Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

by Thomas Hauser

  The civil rights movement and Ali as a fighter both peaked in the mid-1960s. Then the war in Vietnam intervened.

  In 1964, Ali had been classified 1-Y (not qualified for military service) as a result of scoring poorly on a Selective Service mental aptitude examination. Then, in early 1966, with the war expanding and manpower needs growing, the test score required for induction into the armed forces was lowered, leaving him eligible for the draft. Ali requested a deferment, but on February 17, 1966, his request was denied and he was reclassified 1-A (available for the draft). Several hours later, a frustrated Ali blurted out to reporters, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

  The following day, Ali’s outburst was front-page news across the country, and the sporting press raged against him. Red Smith of the New York Times harangued, “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.” Jimmy Cannon continued the assault, proclaiming, “Clay is part of the Beatle movement. He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young.”

  Ali wasn’t a political thinker. His initial concern over being drafted wasn’t religious or political. It was that of a twenty-four-year-old who thought he had put the draft behind him and then learned that he was in danger of having his life turned upside down.

  “Muhammad never studied day-to-day current events like the thousands of white kids who opposed the war,” Jeremiah Shabazz later acknowledged. “But even though he was unsophisticated in his thinking, he knew it was a senseless unjust war. And of course, in addition to that, Muslims following the Honorable Elijah Muhammad decided long ago that we weren’t going to fight the white man’s wars. If he starts them, he can fight them.”

  On April 28, 1967, citing his religious beliefs, Ali refused induction into the United States Army. “Clay seems to have gone past the borders of faith,” Milton Gross wrote in the New York Post. “He has reached the boundaries of fanaticism.”

  Less than eight weeks later, on June 20th, Ali was convicted of refusing induction into the armed forces and sentenced to five years in prison. He was stripped of his title and precluded by state athletic commissions throughout the country from fighting. His “exile” from boxing lasted for more than three years.

  Ali’s refusal to accept induction was part and parcel of a schism within the civil rights movement.

  “The more conservative black leadership was troubled by his opposition to the war,” Julian Bond later recalled. “The civil rights movement at that time was split. There was one group of people who said, ‘Let’s not have any opinion about the war because this will alienate us from the powers that be, from President Johnson and successor presidents.’ And there was another group that said, ‘Listen, this war is wrong. It’s killing black people disproportionately; it’s draining resources that could be applied to the war on poverty; it’s wrong in every respect.’ So people in the first group were horrified by Ali. They thought he was a dunce manipulated by the Nation of Islam. And those in the second group felt entirely differently about him. Still,” Bond continued, “It’s hard to imagine that a sports figure could have so much political influence on so many people. When a figure as heroic and beloved as Muhammad Ali stood up and said, ‘No, I won’t go,’ it reverberated through the whole society. People who had never thought about the war before began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.”

  Andrew Young had similar memories in recalling the reaction of his own mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., to Ali’s decision.

  “Martin made his most publicized speech against the war in Vietnam at Riverside Church [in New York] on April 4, 1967; exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated,” Young remembered. “It was soon after that speech that Muhammad refused to take the step forward, and I know Martin was very proud of him.”

  However, others within the black community took a lesser view of Ali’s conduct. “He’s hurting the morale of a lot of young Negro soldiers over in Vietnam,” said Jackie Robinson. “And the tragedy to me is, Cassius has made millions of dollars off of the American public, and now he’s not willing to show his appreciation to a country that’s giving him a fantastic opportunity.” Joe Louis was in accord with his baseball counterpart, saying, “Anybody in America who don’t want to fight for this country; I think it’s very bad, especially a guy who has made a lot of money in this country. I was champion at the time World War Two started; and when my time came up, I had to go. I think that he should fight for his country.”

  More significantly, though, Vietnam deflected attention from Ali’s racial views and put him in a context where many whites and white opinion-makers could identify with him. There had been an ugly mood around Ali, starting with the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965. Thereafter, Ali seemed to take on a bit of the persona, not just the ideology, of the Nation of Islam. But when the spotlight turned from Ali’s acceptance of an ideology that sanctioned hate to his refusal to accept induction into the United States Army, he began to bond with the white liberal community which at the time was quite strong.

  Thus it was that Ali was martyred and lived to talk about it. Ultimately, he returned to boxing. After wins against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena, he lost a historic fifteen-round decision to Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. Then his conviction for refusing induction into the United States Army was reversed by the United States Supreme Court on a procedural technicality. After that, Ali reeled off ten more victories but suffered a broken jaw in a twelve-round loss to Ken Norton. That made him an “underdog” in the eyes of America. People who had once bristled at his words and conduct began to feel sorry for him.

  Ali earned a measure of revenge against Frazier and Norton with victories in hard-fought rematches. Then, on October 30, 1974, he dethroned George Foreman to recapture the heavyweight championship of the world. But more importantly, by that time, America had turned against the war in Vietnam. It was clear that Ali had sacrificed enormously for his beliefs. And whether or not people liked the racial component of Ali’s views, there was respect for the fact that he had stood by them.

  On December 10, 1974, Ali was invited to the White House by President Gerald Ford. It was an occasion that would have been unthinkable several years earlier and marked a turning point in the country’s embrace of Ali.

  Then, on February 25, 1975, Elijah Muhammad died.

  “After Elijah died,” Ali said later, “his son Wallace took over as leader. “That didn’t surprise us, because we’d been told Wallace would come after his father. But what surprised some people was, Wallace changed the direction of the Nation. He’d learned from his studies that his father wasn’t teaching true Islam, and Wallace taught us the true meaning of the Qur’an.”

  Elijah Muhammad’s death marked a seismic shift for the Nation of Islam and foreshadowed a significant change in Ali’s public pronouncements on race. In the past, the public and private Ali had seemed almost at war with one another over whether white people were truly evil. Now Ali was able to say openly, “I don’t hate whites. That was history, but it’s coming to an end.”

  Some of Elijah Muhammad’s adherents refused to accept the teachings of his son, Wallace. Ministers like Jeremiah Shabazz and Louis Farrakhan maintained that Elijah had been a prophet and continued to preach what he had taught them. Meanwhile, Ali’s religious views were evolving and he later acknowledged, “When I was young, I followed a teaching that disrespected other people and said that white people were devils. I was wrong. Color doesn’t make a man a
devil. It’s the heart and soul and mind that count. What’s on the outside is only decoration. Hating someone because of his color is wrong. It’s wrong both ways; it don’t matter which color does the hating. All people, all colors, got to work to get along.”

  Ali is now a living embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr’s message that all people are deserving of love. As Jerry Izenberg, one of America’s foremost sports journalists, observed, “Ironically, after all he went through, the affection for Ali is largely colorblind. Late in his career, he developed a quality that only a few people have. He reached a point where, when people looked at him, they didn’t see black or white. They saw Ali. For a long time, that mystified him. He expected black people to love him and crowd around him, but then he realized white people loved him too; and that made him very happy.”

  Ali’s love affair with America and the world reached its zenith in 1996. Fifteen years earlier, his public profile had dropped after his retirement from boxing. Thereafter, if Ali appeared at an event, those in attendance were excited but he wasn’t on the national radar screen.

  Then Ali was chosen to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta. It was a glorious moment. More than one billion people around the world watched on television and were united by love and caring for one man. But there’s a school of thought that the 1996 Olympics carried negatives as well, for it was in Atlanta that corporate America “rediscovered” Ali. Since then, there has been a determined effort to rewrite history. In order to take advantage of Ali’s economic potential, it has been deemed desirable to “sanitize” him. And as a result, all of the “rough edges” are being filed away from Ali’s life story.

  “Commercialization is a natural process in this country,” says Jerry Izenberg. “But the Ali I fell in love with wasn’t for sale. He fought the good fight in and out of the ring, and that was payment enough for him. He wasn’t looking to get paid in dollars, and the true worth of the stands he made wasn’t commercial. Then corporate America latched onto Ali at the Olympics,” Izenberg continues, “and he became a gravy train for everyone who wants to make a movie or sell something to the public. But the public gains nothing when Ali is commercialized and marketed the way he is today.”

  No event crystallized the commercialization of Ali more clearly than his appearance at the New York Stock Exchange on December 31, 1999. That was an important day. By most reckonings, it marked the end of a millennium. The Ali who won hearts in the 1960s could have been expected to celebrate the occasion at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to draw attention to the plight of the disadvantaged. Many hoped to see Ali spend December 31, 1999, in a spiritual setting. Instead, the man who decades earlier was a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the globe and who refused to become a symbol for the United States Army became a symbol for the New York Stock Exchange.

  “If it [the stock market] goes up, then you will have been blessed by my presence,” Ali told the assembled financial elite. “If it goes down, I had nothing to do with it.” As the clock struck midnight, Ali was in Washington, D.C., dining on beluga caviar, lobster, and foie gras. That saddened a lot of people. Ali makes his own decisions, but those decisions are made based on how information is presented to him. One can be forgiven for thinking that, had the options been explained differently to him, he would have chosen to serve as a different symbol that day.

  The commercialization of Ali is also typified by the 2001 feature film that bore his name. The movie Ali represented a unique opportunity to depict its subject for generations, now and in the future, that didn’t experience his magic. It cost the staggering sum of $105,000,000 to make and was backed by a multinational promotional campaign that cost tens of millions of dollars. But instead of being faithful to its subject, Ali rewrote history.

  Ali featured countless factual inaccuracies for “dramatic purposes,” as though Ali’s life to date hasn’t been dramatic enough. The screenplay was disjointed, and the film suffered from the hard reality that no one but Ali can play Ali. But the biggest problem with the movie was that it sanitized Ali and turned him into a virtual Disney character.

  “I hated that film,” says director Spike Lee. “It wasn’t Ali.”

  “The movie was appalling,” adds Robert Lipsyte, who for years covered Ali as a New York Times reporter. “They got the plastic covering on Elijah Muhammad’s living-room furniture right, but that’s about all.”

  “Will Smith playing Ali was an impersonation,” adds Jerry Izenberg, “not a performance.”

  Also, in an effort to remove all of the warts from Ali’s character, Ali the movie painted a portrait of its subject—and in the process, of America—that was flat-out wrong. Some of this sanitization, such as reducing Ali’s profligate womanizing to a single meaningful relationship, is understandable. Ali’s penchant for the opposite sex, while at odds with his public religious pronouncements, was not at the core of his public persona. But other omissions were far more damaging to the historical record and integrity of the film.

  For example, Ali’s cruelty toward Joe Frazier was completely ignored. In real life, Ali played the race card against Frazier in a particularly mean-spirited way. For the entertainment of white America, he labeled Joe as ugly and dumb. And at the same time, speaking to black America, he branded Frazier an Uncle Tom, turning him into an object of derision and scorn within the black community. The latter insult was particularly galling. Joe Frazier is a lot of things, not all of them good. But he’s not an Uncle Tom. Yet to this day, there are people who think of him as a less-than-proud black man because of Ali’s diatribes more than three decades ago.

  “One of the many paradoxes about Ali,” says historian Randy Roberts, “is that he embraced an ideology that disparaged white people; yet he was never cruel to white people, only blacks. Except for occasional humorous barbs, Ali’s white opponents were treated with dignity and respect. But things got ugly with Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell, and Joe Frazier. And sure; Patterson and Terrell might have asked for it because of things they said. But Joe was innocent. And to deny the cruelty of what Ali did to Joe Frazier is to continue to be cruel to Joe.”

  In truth, it takes a certain amount of cruelty to be a great fighter. Let’s not forget; Ali beat people up and inflicted brain damage on them as his livelihood and way of life for years. And the time when he was at his peak as a fighter coincided with the time when he was most openly angry at the circumstances he found.

  Thus, the biggest problem with the film was not its portrayal of Ali’s conduct but its misrepresentation of his thoughts. In an effort to create a simple conflict between good and evil (with Ali being good), the movie ignored the true nature of the Nation of Islam. Watching the film, the audience was left with the impression that Nation of Islam doctrine is Islam as practiced by more than one billion people around the world today. Ali depicted only that portion of Nation of Islam teachings that highlighted black pride, black self-awareness, and self-love.

  Moreover, in promoting the view that America turned against Ali in the 1960s because he was a “Muslim”—as opposed to a member of the Nation of Islam—the makers of Ali fed into the dangerous view that America is “anti-Islam.” The truth is, there were people who assailed Ali because they thought he was unpatriotic. There were people who assailed Ali because he was spouting a racist ideology or because they thought he was an “uppity” black man who didn’t know his place. But Americans did not assail Ali because he was a Muslim. Other public figures such as Lew Alcindor, who converted to orthodox Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, were not vilified for their religious beliefs.

  In sum, Ali is now being retroactively turned into a forerunner of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. “A bargain has been struck,” says Robert Lipsyte. “Ali and the people around him get their money. And I’m glad Ali is making money. He’s showing great gallantry in the face of his physical condition, and he never made what he should have made before. But the trade-off is, Ali is no longer threatening. He’s safe; he’s comfor
table. He’s another dangerous black man who white America has found a way to emasculate. You know, white America still hasn’t figured out how to deal with powerful black male figures who don’t play football or basketball other than to find ways to tame them and take away any real power and influence they might have. So the bottom line is, if we can control Muhammad Ali, it makes us more powerful. And at long last, we’ve brought Muhammad Ali under control.”

  Mike Marqusee, author of Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, is in accord with Lipsyte and observes, “Ali’s power in the third world grew precisely because he was a symbol of defiance against racism and the use of United States military power abroad. And those issues are very much alive today; so it means a lot to the powers that be if Ali can be used to suggest to the rest of the world that they aren’t problems anymore. Governments and corporations have this incredible power to incorporate imagery and attach whatever meanings they choose to that imagery in pursuit of their goals. Nothing can take away Ali’s past. It happened; it’s part of history. But that history is now being plundered and deliberately obscured to sell commercial products and, more significantly, ideas. Ali is being reduced to serving as a mouthpiece for whatever ideas and products those with influence and power want to sell. And the people guiding him are letting it happen for narrow financial reasons.”

  “Most great athletes can sell Wheaties,” notes Ramsey Clark. “But they can’t impact upon social and political issues. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to do both.”

  Clark’s voice is significant. As Attorney General of the United States, he oversaw as a matter of duty the 1967 criminal prosecution of Ali for refusing induction into the United States Army. However, he has long been aligned with liberal causes and has worked closely with Ali on a number of occasions.

  “There’s a common tactic among the dominant opinion-makers,” says Clark. “They want to influence the population they’re communicating with, so they transmit information selectively and create an image that’s unreal but very powerful. On the one hand, they’ll demonize their subject. Or in the other direction, they’ll overlook the sins of someone they want to popularize and focus on the aspects of that person’s life which reflect values they want to promote. It’s a question of what those in power want to impose and consider safe. And what we have now in many of the depictions of Ali is the portrait of a man who is heroic, well-intentioned, and good—all of which he was and still is—but who is presented to us in an unreal artificial manner.”