by Jonathan Eig
Four days later, the justices voted five to three (with Thurgood Marshall abstaining) to affirm Ali’s conviction. Justice John M. Harlan was assigned to write the majority opinion. Ordinarily, drafting the opinion is a mere formality. But this time it wasn’t.
Harlan was a conservative justice who believed that social issues should be decided by legislators, not judges. His grandfather had been a close friend of the original Cassius Marcellus Clay, the white slave owner and abolitionist from Kentucky. In the summer of 1971, Harlan was seventy-two years old and suffering terrible pain, unaware he was dying of spinal cancer. As Harlan prepared to write his opinion, one of his clerks, Thomas Krattenmaker, volunteered to help with research. Clerks to the justices of the Supreme Court tended to be young, they tended to be among the best law-school students in the country, and they tended to be opposed to the war in Vietnam. Krattenmaker was a twenty-six-year-old white man who had marched in antiwar protests while studying law at Columbia University. Before going to work as a Supreme Court clerk, he had read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The book gave him a sense of the passion and sincerity with which Malcolm and Muhammad Ali approached their religion. He had also been impressed by the clarity with which Ali had expressed his opposition to the war. “When he said, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong,’ ” Krattenmaker recalled in an interview, “he spoke to every man in America who wasn’t already enlisted. There was no threat to our nation, no threat to our culture. Why were we fighting?”
Krattenmaker understood why the justices would believe that Ali’s opposition to the war was based on race and politics. Ali’s opposition was based on those factors, in part. But the young court clerk was convinced that Ali’s refusal to fight was also religious, and Ali was entitled to have more than one reason for refusing to fight as long as he was sincere about the reason that the court deemed valid: the opposition to all war based on his religion. The test for conscientious objector status required that an individual sincerely opposed participation in war in any form based on his religious training and beliefs. Quakers and other pacifists passed that test, but Catholics who viewed the Vietnam War as immoral did not pass it. True pacifists didn’t get to choose their wars, as the court had decided earlier in the same term. Ali had conceded that he would fight in a so-called Holy War if Allah commanded him to. Did that mean he could not legitimately claim to be a conscientious objector?
Krattenmaker didn’t think so. He urged Justice Harlan to read Elijah Muhammad’s book Message to the Blackman in America. In that book, the Muslim Holy War was described as something entirely hypothetical and abstract — as unlikely as the Armageddon that Jehovah’s Witnesses talked about. In other words, as a practical matter, followers of Elijah Muhammad were sincerely and religiously opposed to all earthly wars.
Justice Harlan’s eyesight was failing, but he agreed to investigate Message to the Blackman, and, after doing so, he decided Krattenmaker was right. On June 9, in a memo to the court, Harlan said he was changing his vote. He included a long description of the teachings of the Nation of Islam and quoted from Message to the Blackman: “The very dominant idea in Islam is the making of peace and not war; our refusing to go armed is our proof that we want peace. We felt that we had no right to take part in a war with nonbelievers of Islam who have always denied us justice and equal rights; and if we were going to be examples of peace and righteousness (as Allah has chosen us to be) we felt we had no right to join hands with the murderers of people or to help murder those who have done us no wrong . . . We believe that we who declared ourselves to be righteous Muslims should not participate in any wars which take the lives of humans.”
Justice William Douglas challenged that, saying the Koran allowed Muslims to fight in a jihad against nonbelievers. How could the same people willing to fight a jihad be deemed pacifists?
With Harlan switching sides, the court was tied four-four. That meant the boxer’s conviction would still be affirmed. Ali would still go to jail. But Justice Potter Stewart was upset. He believed Ali had been convicted for political purposes, and now it would it appear that the Supreme Court was going to send him to jail because some of his fellow justices were afraid of the political backlash that might ensue if they ruled that supporters of the Nation of Islam were exempt from military service. Such a decision — accompanied by no written opinion — would have been a public-relations disaster for the Department of Defense, and it might have turned tens of thousands of black Americans into newly minted Muslims.
Justice Stewart suggested a compromise, based on a legal technicality, one that would allow the court to reverse Ali’s conviction without setting any legal precedent and without deciding whether Ali and the rest of the Nation of Islam’s followers sincerely opposed all war. The appeal board that had rejected Ali’s first claim had not given any basis for its finding, Stewart pointed out. Was Ali rejected because the panel didn’t believe he was opposed to all wars? Did the panel decide that Ali’s views were not based on religion? Or did the panel question the sincerity of his religious beliefs? Without knowing why Ali’s claim was rejected, there was no way to move forward and give him a fair hearing. The only choice was to reverse the conviction.
Harlan referred to the decision as a “pee-wee,” Krattenmaker said, because it corrected an injustice while setting no legal precedent. It was a decision everyone on the court could live with. The ruling was unanimous.
It was 9:15 a.m. on June 28, 1971, on the South Side of Chicago when Ali got the news. He was out for a drive in his green-and-white Lincoln Continental Mark III and stopped at a small grocery to buy a cup of orange juice. He was holding his orange juice and walking back to his car when the storeowner came running out.
“I just heard on the radio,” the man said excitedly, “the Supreme Court said you’re free, an 8–0 vote.” The news arrived fifty months after Ali’s initial refusal to accept induction. In that time, Ali had spent about $250,000 in legal fees, a bill that would have been higher if he had paid in full and if the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union had not donated their services. The grocer hugged Ali. Ali let out a whoop and went back inside, where he bought orange juice for the store’s customers.
By the time he reached the 50th on the Lake TraveLodge, where he and his wife and children were staying, a gaggle of newspaper and TV reporters waited for him. Ali played it cool for the cameras. “I’m not going to celebrate,” he said. “I’ve already said a long prayer to Allah, that’s my celebration.” He continued, “All praises are due to Allah who came in the person of Master Faroud Muhammad, and I thank Allah for giving to me the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and I thank the Supreme Court for recognizing the sincerity of the religious teachings that I’ve accepted.”
Ali was training for a July 26 fight against Jimmy Ellis, his former sparring partner and Louisville friend. He was also exploring the possibility of a fight with basketball superstar Wilt Chamberlain, who would have made an interesting opponent given that he stood seven-foot-one and weighed more than 275 pounds. The fight never came about, perhaps in part because Ali, upon posing for publicity shots with Chamberlain and pretending to throw a punch, couldn’t resist shouting “Timber!”
Ali said he intended to retire after three or four more bouts. Once he beat Frazier and won back the championship, he would quit, return to the Nation of Islam as a minister, and pass his days in the company of his wife and children. He and Belinda, he said, wanted to have seven more kids, at least five of them boys. “I can’t represent the Muslims again until I quit sports,” he said. “I spoke with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and he told me, ‘If boxing’s in your blood, get it out.’ ”
Ali’s body told him that boxing was not a good long-term option. He’d gained at least ten pounds since the Frazier fight. Ever since he’d taken that beating at Madison Square Garden, he’d found that he lacked the energy for training. Before his exile from boxing, he said, he would run five or six miles a day, then hit the gym for sparring, jumping ro
pe, and heavy-bag work. Now he ran two miles and needed a nap. Was it age? Was it his three-and-a-half-year layoff? Was it cognitive damage from too many shots to the head? It was impossible to say. But Ali wasn’t the same in the ring or out, and he knew it. “I used to dance every minute, to the left, to the right, always moving and sticking. You don’t see that no more. I got another year and that’s it. I could fight for eight more years but I’d be flatfooted. I’d start getting bruised up. I’d start getting knocked down more.”
A reporter asked if Ali would sue to recover damages from those who had taken away his career for three and a half years. “No,” he said. “They only did what they thought was right at the time. I did what I thought was right. That was all.”
Ali had defeated America. To Donald Reeves, a black student who briefly met Ali when the boxer visited Cornell University, Ali was everything: The Black Prince, Br’er Rabbit, David-Who-Fought-Goliath, an Invisible Man who refused to be unseen, a battered fighter who showed black people what it took to remain undefeated. Ali was special to Reeves and others because he wasn’t the leader of an organization — he was simply a man who seemed to be at the heart of so many of the central cultural issues of his time. Ali used skill rather than force to defeat his opponents; he refused to play by the rules of the establishment; he disdained materialism; he approached life with a sly smile and great sense of humor. Ali was a fantastic role model for Reeves, and he inspired the college student to compose an essay, which he submitted for publication to the New York Times. “Every time Ali wins,” Reeves wrote, “I see it as a victory for black people. For a black man to exist, he must be the greatest. He must say it over and over again — I am the greatest, because white people might forget . . . Ali insists on being seen, heard, known, and knowing himself. He has transcended all those limitations the white system has imposed on the black man — of course they are trying to send him to jail.”
Ali had more power than ever outside the ring. He had risked his career, taken on the federal government, and won. But when a reporter asked how he would use his enormous influence, Ali’s answer was uncertain at best, jibberish at worst. “I wouldn’t say that I have become a symbol or power,” he said. “I stand . . . for what I believe. Some can say it’s an American, some argue that it’s against the country and it’s bad. The individual must regard it to whatever . . . they want to. As far as what I think about the human rights of the black movement, then we are back to the same answer. You see, it depends on the individual. I try to live up to my own beliefs according to religious reasons. But I do hope that it may help encourage black people to do what they feel is right and to help their own people on the road to freedom and equality. But it is good to know that what ever I do will help someone else do good also.” He continued, “I’d like to say to the black people: right on! Keep pushing. If you can just keep respecting one another and get the youngsters educated where they can go out and do for themselves. I’d like for all black people to read the Muhammad Speaks newspaper . . . You can’t buy the understanding, wisdom and knowledge that’s in that newspaper — get to the Muhammad’s Mosque of Islam. This is what I see, this is what I believe, and if you love me, then you will like my teacher.”
After the Supreme Court’s decision, Ali did not speak out against the war on college campuses. Nor did he deliver speeches in the Nation of Islam’s mosques, where he remained unwelcome according to Elijah Muhammad’s edict. It was remarkable, really, how little he said about race and politics in the wake of the court’s decision. He gave the impression of a man who, above all else, was glad to be a boxer again. With only four weeks to go before his fight with Ellis, he had a lot of work to do and a lot of weight to lose.
On June 25, Ali fought a seven-round exhibition in Dayton, including several rounds against a young fighter named Eddie Brooks of Milwaukee, who hit the former champion with sharp shots, “right on the button,” according to Rolly Schwartz, an Olympic boxing referee who watched the sparring match. When it was over, Ali was exhausted, and it was reasonable to believe he meant it when he talked of retiring soon. “Another year and I’m through,” he said. “I’m getting too old for this.”
Ali wanted his sparring partners to hurt him. He believed that suffering was an important part of his preparation for a fight, that a man could build up tolerance for blows to the head and body in much the same way that one might build up tolerance for spicy food by eating jalapeno peppers. The effect of all those sparring session blows over the course of a career would never be quantified, but sometimes, even in the short term, it was clear that Ali’s strategy backfired. While sparring one day in July, Brooks hit Ali on the chin and Ali went down, flat on his back, as suddenly and stunningly as he’d gone down against Frazier. According to some accounts in the press, Brooks floored him two more times in the same sparring session, which suggests that Ali may have suffered a concussion from the first knockdown. In another sparring session, the European heavyweight champion Joe Bugner popped Ali consistently with quick left jabs, and Ali, flat-footed, seemed either incapable of or uninterested in getting out of the way. Avoiding Bugner’s jab would have required the type of sharp reflexes and boxing technique Ali no longer possessed.
A week before the fight, Ali was still complaining about the roll of fat around his waist and still talking about giving up boxing. He said he was entertaining an offer from a large company in South Africa to give a series of speeches in that racially divided country, adding that he had no ethical qualms about touring South Africa for a white corporation: “I ain’t going to start nothing,” he said. “I’ll talk to blacks and whites and integrated groups, all kinds. Maybe they like the way we (Muslims) talk separation.”
Against Jimmy Ellis, Ali had to worry not about his poor condition but about fighting without Angelo Dundee in his corner. Dundee trained both boxers, but he felt a greater responsibility to Ellis because he also served as his manager.
Ellis had a record of 30–6, with fourteen knockouts, and he had beaten Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry, and Oscar Bonavena. Dundee thought Ellis had a chance against Ali so long as Ellis roughed up Ali’s body and stayed away from his jab.
But it didn’t work out the way Dundee had hoped. Ali was lazy against Ellis. He was overweight and sluggish, but he was thirty pounds heavier than his opponent and much stronger. Ali used his cracking jab to keep Ellis from working his way inside the way Joe Frazier had. Ali and Ellis had been friends since childhood. They’d sparred hundreds of rounds and fought each other as amateurs. Ali was comfortable and confident, thumbing his nose, lowering his hands, dancing around, and daring Ellis to try to hit him. Still, he let the fight go almost the full distance. In the opening moments of the twelfth and final round, Ali opened the kind of full-throttled attack that fans had been waiting to see. Only then did the referee stop the bout.
When it was over, Ali made no apologies for his lackluster performance. “I wasn’t going to kill myself for this one,” he said. “I’m training for Frazier.”
If Ali was indeed training for Frazier, he went about it in a less than optimal way. Over the course of twenty-seven months, beginning with the Ellis bout, Ali fought an astonishing thirteen times, or roughly once every sixty days. In that same period, Frazier fought only four bouts. Even the unheralded Jerry Quarry fought less frequently than Ali during the same stretch.
Why would a man fight thirteen times in twenty-seven months when he didn’t have to? Why would he endure 139 rounds of punishment against some of boxing’s toughest heavyweights, plus thousands more rounds of sparring? Why would he absorb about 1,800 punches in those thirteen fights? What was he thinking? Was his schedule an acknowledgment that he disdained the rigors of training? That he felt compelled to prove himself? That the only way he could stay sharp was by scheduling a steady string of bouts? That he needed the money? That he needed to fight often to prove he deserved another shot at the championship? Or was it something even worse? Was Ali’s judgment clouded by brain damage? Was hi
s lost appetite for rigorous training connected somehow to a dulling of the mind from too many blows to the head?
Ferdie Pacheco, the doctor working in Ali’s corner at the time, said he saw signs of lasting brain damage after the Frazier fight in 1971. Pacheco said he told Ali to quit after that fight.
Why didn’t Ali listen?
“There is no fucking cure to quick money,” Pacheco said. “There is none.”
No one can say with certainty when brain damage begins to affect a person, although scientists have become much better in recent years at recognizing signs of trouble, particularly in athletes who suffer repeated blows to the head. When a person nears the age of thirty, his brain tissue becomes progressively less elastic, making him more susceptible to permanent damage with each passing year and each passing shock to the skull. Boxers are especially susceptible. After all, the point of boxing is to concuss the opponent, to knock him down and knock him out. If attempts were made to render boxing safe for boxers, it would likely mean the end of the sport. Boxers take far more hits to the head than other athletes, and they are less likely to receive proper evaluation after a damaging blow. In football, if a player is removed for a concussion or for concussion testing, another player takes his place. The game goes on. In boxing, if a fighter can’t continue, the fight is over; the audience goes home. In boxing, the ability to shake off brain trauma and go on is considered testament to a fighter’s strength and courage. When Ali bounced back up after he was floored by Frazier’s left hook, boxing fans and writers admired him for his grit, for the steel in his spine. No one stepped in to offer a concussion test. The crowd cheered. The men in his corner urged him on. Even after the fight, no one checked him for a concussion.
