On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Styles make fights,” Ali’s great trainer Angelo Dundee said, in reference to his dazzling young boxer’s ring performances, but the insight applies to the mass replication of images generally. Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali soon revealed himself as a master of a new, radically iconoclastic style in public life. He refused to be self-effacing in the cautious manner of his black predecessors Louis, Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, and Floyd Patterson; the audacity with which he exulted in his blackness called to mind Jack Johnson, the controversial first black heavyweight champion (1908-1915), whose example black athletes (and their white trainers and managers) did not wish to emulate. (Compare the far more cautious yet perhaps not less difficult route of Jackie Robinson in the preceding decade.) Though complicated by issues of religion and race and “ego,” the essential message of Cassius Clay/ Muhammad Ali in the late 1960s and early 1970s was simple and defiant: I don’t have to be what you want me to be.

  No other athlete has received quite the press—accusing and adulatory, condemning and praising, seething with hatred and brimming with love—that Ali has had. From the first, as the young Cassius Clay, he seems to have determined that he would not be a passive participant in his image-making, like most athletes, but would define the terms of his public reputation. As sport is both a mirror of human aggression and a highly controlled, “playful” acting-out of that aggression, so the public athlete is a play-figure, at his most conscious and controlled an actor in a theatrical event. Clay/Ali brought to the deadly-serious sport of boxing an unexpected ecstatic joy that had nothing to do with, and may in fact have been contrary to, his political/religious mission. His temperament seems to have been fundamentally childlike; playing the trickster came naturally to him. “My corn, the gimmicks, the acting I do—it’ll take a whole lot for another fighter to ever be as popular as Muhammad Ali,” he remarked in an interview in 1975. “The acting begins when I’m working. Before a fight, I’ll try to have something funny to say every day and I’ll talk ten miles a minute…I started fighting in 1954, when I was just twelve, so it’s been a long time for me now. But there’s always a new fight to look forward to, a new publicity stunt, a new reason to fight.”

  At the same time, Ali is deadly serious about his mission as a member of the Nation of Islam; there is nothing playful or trickster-like about his commitment to the Muslim faith (“Muslims…live their religion—we ain’t hypocrites. We submit entirely to Allah’s will”).

  There has always been something enigmatic about Clay/Ali, a doubleness that suggests a fundamental distinction between public and private worlds. And what a testimony is Ali’s career of nearly three decades to the diversity of media attention! In our time, in his sixth decade, long retired from the sport that made him famous and from the adversarial politics that made him notorious, Ali now enjoys a universal beneficence. He has become an “American icon” known through the world; a brand name symbolizing “success.” He remains a Muslim but no longer belongs to the Nation of Islam; he no longer makes pronouncements of a political nature. He has become a mega-celebrity divorced, like all such celebrities, from history; a timeless mass-cult contemporary of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

  Yet of course it was not always like this. There were years following Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army, as a member of the Nation of Islam, when he was one of the most despised public figures in America; even, in State Department terms, a “possible security risk”! Boxing audiences didn’t greet him with incantatory chants of “Al-li! Al-li! Al-li!” but with boos. It’s rare to encounter an athlete who chooses to be a martyr for a principle; an athlete who has made himself into a figure of racial identity and pride. (It was always the hope, to become in time a stereotypical hope, that the black athlete like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson would be a “credit to his race.” What was not desired was racial confrontation and conflict.) The issue of race was always predominant in Ali’s strategy of undermining an opponent’s confidence in himself and, ingeniously, though sometimes cruelly, fashioning himself as the “black” boxer against the “white man’s” Negro. Floyd Patterson, much admired by white America, was particularly susceptible:

  I’m going to put him flat on his back

  So that he will start acting black.

  (In fact, Ali didn’t put Patterson flat on his back, but humiliated him in a protracted, punishing fight.) Even as the brash twenty-two-year-old contender for the heavyweight title, he’d dared mock the champion Sonny Liston as an “ugly old bear”—an “ugly slow bear”—Liston, who’d so demolished Patterson! Years later, in 1975, Ali would relentlessly taunt Joe Frazier with remarks that would have seemed, from a white boxer, racist:

  Joe Frazier is a gorilla,

  And he’s gonna fall in Manila!

  Yet worse (or funnier): “Frazier’s the only nigger in the world ain’t got rhythm.” Frazier, too, was fashioned by Ali into the white man’s Negro; the boxer whom whites presumably wanted to win, therefore isolated from the community of blacks. Is this bad sportsmanship on Ali’s part, a sly sort of racist tweaking of noses; is it Ali at his purposeful worst, or simply a manifestation of the man’s enigmatic nature, the trickster-as-athlete?

  Race has long been an American taboo. The very word “nigger” strikes the ear as obscene; in using it, particularly in the presence of whites, blacks are playing (or making war) with the degrading, demeaning historical context that has made it an obscene word, in some quarters at least. (In another context, the word can be a sign of affection. But this context isn’t available to whites.) Ali, intent upon defining himself as a rebel in a white-dominated society, would make of every public gesture a racial gesture: defiance toward the white Establishment, alliance with the black community. The political issue of serving in Vietnam (“No Vietcong ever called me nigger” was Ali’s most pointed defense) would seem to have been secondary to the more pervasive issue of black inequity in America, for which Ali would be spokesman, gadfly, and, if needed, martyr. In his Playboy interview of November 1975, Ali is quoted as saying that, following the teachings of the late Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, he believes that the majority of whites are “devils” and that he anticipates a separation from white America: “When we take maybe ten states, then we’ll be free.”

  By making race so prominent an issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ali provoked a predictably hostile response from the Establishment, including the federal government. Though forbidden to leave the United States, he would be exiled within it; as a black Muslim he would be “separate” from the white majority. Indeed, among public celebrities of the America twentieth century only Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson, persecuted by right-wing politicians in the 1950s for their “Communist” principles, are analogous to Ali. The black athletes Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe, in their very different ways, Robinson in integrating major league baseball and Ashe in his activist phase in the public cause of AIDS education, acquired a profound cultural significance apart from their sports yet were never controversial figures like Ali. Considering the protracted violence of the 1960s, the assassinations of public figures and frequent killings and beatings of civil rights activists, it seems in retrospect miraculous that Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, the self-declared “nigger that the white man didn’t get,” didn’t provoke violence against himself.

  Ali rode the crest of a new wave of athletes—competitors who were both big and fast…Ali had a combination of size and speed that had never been seen in a fighter before, along with incredible will and courage. He also brought a new style to boxing…Jack Dempsey changed fisticuffs from a kind where fighters fought in a tense defensive style to a wild sensual assault. Ali revolutionized boxing the way black basketball players changed basketball today. He changed what happened in the ring, and elevated it to a level that was previously unknown.

  —LARRY MERCHANT

  The extraordinary career of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali is one of the longest, most varied and sensational of boxing c
areers. Like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Archie Moore, among few others in so difficult and dangerous a sport, Ali defended his title numerous times over a period of many years; he won, he lost, he won and he lost; beginning brilliantly in 1960 as an Olympic gold medalist and ending, not so brilliantly, yet courageously, in 1981. What strikes us as remarkable about Ali is that, while as the brash young challenger Cassius Clay he’d been ready to quit his first title fight, with Sonny Liston, in an early round (with the complaint that “something was in his eye”), he would mature to fight fights that were virtually superhuman in their expenditure of physical strength, moral stamina, intelligence and spirit: the long, gruelling, punishing fights with Joe Frazier (which, in turn, Ali lost, and won, and won); and the famous Rope-a-Dope match with then-champion George Foreman in Zaire, in 1974, which restored Ali’s title to him. Never has a boxer so clearly sacrificed himself in the finely honed, ceaselessly premeditated practice of his craft as Ali.

  This long career might be helpfully divided into three, disproportionate phases: the first, 1960-67, the “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee” Era when Ali’s youthful boxing skills were at their zenith; the second, 1971-78, Ali’s return after his three-and-a-half-year exile from boxing; and the diminished third, a kind of twilit epilogue ending with Ali’s belated retirement at the age of forty. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s cryptic remark, “There are no second acts in American lives,” would seem to be refuted by the example of Ali; dazzling as he was as a young boxer, he becomes more interesting in his second phase as a boxer no longer young who must rely upon superior intelligence and cunning in the ring, as well as the potentially dangerous ability to “take a punch”; bringing to bear against his hapless opponents some of the psychic warfare we associate with actual warfare. That is, the wish to destroy the opponent’s spirit before the body is even touched.

  1960-1967. “Float like a butterfly, destroy like a viper” might have been a more accurate metaphor for Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in these early fights. Not until the emergence of Mike Tyson at an even younger age in the mid-1980s would a young heavyweight boxer make such an impact upon his sport as this Olympic gold medalist turned pro after 108 amateur bouts. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942, grandson of a slave but reared in a comfortable, supportive black middle-class environment, the young Cassius Clay was like no other heavyweight in history: massive, perfectly proportioned, a Nijinsky with lethal fists and a manner both in and out of the ring that might be called inflammatory. By instinct, Clay knew that boxing is, or should be, entertaining. Boxing is, or should be, drama. From the campy prowrestler Gorgeous George, he’d learned that people will buy tickets to see a boxer lose as well as to see a boxer win. Calling attention to oneself, cartoon- and comic-book-style, is a way of calling attention to the fight, and to box office revenue. The early disdain of boxing experts for “The Mouth” is certainly understandable in the light of boxing’s tradition of reticent champions (like Louis); a boxer should speak with his fists, not his mouth. With adolescent zest, predating the insouciance of black rap music, Cassius Clay repudiated all this.

  This is the legend of Cassius Clay,

  The most beautiful boxer in the world today.

  He talks a great deal and brags indeedy

  Of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speedy.

  The fistic world was dull and weary,

  With a champ like Liston things had to be dreary.

  Then someone with color, someone with dash,

  Brought fight fans a-runnin’ with cash.

  This brash young boxer is something to see

  And the heavyweight championship is his destiny.

  And much, much more.

  Of course, the young boxer’s arrogant verbosity and pre-fight antics were more than balanced by his ring discipline and boxing skill. From the first, Clay attracted media attention as much for his style as for his victories. What was unique about Clay in the 1960s? Even after his wins against such highly regarded veterans as Archie Moore and Henry Cooper (whose face Clay savagely bloodied in a bout in England in 1963), the eccentricities of Clay’s style aroused skepticism and sometimes alarm in commentators. A. J. Liebling described this bizarre heavyweight as “skittering…like a pebble over water.” He held his gloves low, as a boxer is trained not to do. He leaned away from his opponent’s punches instead of slipping them, as a boxer is trained not to do. He feinted, he clowned, he shrugged his head and shoulders in odd ways, even as he danced in a sort of sidelong way. He performed a “shuffling” movement to distract opponents and entertain spectators. In the words of Garry Wills, Clay “carries his head high and partly exposed so that he can see everything all the time…whips his head back just enough to escape a punch without losing sight of his man.” In Hugh McIlvanney’s prophetic words, the young boxer seemed to see his life as a “strange, ritualistic play” in which his hysterical rantings were required by “the script that goes with his destiny.” Norman Mailer wrote extensively and with romantic passion of the young boxer as a “six-foot parrot who keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage. ‘Come and get me, fool,’ he says. ‘You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I am. I am human intelligence and you don’t even know if I’m good or evil.’” Of the distinctive, idiosyncratic Cassius Clay style, his trainer Angelo Dundee said in an interview:

  He wasn’t a guy who was led easily. You’ve got to remember the intricacies of training this kid. You didn’t train him like the usual fighter. He resented direction, so I used indirection. I cast the illusion of him doing something when he wasn’t. To get him to do what he should be doing.

  [“We Never Saw Muhammad Ali at His Best”]

  What any boxer “should” be doing is winning, and Cassius Clay was perhaps no more inventive or flamboyant than he needed to be to rack up victory after victory to ever-increasing public acclaim.

  Consider the first, shocking title fight with Sonny Liston (shocking because the seven-to-one underdog Clay won so handily and the seemingly unbeatable champion ignominiously quit on his stool alter six rounds): the younger boxer simply out-boxed, out-punched, out-danced, out-maneuvered and out-psyched his older opponent. What an upset in boxing history, on February 25, 1964! This fight is fascinating to watch, like a dramatized collision of two generations/two eras/two cultures; a fairy tale in which the audacious young hero dethrones the ogre exactly according to the young hero’s predictions.

  Yet what controversy followed when Cassius Clay announced that he was changing his debased “slave” name to “Muhammad Ali”; he’d been converted to the black militant Nation of Islam (more generally known as the Black Muslims) and was “no longer a Christian.” With remarkable composure, the young athlete who’d seemed so adolescent was publicly and courageously re-defining himself as black. As virtually no other black athlete of great distinction had done, Ali was repudiating the very white political, social, and economic Establishment that helped create him. As, three years later, he would yet more provocatively define himself as a conscientious objector who refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army to fight in Vietnam, with the punitive result that he would be stripped of his title and license to box in the United States. (Interesting to note that the majority of white publications, including even The New York Times, as well as television commentators, refused through the 1960s to acknowledge Ali’s new, legal name; as if the former Cassius Clay hadn’t the right to change his name to Muhammad Ali—or to any name he chose. It might have been the quixotic hope that if they refused to sanction “Ali” in the media, his allegiance to the Nation of Islam, if not to blackness itself, might simply fade away.)

  Between February 1964 and his ascension to heavyweight champion and April 1967 when he was forced into an involuntary exile, Ali successfully defended his title nine times. Widespread white disapproval of his new identity didn’t discourage boxing fans from attending his spectacular fights. Among these, the May 1965 rematch
with Sonny Liston proved even more disappointing and, for Liston, more ignominious, than the first fight: this time Liston quickly went down in the first round and stayed down, felled by what many boxing commentators saw as a “mystery punch” of Ali’s that put Liston out of the fight even as an enraged Ali, adrenaline pumping, screamed for him to get up and fight. (Did Liston throw the fight? Did Liston so fear Ali, he couldn’t fight? The sight of Liston lolling on the canvas recalls the similarly fallen—and feigning?—Jack Johnson who lost his heavyweight title to the White Hope Jess Willard in 1915 in the twenty-sixth round of their marathon match. Yet Angelo Dundee would claim to have seen the punch, “a good right hand to the temple my guy threw from up on the balls of his feet…He was out. He was definitely out.”) Liston, believed to be mob-connected, would be found dead in 1970 in Las Vegas, allegedly of a drug overdose, possibly of murder. One of the shabbier and more sordid episodes in America’s noir sport.