by Jonathan Eig
Barrett did call Ali, and he soon after went to work trying to get Ali another fight. He quickly became one of the boxer’s business advisors, not replacing Herbert Muhammad or Gene Kilroy but supplementing them, because the Ali entourage always had room for one more man. Years later, when Barrett was convicted on cocaine trafficking charges, Ali testified as a character witness. “Right away, I got the feeling he was a good person to have for a friend,” Ali told the judge on behalf of his friend, in a refrain he might have repeated about any number of people. “If I was the Lone Ranger, he’d be my Tonto.”
Ali had other Tontos. Harold Conrad, the promoter who had worked to publicize the first Sonny Liston fight, contacted twenty-two states on Ali’s behalf, checking to see if any governor or athletic commission chairman might be bold enough to give Ali the chance to fight. Kilroy wrote letters and made phone calls, too. In California, the athletic commission seemed open to the idea, but Governor Ronald Reagan said no. In Nevada, boxing officials agreed to let Ali fight, but the mobsters who ran the big hotels in Las Vegas killed the deal. Conrad hatched a plan for Ali to fight Frazier in a Tijuana bullring, promising the U.S. Department of Justice that Ali would spend no more than six hours beyond American borders. But that didn’t work either. Other locations were considered: Detroit, Miami, even Boley, Oklahoma, an all-black town with a population of 720. Gene Kilroy and former pro football player Ed Khayat lobbied officials in Mississippi to license the fight. At one point, the prominent attorney Melvin Belli encouraged Ali to sue the states that were denying him the right to earn a living, but Ali declined.
When Ali went into exile, Bob Arum started a new boxing company, which he called Sports Action. Now that Ali was out of boxing, Arum had no reason to share closed-circuit-TV profits with Herbert Muhammad and John Ali. With Sports Action, he didn’t have to. Arum asked one of his new business partners, Bob Kassel, to see if he could figure out a way to put together an Ali-Frazier fight. Kassel called his father-in-law, who lived in Atlanta, and Kassel’s father-in-law put Kassel in touch with one of Georgia’s most powerful black politicians, the state senator Leroy Johnson, who was not only beloved among his black constituents but also respected for his power-brokering skills by many of Georgia’s white legislators.
Johnson researched the law and found the state of Georgia had no state boxing commission and no rules governing boxing. That meant Atlanta could license the fight if the mayor and Board of Aldermen approved, and since Johnson had helped the mayor and several members of the board get elected, Johnson was confident he could win their support. Kassel and Arum offered Johnson all the money from ticket sales; Sports Action would keep the more lucrative closed-circuit-TV income. Johnson pitched it to local political leaders as a chance for Atlanta to show the world it had become the most socially sophisticated and least racially divided of all major American cities, the city that was “too busy to hate,” as one of the fight’s sponsors said. Atlanta’s mayor, Sam Massell, agreed to go along if Ali’s team donated fifty thousand dollars to one of the city’s crime-fighting programs. To make sure there would be no interference from the state, Johnson met with Lester Maddox, the Georgia governor who had risen to fame as a restaurant owner defiantly refusing to serve black customers after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. As governor, Maddox had surprised both supporters and opponents by hiring and promoting black officials and by initiating an early release program for the state prison system. Johnson, knowing that Maddox hated welfare programs for the poor, told the governor that Ali had no way to make a living without boxing and might end up on the public dole if he couldn’t box.
“On with the fight!” Maddox pronounced.
To prove he could deliver Ali and pull off an event in the Deep South without prompting riots or Ku Klux Klan attacks, Johnson staged an exhibition at Morehouse College, where three thousand people crowded a gym on September 2, 1970, to watch Ali spar for eight rounds with three opponents. “The roof did not fall in,” reported Sports Illustrated. “No one threw a bomb. Fire and brimstone did not rain down from heaven and no one was turned into a pillar of salt. There wasn’t even a picket.”
The old gang reunited for Ali. In his corner once more were Angelo Dundee and Bundini Brown, who’d been forgiven again after pawning Ali’s bejeweled championship belt to a Harlem barber for five hundred dollars (“It wasn’t as if I pawned it to a hock shop,” Bundini said in his own defense. “I pawned it to a friend.”).
A bit of fat wiggled at Ali’s waist when he took off his robe and began to bounce around the ring. He drifted, flicking jabs, showing his footwork, which remained fine, and paused at times to allow his opponents to hit him on his arms and on the top of his head, as if this, too, were something he would have to get used to again. When it was over, Ali sat naked in his dressing room and spoke to reporters, telling them he wasn’t ready yet for Frazier, but he would be soon.
Dundee agreed. “It was all there,” said the trainer. “Everything. He can still fake with the hip, the hand, and the shoulder.”
Not everyone was convinced. Cus D’Amato, the trainer, who considered himself one of the sport’s salty oracles, said Ali’s hand speed looked as good as ever, but his defense was sharply diminished. “Clay was saying he let his sparring partners get to him,” D’Amato said, “let them hit him those heavy shots in the head and body. Well, I’m telling you, no fighter ever lets anybody hit him. It hurts. It rattles your brain. Clay simply couldn’t stay away from those guys.”
And those guys were sparring partners, not opponents fighting with their careers and lives in the balance. To D’Amato, it was a sign of trouble.
Frazier wouldn’t agree yet to fight Ali. With no obvious second choice lined up, the PR man Harold Conrad knew what to do: get a white man to take on Ali, the black freedom fighter.
They settled on Jerry Quarry, who was twenty-five years old, a good-looking Irish kid and the son of a migrant farmer. In 1969, Quarry had gone punch for punch with Joe Frazier in a furious battle before a cut over Quarry’s eye had forced him to stop. In a division dominated by black fighters, sportswriters of course referred to Quarry as “The Great White Hope.” He might not have been great, but Quarry was certainly good, and he represented a bold choice for Ali. For his first fight back after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, he might have been better off taking on a bum. But Ali was confident he could handle Quarry.
The bout was set for October 26, 1970, with a contract that gave Ali $200,000 guaranteed against a 42.5 percent share of the revenues. Quarry would get $150,000, against 22.5 percent of revenues. One month after Atlanta granted Ali a license to fight, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the state’s athletic commission had violated Ali’s rights by barring him from his profession. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund had filed the suit on behalf of Ali, noting that other convicted criminals had been licensed to fight in New York. Judge Walter R. Mansfield agreed, calling the commission’s decision to ban Ali “intentional, arbitrary and unreasonable.”
Prison remained a possibility, as Ali continued to appeal his draft-evasion conviction. But, in the meantime, he was permitted once again to box, at least in Atlanta and New York.
Ali understood the stakes. He understood that if he lost to Quarry everything would change. He understood that the safer move would have been to retire. He would have gone out on top, undefeated. He would have won the respect of Elijah Muhammad. He would have completed his martyrdom by sacrificing his career. He would have been remembered forever as a champion. He would have had his good looks, his health, his celebrity. He would have remained frozen in time, in a sense, as the prince of boxing and one of America’s most brilliant and influential sportsmen.
But he couldn’t quit. He needed to fight. He needed the money. He needed the attention.
Ali took a room at a hotel in Miami Beach, leaving Belinda and their three children in Philadelphia, and began training again at the Fifth Street Gym. A new coat of pai
nt had been added since the last time he’d trained, but the place was as beautifully foul as ever.
He went to work, doing what he did best, beginning at five or so each morning with a long run, trying to melt away his flab, preparing his body to do damage and endure damage. He taped a picture of himself to a mirror at the gym — a picture taken five years earlier, before the second Liston fight, when he was as taut and muscular as he had ever been. “That’s when I was at my top condition,” he said one day. “See how narrow and trim I was. Maybe I’ll never look like that again.” He asked the reporters to tell him how he looked. Was he trim? He said he was ready to be tested. He said he was running hard, sacrificing more, that he was sure he would make no mistakes in preparing. “I’m crazy with loneliness, though. Durin’ all the years I was away, I was never lonely. Oh, I had a ball, drivin’ to the colleges and stayin’ at the inns and meetin’ students, the black power groups, the white hippies.” Now he was alone, more or less, up at five, in bed by ten, hungry all the time, refusing the advances of women, and all because he was “thinkin’ of that short walk to the ring, and all those faces there, lookin’ at me and sayin’: ‘Why it’s a miracle! He looks sooooo beautiful.’ ”
Everyone was counting on him, he said. “I get letters from black brothers beggin’ me to be careful. . . . Nobody has to tell me this is serious business. I’m not just fightin’ one man, I’m fightin’ a lot of men, showin’ a lot of ’em here is one man they couldn’t defeat, couldn’t conquer. . . . If I lose I’ll be in jail for the rest of my life. If I lose I will not be free. I’ll have to listen to all this about how I was a bum, I was fat, I joined the wrong movement, they misled me. So I’m fightin’ for my freedom.”
“Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali!”
This was new. He had never been cheered like this. Not as Ali and not as Clay. In almost every one of his prior fights, he had been the bad guy, the loudmouth, the upstart, the traitor, the one everyone wanted to see leave the ring on a stretcher, preferably with droplets of blood trailing him. Yet now, here he was, still facing prison for draft evasion, still a Muslim, still one of the most loathed black men in America, moments away from fighting a white man in the great state of Georgia . . . and the mostly white crowd was on his side? It was like a scene from Lester Maddox’s strangest nightmare, like watching Paul Robeson play Rhett in Gone with the Wind . . . except it was real.
Black fans arrived from all over the country, their ranks including celebrities, sports stars, and civic leaders: Sidney Poitier, Diana Ross, Hank Aaron, Coretta Scott King, Mary Wilson, Julian Bond, and Andrew Young. Curtis Mayfield strummed an acoustic guitar as he sang the national anthem, and comedian Bill Cosby sat ringside, working as one of the television analysts, providing commentary that was neither comedic nor particularly analytical. Rev. Jesse Jackson, his afro almost as big and wide as that of the pop music star Diana Ross, joined Ali in his dressing room before the fight and, at Ali’s suggestion, led everyone in an ecumenical prayer. Boxing historian Bert Sugar called it the greatest collection of black power and money ever assembled. Some of the nation’s most prominent black drug dealers, pimps, and street hustlers were also in attendance, thanks in part to the work of Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland, the legendary playground basketball player from New York City and a soon-to-be-convicted drug trafficker, who said he bought five-hundred tickets to the fight, “because I thought it would be real good if a lot of people from Harlem that I grew up with was able to see Ali in ringside seats.”
The Harlemites strolled up and down Peachtree Street and through the city’s finest hotels with an ebullience that said they’d been waiting for this moment, waiting for the day when black men and women could strut arrogantly across a southern city, dressed like royalty, the pimps and drug dealers dressed even more luxuriantly than the women by their sides, everyone laughing, showing no deference, taking Ali’s swagger and making it their own. Only Ali could inspire such a show. Ali was a phenomenon, a spirit, an attitude, a challenge to democracy and decorum. He was the Great Equalizer. He was the fist to the white man’s face.
It didn’t matter if the man himself seemed to be guided more by effusive moods than a concrete philosophy. In fact, it may have helped. Ali was harder to pin down now that Elijah Muhammad had suspended him from the Nation of Islam. Ali at that moment, said the writer Budd Schulberg, “had managed to merge a score of ideological conflicts in his own transcendental black beauty. Somehow he had become Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Cosby, Jimmy Brown, and Dick Gregory all in one.”
On the night of the fight there were limousines painted in psychedelic designs. There were men in purple tuxedoes with lapels wide as Cessna wings. There were silk shirts unbuttoned to the navel. There were men’s platform shoes rising four inches high. There were ankle-length mink coats, mink fedoras, and silver mink bowties. Doing his best to keep up with the fashion show, Cash Clay wore a white, double-breasted suit and a wide-brimmed hat with a red band. Many of the ornately dressed men in the arena accessorized their wardrobes with concealed handguns, a fact that Mayor Sam Massell learned from his bodyguard only after the fight.
If Ali was anxious, he didn’t show it. He walked among his fans with élan, boasting, shadowboxing, spinning, flashing his famous gap-toothed grin, enjoying every minute, reminding all that he had not grown fat or big-headed; that he was a man of the people and the King of the World, and King of the Black World in particular; that his time away from boxing had not diminished the strength of his ego. He was gorgeous and proud.
He spent the morning of the fight taking phone calls, then drove to the Municipal Auditorium, which looked, as one writer said, “as though it were constructed to hold a good sized PTA meeting.” Ali’s dressing room was small, barely wider than the length of the rubbing table at one end. On the opposite wall was a dressing table with mirrors outlined with light bulbs. Jesse Jackson, Angelo Dundee, and Bundini Brown crowded into the room. In one corner, George Plimpton crouched with a notebook and pen, jotting notes as Ali argued with Dundee about which protective cup to wear. Ali thought the standard-sized cup made him look fat. Dundee insisted Ali wear it.
Ali admired his image in his dressing-room mirror. He was strong and lean again, thicker in the chest and stomach than before his layoff. He combed his hair. He shadowboxed until his chest and shoulders shined with sweat. Then came a knock at the door and a voice: “It’s time.” Ali took one last look in the mirror and stepped outside.
It was the first time Ali would fight a younger man. Dundee, Bundini, and Jesse Jackson accompanied Ali as he walked through the arena and into the ring. Jackson told reporters over the noise: “If he loses tonight, it will mean, symbolically, that the forces of blind patriotism are right, that dissent is wrong; that protest means you don’t love the country. This fight is love-it-or-leave-it versus love-it-and-change-it. They tried to railroad him. They refused to accept his testimony about his religious convictions. They took away his right to practice his profession. They tried to break him in body and mind. Martin Luther King used to say, ‘Truth crushed to the earth will rise again.’ That’s the black ethos. And it’s happening here in Georgia, of all places, and against a white man.”
No pressure though.
For the old Ali, Quarry would have been no trouble. He was shorter than Ali. He was slower than Ali (every heavyweight was). He weighed less than Ali. He had shorter arms than Ali. He had lost not only to Joe Frazier but also to George Chuvalo, Jimmy Ellis, and Eddie Machen. Still, Quarry hit hard and took a good punch, and he claimed to have trained harder for this contest than he had ever trained, no doubt aware that if he suffered one more loss he might be labeled with the word no boxer wanted to hear: journeyman.
Ali came out fast, determined, throwing jabs and combinations, his gloves whap-whap-whapping Quarry’s face. He wasn’t teasing or playing around, as he had in some of the fights
prior to his exile. Young Ali had jabbed and dance, jabbed and danced, but the twenty-eight-year-old Ali jabbed and threw, jabbed and threw, using his quick left hand to set up a quick left-right-left combination. From the opening minute, one thing was clear: Ali’s jab was as good as ever, even if he wasn’t using it quite as much. He was bigger now, at 2131/2 pounds, and that made the sight of those sizzling jabs even more astonishing, like flame flaring from a dragon’s mouth.
It remained to be seen how his legs would hold up, which might explain why Ali worked so hard. In the first round, he threw sixty-one punches, landing twenty-five, including sixteen jabs and nine power shots. When the first round ended, Ali looked exhausted, slumped on his stool “like a beached whale,” reporter Jerry Izenberg said.
In the second round, Ali was almost as active, throwing forty-nine and landing twenty punches. But in the third round, he slowed down, “bordering on exhaustion” according to Angelo Dundee, but still hitting, throwing thirty-nine punches, landing twelve. Fortunately for Ali, one of those twelve punches in the third round opened a cut over Quarry’s left eye. When the round ended, the referee stopped the fight.
Bundini, Dundee, Jesse Jackson, and the painter LeRoy Neiman surrounded Ali in the ring, sharing his victory. Ali did not boast. He did not thank Allah or Elijah Muhammad. Instead, he praised Quarry and said “hello to the Supremes, the Temptations, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, all of my friends here in the audience, and Gale Sayers also in Chicago.”
Later, he admitted that he’d been disappointed by his performance, surprised that his body no longer performed as it had four years earlier.
Still, he’d won, and it felt good to be back.
After the fight, there was a party. The printed invitations, handed out at the fight to many of the best-dressed black men and women, said someone named “Fireball” was hosting a soiree at 2819 Handy Drive, a ranch house in the Collier Heights section of Atlanta, where many prominent black Atlantans lived. The house belonged to a well-known street hustler named Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams. The guests were mostly pushers, pimps, and mobsters. Upon arrival, masked men with shotguns met them. The would-be revelers were led to the basement, stripped to their underwear, ordered to place their handguns and valuables in a pile, and spread out on the floor. When space in the basement ran out, the men and women were ordered to lie on top of one another, stacked like cordwood. By three in the morning, there were at least eighty people in the basement, including Cash Clay. Two days later, the Atlanta Journal reported that $200,000 had been stolen, although only five victims filed reports with the police. Most, like Cash Clay, were too embarrassed to admit they’d been scammed. Six months after the holdup, two of the suspected robbers were gunned down outside a Bronx pool hall.
