Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

by Thomas Hauser

  LOU DIBELLA: One night, several years ago, I took my wife to dinner in Manhattan. As we were walking to the restaurant, I saw something close to a mob on the sidewalk. It was a crowd of people around Muhammad Ali, who was signing autographs. Anyway, my wife and I had dinner. And when we came out of the restaurant, Ali was still there, playing with kids, posing for pictures, signing for everyone who came up to him. I think about that now, when I look at today’s athletes, who in the larger scheme of things mean absolutely nothing, who make millions of dollars, who won’t take five seconds to give a kid an autograph. And I compare today’s so-called “superstars” with Ali; a man in his fifties with Parkinson’s syndrome, standing on the street that night, embracing every person he met.

  MUHAMMAD ALI: Every time I give an autograph, the person I give it to goes off happy and smiling and keeps my autograph forever. And to me, it’s just a little thing, no more than a couple of seconds.

  DR. DENNIS COPE [ONE OF ALI’S PERSONAL PHYSICIANS]: In the end, what impresses me most about Muhammad is his extraordinarily charitable spirit. He’s an incredibly giving man and always seems able to marshal the resources to help whoever might be around him. I remember one time when he was at the UCLA Medical Center. There was a patient in the hospital, an elderly man who was near death, who was a big fan of his. I asked Muhammad if he would go down to see him, and Muhammad said yes. We went down to this other patient’s room, but he was off the floor for a procedure. I said to Muhammad, “Well, that’s too bad; we weren’t able to see him.” And Muhammad said, “No, let’s wait for him.” We waited for half an hour, and the man still hadn’t come back, so Muhammad said, “Let’s go look for him.” Finally, we found him. Muhammad talked with him for a while and then went back to the room with him and they talked some more. This man’s spirits were so lifted by meeting Muhammad. I can’t tell you how happy it made him. He talked about it constantly until he died. I’ve been astounded so many times like that by Muhammad’s capacity to give. I’ve never seen him disappoint anybody who wanted a moment of his time.

  LONNIE ALI: It’s gratifying for Muhammad to see the way people respond to him. And what’s even more gratifying is the way young people who weren’t even born when Muhammad was fighting are drawn to him. These are five and six-year-old children, who come up to Muhammad and hug him. It’s truly a blessing from God that the love Muhammad has for people and the love people have for him keeps growing from generation to generation, and that every new generation of children seems to know who Muhammad is.

  BETTY SHABAZZ: One of the things that has been constant through Muhammad Ali’s life is that he loves children. His children, other people’s children. I don’t think that Muhammad Ali could have too many children.

  MARYUM ALI: Everybody knows what my father was like when he was young; the boxing, the controversies, I am the greatest. But they don’t understand what he’s doing now and how deeply he believes in Islam. As soon as he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, he began making plans to propagate Islam when he retired. No one took him seriously then. People said, “Well, he won’t really do anything like that.” But he has. He meant it then and he’s doing it now.

  MUHAMMAD ALI: If I could go back in time, I’d like to be there the day Muhammad received the first revelation from God and went home to tell his wife about it. And I’d like to be there with Moses the day he opened up the Red Sea; and with Jesus on the day of the crucifixion to see if it was really him on the cross, because Muslims believe it was someone else.

  ROGER WILKINS: I was the coordinator of Nelson Mandela’s trip through the United States in 1990, and I was extraordinarily moved by the sustained love and joy that greeted him from one end of the country to the other. But after a while, it began to wear him down. Every big-shot politician and celebrity wanted a piece of him. They were all grabbing and grasping. Mandela went through it with incredible grace, but I will tell you, he was unimpressed by the behavior of many of the politicians and so-called superstars that he came in contact with. Then we got to Los Angeles, which is star-studded to begin with, and they turned out every star you can imagine. Mandela was more than tired by then; he was exhausted. We were walking together at yet another fundraising event. Mandela was leaning on me. And all of a sudden, I saw his face light up as I’d never seen it light up before. He looked past me with a radiant smile. I felt his entire body straighten up and come to life. Almost reverentially he whispered, “Champ.” And, of course, walking toward us was Muhammad Ali.

  ALEX HALEY [AUTHOR OF ROOTS AND MALCOLM X’S COLLABORATOR ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X]: I see Muhammad Ali today very much as a spiritual leader. You know, here’s a man who can go into the Islamic world, which is huge beyond our imagination, and you need troops to clear the way for him. I don’t know if there’s anybody on earth who could go to those countries and draw the crowds that Muhammad Ali can draw. To tell you the truth, and I don’t mean to be irreverent, I doubt the Pope could draw crowds as large as Muhammad Ali. I think he’s probably the single most powerful religious figure in this country, and maybe in the world, today.

  MUHAMMAD ALI: If you love God, you can’t separate out and love only some of His children. To be against people because they’re Muslim is wrong. To be against people because they’re Christian or Jewish is wrong. To be against people because they’re black or white or yellow or brown is wrong. Anyone who believes in One God should also believe that all people are part of one family. People are people. God created us all.

  RAMSEY CLARK: To me, Muhammad Ali is a totally spiritual person. It doesn’t have to do with the Christian faith in which he was raised, and it doesn’t have to do with the Islamic faith to which he converted; both great religions. It has to do with his love for life, his faith in the human spirit, and his belief in the equality of all people. I see Ali as a human being whose sense of purpose in life is to help others. He must lay awake at night, wondering what he can do to help people, because wherever people are in need, his priorities are there. He sees children who are right next to him, but children who are starving in Africa and threatened by bombing in Iraq are also within the scope of his imagination. He wants to help everyone and he travels at great personal burden and financial expense to be wherever he’s needed. I say, God bless him. He makes an enormous difference.

  MUHAMMAD ALI: Life is short; we get old so fast. It doesn’t make sense to waste time on hating.

  FERDIE PACHECO: I’m sure that God looks down on Ali from time to time, shakes his head in wonderment, and smiles.

  EARNIE SHAVERS: And on the eighth day, God created Ali.

  BILL CLINTON: Muhammad Ali taught us all that, whatever color you are, whatever religion you are, you can be proud of who you are.

  JERRY IZENBERG: This is a man who spent his whole life telling the world, “I Am The Greatest!” And whenever you got exasperated with him and said, “Shut up, because you’re not,” he’d do something to prove that he was.

  RALPH BOSTON: There are lots of good athletes and a few great athletes. But there’s only one Ali.

  DAVE KINDRED: Rainbows are born of thunderstorms. Muhammad Ali is both.

  JERRY IZENBERG: People don’t really think of Ali as being black anymore. He’s one of a kind; he’s Muhammad Ali. That’s the wonderful ultimate irony; that this man who was once viewed as a dangerous militant black-nationalist revolutionary should turn out to be without color in the eyes of America.

  RALPH BOSTON: If a young boy were to ask me today, “Why should I care about Muhammad Ali?” I’d tell him, “Because Ali cares about you.” That might be hard for some people to understand, but that’s the way Ali is. He cares about every single person on this planet.

  JOHN CARLOS: Muhammad Ali is love.

  LEGACY

  THE LOST LEGACY OF MUHAMMAD ALI

  2004

  In 1960, shortly after the Rome Olympics, a Soviet journalist asked Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. how it felt to win a gold medal for his country when there were restaurants in the Un
ited States that he was forbidden to eat in. Clay’s response was short and sweet: “Tell your readers we got qualified people working on that problem. To me, the USA is the best country in the world, including yours.”

  Seven years later, that same young man was one of the most vilified personages in America.

  People today understand that Muhammad Ali defied the United States government and alienated mainstream America because he stood up for his principles. But they don’t know what those principles were. Generally, they are aware that, after beating Sonny Liston to capture the heavyweight championship in 1964, Clay announced that he had accepted the teachings of a religion known as the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Thereafter, he refused induction into the United States Army during the height of the war in Vietnam. But to younger generations, Ali today is famous primarily for being famous. There has been a deliberate distortion of what he once believed, said, and stood for. History is being rewritten to serve political, social, and economic ends.

  Thus, it’s important to revisit the Muhammad Ali who, in the words of author Dave Kindred, was “as near to living flame as a man can get.”

  In the early 1960s when Ali first entered the public consciousness, sports was considered one of the few areas where black Americans could compete on equal footing with whites. But in reality, sports reflected the old order. Black athletes could become stars, but only within guidelines dictated by the establishment. And away from the playing fields, as Ali himself once noted, “Many colored people thought it was better to be white.” Black Americans were scorned, demeaned, and denied even self-love.

  In 1961, while in Florida training for a fight, Cassius Clay met a man named Sam Saxon. Saxon was one of a small group of adherents (known to the media as “Black Muslims”) who attended Nation of Islam meetings at a Miami temple and followed the black separatist teachings of a self-proclaimed “messenger” named Elijah Muhammad. Clay accepted Saxon’s invitation to attend a Nation of Islam service, and thereafter was indoctrinated with the tenets of the religion.

  The Nation of Islam taught that white people were devils who had been genetically created by an evil scientist with a big head named Mr. Yacub. It maintained that there was a wheel-shaped Mother of Planes one-half mile wide manned by black men in the sky, and that, on Allah’s chosen day of retribution, fifteen hundred planes from the Mother of Planes would drop deadly explosives, destroying all but the righteous on earth. Neither of these views are part of traditional Islamic thought or find justification in the Qur’an. Moreover, while the concepts of Heaven and Hell are central to traditional Islamic doctrine, the Nation of Islam rejected both.

  Herbert Muhammad, one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons, later explained and sought to defend his father’s teachings as follows:

  “Black people knew their life was bad. They wanted something to make it better. And my father’s message was to gain dignity and self-respect and make black people the master of their own needs. As long as other people controlled what we needed, then these people would be able to control us. So my father sought to make black people self-reliant and take them away from gambling, alcohol, prostitution, and drugs. He taught us that the answer to what black people need is in God and in ourselves. And you have to ask what it was that enabled my father to get a man or woman off drugs when right now the whole government can’t do it. You have to ask what it was that could bring a man out of prison, and the next month have that man be clean-shaven, wearing clean clothes, completely clean. You see, my father saw that black people had a deep inferiority complex. He saw that white people had a great superiority complex. And by the whites being in an upper-hand position, blacks would never come up unless someone gave them a philosophy that they were better than whites.”

  From 1964 through his conversion to orthodox Islam in 1975, Muhammad Ali was the Nation of Islam’s most visible and vocal spokesman in America. Nation of Islam teachings were at the core of who he was at that time in his life. Among the positions Ali preached were:

  On integration: “We who follow the teachings of Elijah Muhammad don’t want to forced-integrate. Integration is wrong. We don’t want to live with the white man; that’s all.”

  On intermarriage: “No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.”

  On the need for a separate black homeland: “Why don’t we get out and build our own nation? White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing. Why not let us go and build ourselves a nation? We want a country. We’re forty million people, but we’ll never be free until we own our own land.”

  On brotherhood: “We’re not all brothers. You can say we’re brothers, but we’re not.”

  Ali was black and proud of it at a time when many black Americans were running from their color. “He lived a lot of lives for a lot of people,” said social activist Dick Gregory. “And he was able to tell white folks for us to go to hell.”

  For more than a decade, Ali was the gloved fist of John Carlos and Tommie Smith every day of the year. The establishment media, and sportswriters in particular, came down hard on him. Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times labeled Ali the “white man’s burden.” Jimmy Cannon of the New York Journal American called his ties to the Nation of Islam “the dirtiest in American sports since the Nazis were shilling for Max Schmeling as representative of their vile theories of blood.”

  A lot of white liberals and black Americans also took issue with Ali. “I never went along with the pronouncements of Elijah Muhammad that the white man was the devil and that blacks should be striving for separate development; a sort of American apartheid,” said Arthur Ashe. “That never made sense to me. It was a racist ideology, and I didn’t like it.”

  Joe Louis added his voice to those opposing Ali and opined, “I’m against Black Muslims. I’ve always believed that every man is my brother. Clay will earn the public’s hatred because of his connections with the Black Muslims. The things they preach are just the opposite of what we believe.”

  Former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson concurred with Louis, declaring, “I’ve been told that Clay has every right to follow any religion he chooses, and I agree. But by the same token, I have every right to call the Black Muslims a menace to the United States and a menace to the Negro race. I do not believe God put us here to hate one another. I believe the preaching of segregation, hatred, rebellion, and violence is wrong. Cassius Clay is disgracing himself and the Negro race.”

  Still, whether or not one liked what Ali represented, it was clear that his demand for full entitlement for all black people was on the cutting edge of an era. And to many, he was the ultimate symbol of black pride and black resistance to an unjust social order. In that vein, Jeremiah Shabazz, who was one of Ali’s first teachers within the Nation of Islam, recalled, “When Elijah Muhammad spoke, his words were confined to whatever city he had spoken in. But Ali was a sports hero and people wanted to hear what he had to say, so his visibility and prominence were of great benefit. His voice carried throughout the world.”

  Outside the ring, Ali was never violent. His threat to the status quo was one of ideas, which is ironic because he himself was never a “thinker.” But beneath it all, there was fear within the establishment that the ideas Ali preached could be converted to rebellion in the streets. Indeed, one can make the case that Ali and the Nation of Islam frightened the powers that be in America into embracing the agenda of moderate civil rights leaders as a way of muting the cries of those who wanted more.

  Arthur Ashe later recalled, “I can tell you that Ali was very definitely, sometimes unspokenly, admired by a lot of the leaders of the civil rights movement, who were sometimes even a little bit jealous of the following he had and the efficacy of what he did. There were a lot of people in the movement who wished that they held that sort of sway over African-Americans but did not.”

  “Muhammad was
probably the first black man in America to successfully break with the white establishment and survive,” posited civil rights pioneer Andrew Young.

  And before Cassius Clay ever changed his name, Malcolm X maintained, “Clay will mean more to his people than Jackie Robinson, because Robinson is the white man’s hero but Cassius is the black man’s hero.”

  “It’s very difficult to imagine being young and black in the sixties and not gravitating toward Ali,” Bryant Gumbel later recalled. “He was a guy who was supremely talented, enormously confident, and seemed to think less of what the establishment thought of him than about the image he saw when he looked in the mirror. And to people who were young and black and interested in tweaking the establishment, and in some cases shoving it up the tail of the establishment, you had to identify with somebody like that. The fact that he won all the time made it even better. You know, for all our passions of those years, we didn’t have a lot of victories. More often than not, we were on the losing side, so the fact that Ali won was gravy. He was a heroic figure, plain and simple. In every sense of the word, he was heroic.”