But their arguments continued. Sonji’s wardrobe would continue to be a catalyst for anger and bitter feuds.

  On April 1, 1965, Ali and Sonji split again, but this time it was for professional reasons. Ali boarded his custom-painted bus, Little Red, for the drive from Miami to Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, where he would train for his rematch with Liston, which had been rescheduled for May 25. He had invited Bundini Brown, Howard Bingham, a few sparring partners, his cooks, and four white journalists to join him for the trip. Rahaman Ali would follow in his brother’s tomato-red Cadillac.

  The bus was parked in front of Ali’s house, everyone on board and ready to go, when Sonji shouted out the door: “Ali, you see about my dry cleaning?”

  “All sent,” the heavyweight champ told his wife.

  “How about my shoes at the shop?”

  “Done.”

  “Then take out the garbage.”

  Ali put one finger to his lips.

  “Shh. Champs don’t take out garbage.”

  Sonji’s tone hardened. “I’m telling you, Ali . . . ,” she said. Ali took out the garbage and got on the bus.

  The bus was a 1955 Flexible. It smelled of cigarette smoke, white-bean pie, and fried chicken, the latter cooked by Sonji and packed in strong supply in the hope that Ali and his fellow travelers would not have to stop and test racial tolerance among restaurant owners in Florida and Georgia. Ali drove, one hand on the wheel, unconcerned with Miami traffic, as he looked over his shoulder to inform his fellow travelers about their great fortune: “Just think, the whole world would love to be on this bus with me, but they ain’t and you are. We’re going to breathe fresh air and look at pretty trees and eat that chicken and you can interview me while I’m driving my beautiful bus along at the cruising speed of eighty-five.”

  He paused to ask a question: Did anybody have gas money?

  He pointed at a reporter in glasses.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pope,” said Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald.

  “Pope, loan me a hundred dollars.”

  Pope and others on the bus still didn’t know what to call Ali. Muhammad sounded silly. Clay, the boxer insisted, wasn’t his name anymore. If he was in a good mood he would answer to Cassius, but most of the men played it safe and addressed him simply as “Champ.” For the white passengers, it was difficult to imagine that the leader of their brigade was the same man caught up in the violent world of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. He was delightful, full of jokes, including quips about the nation’s racial unrest.

  “Next stop Boston,” he said. “But first we stopping in Selma and Bogalusa.” He was joking about bringing an integrated bus through the Deep South and the trouble that might ensue. “Don’t worry, when we shout at girls it’s gonna be colored girls so nobody get hung.”

  He was the finest source of copy some of these reporters had ever met, a man whose every utterance and action begged to be recorded. Pope was typing his stories on a portable Smith Corona typewriter while the bus bounced along. When Ali wasn’t driving, he would squeeze in next to Pope to see what he was typing and to make suggestions or offer additional comments. When the bus stopped, the jour
nalist would find a pay phone, call his editor, and dictate a column. Fortunately for Pope and his readers, the bus stopped often, as Ali couldn’t stand to pass a town without letting its citizens express their appreciation for his visit.

  By suppertime on the journey’s first day, the crew hadn’t left Florida, and the supply of Sonji’s fried chicken had already been exhausted. In Yulee, just south of the Georgia line, the bus slowed and pulled into a truck stop. Big gas pumps stood like gravestones under overhead lights and truck trailers filled the macadam lot. Bundini Brown and some of the white reporters got off the bus and walked into a diner.

  “They don’t want you,” Ali warned Bundini. “Don’t try.”

  Bundini, wearing a denim “Bear Huntin’ ” jacket, just like the one Ali owned, went in anyway. The champ and some of his sparring partners stood by the gas pumps, watching him go. Bundini was one of the few men in the entourage who argued race with Ali. He told Ali the Nation of Islam was steering him wrong, that black and white people were no different, that it was only a matter of time before people stopped fighting one another over racial prejudice. At one point, Elijah Muhammad offered Bundini fifty thousand dollars a year to become a Muslim, mostly so he would stop planting dangerous ideas in Ali’s mind. Bundini scoffed at the offer, according to his son, saying, “What kind of religion do you have if you gotta pay someone to become a member?”

  Ali would fire and rehire Bundini many times over the years, but, in truth, he seemed to like sparring with his motivator-in-chief. Most people in the entourage said whatever they thought the champ wanted to hear, but not Bundini; Bundini challenged him.

  “Okay, Jackie Robinson,” Ali said. “You my integrator. If you come back on your head I know they don’t want us.”

  Bundini went through the screen door, walked past six or seven white couples, and took a seat at the counter. The reporters joined him.

  “I’m sorry,” the manager said, coming out from behind the counter. “We have a place out back. Separate facilities.”

  From the kitchen, two black cooks peeked out the door. Bundini and the reporters tried to argue, but the manager — talking to the reporters, not to Bundini — said there was nothing he could do.

  The screen door opened and Ali walked in — not to save the day but to humiliate Bundini.

  “You fool — what’s the matter with you? You damn fool.” Ali’s nostrils flared and his voice raged almost out of control, according to George Plimpton, one of the writers at the counter. “You clear out of this place, nigger, you ain’t wanted here,” Ali said. “Can’t you see, they don’t want you, you nigger?” Ali grabbed Bundini by the jacket and hauled him out the door. Bundini flew across the macadam “as if he had been launched from a sling,” Plimpton wrote. The champ rushed after him, still yelling. “I’m glad, Bundini! I’m glad you got showed, Bundini, you got showed!”

  Bundini looked at his feet. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m good enough to eat here! I’m a free man. God made me.”

  He broke away from Ali and hid on the bus. But Ali kept after him, calling him Uncle Tom and telling him to bow his head.

  Bundini argued. He had served his country in the military, he said. He should be able to eat anywhere he wanted. The truck-stop manager would regret his actions someday.

  “Tom! Tom! Tom!” Ali shouted.

  “Leave me alone,” Bundini said, barely audibly, as he hung his head and cried.

  Fifty miles up the road, in Brunswick, Georgia, the bus stopped at another roadside restaurant. This time, without explanation, Ali marched his crew inside, asked for a table, and sat down to eat. He was ruthless, like a dictator or tribal chief who might rally his followers to great heights one day and then order them to undertake a suicide mission the next, his judgment as mysterious as it was uncontested.

  He picked up a pitcher and poured cream in his cup.

  “Bundini,” he called out. “I’m going to integrate the coffee.”

  Bundini laughed. “One of these days,” he said, “we’re going to find out which one of us is crazy. I think it’s you.”

  18

  Phantom Punch

  In Fayetteville, North Carolina, Little Red burst into flames and had to be retired.

  “My poor little red bus,” Ali said softly, offering a roadside eulogy. “You was the most famousest bus ever in the history of the world. Leastwise you the onliest one ever to come on a trip like this.”

  Still reluctant to fly, Ali and his band made the rest of the trip on a Trailways bus, arriving fifty hours later in Chicopee Falls. To some skeptics in the press, the disastrous trip was an omen. Ali hadn’t really beaten Sonny Liston last time; Liston had quit. There was a sense that the young boxer had gotten lucky, that David had slung a lucky stone and would be wise to leave Goliath alone. The odds makers in Las Vegas once more made Liston the favorite, same as before Ali’s hernia.

  In early May, with the fight weeks away, boxing officials in Massachusetts canceled the contest over concerns that Liston’s promoters had ties to the mob. A cynic might say everyone in boxing had ties to the mob, but fight promoters had no interest in philosophical dialogue; they needed to find a new venue, and they needed to find it fast. When a promoter and pawnshop owner from Lewiston, Maine, offered the five-thousand-seat St. Dominic’s Arena for the fight, improbably, a deal was struck. Lewiston, a textile town with a population of 41,000, would be the smallest town to host a heavyweight championship in forty-two years.

  Everything about the fight was a mess. Although the arena was small, half the tickets went unsold. The prices, ranging from twenty-five to one hundred dollars, were too high for most Lewistonians. The official paid attendance of 2,434 was the lowest for a heavyweight title fight in modern history. One rumor circulating said followers of Malcolm X would try to kill Ali the night of the fight. Another rumor said a Nation of Islam hit squad would kill Sonny Liston if he didn’t take a dive. Muslims had been almost invisible at the fight in Miami, but they were out in force in Maine. Men in dark suits and bowties surrounded Ali wherever he went, scanning the crowds and frightening white reporters who were accustomed to a more jovial atmosphere.

  Then there was Liston, who not only seemed anxious but in far from peak condition. Drinking Scotch and working out half-heartedly, the former champ, age thirty-two at a minimum but more likely thirty-four, appeared worn and weary.

  “Liston is burnt out,” Ali said.

  “You can see it in his eyes,” one of Liston’s sparring partners said. “They don’t look so scary anymore.”

  His wife, Geraldine, noticed the same thing. “He just didn’t seem like Sonny,” she said. Before his first contest with Clay, Liston had been confident and calm. This time, on the day of the fight, he was nervous — and wracked with diarrhea.

  Ali, on the other hand, trained like a man who thought he had become the King of the World, or at least the King of the Black World, and who would do everything possible to avoid disappointing his legions. He alternated between speedy sparring partners and sluggers. Jimmy Ellis would test his reflexes, and Joe “Shotgun” Shelton would bang away at Ali’s gut while Ali leaned against the ropes, conditioning himself for late rounds against Liston, as if pain were no consideration.

  On the night of the fight, hundreds of police officers from the surrounding area were called for duty. They combed the arena for bombs and patted down spectators for guns. Security was so tight that many ticketholders were still standing outside when the fight began. The only consolation for those stranded ticketholders was that they didn’t have to listen to Robert Goulet butcher the national anthem.

  Ali left his hotel at nine, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Riding along, Mort Sharnik of Sports Illustrated asked the champ for a prediction. Ali answered without a rhyme. “It may start out with me not even throwing a punch,” he said calmly. “I’m just gonna go backwards and Liston will pursue and then, finally, bam! — I’ll hit him with the right hand and it’s gonna be over.” A week
earlier, he had told a reporter that he never liked to go into a fight with a plan. “Angelo, he got a fight plan,” Ali said, “and I do it when I can. But it would be the worst thing I could do to go in there with my mind all made up what to do. I been fighting since I was a child, and I do everything on instinct. Sometimes I wonder at myself when I see a big fist coming at my head, and my head move without me thinking and the big fist go by. I wonder how I did it.”

  That was the plan.

  The fight began at 10:40 p.m. Sonji — who had decided to take the last name Clay, even though her husband had dropped it — sat with her in-laws, Cash and Odessa. Not far from the Clays, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Elizabeth Taylor sat ringside — the first and last time Lewiston saw such an array of stars. The crowd booed Ali as he arrived and cheered for Liston, lending truth to the maxim that says my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Ali may have been the most widely disliked man in America in 1965.

  The referee, Jersey Joe Walcott, himself a former heavyweight champ, met the fighters in the center of the ring and reminded them of the rules. Before the bell, Ali bowed his head and offered a prayer in the direction of Mecca, while Liston shuffled heavily in the opposite corner.

  The fight began. Ali, in white trunks, looked bigger and stronger than ever, his chest and shoulders easily as imposing as Liston’s, his stomach lean, coiled with muscle. He didn’t backpedal, as he told Sharnik he would. Instead, he rushed to the center of the ring and threw two quick punches. With that message sent, he did what everyone expected of him, backpedaling and circling while Liston chased and threw punches that mostly failed to connect. Every time Liston tried to corner his opponent, Ali slid away, usually to his left, and danced another circle around the ring. In most of his fights, Ali would jab, jab, jab while he moved, but this time he hardly bothered, content to dance and let his opponent give chase. Through the first ninety seconds of the fight, Ali threw only two jabs, and both missed. Perhaps he was measuring Liston, perhaps maintaining distance for his own safety.