Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  But three months later, he fought again. Once more, it was in the wondrous Astrodome, this time against Ernie Terrell. No animosity brewed between Ali and Terrell before the fight. In fact, Ali seemed to like Ernie, who had grown up in Mississippi. Like Ali, Terrell entertained notions of having a career as a singer and made recordings with a group he called Ernie Terrell and the Heavyweights. Both men had fought as light-heavyweights in the Golden Gloves and both lived on Chicago’s South Side, although Ali had been spending so much time in Houston of late that he had begun calling Texas his home.

  On December 28, 1966, the boxers were in New York promoting their match. Terrell, a tall, lean, soft-spoken man, was telling reporters that he’d been waiting years to face Ali, who he continued to refer to as Cassius Clay. Terrell said they’d fought and defeated many of the same men, including Cleveland Williams, George Chuvalo, and Doug Jones. While many state boxing commissions continued to recognize Ali as the heavyweight champ, and while most sports fans did the same, the World Boxing Association had vacated Ali’s title to register its unhappiness with his political views. At least according to the WBA, the title belonged to Terrell. But Terrell knew that he needed to defeat Ali to stake a legitimate claim to the championship.

  The boxers were in a small room talking to Howard Cosell of WABC-TV, jawing at each other in the way fighters often did while trying to hype a bout, inflating their chests and their egos, when Ali complained, “Why you want to say ‘Cassius Clay’ when Howard Cosell and everybody is calling me Muhammad Ali?” He continued, “My name is Muhammad Ali and you will announce it right there in the center of the ring after the fight if you don’t do it now . . . You just acting like a old Uncle Tom, another Floyd Patterson. I’m gonna punish you!”

  At the mention of “old Uncle Tom,” Terrell turned to Ali, leaned in, and said, “Don’t call me no Uncle Tom.”

  “That’s what you are,” Ali said. “Just back off of me, Uncle Tom!”

  The men shoved at one another. Ali slapped Terrell in the face.

  “Keep shooting,” Cosell told his cameraman.

  No doubt Ali was looking to irritate Terrell and to promote their fight, but he also had a legitimate and sincere gripe. People changed their names all the time — sometimes to hide their religion, sometimes to accentuate it. Few were the people who insisted on referring to Tony Curtis as Bernard Schwartz or Marilyn Monroe as Norma Jean Baker or Mother Teresa as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. Yet every major American newspaper continued referring to Muhammad Ali as Cassius Clay. So did Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. So did most of the fans approaching him for autographs. In the New York Times article reporting on the tiff between the two boxers, the headline referred to Muhammad Ali while the body of the story continued to call him Cassius Clay. Cosell was one of the few journalists consistently calling him Ali in December 1966.

  Terrell was no Uncle Tom, and he had expressed no objection to Ali’s faith. He had never said, as Floyd Patterson had, that Ali’s religion was inferior to Christianity. In fact, Terrell told another reporter: “I got nothing against him or his religion.” He went on to say he knew that Ali was only trying to rattle him, and maybe he was trying to rattle Ali in return. “He wants me to worry about what people think about me, wants to confuse the issue,” Terrell said. “But it’s dangerous to be distracted. I’ll just concentrate more.”

  Leading up to the fight, Ali vowed to punish Terrell for disrespecting his faith and his new name. “I want to torture him,” he said. “I want to give him the Patterson humiliation and punish him. A clean knockout is too good for him.”

  Ali did punish him, but not right away. The fighters exchanged punches evenly in the first two rounds, before Ali began to land his jabs effectively. Just as they had after the Patterson fight, reporters accused Ali of carrying Terrell, of making him suffer through a long night when he could have finished him off sooner. But there’s little evidence to suggest that was true. In the seventh round, Ali spun Terrell around with a punch, shoved him into the ropes, and then unleashed a furious series of blows, lifting both feet off the mat to put all his body weight into the punches, clearly going for the knockout. Terrell’s legs wobbled and both eyes bled, but the challenger gathered himself and fought back, hammering hard on Ali’s head in the final minute of the round. It happened again and again. Every time Ali took control of the fight, Terrell fought back, even as his left eye puffed and closed.

  “What’s my name?” Ali taunted in the eighth, followed by a whistling left-right combination that make the question rhetorical. “What’s my name?” he spat again through his mouthpiece. Terrell closed his eyes as the next combination flew.

  When the bell clanged to end the round, Ali did not go to his corner. Instead, he stepped in close to Terrell. His eyes went wide. The tendons in his neck tightened. His arms fell to his sides and he leaned in. He barked it this time so it didn’t sound like a question: “What’s my name!”

  The fight went on for seven more rounds, but not because Ali wanted it to; he tried and couldn’t end it. In round twelve, Ali stood flat-footed and threw his biggest punches. Terrell took the blows and fought back. Ali threw 737 punches in the fight, almost all of them to Terrell’s head. But Terrell’s long jab kept Ali at a distance much of the time, and Ali, looking weary, couldn’t land a big enough punch to put Terrell away. He stopped taunting.

  When it was over and the judges unanimously named Ali the winner, announcer Howard Cosell got in the ring and asked Ali if he could have knocked out Terrell if he had wanted to.

  “No, I don’t believe I could’ve,” Ali said. “After the eighth round I laid on him, but I found myself tiring.”

  It didn’t matter to the white men covering the bout, who by now looked for any and every reason to criticize Ali. They said he lacked dignity. They called it “a disgusting exhibition of calculated cruelty,” as if boxing were supposed to be anything else. Milton Gross said he almost yearned for a return to the days when the mafia controlled the sport. Arthur Daley called Ali “a mean and malicious man,” and Jimmy Cannon, of all people, called Ali’s treatment of Terrell “a kind of a lynching.”

  Ali had boxed beautifully, changing speed and direction like a kite, cracking jabs, digging hooks to the ribs, sliding away with a shuffle to survey the damage, and then cracking more jabs, moving in and out with no steady rhythm, no pattern. He was a revolutionary, like Charlie Parker, with an innate style and virtuosity no one would ever reproduce. He turned violence into craft like no heavyweight before or since.

  But that doesn’t mean boxing’s inherent violence passed him over. Even in a relatively easy win, Ali took about eighty punches to the head and sixty to the body from a man who stood six-feet-six-inches tall and weighed 2121/2 pounds and never quit. If that made Ali a torturer or a thug, it made him a bad one.

  23

  “Against the Furies”

  In 1967, Muhammad Ali was twenty-five years old, the world’s heavyweight champion, the most widely recognized athlete on earth, the most prominent Muslim in America, and the most visible opponent of the war in Vietnam. He remained obsessed with cars and houses and money, and he was eager to find a new wife, but the thing he talked about most of all was race. Race was the live wire that ran through him.

  “A house is on fire, pretend,” he told Jack Olsen, a white reporter for Sports Illustrated. “You’re sleeping next to your partner.” Ali made the sound of snoring. “You open one eye and you see the house is on fire. Your partner’s still sleeping.” He added whistles to the snoring sounds. “And you see this hot lava and this burning two-by-four is getting ready to fall on your partner, and you get out of the bed. You run out of the house without waking him up! When you get outside, you say [he clasped his hands and looked to the sky], ‘Oh, Lord, what have I done wrong? I was so selfish and greedy, worrying about myself until I left my partner inside. Oh, [wringing hands], he’s probably dead, the house caved in.”

  He paused dramatically.

 
“And then he comes out just in time and he looks in your face! Right then you feel he’s supposed to kill you. You know what you’d do if somebody left you in a burning house . . . And he says, ‘Man, why didn’t you wake me up? Why did you let me stay in that house? [Shouting] The house was on fire! Man, you were gonna let me burn . . . !’

  “Well, that’s what white Americans are like. The house’s been on fire for 310 years, and the whites have let the blacks sleep. The Negro’s been lynched, killed, raped, burned, dragged around all through the city hanging on the chains of cars, alcohol and turpentine poured into his wounds. That’s why Negroes are so full of fear today. Been put into him from the time he’s a baby. Imagine! Twenty-two million Negroes in America, suffering, fought in the wars, got more worse treatment than any human being can even imagine, walking the streets of America . . . hungry with no food to eat, walk the streets with no shoes on, existing on relief, living in charity and poorhouses, 22 million people who faithfully served America and who have worked and who still loves his enemy are still dogged and kicked around.”

  The words were powerful and prescient. But, at the same time, Ali’s views could be slippery, even incongruous. That didn’t make him unusual. What made him unusual is that so many people were listening. Reporters wrote down his remarks. Elijah Muhammad’s followers heard him lecture several times a month at mosques around the country. FBI informants made notes and sent memos to the home office in Washington, DC.

  “If total integration would make them happy, the whites as well as the blacks, I would totally integrate,” he told one journalist. “If total separation, every man with his own, would make them happy, I’ll do that. Whatever it takes to make people happy, where they won’t be shooting and hiding in the bushes and blowing each other up and killing each other, rioting. But I don’t think total integration can work.”

  Boxers are professional rebels. They are permitted to engage in violence that others are not. They are permitted to be uncivil. Ali merely extended it beyond the ring. He wanted to make everything he said and everything he did a protest. He declared every chance he got that he was not going to be tamed. He would fight, stand up, say it, do it, right away, every time. He would be the world’s heavyweight rebel champion. He was living a life of superficiality, as most of us do, making a career as an entertainer, blowing his money on more cars than he could possibly drive, and yet an overriding spirit of rebellion guided him and perhaps redeemed him. That’s why his refusal to accept the draft captured so much attention and stirred such anger, because everything about Ali’s existence offended the majority of white Americans: his skin color, his loud mouth, his religion, and, now, his lack of patriotism. For the first time in almost forty years, The Ring magazine, the fight game’s bible, declined to name a “Fighter of the Year,” insisting that Ali (still referred to as Cassius Clay by the magazine) was “not to be held up as an example to the youngsters of the United States.”

  The criticism never bothered Ali, perhaps because he had little confidence in America to do right by him. The problem went back to slavery, he said: “Well, we weren’t brought here to be citizens in white America. The intention was for us to work for them — and like it. They mated us up, the more the merrier. The big black slave was called the buck. ‘This nigger slave can breed fifteen babies a month!’ And as soon as the baby was born, it was separated from the mother. And that was the making of your ‘negro.’ He was a mental slave. And that’s the people we still have in America today.” Given all that, he asked, how could the black man in America ever expect to be treated fairly? “When you put your whole trust and your whole future in another people, then you’re putting yourself in a position to be disappointed and deceived. You cannot disappoint me. You cannot deceive me if I’m not looking for anything from you.”

  Ali voiced plainly and simply what so many black Americans felt: that they would never get a fair deal because a fair deal wasn’t possible under the longstanding conditions imposed on them. Even black Americans who cared little for boxing and knew nothing of the law had the overriding sense that Ali had been the victim of prejudice. But it was his response, not his victimhood, that made him a hero. It was his refusal to back down as the government and boxing officials threatened to punish him. “Six-foot-two and a half and 220 pounds, as pretty as a man could be, Muhammad Ali was a black hero in an American landscape that nourished few black heroes,” journalist Jill Nelson wrote. “Articulate, funny, incredibly male, Ali took no shit from the white man and lived to tell the tale, the man of black women’s collective dreams.”

  Ali’s stand against Vietnam made him a symbol of protest against a war in which black men were dying at a wildly disproportionate rate. Black men accounted for 22 percent of all battlefield deaths when the black population in America was only 10 percent. Why was America spending money and tossing away lives in the name of freedom in a distant land while resisting the cause of freedom at home? Why, yet again, did the interests of black Americans seem to diverge from the interests of the nation as a whole? Ali raised these troubling questions as opposition to the war rapidly spread.

  Martin Luther King Jr. had begun speaking out against America’s involvement in Vietnam, although board members at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were concerned that King would only serve to enrage President Johnson and set back the civil rights movement. King was contemplating a dramatic change in direction for the SCLC. After his failed campaign against segregated housing in Chicago in 1966 and after horrific riots in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967, the civil rights leader said American society could only be saved with “radical moral surgery.” If something wasn’t done quickly — to stop the war, combat discrimination, and end the government’s oppression of the poor — King feared an all-out race war that would end with a right-wing, fascist police state in America. King intended to lead a more radical movement, and his opposition to the war in Vietnam would be one of its pillars.

  Andrew Young Jr., executive director of the SCLC, said Ali’s stance may have played a part in King’s decision to publicly oppose the war. “It was about the same time that Muhammad declared he was a conscientious objector that Martin began to say, ‘I can’t segregate my conscience,’ ” Young recalled. “There’s no question in my mind there was a subtle influence that connected the two of them in terms of conscience and the war in Vietnam.”

  In an editorial, the New York Times said the boxer “may become a new symbol and rallying point for opposition to the draft and the Vietnam war. In Harlem, the nation’s largest Negro ghetto, there were indications . . . that Clay’s refusal to be drafted was creating considerable emotional impact, particularly on the young.”

  Tom Wicker of the Times wondered what would happen if thousands of Americans followed Ali’s lead and refused to fight. “The fact is,” Wicker wrote, “that he is taking the ultimate position of civil disobedience; he is refusing to obey the law of the majority on the grounds of his personal beliefs, with full knowledge of the consequence . . . What would happen if all young men of draft age took the same position!” An answer to the question came from L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who said that if Ali, “that great theologian of Black Muslim power,” won a deferment, the president’s power to deploy the military would be undercut by a flood of double-talking conscientious objectors. U.S. Congressman Robert H. Michel of Illinois also condemned Ali, saying, “While thousands of our finest young men are fighting and dying in the jungles of Vietnam, this healthy specimen is profiteering from a series of shabby bouts. Apparently Cassius will fight anyone but the Viet Cong.” Michel went on to say that while Ali considered himself “the greatest, . . . I am sure history will look upon him as the least of all the men who have held the once-honorable title of Heavyweight Champion of the World.”

  Draft board officials worried too, saying Ali was making it difficult for them to do their jobs. One of them, Allen J. Rhorer, chairman of the draft board in Calcasi
eu Parish, Louisiana, wrote to the U.S. attorney general, Ramsey Clark, saying the members of his board would “seriously consider submitting their resignations” unless “prompt and vigorous action” were taken against Ali.

  Ali claimed he was a Muslim minister, saying he spent 90 percent of his time preaching and 10 percent boxing. But Ali never held the formal title of minister or any other title within the Nation of Islam. In fact, Elijah Muhammad stated clearly that Ali was not a minister, according to an FBI memo dated March 17, 1966, and made public half a century later. According to the memo, Elijah told another member of the Nation of Islam that Ali was welcome to attend an upcoming Nation of Islam event, but he should not receive any special treatment or honors. “He can come,” Elijah said. “That’s up to him. Nobody barring him from the meeting. He won’t be up on the speakers stand. He’s no minister . . . He won’t speak unless I ask him to say something and I will tell him what to say.”

  Nevertheless, Ali continued to call himself a minister, and officials in the Nation of Islam never publicly contradicted him. The FBI, in its memo, speculated that Elijah Muhammad allowed Ali to describe himself as a minister “because of his publicity value.” The Nation also helped Ali find a lawyer, Hayden C. Covington of New York, who had successfully defended members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses against draft-evasion charges. Covington and the Nation secured signed statements from nearly four thousand people — most of them members of the Nation of Islam — affirming that Ali was a full-time minister. The lawyer also asked Angelo Dundee to sign a statement confirming that boxing was merely Ali’s “side line or avocation” and that preaching was his “main job or vocation.” In a letter to Ali, Covington wrote, “I told the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that we will fight them until hell freezes over and in the end skate on the ice of victory.”