by Jonathan Eig
Ali adapted to the changes in popular culture as well as anyone. Even the death of Elijah Muhammad and the ascendancy of his son played to the boxer’s advantage. Wallace D. Muhammad moved quickly to disavow many of his father’s teachings and reinvent the Nation of Islam. Wallace turned the organization toward orthodox Islam. He eliminated dress codes. At a reception held in honor of Muhammad Ali, Wallace allowed smoking and dancing for the first time. He dropped demands for a black-only state. He even invited white people to join the organization. Finally, about a year and a half after the death of Elijah, Wallace Muhammad announced that the Nation of Islam would no longer exist, and he launched a new organization called the World Community of al-Islam in the West, the first of many name changes.
Suddenly, Ali had a clean slate. He was the champion, he was immensely popular, and he was unfettered from Elijah Muhammad. But who would Ali be without the order and sense of obedience his spiritual advisor had long imposed?
Ali would be a celebrity all his life, just as Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey had remained celebrities. Of that there could be little doubt. But his words and actions suggested that he believed his fame at this point in his career derived almost exclusively from boxing, which made it difficult to know how far that fame would carry when he retired. It was even less clear what mattered to Ali most beyond his sport. Almost every professional athlete faced a similar challenge toward career’s end. For an athlete, achieving greatness is the second hardest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is to quit.
“Ali has entered folklore,” Wilfrid Sheed wrote, “and has no place to go but down.”
In January, a week after his thirty-third birthday, Ali began that downward trek when he joined Don King and Dick Sadler at Chicago’s Hyatt Regency Hotel to announce his next fight. It wasn’t a rematch with Foreman. It wasn’t a third tilt with Joe Frazier or Ken Norton. It wasn’t even a contest with the previously advertised Joe Bugner. No, Don King and Herbert Muhammad had gone even lower on the food chain and chosen as Ali’s opponent the journeyman fighter and part-time liquor salesman Chuck Wepner of Bayonne, New Jersey, a man known as the Bayonne Bleeder for the ease with which his face sprung leaks. Wepner was thirty-six years old and possessed a record of thirty wins, nine losses, two draws, and more than two hundred stitches.
Was this Ali’s plan to ease into retirement? Was he going to dabble in boxing? Was he going to perform on the TV talk-show circuit and dust off his boxing gloves every three or four months to beat up a human marshmallow like Chuck Wepner?
Desperate to hype the humdrum fight, Don King tried to exploit racism, saying Wepner had been chosen to “to give the white race a chance.” When that failed to get a reaction, he said fifty cents from every ticket sold would go to Project Survival, the same unheard-of charity he’d mentioned a year earlier to generate interest in his Salt Lake City boxing exhibition. Even Ali couldn’t manage to make Wepner sound threatening. He always did better razzing black opponents than white ones, perhaps because he perceived black boxers as his true rivals in the contest to be America’s baddest black man. At one point, casting about wildly to hype his upcoming fight, Ali said boxing fans ought to buy tickets because Wepner was “a good family man who could use the money.” Then he said he promised to make the fight more interesting by confining his punches to the region between Wepner’s belly button and Adam’s apple, avoiding the targets from which Wepner was most likely to bleed. In conclusion, he said, he didn’t really have to explain why he had chosen Wepner. He was, he declared, “still the greatest fighter of all time,” and boxing fans and “pretty foxes” would pay to see him perform no matter the opponent.
The press conference in Chicago raised another uncomfortable question: why was Dick Sadler, manager to George Foreman, standing by King’s side? In the months ahead, Sadler and King would work together promoting Ali’s fights, and Sadler would work at Deer Lake as an assistant trainer for Ali. Was this Sadler’s reward for poisoning George Foreman? The answer may never be known. King was still new to the fight business. It’s possible that he merely seized on the breakup of Sadler and Foreman, reaching out to Sadler at a low point in his career and gaining a valuable new ally.
To make sure he didn’t lose Ali, King made monthly cash payments to the men who surrounded the champ and urged them to say good things about King to Ali. He took special care to pay the Muslims surrounding the fighter, including Abdul Rahman, formerly known as Captain Sam Saxon, who received five hundred dollars a week plus expenses to serve as the boxer’s spiritual mentor. King also threw a party in Chicago for Herbert Muhammad, celebrating the “unsung genius” who had guided Muhammad Ali’s career for so long. King invited Howard Cosell, Ken Norton, George Foreman, Redd Foxx, B. B. King, Lola Falana, Horace Silver, Paul Anka, Lou Rawls, and Nikki Giovanni, among others. But even as he did his best to ensure the continuing loyalty of Herbert Muhammad and Ali, King knew he would need additional fighters, and Sadler could help deliver them.
For the Wepner fight, Ali would receive $1.5 million, plus $200,000 in training expenses; Wepner got $100,000. The money didn’t come out of Don King’s pocket. He had investors — investors with alleged underworld ties. By overpaying Ali and spreading around cash to members of the fighter’s coterie, King solidified his control over boxing’s biggest star. No one believed that Wepner had a chance to beat Ali. In 1970, in the last fight before his death, Sonny Liston had used Wepner’s face to paint the boxing ring red. Wepner had needed seventy stitches to close the cuts in his face after the fight, but the underdog had refused to quit. “The referee was Barney Felix,” Wepner recalled. “He came up to me before the ninth round. I said, ‘Barney, give me one more round.’ ” The referee asked Wepner how many fingers he was holding up. “How many guesses do I get?” Wepner joked. Wepner’s manager tapped his back three times. “Three!” Wepner shouted. Felix allowed the fight to continue. “But in the ninth I threw a wild punch that hit the ref in the shoulder, and after that they stopped the fight,” Wepner recalled.
Despite Wepner’s winning personality and the clash of black versus white man, champion versus man-on-the-street, ticket sales were soft. So was Ali’s gut. “I’m over-tired and under-trained,” he admitted. “It’s a grinding, grueling job. There’s no pleasure in the ring for me . . . I’ll be OK for that Wepner, though.”
The fight, held March 24 at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, would be remembered primarily for four things:
1. Ali’s inability to finish off his brave and bloodied opponent until only nineteen seconds remained in the fifteenth and final round.
2. The sight of Ali sneaking glances at TV monitors near the ring to see how he looked as he fought.
3. Wepner’s ninth-round knockdown of Ali, which may have been the result of a trip or a slip as well as a good shot to Ali’s chest.
4. Even in the loss, Wepner inspired a young man watching the fight to develop a screenplay about a blue-collar boxer who goes the distance against boxing’s heavyweight champion. The young man’s name was Sylvester Stallone, and his screenplay became the movie Rocky, which would win the Academy Award for best picture in 1977.
After beating Wepner, Ali fought again seven weeks later. In a bout televised live on ABC from Las Vegas, Ron Lyle gave Ali a surprisingly hard time. Lyle had learned to box while in prison on a murder charge. Now, after studying Ali’s recent fights, Lyle refused to fall for the champ’s rope-a-dope tactic. Instead, he waited patiently for Ali to meet him in the center of the ring. In the first round, Ali didn’t land a single punch. Through the first six rounds, he landed only eighteen, looking very much like a fighter hoping to win by a popular vote. In the tenth round, Ali did more gabbing than jabbing, leaning to his right and talking to Lyle while Lyle threw punch after punch, aiming for the nasty purple welt rising under Ali’s right eye. Finally, in the eleventh round, Ali rocked Lyle with a right. One punch changed everything. Lyle stumbled and rested on the ropes, trying to clear his head and find his le
gs. Ali attacked with his first real burst of energy of the night. Soon, the referee stepped in and put an end to it, declaring Ali the winner by a TKO.
Six weeks later, Ali fought yet again, this time against Bugner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where a crowd of twenty thousand greeted him at the airport. The temperature in the ring hit more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the men went fifteen grueling rounds. Ali won by unanimous decision.
Once more, Ali had to work hard for a fight that his trainers and promoters had treated almost as if it were an exhibition, a supposedly easy paycheck with little risk involved. Ali did get paid handsomely for his fights against Wepner, Lyle, and Bugner, but the fights were not without cost. Against three heavy hitters, Ali fought forty-one rounds and took 483 punches. There were even more blows in the same period, from countless thousands thrown in sparring sessions and exhibitions. In fact, during one five-round exhibition at the Louisville Convention Center, a fundraiser for the new Ali School of Boxing in Louisville, Ali was knocked down four times by Jimmy Ellis. Later, he said the first knockdown was real, and he faked the others to convince the crowd that the first one had been phony, too. When he and Ellis finished, Ali welcomed to the ring a sixteen-year-old fighter named Greg Page, a future heavyweight champion. For three rounds, Ali and Page exchanged heavy blows. When they were done, Ali joked, “That boy hit me so hard, it jarred my kinfolk back in Africa.”
Ali didn’t mind getting hit between fights. In fact, he believed it helped him prepare for combat with men who were trying in earnest to knock him out. “I let my sparring partners beat up on me about eighty percent of the time,” he said in a 1975 interview. “I go on the defense and take a couple of hits to the head and the body, which is good. You gotta condition your body and brain to take those shots, ’cause you’re gonna get hit hard a couple of times in every fight.”
Larry Holmes, one of his sparring partners at the time, said Ali made it clear to the men he hired that they were supposed to hit him hard — and not try to avoid the head. “If you didn’t hit Ali, he’d probably fire you,” Holmes recalled. Years later, Holmes would laugh at Ali’s notion that taking punches during sparring sessions somehow hardened him for battle. He ridiculed Ali for acting as though he were proud of his ability to take a punch in sparring sessions and in fights. “The object of the game of boxing is hit and don’t be hit,” he said. “Don’t be no fool! Don’t prove shit to nobody. You wanna show people how strong you are, show ’em how strong you are by not taking those shots. But you know, he didn’t do that. Hit me! Show me something! And they did.”
Ali had entered a troubling career phase. After saying throughout most of 1973 that his retirement was imminent, he continued fighting through 1974 at a pace usually reserved for up-and-comers. These one-sided bouts were no good for boxing. They turned the sport into a mockery. They undercut the democratic idea that fighters could work their way to a shot at the title. The mismatches were no good for Ali, either. He was older, slower, and heavier now. He gulped down Coca-Cola like it was water. He could pour six packets of sugar into one cup of coffee. Ali liked to say he was so fast he could turn out the lights and get in bed before it got dark, but he also might have said he could finish a piece of pie and a scoop of ice cream before the plate hit his table. For Lyle and Bugner, he’d weighed in at 2241/2 pounds, which was 8 pounds more than he’d weighed against George Foreman and almost 19 pounds more than he’d weighed for his second Sonny Liston fight. He didn’t take these fights as seriously as he’d taken his earlier contests. Now, his fellow boxers could see that he was risking his health.
“For Ali to come out there and fight George Foreman,” Larry Holmes said, “George is a big ol’ man, and getting hit by that! That motherfucker’s a horse! You beat up a horse. You make him run and run and run and run out of gas like Ali did, but you don’t stay on the ropes for five or six rounds and get punched! Thirty, forty times a round getting hit! You get hit upside the head thirty times a round and you got hit a lot . . . You can’t do wrong all the time and think you’re gonna come out of it whole.”
Ali remained in denial. He did think he was going to come out of it whole. He continued to tell reporters that he was a scientific fighter who never got hurt, that he was special, that even though he didn’t dodge punches as well as he once did, and even though he didn’t dance away from punches as quickly as he once did, that he still saw punches better than anyone and still managed to shift the angle of his head and torso just enough, at the last possible moment, so that most of the blows failed to land with full impact. He continued at age thirty-three to believe he could avoid the damage that almost inevitably befell boxers.
But that would soon change, because Ali was getting ready once again to fight Joe Frazier. After Ali-Frazier III, the cruelty of boxing and its lasting impact on a fighter’s mental and physical health would be clear to everyone, even Ali.
43
Impulses
Belinda learned about her husband’s affair with Veronica Porche soon after everyone had returned from Zaire. It did not come as a shock. A few years earlier, Wilma Rudolph, Ali’s Olympic teammate, had come to the Alis’ house in New Jersey asking for money to support a child that Rudolph claimed belonged to Ali. Ali admitted the affair with Rudolph but told Belinda he didn’t believe the child was his. After seeing the baby, Belinda decided her husband was probably telling the truth; the child didn’t look like Ali.
There were other women and other children, some that Belinda knew about and some that she didn’t. According to one of Ali’s former bodyguards, the boxer continued to see Sonji Roi, his first wife, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Areatha Swint, Ali’s old girlfriend from Central High School in Louisville, said she carried on an affair with Ali during his marriage to Belinda and traveled with the boxer to some of his fights. A woman named Barbara Mensah said she began a long-running affair with Ali in 1967, when she was seventeen years old, and eventually had his daughter. In 1972, Ali and a woman named Patricia Harvell had a daughter named Miya, a child Ali acknowledged as his own. In 1973, Ali met a high-school senior named Wanda Bolton who was visiting the Deer Lake training camp with her parents. In 1974, Ali became the father of Bolton’s daughter, and the year after the child’s birth, Ali married Bolton in an Islamic ceremony that was never legally recognized. Ali and Belinda were still married at the time. Islamic law allowed a man to have up to four wives, although the vast majority of American Muslims did not practice polygamy because it violated American law. Bolton, who joined Ali in Zaire for the Foreman fight, later sued and settled her case with Ali for child support. Another teenaged girl, Temica Williams, claimed she began an affair with Ali in 1975 and soon after had his son. In a lawsuit filed in Cook County, Illinois, Williams claimed that Ali provided only four years of financial support for her boy. Williams sued Ali for sexual assault, alleging that she had been only twelve years old at the start of the relationship and had still been a minor at the time Ali purportedly fathered her child. Her case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired. Years later, Veronica said she knew about Temica. Ali had admitted the affair, but he told Veronica he didn’t believe Temica’s child was his. “He would have claimed that baby,” Veronica said, “but everybody in the camp was going with that girl.” Also, when Muhammad and Veronica talked about it, they concluded that the child was likely conceived at a time when Ali had been traveling.
“Ali’s weakness was coochie,” said Leon Muhammad of the Philadelphia mosque. “Ali did a lot of things because he was Ali. People would say to him, ‘Hey, be loyal to Belinda . . .’ How can you tell a guy that when he’s the boss, when he’s paying you?”
Years later, others would wonder whether some of Ali’s behavior was connected to brain injury from repeated blows to the head. Ali complained of difficulty sleeping and compensated with frequent naps. He described lacking the motivation to go for long runs. He engaged in risky behavior, letting opponents and sparring partners swing away at him,
even though he had said years earlier that he knew his long-term health and success in boxing depended on his ability to avoid being hit. But Belinda said she never saw any signs of cognitive damage in her husband. “He was automatically stupid and crazy,” she said years later. “He got that DNA-wise.”
Ali knew his philandering was wrong. He knew it hurt his wife. He knew it undermined his public image. But as long as he was enjoying himself, Belinda said, those things didn’t matter. He seemed entirely unable to control his impulses. Years later, Belinda listened to a Muslim sermon on a CD and heard the imam say that when a man made his primary goal the pursuit of fame, he inevitably failed as a man. “I said, yeah, that’s true. Because Ali failed as a man. He was a successful fighter, but he failed as a man. He failed as a father. He failed as a leader, as a role model.”
Belinda tolerated it, for the most part. When they argued, Ali would cry and say he was sorry and say he didn’t love the other women. He would say it was just sex, that it didn’t mean anything. He would say he couldn’t help himself. Among friends, Ali would joke about it: “My wife is married,” he’d say.
But Ali didn’t accept all the blame. Sometimes he would point out that Belinda had no right to complain because she had helped arrange for him to see the other women. Sometimes he would threaten to go public with her complicity if she sought a divorce or told reporters her side of the story. She put up with all of it. “The problem I had was when he started bringing them home,” she said. “One time he asked me to go to the grocery, and I came back because I forgot my wallet, and she’s in my bed. I felt like my whole body was on fire . . . The children were down the hall. He didn’t care. He’s Muhammad Ali. He can do whatever he wants.”
Black women, white women, young women, old women, Hollywood actresses, chamber maids: Ali didn’t discriminate. Everyone close to the fighter knew his proclivities. His friends laughed about it. His entourage members and business associates supported it. Within Ali’s closest circle, a special set of coded signals developed to be used in noisy crowds. The men would cluck their tongues loudly. One cluck meant where are you? Two clucks might mean I’m here or okay, understood. Multiple clucks meant stop whatever you’re doing, this is important, or, more specifically, Belinda has been spotted and Ali needs to ditch the woman he’s with.
