Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  “I know it,” he said in an interview almost forty years later. “I know what happened.”

  Why would Foreman’s manager drug him? Foreman suspected that Sadler had cut a deal with Herbert Muhammad — let Ali win this one, and we’ll both cash in on the rematch.

  Foreman waffled on whether he’d lost because he’d been drugged or because Ali had been the superior fighter, sounding like a man still burning with resentment but wishing to be magnanimous. “It’s not like the water beat me,” he said. “Muhammad beat me. With a straight right hand. Fastest right hand I’d ever been hit with in my life. That’s what beat me. But they put drugs in my water there.”

  Foreman also complained that the referee, Zack Clayton, had given him only eight seconds instead of ten to get up after the knockdown. Replays of the fight suggest Foreman may have been right. Clayton’s count appeared to be quick and short. When the referee began his count, only eight seconds remained in the round. The bell should have ended the round before Clayton counted ten. But even without factoring for the bell, Foreman appeared to be on his feet before Clayton’s count reached ten.

  Nevertheless, as Foreman stood, Clayton waved his arms, declaring Ali the winner by knockout.

  Before the fight, Foreman said Sadler asked him for $25,000 in cash. The money, Foreman said, was for Clayton, to make sure the referee didn’t show any favoritism toward Ali. Foreman said he gave Sadler the cash and Sadler gave it to Clayton. Years later, though, Foreman said, he discovered that Herbert Muhammad had also made a cash payment to Clayton for the same ostensible purpose — to make sure the referee wasn’t prejudiced. Herbert’s payment, according to Foreman, was “a little bit more” than $25,000.

  When asked if Foreman’s story was true, Gene Kilroy shouted angrily: “That’s bullshit! We only paid ten thousand!”

  The conspiracy theories would live on for decades, but they would make no difference. It had been ten and a half years since Cassius Clay had used a felt-tipped pen to write the words “heavyweight champion of the world” next to his name on a mattress in his Miami home in the days before his first fight with Sonny Liston. Now, his name had changed, but the title was his again, making him only the second man in heavyweight boxing history to lose and regain the championship.

  It was dawn when Ali left the arena. He and Belinda got into the back of a silver Citroën. The rest of Ali’s camp boarded two buses. They formed a caravan, led by a police car with an orange beacon, that rolled through Kinshasa “like . . . a military column through a liberated territory,” as Plimpton described it. Crowds filled the street in celebration, everyone chanting “Ali! Ali! Ali!” As the caravan moved out of the city and back toward Ali’s training camp, crowds that had heard the news came out along the road. Low, heavy clouds hung over the hills. The morning sky turned green. A pounding rain began to fall, drumming the roofs of the buses and Ali’s car. Plimpton recalled that it had rained in Miami too, after Ali’s shocking defeat of Sonny Liston. Then the boxer had been a plucky upstart; now he was a king, gazing through rainstreaked windows at another piece of his kingdom.

  “Bulldogs is falling out of the sky,” Bundini said as the caravan slowed for storm.

  The next day, Ali laughed and took credit for holding back the rain long enough to finish the fight.

  With his victory over the mighty Foreman, the Ali myth grew again. He was John Henry hammering on the mountain but greater, because Ali had hammered over and over through the years — hammered on Liston, hammered on Patterson, hammered on white reporters who told him to shut up and box, hammered on LBJ, on Nixon, on the U.S. Supreme Court, on Norton, on Frazier, and now on big, bad George Foreman.

  For a decade and a half now he had been telling the world: “I am the greatest!” How could anyone disagree?

  Through it all, he remained an appealing figure, which may have been his most surprising accomplishment. For all his bragging, Ali knew how to laugh at himself. He recognized that he was the court jester who’d become king, not the obvious heir to the throne. One minute he was saying he might call on President Gerald Ford to see if he could be of service to his country as a diplomat, and the next minute he was performing a magic trick with three pieces of rope of three different lengths that, abracadabra, became all the same length. Despite his bluster and the fundamental brutality of his sport, Ali’s happy-go-lucky manner endeared him to people, black and white. Racism still permeated American society. Wounds from Vietnam remained open and raw as veterans settled in back home with missing limbs, suicidal thoughts, and a noticeable dearth of victory parades. Ordinary Americans had lost trust in their leaders, lost all sense of what heroism and gallantry were supposed to look like in an age of growing cynicism and despair. And here was Ali — a man with every right to be angry — still exuberant, still hopeful, still pretty, still winning. He wasn’t the ideal American hero, merely the ideal one for his time.

  What would he do next?

  Ali admitted he wasn’t sure.

  “But I know,” he said, “that beating George Foreman and conquering the world with my fists does not bring freedom to my people. I am well aware that I must go beyond all this and prepare myself for more.

  “I know,” he said, “that I enter a new arena.”

  42

  Moving on Up

  Ali returned home to a hero’s welcome. After landing in Chicago, the boxer traveled by motorcade to City Hall, where Mayor Richard J. Daley declared November 1, 1974, Muhammad Ali Day. Dressed like a dandy in a blue suit with a neck scarf and carrying an ornate walking stick that had been a gift from Zaire’s ruler, Ali thanked the mayor. He posed for photographs. He told reporters he was eager to see his four children “and my great leader, Elijah Muhammad.”

  From City Hall, Ali traveled to the Nation of Islam’s Salaam Restaurant on the South Side. The next day, when he went to the home of Elijah Muhammad, he saw a man much diminished in health, intellect, and power. For years, there had been rumors that the Messenger’s mind had been slipping. Some of Elijah Muhammad’s recent pronouncements differed from his core principles. When he spoke at his annual Saviours’ Day assembly in 1974, for example, he had urged followers to stop condemning the white man and to stop blaming American society for their problems. “The fault is not on the slavemaster any more,” he had said, “since he said you can go free and we see that he is not angry with us.” He told Leon Forrest, one of the writers working on Muhammad Speaks: “Let’s not talk no more about any blue-eyed devils.” FBI reports suggested that Elijah Muhammad was seriously considering granting permission for his followers to vote.

  Ali was still officially barred from the Nation of Islam, but, in the meantime, the fighter continued to describe himself as a firm believer. Also in the meantime, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam continued to benefit financially from their association with the boxer. With Ali’s return from Africa, Elijah told Ali once again: he should retire from boxing and return to the Nation of Islam as a minister. Elijah Muhammad had shaped Ali’s life as much as anyone. The Messenger had given Ali a new religion and a new name, had pushed him to divorce his first wife, to abandon his friend and mentor Malcolm X, and to reject the draft. “My whole life is Elijah Muhammad,” Ali said in an interview a month after his return from Africa. “Everything.”

  Still, he could not bring himself to obey this order. After regaining the championship, he was not prepared to retire.

  Had Ali’s faith weakened? Had his greed grown? Was it a combination of these forces?

  “I feel real guilty, makin’ so much money so easy,” he said during one press conference after the fight in Africa. “Fighting George Foreman was an easy $5 million . . . From here on out, in all my championship fights, I don’t want nothing but what it costs to train. I want my share to go to needy groups.” He mentioned, specifically, the Nation of Islam and the NAACP, even though the groups maintained conflicting missions. Asked if Ali might someday become the leader of the Nation of Islam, he said, “No, sir.
I don’t want to be a leader. I don’t live clean enough to be a spiritual leader.”

  A week after Chicago celebrated Muhammad Ali Day, Louisville did the same. Cheerleaders and a marching band from Central High greeted Ali upon arrival in his hometown. Odessa Clay was there too, wearing a white mink stole that had been a recent gift from her son. The mayor announced that a downtown street, Armory Place, would be renamed Muhammad Ali Place, and Ali announced that after all his global travel he still considered Louisville the greatest city in the world — “because I’m from here, mainly.” He told the students of Central High to do their homework so they wouldn’t wind up needing as many lawyers as he did. After a ten-minute speech at the airport, Ali climbed into a white Cadillac limousine with two telephones, a television, and a refrigerator; stood up and stuck his head through the sliding roof; and waved goodbye to the crowd.

  “You are the greatest, my man!” a fan shouted to Ali, who winked back.

  Ali’s victory over Foreman had generated powerful new feelings of admiration among his fans, according to Ebony magazine. The magazine asked, “Is it far-fetched to say there are elements of religion of some kind involved in the very special relationship that those people have with Muhammad Ali?” Ebony quoted a black dermatologist who had watched the Rumble in the Jungle at a Washington, DC, arena packed with seventeen thousand people. “Most were black,” the dermatologist told the magazine, “and as we watched Ali fighting round after round to take back a title he lost because he was black man enough to stand on his own two feet and suffer the consequences, well, something just seemed to go through the crowd, something warm and good-feeling . . . When he won, it seemed as though everybody in the arena was suddenly cleansed of any negative thoughts we had about our black selves and about one another and we walked out filled with pride and brotherliness and black self-love.”

  His effect on white Americans was powerful, too. Pat Harris was eighteen years old, the son of a longshoreman, and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey. He’d hated Ali in 1971, hated his refusal to fight for his country, hated his arrogance, hated the way he’d bad-mouthed Joe Frazier, and he’d been ecstatic when Frazier had won their first contest. He and his buddies paid twenty dollars each for seats in the last row of Madison Square Garden to watch the Ali-Foreman fight. Even though the fight was broadcast via closed-circuit TV, the energy in the arena was incredible. Everyone booed when Foreman’s face appeared on the screen, and everyone cheered Ali. “All of a sudden I was an Ali fan,” Harris recalled. Only later did he realize how Ali shaped his views on race. “As kids, I don’t think race affected us that much,” he said, because almost everyone around him was white. “Black people, they were ballplayers,” he said. “They were boxers.” Harris and his friends weren’t permitted to use “the n-word,” as Harris put it, “but Ali used it all the time. He called Joe Frazier a nigger. We got a kick out of that. Archie Bunker and Ali were the only ones who were allowed to say that.” Harris didn’t have much interaction with black people until years later when he moved to New York City and became a sportscaster. But as a teenager in 1974, it struck him that Ali wasn’t angry anymore, at least not angry at white America, and that made him appealing. “If you followed his career and watched his progression, you couldn’t help but love him . . . I think he liked making people laugh. I think he liked making people happy.”

  Ali knew he mattered to people like Harris, and especially to people like the black dermatologist in Washington. He also knew he would have to do something special to top his victory over Foreman. In Louisville, Ali told reporter Dave Kindred of the Courier-Journal that he wanted to fight George Foreman and Joe Frazier on the same night, as part of the same television broadcast, for a $10-million payday. He insisted he was serious. Perhaps Ali thought it was the only way he could top the Rumble in the Jungle. When two of his Nation of Islam bodyguards interrupted the interview to say Ali had to move on to another appointment, Ali told them to wait until he and Kindred finished. When the bodyguards left, Ali whispered, telling Kindred he would have left the Nation of Islam long ago if not for fear for his own safety. “But you saw what they did to Malcolm X,” Ali said, in a comment Kindred reported years later in a book. “I can’t leave the Muslims. They’d shoot me, too.”

  Three months later, on February 25, 1975, Elijah Muhammad died of heart failure at age seventy-seven. When he heard the news, Ali left his training camp in Deer Lake to attend the funeral service in Chicago. Publicly, he had little to say about his mentor’s death. But Ali spoke at length in a private memorial service for Elijah Muhammad, in remarks that were never reported by the press or previous biographers.

  “After hearing of the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” said Ali, wearing a brown suit and glancing at notes, “immediately I took a jet to Chicago . . . to see Herbert because I knew Herbert would tell me just what’s happening, how I should feel, what I should say, what I should do.”

  Ali explained that Elijah Muhammad had told him many years ago that he should accept Herbert Muhammad’s orders and advice as if it had come directly from the Messenger. It was Elijah Muhammad who had inspired Ali’s faith, but it was Herbert who Ali had seen or spoken to virtually every day for more than a decade. It was Herbert who had been his teacher. And it was Herbert who had been told by his father to take care of Ali, to “never leave his side,” according to the journalist Mark Kram, because Ali was vulnerable, easily persuaded, and would always “follow the last person to have his ear.” Now, Ali said, it was Herbert who told him what he should do in response to the Messenger’s death: he would embrace another one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons, Wallace D. Muhammad, as the new leader of the Nation of Islam. “If every Muslim was killed tomorrow,” Ali told the mourners gathered in Chicago, “and I was the onliest one left, I would go out somewhere and set me up a little mosque and continue from there on what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught me.” He concluded, “I make my pledge here today . . . that I will be faithful and loyal and honorable to the Honorable Wallace Muhammad, and I’m sure that everyone here today who feels the same will be happy to stand up right now and let the world know that you’re behind this man.”

  The crowd stood as Ali turned and hugged his new spiritual leader.

  Back in Deer Lake, Ali continued to talk about fighting Foreman and Frazier in one night. No one took him seriously. Don King and Herbert Muhammad were selecting Ali’s opponents now. “Herbert was not that fond of Don,” said Lloyd Price, who had introduced the men, “but they made money together.” King and Herbert Muhammad were in no rush to schedule a fight with anyone who posed a serious threat to their man. The better, safer strategy was to line up a few small-to medium-sized events against so-so fighters. For starters, Don King suggested Ali fight Joe Bugner, whom Ali had already beaten once in 1973. King, who was eager to solidify his position as boxing’s newest big-time promoter, promised Ali $2 million for the fight.

  “Joe Bugner?” Ali asked Gene Kilroy incredulously. “How do you turn down Joe Bugner, two million dollars? I wouldn’t hire him as a sparring partner.”

  Although Ali had said he intended to retire after facing Foreman, he now gave it little thought. How do you quit when you’re flying high, when you’re the best in the world at what you do? How do you go from being heavyweight champ to . . . what? A chatty celebrity? A TV game-show host? What would he do for the next forty or fifty years? It wasn’t as if he could pick up where he left off when he was twelve. He was not going to return to school. He was not going to peddle life insurance. He could have joined Howard Cosell as a television commentator, but was Ali really ready to let other athletes command the spotlight while he sat on the sidelines in a garish sport coat and tie? He might have enjoyed diplomatic work, as he suggested in interviews after the Foreman fight, but he was not the sort who would operate happily and efficiently in a bureaucratic machine. He joked in a December visit to the White House that he might run for president, but that seemed unlikely too, especially given that he ha
d never so much as voted.

  The mere sight of Ali sharing a laugh with President Ford offered evidence of Ali’s strange place in American culture and the difficulties he might face in trying to become something more than a celebrity prizefighter. Ali’s fame had long rested on his rejection of American values. Yet here he was, officially welcomed to the highest office in the land, and here he was, happy to be welcomed, making no waves, raising no political or social issues, just smiling and joking with the president. Ali was now an American hero, a symbol of national identity. He had earned that position by pulling off the great upset of George Foreman but also by riding waves of good fortune beyond his control. America had changed. A comedy called The Jeffersons debuted on CBS in 1975. It was a show about a black family in New York that was “moving on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky,” and it encouraged viewers to consider the payoff of the civil rights movement, to see one version of racial progress, even if it portrayed George Jefferson and his family as foreigners in upper-class society, as the historian Bruce J. Schulman has noted. “Separate but equal,” the battle cry of Southern segregationists, was dead now. But it had been replaced by something more complicated than equality. A new ideal of diversity was taking shape, with racial and ethnic groups fighting to maintain their distinctions. George Jefferson was moving on up, but he wasn’t looking to blend into white society, and neither was Muhammad Ali. But others were. O. J. Simpson, the star running back for the Buffalo Bills, avoided politics because he thought it might damage his brand and impair his income, and he was rewarded for it, becoming one of the first black pitchmen for corporate America.