by Jonathan Eig
As the procession moved from his childhood home on Grand Avenue toward downtown, it did not precisely follow the route young Ali had run on his way to school back in the 1950s, but it came close. The hearse moved along Broadway, where Ali had once dreamed of flying, passing Fourth Street, where his bicycle had been stolen and where he’d met his first boxing coach. At Sixth Street, spectators began to chant, “Ali boma ye” — “Ali, kill him” in Lingala — same as the people of Zaire had chanted forty-two years earlier, when Ali fought Foreman. The procession passed the Beecher Terrace apartments, where the teenaged Ali had kissed a pretty girl, fainted, and fallen down the stairs. It passed Central High, where Ali had been granted a diploma despite poor grades because the principal had detected something extraordinary about his student. It passed the former site of the Broadway Roller Rink, where Ali had picked up his first copy of Muhammad Speaks and begun to learn about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. It passed the downtown Muhammad Ali Center, where the boxer’s accomplishments were memorialized in a manner usually reserved for American presidents; and on, finally, to Cave Hill Cemetery, where Ali’s body would be laid to rest.
The burial was a private ceremony, attended only by Ali’s close family. This was followed by a public service at the city’s largest downtown arena, where more than twenty thousand people gathered to hear speeches by religious leaders as well as eulogies from former President Bill Clinton, television broadcaster Bryant Gumbel, actor Billy Crystal, Lonnie Ali, and two of Ali’s children, Maryum and Rasheda. Ali’s former wives, Khalilah and Veronica, were there, as were Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Gene Kilroy, Will Smith, Don King, Bob Arum, Mike Tyson, George Foreman, and Larry Holmes. The service, broadcast live on network television and seen around the world, lasted more than three hours.
“Muhammad fell in love with the masses,” Lonnie Ali said in eulogizing her husband, “and the masses fell in love with him. In the diversity of men and their faiths, Muhammad saw the presence of God.” Even though he was born in a society that treated black people as inferior, she continued, Ali had “two parents that nurtured and encouraged him. He was placed on the path of his dreams by a white cop, and he had teachers who understood his dreams and wanted him to succeed. The Olympic gold medal came, and the world started to take notice. A group of successful businessmen in Louisville, called the Louisville Sponsoring Group, saw his potential and helped him build a runway to launch his career. His timing was impeccable as he burst into the national stage just as television was hungry for a star to change the face of sports. You know, if Muhammad didn’t like the rules, he rewrote them. His religion, his name, his beliefs were his to fashion no matter what the cost.”
Ali’s voice was noticeably absent from the memorial service, but Imam Zaid Shakir did his best to channel him.
He stepped to the lectern and offered a poem:
He floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee
The greatest fighter this world has yet to see . . .
On the heart of every life he touched he left an indelible stamp,
And he will always be known as the People’s Champ.
Long before, Ali had spoken about the meaning of his life.
“God is watching me,” he once said. “God don’t praise me because I beat Joe Frazier . . . He wants to know how do we treat each other, how do we help each other.”
In one of his final interviews, he assessed his own accomplishments: “I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man,” he said. “I had to show that to the world.”
POSTSCRIPT
Five months after Muhammad Ali’s death, a political activist from the 1960s sat in a coffee shop on Chicago’s South Side and told this story:
In the summer of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. had come to Chicago, planning to put the city at the center of his ongoing, nonviolent revolution. He called it the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the main focus was an attack on discriminatory housing. King led marches into all-white neighborhoods, where he faced vicious attacks by mobs. He also organized a rent strike, urging tenants in derelict buildings to put their monthly rents into a special trust fund instead of paying it to their landlords, and vowing that the money would be used for badly needed home repairs.
One day, one of the volunteers in the movement got word that a family participating in the rent strike was being evicted from a home in the Garfield Park neighborhood. The volunteer, a young woman enrolled in law school at the University of Chicago, hurried to the scene. As she arrived, officials from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office were emptying the family’s apartment, cluttering the sidewalk with furniture, clothing, books, and family photos. The day was hot and humid. Hundreds of people lined the street, watching the eviction in progress.
As the young woman stood and stared, helpless, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned around and looked up. It was Ali. Until then, she had seen him only on television. He was wearing a beautiful blue seersucker coat, and he was gorgeous. He removed his coat and asked the young woman to hold it.
Ali was facing draft-dodging charges at the time, but he had not yet been barred from boxing. In fact, he was at his athletic peak: twenty-four years old, too fast to be hit, too strong to be resisted, as perfect a boxer as the world had ever seen.
Although he had spent much of the summer in Chicago, he had not marched with King during the Chicago Freedom Movement nor commented publicly on the protest. How had Ali heard about the eviction? Why was he there? Had he stumbled across it by accident? Had someone called him?
There were no reporters on hand to ask him, and no cameras to capture what happened next.
Without saying a word, Ali walked to where the family’s belongings had been dumped on the sidewalk, picked up a kitchen chair, and carried it back into the apartment. The sheriff’s deputies made no move to stop him. Within seconds, dozens of people followed Ali’s lead. Soon, the apartment was full again.
Ali took back his jacket, got in his car, and drove away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
You’ve got a big responsibility here,” Gene Kilroy told me. “Don’t screw it up.” He repeated it at least a hundred times over four years, in case I forgot. I never did. I certainly could not have written this book without the help and trust of Kilroy and many others who loved Ali. I’d like to begin by thanking Lonnie Ali, Veronica Porche, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, Rahaman Ali, Caroline Sue Ali, Kilroy, Frank Sadlo, Vic and Brenda Bender, Larry Kolb, Bernie Yuman, Ron DiNicola, Howard Bingham, Michael Phenner, Mike Joyce, Elijah Muhammad III, Lowell K. Riley, Abdul Rahman, Louis Farrakhan, David Jones, Tim Shanahan, Keith Winstead, Seth Abraham, and Hank Schwartz.
I’d also like to thank the friends and writers who helped me in so many ways: Ron Jackson, Charlie Newton, Heidi Trilling, Richard Babcock, Robert Kurson, Joseph Epstein, Bryan Gruley, Kevin Helliker, Robert Kazel, Bob Spitz, David Garrow, Steve Hannah, Jamie Hannah, Dan Cattau, Tony Petrucci, Patrick Harris, Don Terry, Myron and Karen Uhlberg, T. J. Stiles, Richard Milstein, Rabbi Michael Siegel, Linda Ginzel, Boaz Keysar, Jeremy Gershfeld, Elizabeth Miller-Gershfeld, Stephen Fried, Joel Berg, Marshall Kaplan, Jeff Pearlman, Jeff Ruby, Tim Anderson, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, Stephanie Jenkins, Jeremy Schaap, Willie Weinbaum, Douglas Alden, Ashley Logan, Steve Reiss, Caspar Gonzalez, Craig Sieben, Dan Shine, Tony Fitzpatrick, Solomon Lieberman, Jim Sigmon, Richard Cahan, Ethan Michaeli, Dan Cattau, Jay Lazar, Andy Kalish, Mike Williams, Louis Sahadi, Joe Favorito, Stefan Fatsis, Baron Wolman, A. J. Baime, Robin Monsky, Dan Kay, Audrey Wells, Stacey Rubin Silver, Ted Fishman, Kevin Merida, Lisa Pollak, Kwame Brathwaite, Richard Sandomir, Pat Byrnes, Mark Caro, James Finn Garner, Jim Powers, Lou Carlozo, Michael Hassan, Rich Kaletsky, Marci Bailey, Amy Merrick, and Tom Tsatas.
Research help came from Lori Azim (who also did a knockout job as a fact-checker), Shirley Harmon, Tom Owen, Howard Breckenridge, Mark Plotkin, Britt Vogel, Maranda Bodas, Jack Cassidy, Shane Zimmer, Jake Milner, Eric Houghton, Madeline Lee, J. R. Reed, Bethel Habte, Mere
dith Wilson, Mary Hinds, Alison Martin, Liz Peterson, Jeff Noble, Steven Porter, Olivia Angeloff, Gabriella Moran, Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory, Michelle Martinelli, and Ally Pruitt.
For their expert fact-checking, thanks to Mike Silver, Bob Canobbio, and Lee Groves. Thanks to Robert Becker and Congressman Mike Quigley for helping to expedite some of my Freedom of Information Act requests. Thanks to Canobbio and CompuBox, Inc., for developing amazing new statistics on Ali’s career. Thanks to Visar Berisha and Julie Liss for working with me to study the effect of boxing on Ali’s speech rate. Thanks to Jimmy Walker and everyone at Celebrity Fight Night. Thanks to David Zindel and Graymalkin Media for permission to quote the Joe Frazier–Muhammad Ali dialogue from The Greatest: My Own Story. Thanks to Dr. Stanley Fahn for helping me understand Ali’s health. Thanks to Ikenna Ezeh and everyone at ABG. Thanks to Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, Leon Muhammad, and Harlan Werner. Thanks to the many writers and photographers who shared their knowledge of Ali and in some cases shared their research materials, including David Remnick, George Sullivan, Karl Evanzz, Andy Quinn, Tom Junod, J. Michael Lennon, Michael Long, Stephen Brunt, Davis Miller, David Maraniss, Gordon Marino, Art Shay, David Turnley, Peter Angelo Simon, Michael Gaffney, Maureen Smith, Thomas Hauser, Mark Kram Jr., Michael Ezra, Dave Kindred, Robert Lipsyte, Neil Leifer, Edwin Pope, John Schulian, Richard Hoffer, Stan Hochman, Jerry Izenberg, Richard Feldstein, Ed Feldstein, Randy Roberts, and Johnny Smith.
Thanks to my friend and agent, David Black, and to everyone at Black, Inc., and especially Sarah Smith, Susan Raihofer, and Jennifer Herrera. Thanks to Lucy Stille, my agent at APA. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, thanks to my brilliant editor Susan Canavan and her team, including Jenny Xu, Megan Wilson, and Hannah Harlow. For her wonderful copyediting work, thanks to Margaret Hogan.
Thanks to my family for being in my corner: Phyllis Eig, David Eig, Matt Eig, Lewis Eig, Judy Eig, Penny Eig, Jake Eig, Ben Eig, Hayden Eig, Martin Karns, Don Tescher, SuAnn Tescher, Gail Tescher, Jonathan Tescher, and Leslie Silverman. Thanks and love to my kids: Jeffery Schams, Lillian Eig, and Lola Eig. This book is dedicated to Lola, who was five years old when she wrote a letter to Muhammad Ali. It read, “Dear Muhammad, Jonathan really loves you. Do you love him?” That letter earned us a phone call from Lonnie Ali. It earned Lola a birthday greeting from Lonnie and Muhammad. And it earned us both an invitation to visit Lonnie and Muhammad at their home in Phoenix.
Finally, and most of all, thanks to my amazing wife, Jennifer Tescher — the greatest of allllll tiiiiiimes!
NOTES
This book is the product of more than six hundred interviews with more than two hundred individuals. I conducted all the interviews myself, either on the phone or in person.
The notes that follow provide a detailed list of sources, including thousands of pages of FBI documents, hundreds of books, and thousands of newspaper and magazine stories. A few sources may require additional explanation.
In describing fight scenes, I relied heavily on YouTube videos. I have opted not to list the complete URLs for each of those videos. Most boxing statistics and dates for fights come from www.boxrec.com.
I was very fortunate to come along after so many brilliant writers had already covered Ali. Their names appear scattered through the book and in the following notes. Some of them met with me or took my calls and answered my questions. Those include Jerry Izenberg, Thomas Hauser, David Remnick, Edwin Pope, Stan Hochman, Robert Lipsyte, J. Michael Lennon, Stephen Brunt, Dave Kindred, Johnny Smith, Karl Evanzz, and David Garrow. Others — including Richard Durham, Tom Wolfe, Manning Marable, and Nick Thimmesch — left archives for me to explore. One archive worthy of particular mention is that of Sports Illustrated writer Jack Olsen, who spent weeks with Ali and had his tape recorder running for long and glorious hours. Those recordings, held now by the University of Oregon, were like time-travel machines, getting me as close as I could ever hope to being in the same room with young Cassius Clay, his mother, his father, and many others. Some of them had never been heard since Olsen listened to them.
Years from now, when another Ali biographer comes along and listens to the recordings of my interviews with Ferdie Pacheco, Gene Kilroy, Rahaman Ali, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, Don King, Veronica Porche, George Foreman, and many others, I hope they feel some of the same thrill that I did in listening to Jack Olsen’s tapes.
I was also fortunate to gain access to FBI and Justice Department files on Ali, many of which had never previously been seen. For this I am thankful to the archivists and Freedom of Information officials who handled my requests, and especially to Robert Becker in U.S. Congressman Mike Quigley’s office for helping to expedite my FOIA requests.
In describing Ali’s relationship with the Louisville Sponsoring Group, I relied heavily on interviews with the group’s lawyer, Gordon Davidson, as well as memos, letters, and business records stored at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville. Details on the murder conviction of Ali’s grandfather — never previously reported and almost certainly unknown to Ali — come from newspaper clippings and trial transcripts held at the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Lonnie Ali helped me track down the marriage certificate for Cassius and Odessa Clay, which strongly suggests that Odessa was already pregnant at the time of her marriage — another fact that has never been previously reported and was likely unknown to Ali.
Finally, this book contains two completely new bodies of research. At my request, CompuBox, Inc., researchers watched every one of Ali’s recorded fights and counted the punches. As a result, now, for the first time, we can describe with a high degree of accuracy how many times Ali was hit and how many times he hit opponents, round by round, fight by fight, and over the long arc of his career. I also asked speech scientists at Arizona State University to review Ali’s television appearances and evaluate changes in his speech rate. The study, led by Visar Berisha and Julie Liss, sheds important new light on how Ali’s boxing affected his cognitive skills.
PREFACE: MIAMI 1964
A long, black Cadillac: “Clay’s Act Plays Liston’s Camp and Sonny Is a Kindly Critic,” New York Times, February 20, 1964.
custom-made denim jacket: BBC News footage, n.d., www.youtube.com.
“I’m the biggest thing in history!”: Ibid.
Men in shorts and girls in tight pants: “Clay’s Act Plays Liston’s Camp.”
“Float like a butterfly”: Ibid.
“I’m pretty and move as fast as lightning”: John Cottrell, Muhammad Ali, Who Once Was Cassius Clay (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967), 127.
“There’s got to be good guys”: Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston (New York: Little, Brown, 2000), 201.
He swats away the outstretched hands: BBC News footage, n.d., www.youtube.com. “is just a little kid”: “Clay’s Act Plays Liston’s Camp.”
In a cramped hotel room: “Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) HQ File,” FBI memo, February 5, 1964, Federal Bureau of Investigation, https://vault.fbi.gov/malcolm-little-malcolm-x (hereafter FBI Vault), section 10.
“Being an old farm boy myself”: “Malcolm X Scores U.S. and Kennedy,” New York Times, December 2, 1963.
It’s 2 in the morning: Malcolm X FBI file, February 5, 1964, section 10.
According to an FBI informant: Malcolm X FBI file, January 21, 1964, section 9.
“You ain’t got a chance”: BBC film footage, n.d., www.youtube.com.
“I am the GREATEST!”: Murray Kempton, “The Champ and the Chump: The Meaning of Liston-Clay I,” New Republic, March 7, 1964, http://thestacks.deadspin.com/the-champ-and-the-chump-the-meaning-of-clay-liston-i-1440585986.
“See, the different parts of the brain”: William Nack, My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money and the Sporting Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 123.
“He fools them”: George Plimpton, “Author Notebook: Cassius Clay and Malcolm X,” in George Kimball and John Schulian, eds., At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (New York: Library of America, 2012), 190.
&
nbsp; #x201C;That’s the only time”: David Remnick, King of the World (New York: Random House, 1998), xii.
“the very spirit of the 20th Century”: Norman Mailer, King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the Fight of the Century (New York: Signet, 1971), 11.
200,000 blows: At the request of the author, CompuBox, Inc., compiled punch-by-punch statistics from Muhammad Ali’s fights. Complete footage was available for 47 of Ali’s 61 professional bouts. The CompuBox review of those 47 fights showed that Ali absorbed 14.8 punches per round (slightly below the heavyweight average of 15.2 per round) over the course of his professional career. The estimate of 200,000 lifetime blows is based not only on the CompuBox data but also on author’s interviews with managers, trainers, sparring partners, and opponents. Ali boxed 548 rounds as a professional, about 260 rounds as an amateur, an estimated 12,000 rounds of sparring as part of his training regimen, and at least 500 rounds of exhibitions. Ali probably took fewer than 14.8 shots per round as an amateur and in exhibitions, but he probably absorbed more than 14.8 shots per round during sparring sessions. Given those assumptions, the following calculation is likely a conservative one: 13,308 rounds multiplied by 14.8 punches per round equals 196,958 punches.
1. CASSIUS MARCELLUS CLAY
convicted murderer: “Shot through the Heart,” Louisville Courier-Journal, November 5, 1900; trial transcript, November 12, 1900, Commonwealth v. Herman Clay, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort.
a drinker, a bar fighter: Rahaman Ali, Khalilah Camacho-Ali (formerly Belinda Ali), Gordon Davidson, and Coretta Bather, interviews by author, November 10, 2014; March 28, 2016; March 18, 2014; March 28, 2014.
slashed his eldest son: Jack Olsen, Black Is Best: The Riddle of Cassius Clay (New York: Dell, 1967), 49.
tall, strong, and handsome: John Henry Clay photo, courtesy of Keith Winstead, cousin of Muhammad Ali.
