Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Ali appreciated that the Louisville Sponsoring Group paid his bills and kept track of his income. He told one boxing promoter after the second Liston fight that he intended to renew his contract with the group. He liked the men in the consortium so much that when one of them said he wanted to sell his stake, Ali took it as a personal affront. He couldn’t stand the idea of anyone losing confidence in him. In December 1964, Bill Faversham, the leader of the Louisville group and the closest thing Ali had to a manager, suffered a major heart attack. When he heard the news, Ali got in his car immediately and drove all night from Chicago to Louisville to be with Faversham in the hospital.

  Despite his warm feelings toward Faversham and the rest of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, tension arose between them and Ali as Herbert Muhammad got involved. In the days after the Liston fight, Ali told the Louisville businessmen he was eager to pay off his debts and start fighting again, at least three or four times a year, beginning with a bout against Floyd Patterson or George Chuvalo. But Herbert wanted the Louisville businessmen to guarantee the fighter $150,000 after taxes for his next bout. Ali’s take from the Liston fight had been $160,000 before taxes and about $95,000 after. There was no way he was going to get $150,000 after taxes given that Patterson and Chuvalo were less compelling opponents than Liston. But when the businessmen told him that, Ali said he intended to hold off on paying his debt to the group — a debt that had climbed to $60,000 by August 1965 — until he got what he wanted.

  Arthur Grafton, an attorney, wrote in a memo to the Louisville Group: “When we pointed out that this was contrary to our established precedent and that it would leave him with practically nothing net out of the next fight, he seemed to think that this attitude was unfair to him and indicated an unwillingness on our part to do him a little favor. In this he was both egged on and abetted by the language of Herbert Muhammid [sic].” Grafton went on to say he hoped that Ali — who owed money to Sonji now, as well as to his financial supporters — would come to his senses and realize he would quickly go broke if he didn’t fight.

  There was a degree of racism, or at least paternalism, in the way the Louisville Sponsoring Group treated Ali. There were references in their correspondence to “our boy” and “his unsophisticated mind.” But there were also well-intentioned efforts to help. In one letter, a group member commended Ali’s desire to give money to his church — although he also pointed out that Herbert Muhammad had informed the business executives that the Nation of Islam did not qualify as a tax-exempt organization.

  A meeting was organized to work out the differences between Ali and his Louisville backers. Archibald Foster, dressed in a dark blue custom-made suit with whalebone buttons and a candy-stripe shirt, hosted the assembly in his New York office. Worth Bingham, Bill Cutchins, and Foster represented the Louisville Sponsoring Group. Ali was joined by Herbert, Howard Bingham, and Angelo Dundee. When they began talking about a fight with Patterson or Chuvalo, Ali grew excited. He wanted to fight again. Then he asked about the money, saying he wanted to donate all or part of his income from the next bout to the Nation of Islam to support construction of a $3.5 million mosque in Chicago. When members of the group reminded him that he made only $95,000 from his last fight and still owed $65,000 to his financial backers, Ali cursed. “I don’t see why I should fight any more if I can’t make no money,” he said.

  The white men in the room told Ali that if he kept fighting and investing his money wisely, his wealth would grow, and before long he would have more than enough savings to make generous donations to the Nation of Islam. But Ali was impatient. Three or four times Herbert pulled him out of the office for private conversations while Howard Bingham stayed in the room to monitor the Louisville businessmen.

  “The longer we talked, the more violent Cassius and Herbert became,” Worth Bingham wrote. After another conference outside the office, Ali came back with a final and even more unrealistic proposition: he would agree to fight if the men would guarantee him $200,000 after taxes. When the businessmen said it was impossible, he dropped his demand to $150,000. Still impossible, they said. He would need to earn $500,000 to clear $150,000 after taxes. Ali also suggested that the Louisville Sponsoring Group pay him $150,000 to renew his contract. When that offer was greeted coolly, he asked if the men would consider forgiving his $65,000 debt. The businessmen offered him a compromise: if he paid off the $65,000 now, they would lend him another $30,000 immediately.

  That hurt Ali’s feelings. “You were right,” he told Herbert. “I can’t hardly believe it. I thought they believed in me more than that.”

  Worth Bingham said he thought it was a mistake to let Ali get in deeper debt because he would “always be behind the eight ball.”

  Then it was Herbert’s turn to take offense. “What he say?” Herbert asked, apparently upset at the use of the term eight ball, which is sometimes used to refer to dark-skinned black people. “You hear what he say? Why a man want to talk like that? I don’t think you ought to say things like that unless you mean them.”

  With that, Ali and his group got up and left.

  Later the same day, Worth Bingham and the other members of the Louisville Group went to meet the Nilons, who still controlled the rights to promote Ali’s next fight. Bingham was horrified to learn that the Nilons had been bribing newspaper reporters with miniature Sony TV sets — and that every reporter except Red Smith, Arthur Daley, and Shirley Povich had accepted the gifts. “It was a bruising day,” Bingham wrote in a letter to his fellow members of the group, “full of shocking revelations. We are deep in with pretty undesirable characters who have us where they want us, at least for the timebeing. Through it all came the questioned [sic], repeated by almost everyone: ‘What are men like you doing in this business?’ A good question, I feel.”

  20

  A Holy War

  The crowd booed as he bounced down the aisle, booed louder as he climbed into the ring, and booed loudest when the ring announcer introduced the heavyweight champion as Muhammad Ali, not Cassius Clay. Ali ignored the noise. He walked to his corner, turned up his palms, and recited a brief, silent prayer before turning to meet his opponent, Floyd Patterson.

  It was November 22, 1965, two years to the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and more than five years since Ali — then an Olympic hopeful named Cassius Clay — had first met Patterson in Rome.

  Ali’s body glistened under the lights of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The fight began.

  By now he was accustomed to being booed. He knew it was good for business, but he was also fueled by a sense of righteousness. Elijah Muhammad’s group, he said in the days leading up to the fight, was the only religion teaching “truth, fact, and reality.” He continued, “I found within it a device by which the so-called Negroes could unite and do something for themselves instead of begging and forcing themselves on other people. United, we could accomplish things for ourselves the way other nations do . . . I never felt free until I gained the knowledge of myself and the history of our people. This taught me pride and gave me self-dignity . . . To sum it all up, I wish to make it understood that I am not an authority on religion, and not even thirty percent qualified to explain the complex world of religion. I am no leader and not a preacher. I am merely the heavyweight champion of the world who believes in his religion and who is misunderstood.” The remarks sounded as if they’d been polished by the interviewer, the boxing publicist Hank Kaplan, and a note attached to Kaplan’s original copy of the interview said that the document had been approved by Herbert Muhammad.

  Still, these were some of the most succinct and thoughtful comments Ali had made on his conversion, and they aligned him with other young black men who were moving away from the mainstream civil rights movement and fighting for Black Power as opposed to the more pacifist goal of “equal rights.” But Ali was different, too. His faith in a nonwestern religion confused many Americans, and his belief that a global union of nonwhites would eventually defeat the Caucasian min
ority infuriated many of those same people. What made Ali so controversial was that he was an athlete, not a radical political activist. He was more difficult for white Americans to ignore as a result of his boxing career and the media that followed him. In Ali v. Patterson, Ali stood for the black radicals while Patterson represented the integrators, at least in a general sense. Ali carried real animosity for Patterson, anger that had been brewing for at least a year, ever since Patterson had said he felt a sense of moral duty to win the heavyweight championship back from the Muslims. “It’s going to be the first time I ever trained to develop in myself a brutal killer instinct,” Ali told Alex Haley. “I’ve never felt that way about nobody else. Fighting is just a sport, a game, to me. But Patterson I would want to beat to the floor.” Ali called Patterson the white man’s champ. He mocked the former champion for buying a house in a white neighborhood only to move out when he discovered that the white neighbors didn’t want him. Patterson, Ali said, was nothing but an “Uncle Tom Negro.”

  Patterson didn’t back down. In an article in Sports Illustrated co-authored by Milton Gross, the former champ wrote: “I am a Negro and proud to be one, but I’m also an American. I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that Negroes don’t have all the rights and privileges that all Americans should have. I know that someday we will get them. God made us all, and whatever He made is good. All people — white, black, and yellow — are brothers and sisters. That will be acknowledged. It will just take time, but it will never come if we think the way the Black Muslims think. . . . Clay is so young and has been so misled by the wrong people that he doesn’t appreciate how far we have come and how much harm he has done by joining the Black Muslims. He might just as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Patterson didn’t sound like an Uncle Tom any more than Martin Luther King did. He sounded like a man who believed that nonviolent resistance was the most practical and effective approach for black people seeking justice. Radical groups like the Nation of Islam made a lot of noise, but, in Patterson’s view, they had accomplished nothing and probably never would. Patterson’s mistake was not in arguing politics. His mistake, if it can be called one, was in attempting to make a boxing match stand for something more than a fistfight. He declared his contest against Ali a holy war. Patterson said Ali had a right to believe in any religion he wanted. But, he added, “I have rights, too. I have the right to call the Black Muslims a menace to the United States and a menace to the Negro race. I have a right to say the Black Muslims stink. . . . So in addition to winning the world’s heavyweight title for the third time, I have one other responsibility. The Black Muslim influence must be removed from boxing.”

  Ali’s response was unambiguous: Patterson was going to get hurt.

  Sportswriters, of course, love to depict athletic contests in the most grandiose terms. When Jesse Owens won the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, writers described it as a victory over Hitler’s notions of Aryan supremacy. But first it was a simple footrace. In this case, too, Ali v. Patterson would be a punching contest before all else, and Ali, as the bigger, stronger, younger, faster man, held every advantage.

  The fight began and no one in the crowd could understand what Ali was doing. He seemed to be throwing punches with no intention of hitting Patterson. He was throwing them far above Patterson’s head and far from his body, pulling back to make sure he never came close to making contact. When Patterson bulled in and tried to pummel Ali’s body, Ali grabbed Patterson’s head, hugged him, then pushed him away and began throwing more of those strange, fake punches. At one point, Ali threw both hands in the air, as if performing a jumping jack, and then danced away, bobbing, circling, and wagging his shoulders. At another moment, he drew circles with his right hand, as if winding up for a Popeye punch, only to drop his fist and retreat again.

  “Come on, American! Come on, white American!” Ali taunted his opponent.

  Patterson must have felt as if he were fighting a ghost. He couldn’t hit Ali, and Ali wasn’t hitting him. It may have been the only time in the history of heavyweight boxing that the defending champion seemed entirely uninterested in punching. When the bell rang to end the round, Ali returned to his corner and raised his hands in triumph as the crowd once again booed.

  What had happened to his intent to drive Patterson to the floor, to make the man suffer? Or was this strange opening round part of his plan? It seems unlikely that Ali felt the need to fatigue Patterson, as he had Liston. Ali always said he fought on instinct, and in the opening round against Patterson it looked as if he had so much energy and so much anger that he found himself pushing the bounds of his own creative forces, like Miles Davis waiting and waiting to play the first note of a trumpet solo until the audience couldn’t stand it, letting the silence speak until it resounded more forcefully than any blown note ever could. Ali’s punchless performance was pure electricity, possibly madness, possibly genius.

  In round two, real blows were exchanged. The first five Ali jabs were quick as a cobra’s tongue, each one grazing Patterson’s left ear. Then Ali made the necessary calibrations and his punches began thumping Patterson’s nose, chin, and forehead. They stung, but they served another purpose. Ali’s arm span was seven inches longer than Patterson’s, a massive advantage for a man trying to hit without being hit. Ali knew he didn’t have to hurt Patterson with the jab. The jab would keep Patterson at a distance, off balance, and unable to attack. Ali didn’t know it, but he had another advantage. Earlier in the week, Patterson had injured his back. He didn’t want to call off the fight, but he was clearly impeded by the injury. In round two, Ali threw sixty-five punches and connected on fourteen, and while that was not a great percentage, Patterson attempted only nineteen punches and connected four times. It was a one-sided fight, and it would continue that way, as Ali circled and jabbed, seemingly content to go on all night, popping Patterson in the face, calling him an Uncle Tom, and then popping him in the face again. Finally, in the twelfth round of a scheduled fifteen-round bout, Ali attacked with genuine fury, the kind he had promised to unleash against his opponent. He abandoned the jab and threw uppercuts and hooks with the full force of his body, all of them aimed at Patterson’s face.

  “A happiness feeling came over me,” Patterson would tell writer Gay Talese later, referring to the twelfth round. “I knew the end was near . . . I was feeling groggy and happy . . . I wanted be hit by a really good one. I wanted to go out with a great punch, to go down that way.”

  But he didn’t. The referee stopped the fight.

  Ali had obliterated Patterson. Of course, the crowd booed him for it. The white press criticized Ali too, accusing him of torturing his opponent the way a psychopath might torture a defenseless animal, which seems an odd complaint given that the objective of boxing is to hurt, torture, and render a man unconscious. What had Ali done wrong? Was jabbing a man relentlessly for twelve rounds somehow crueler than jolting his skull and short-circuiting his brain with one whopping punch? Ali knew there was but one way he would please his critics, and that was to lose.

  After the fight, there was a victory party at the Sands Hotel. Sonji, apparently uninvited, showed up in a slinky red dress. She chatted with Bundini and sat in the lap of Cassius Clay Sr.

  Ali watched her from across the room but did not approach.

  “I got a feeling I was born for a purpose,” Ali had said before the Patterson fight. “I don’t know what I’m here for. I just feel abnormal, a different kind of man. I don’t know why I was born. I’m just here. A young man rumbling. I’ve always had that feeling since I was a little boy. Perhaps I was born to fulfill Biblical prophecies. I just feel I may be part of something — divine things. Everything seems strange to me.”

  In countless ways, Ali behaved as if he were special, different, a young man rumbling.

  Ali liked to be paid in cash after a fight. Once, around the time of the Patterson fight, Arthur Grafton, one of the lawyers for the Louisville Sponsoring Group, accompanied Ali to the bank.
“He had something like twenty-seven thousand dollars coming to him, I think it was,” Grafton told writer Jack Olsen. “That was what was left after he paid his divorce lawyers and a thousand dollars extra to a sparring partner and another five thousand somewhere else and whatever it was he owed us. We walked to the bank and he asked for twenty-seven thousand-dollar bills. The bank didn’t have it, and Cassius said, ‘Well, how long would it take you to get it?’ and the bank said about twenty minutes, from the Federal Reserve. Cassius said no, that’d take too long, and the tellers started making up his twenty-seven thousand in smaller denominations. We finally wound up with a great big pouch full of money, and on the side of it was written in big letters ‘First National Bank,’ and we had to carry that thing through the streets of Louisville to his hotel. Before we left, Cassius said to the lady teller: ‘You know I’m gonna count this money back in my hotel room and you’ll know it’ll be an honest count because my lawyer will watch me.’ On the way back he was kidding me — I was nervous about this whole idea — and he said, ‘Do you think I’m gonna be held up? You do, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Maybe we should hire a cop. How much would it cost to hire a cop to walk back with us?’ We got to the hotel and he spilled all the money out on the bed and started counting, and would you believe it? It was a thousand dollars short! We counted it five times and then carried the whole bag right back to the bank. They had already realized it was short and were expecting us. Then Cassius, twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash and all, flew off to Chicago.”