Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Ali liked to run his fingers through his money and show the piles of cash to friends. He needed to see it and feel it in part because so much of his income seemed to vanish before he could spend it. Before Ali could ever see his money, big chunks of it went to the IRS, Sonji, the Louisville Sponsoring Group, his lawyers, members of his entourage, and various car dealerships. He often asked members of the Louisville Group to give him photostats of his income-tax receipts. It wasn’t that he wanted proof that the taxes were being paid; it was that he couldn’t believe how much Uncle Sam was taking, and he liked to show off the receipts to friends. Of course, keeping all that cash on hand sometimes added to his loss. Once, in 1965, his limousine driver took off, never to return, with three thousand dollars that Ali had been keeping in the trunk of his Cadillac. But Ali grew accustomed to such losses.

  As his contract with the Louisville Sponsoring Group neared its end, the boxer told his backers he intended to renew the deal. But members of the group encountered a complication, and they were not happy about it. In January 1966, Muhammad Ali summoned the press to announce a new business venture called Main Bout, Inc., that would manage the ancillary promotional rights to all his fights, including the live and tape-delayed broadcasts. “I am vitally interested in the company,” he said, “and in seeing that it will be one in which Negroes are not used as fronts, but as stockholders, officers, and production and promotion agents.”

  Ali was making good money on his fights. The Patterson bout two months earlier had grossed about $3.5 million, with about $750,000 of that going to Ali and the Louisville Sponsorship Group. He was by far the biggest and most well-paid draw in all of sports. Now, in pronouncing the creation of his own promotional company, Ali was asserting unprecedented autonomy for a black athlete. He was also diverting the biggest stream of income so that it would no longer flow to the Louisville Sponsoring Group. It was a sign of how much the world had changed in six years. When he had come home from the Olympics, the young boxer had considered himself fortunate to have a group of white benefactors. Now, he was talking about black independence and economic empowerment in terms that would have been unimaginable in 1960.

  Members of the Louisville Group, not surprisingly, were shaken. In an interview with the FBI, attorney Arthur Grafton of the Louisville Sponsoring Group said he did his best to warn Ali that Main Bout was not offering him a good deal. Ali told Grafton he didn’t understand Grafton’s concerns. The organizers of Main Bout were his friends, Ali said, and Herbert Muhammad was the son of Elijah Muhammad, “who gives me strength — if I can help the Muslims, it gives me strength — it doesn’t hurt if I don’t make as much money as I would.” Grafton knew he couldn’t change the fighter’s mind. In a memo to the members of the Louisville Group, he wrote that Ali was “obviously now being completely dominated by the Muslims.” In response, at least one member of the group said he wanted to sever his connection with the boxer.

  The businessmen were not alone in their anger. “The fight racket has been turned into a crusade by the Muslims,” complained the sports writer Jimmy Cannon. “Their great trophy is Clay.” Doug Gilbert, writing in Chicago’s American, said, “If the Muslims own Clay, and also own the television rights to all his fights, they have what amounts to a hammerlock on all that’s lucrative in boxing.”

  But there was also irony in the racist fears surrounding Ali’s move toward independence. To begin with, the so-called Muslim crusade to control the fight business was the brainchild of a white Jew, the New York lawyer Bob Arum. Arum presented the idea to Herbert Muhammad, who invited Arum to Chicago to seek the approval of Elijah Muhammad. Arum was summoned to a meeting at Elijah Muhammad’s home, where a large entourage of Muslims stood and listened respectfully. After twenty or thirty minutes of cordial discussion about their shared business interests, Elijah Muhammad, seemingly for no reason, launched into a sermon about “blue-eyed devils” and the sins perpetrated upon the black man. Arum had the impression Elijah Muhammad was giving a performance for his entourage, and he took it as a sign of Muhammad’s cunning intelligence. When the meeting was over, Elijah Muhammad gave the deal his blessings, but with one condition: he wanted John Ali, the national secretary of the Nation of Islam, to be included in the new business because John Ali had a more sophisticated knowledge of business than Herbert.

  Did Elijah Muhammad approve the deal because it was good for the Nation of Islam? That wasn’t Arum’s sense of it. “It was a way for his son to make some decent bucks,” Arum recalled. Herbert Muhammad was already getting about a third of Ali’s boxing income — by some accounts it was 40 percent. Now, he would also receive $45,000 a year in salary plus a percentage of revenues from Main Bout. He was making so much money that members of his own family were growing jealous, according to an FBI memo. And Herbert’s family didn’t know that Herbert was also taking money “under the table,” according to the FBI, cutting partners in on some of the Main Bout profits in exchange for cash up front.

  Why was John Ali included in the Main Bout deal? Arum said he learned years later from a source in law enforcement that John Ali may have been one of the forces behind the murder of Malcolm X, “and this was his reward . . . the boxing money.” John Ali denied it, saying neither he nor anyone else in the Nation of Islam had anything to do with Malcolm’s murder.

  Arum put together a group of five officers and stockholders that included himself; another white man named Mike Malitz, who controlled most of the nation’s closed-circuit TV business; football star Jim Brown; Herbert Muhammad; and John Ali. Muhammad Ali had no ownership stake in the company and no seat on the board of directors. In an interview years later, John Ali said he and Herbert profited personally from Main Bout. Muhammad Ali was paid a percentage of revenues from each fight, and the Louisville Sponsorship Group was compensated until its contract with Ali expired. But none of the money flowed to the Nation of Islam, according to John Ali. “The Nation was not dependent on charity,” he said.

  “The more I think about the situation,” Louisville Sponsoring Group member Archibald Foster wrote, “the more I want to be quit of my association with the champion. All our long-term purposes have been frustrated. We had hoped to be completely free of underworld connections, but we seem to have new ones in Chicago. Certainly we don’t very much like the anti-American philosophy which attaches to us by association. Finally, the money rewards are so little that I can’t believe any of us are interested in those. What I’d like to do is to give Cassius back his contract.”

  On February 16, 1966, Arthur Grafton circulated a memo saying they would begin making sure all their bills were paid and their obligations met so that they could “relinquish our contract to Clay” when the right time came. Meanwhile, Grafton said, he had reserved seventy-five ringside seats for Ali’s fight against Ernie Terrell in Chicago if any members of the group wished to attend. It looked as if this would probably be their last chance to enjoy the perks of their association with boxing’s heavyweight champion.

  Many members of the group said they intended to attend the fight. For all the complications they had encountered, for all the frustrations, most of the men still adored and wished well for the young man whose career they had helped launch.

  21

  No Quarrel

  Muhammad Ali stretched his long legs and sank back into his lawn chair as he sang a refrain from Bob Dylan: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” It was February 17, 1966, and the question on Ali’s mind was this: why had a draft board in Louisville reversed its previous position and classified his status as 1-A, suddenly making him eligible for military service?

  “Why me?” he asked as he reclined in front of his gray cement house in Miami, jawing with reporters, neighbors, and friends. “I can’t understand it. How did they do this to me — the heavyweight champion of the world?”

  Two years earlier, when he was calling himself Cassius Clay, he had failed his pre-induction mental exam. But since then, the war in Vietnam had escalated. From 1
964 to 1965, the number of American soldiers dying in Vietnam increased ninefold, from about 200 to 1,900. In 1966, the death toll would triple to more than 6,000. More American soldiers were being called to duty, and many of those who had been deferred faced reevaluation. As the death count rose, so did the divide among American people. Many believed that if South Vietnam fell to a communist power, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow, while others argued that America had no reason to fight in a nation that even the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, referred to privately as “a raggedy-ass, fourth-rate country.”

  Ali repeated his complaint to one TV reporter after another. Everyone knew the draft was rigged to protect wealthy white men from service, while the poor and dark-skinned served in disproportionately high numbers, he said. Around the house, members of the Nation of Islam warned Ali that he would be sent to the frontlines right away, that white cracker sergeants were going to torture him.

  “How can they reclassify me 1-A?” Ali asked.

  “How can they do this without another test to see if I’m any wiser or worser than last time?”

  Reporter Bob Halloran of the CBS Evening News showed up with a cameraman. Halloran went inside, unplugged Ali’s phone without Ali’s knowing so they wouldn’t be interrupted, and then began his interview, asking the boxer to react to the draft board’s decision. Ali gave Halloran his reaction in a burst:

  “Yes, sir, that was a great surprise to me,” he said. “It was not me who said that I was classified 1-Y the last time. It was the government who tested me. It was the government who said that I’m not able. Now, in order to be 1-A I do not remember being called nowhere to be reclassified as 1-A. Two fellas got together and made the statement that I’m 1-A without knowing if I’m as good as I was last time or better. Now, they had 30 men to pick from in Louisville, Kentucky . . . To pick out the heavyweight champion of the whole world . . . You have a lot of men in baseball you could’ve called. You have a lot of young men in football they could’ve called. You have a lot of young men that they could’ve called . . . that have taken the test and are 1-A. Now, I was not 1-A last time they checked me. All of a sudden they seem to be anxious to put me in the army and throw me in the 1-A category out of thirty or forty men that they could’ve picked from, and two men made the decision. And another thing I don’t understand, I really don’t understand, is why me, a man who pays the salary of at least 50,000 men in Vietnam, a man who the government takes $6 million from a year off of two fights, a man who can pay in two fights for three bomber planes.”

  That evening, Ali and his friends gathered in front of the TV to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news on CBS. After a report about riots at a penal institution for girls in Indianapolis (“End of times!” someone in the room shouted at the TV), Cronkite introduced the story Ali had been waiting to see.

  “In Louisville today . . . ,” Cronkite began.

  “Shhh-shh,” said Ali.

  Cronkite continued: “. . . heavyweight champion Cassius Clay’s draft board reclassified him 1-A, making him immediately eligible for military service.”

  Ali was on the screen next, reciting his fiery pronouncements, complaining about being classified as 1-A. When it was done, Cronkite appeared again on the black-and-white TV to say there was no indication when Clay might be inducted or if his March 29 fight against Ernie Terrell would be canceled.

  “That was a good one, wasn’t it?” Ali asked the room.

  Affirmation, along with a commercial for Chiffon margarine, came promptly.

  “Did Lyndon Johnson hear what I just said?” Ali asked. “Was he watching that?”

  “He was watching it!” someone shouted.

  “Lyndon Johnson watches that? Two of my fights I pay for three bomber planes!”

  Whether LBJ heard Ali’s comments or not, millions of others did. The war in Vietnam provoked heated debate, but the majority of Americans in 1966 still supported the effort to fight communism in Southeast Asia. When TV viewers and newspaper readers learned that Ali did not want to serve in the military, it sounded like further proof of his selfishness and disdain for his own country. Ali never said he opposed the war on political, philosophical, or religious grounds; all he said was that he didn’t want to go, that the draft board ought to be able to find someone to take his place, and that he didn’t mind if the nation used his tax money to buy bomber jets to kill the enemy in Vietnam.

  Two days later, he refined his argument, telling a reporter for the Chicago Daily News in a telephone interview, “I am a member of the Muslims and we don’t go to wars unless they are declared by Allah Himself. I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” He added, “All I know is they are considered as Asiatic black people and I don’t have no fight with black people. I have never been over there and I have nothing against them.” He had probably heard that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had taken a stand against the war, saying it was wrong to send black Americans to fight for democracy in Vietnam when they were denied freedom in their own country. Ali said he’d seen white men burning their draft cards on TV, and he’d heard that some congressmen opposed the war in Vietnam. “If they’re against the war . . . why should we Muslims be for it?” he asked.

  Ali was making a moral and religious argument now, one likely inspired by his teacher, Elijah Muhammad, who had served four years in prison during World War II for refusing to fight. Sam Saxon, now going by the name Abdul Rahman, claimed he was the one who fed Ali the memorable line, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” Later, a variation of the quote would be widely attributed to Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” It would be coupled with another quote, one that would appear on T-shirts and posters bearing Ali’s image, becoming one of the most powerful quotations ever attributed to an American athlete: “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” There’s little question that Ali uttered the first remark, or something close to it. But there’s no evidence that he spoke the second sentence until years later on a movie set. As Stefan Fatsis noted in a 2016 essay, antiwar protesters had used the phrase “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger” before Ali spoke out on the war.

  Nevertheless, in his refusal to accept the Viet Cong as his enemy, Ali showed how his views were coalescing. His enemy was not to be found in Southeast Asia, he said; his enemy was American racism.

  When he recognized its resonance, Ali began repeating the line: “I have no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” or the double-negative version, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” It would become his most memorable quote in a lifetime of them. It was witty. It was rebellious. Whether it was calculated or not didn’t matter because, essentially, it was true. Alone, with almost no support from the nation’s intellectuals or religious leaders, he had taken a position that was, ironically, very much American. Like Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes that helped fund slavery and the Mexican-American War, and like the black men and women who refused to leave all-white lunch counters in the South, Ali was making a stand for civil disobedience, for freedom.

  On February 28, 1966, eleven days after being notified of his new draft status, Ali submitted paperwork to the Selective Service claiming to be a conscientious objector. He claimed exemption to both combat and noncombat service, based on religious belief. He named Elijah Muhammad as the person he relied on most for religious guidance, said he believed in the use of force “only in sports and self defense,” and cited as proof of his consistent religious conviction that he had divorced his wife, “whom I loved because she wouldn’t conform to my Muslim faith.”

  Much of the form was completed by a New York attorney, Edward W. Jackson, who said Ali had asked him to record his answers. But on the first page, where a signature was required, Ali wrote:

  Slave Name Cassius M Clay Jr RIGHT NAME Muhammad Ali.

  Not surprisingly, Ali’s refusal to fight for his country inspired more hatred.

  Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times snid
ely called Ali “the greatest American patriot since Benedict Arnold, the No. 1 candidate for the Congressional Medal of Prudence.” Murray had a suggestion for Ali, whom he still referred to as Cassius Clay: “Go to some mother in Iowa — or Harlem for that matter. She will be sure to understand. Tell her you got this chance to make a big-money shot. Tell her you got two Cadillacs, an ex-wife, a whole religion to support . . . Suggest she send her son instead. You got no quarrel with the Viet Cong, you said. Well, I think you’re on solid ground there, Cash. Why go to war for a lousy principle? I mean, look at it this way: half-a-million guys get killed in the Civil War fighting slavery. I bet half of them didn’t even know what it was . . . The dumb clucks should’ve burned their draft cards. Or hired a lawyer, like you’re doing. Well, there’s a good side of it, Cash. If they hadn’t died to free your folks, think of all the lawyers who would be out of work. Lordy. Elijah Muhammad himself might be broke. You’re supporting the whole fez industry.” Others writers questioned Ali’s intelligence, saying that he didn’t understand the issues or principles involved. A few speculated that Ali opposed the draft simply to drum up interest in his fight with Ernie Terrell. Several others claimed Ali was nothing but a puppet for Elijah Muhammad, that Ali would serve if Elijah told him to.

  In Chicago, where Ali was supposed to fight Ernie Terrell, local newspapers urged cancellation of the bout. For the editorial writers at Chicago’s American, the issue was Ali’s unconvincing series of excuses for refusing the draft. The Tribune, meanwhile, didn’t want to see money from the fight going to the Nation of Islam by way of Main Bout, Inc. Soon, veterans groups and local politicians joined the call for cancellation of the fight. At one point, Ali offered a half-hearted apology. “If I knew everything I had said on politics would have been taken that seriously . . . I never would have opened my mouth,” he told United Press International.