Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  “I Ain’t Got No Quarrel

  with Them Vietcong”

  SHORTLY AFTER ALI RETURNED from Africa in the spring of 1964, thousands of college students—black and white—from across America began to pour into Mississippi to register black voters, who had long been denied the franchise in America’s most racist state. It was the start of Freedom Summer.

  On June 21, three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were arrested on a trumped-up charge by Cecil Price, a deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who also happened to be a member in good standing of the local Ku Klux Klan. After alerting his Klan brothers, Price released the three activists—two of them white—late at night. Twenty minutes later, they were brutally murdered on a dark road. If John F. Kennedy’s assassination seven months earlier had marked the end of America’s innocence, then the deaths of the three civil rights martyrs marked a transition for a generation of youth from idealism to defiance.

  Eight thousand miles away, defiance was already creating Vietnam’s own martyrs. Images of Buddhist monks pouring gasoline over themselves and going up in flames to protest the brutal dictatorship of South Vietnam were helping to fuel an indigenous revolt. To quell it, President Lyndon Johnson sent five thousand American troops to South Vietnam on July 21, the first official combat troops not disingenuously designated “advisers.” The United States was wedding itself to a murderous regime it considered the only alternative to communism, but whose actions were increasingly driving the people to support the communist Vietcong “liberators.”

  Two weeks later, on August 5, Johnson ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and “certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam” after a number of alleged attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on routine patrol in the area on August 2—and that North Vietnamese military boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” on a pair of U.S. ships two days later. But it was revealed years later that there was no second attack by North Vietnam—no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” The Johnson administration, seeking an excuse to escalate the conflict into a full-scale war, lied to Congress and the American people and set the stage for America’s longest war.

  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam—sailed through Congress on August 7. The resolution authorized the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, opposed the resolution. The overwhelming majority of Americans, believing their president, supported the new war.

  Muhammad Ali had other things on his mind. “I vaguely recall hearing about the ships getting hit but I wasn’t really paying much attention,” he says. A month earlier, he had fallen in love with a twenty-three-year-old cocktail waitress named Sonji Roi. A week after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed, the two were married in Gary, Indiana.

  After a brief honeymoon, Ali signed to fight a rematch against Sonny Liston. And he persisted in proselytizing for his new faith, travelling to mosques all over the country preaching the Black Muslim message and raising the ire of the white establishment.

  His new religion was already proving costly. He told Ebony magazine that joining the Nation of Islam had cost him “some $500,000 in possible commercial contracts. I have turned down another $500,000 from several concerns because they wanted me to do something I think is dead wrong—chase white women in films.” He revealed that he had turned down an offer to play Jack Johnson in a movie because the part would have forced him to be portrayed marrying a white woman.

  The media continued to register their disgust. The dean of America’s boxing writers, Jimmy Cannon, called Ali’s affiliation with 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.” For his part, Ali calmly deflected the mounting criticism as if he were fending off jabs in the ring. “Elijah isn’t teaching hate when he tells us about the evil things the white man has done any more than you’re teaching hate when you tell us about what Hitler did to the Jews. That’s not hate, that’s history.”

  Pat Putnam covered boxing for the Miami Herald during this period. He remembers the attitude of some of his colleagues. “Some of the old-line boxing writers absolutely hated him,” he recalls. “He didn’t fit into their mold. I think there was some racism involved. Cannon idolized Joe Louis, he believed every boxer should be like him. Here comes this brash, loud-mouthed kid and he couldn’t handle it. There was this hysteria around the Muslim thing. People were afraid of the Muslims. I think some of the old block writers were saying, ‘look at those scary black men, they’re going to rape my sister.’”

  Ali was assuming the role that Malcolm X had vacated when he left the Nation of Islam. And, like Malcolm, he was good for recruitment. Meanwhile, Malcolm continued to spread his message through his newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, advocating that blacks achieve their freedom “by any means necessary” and decrying the racism of his former movement. As he did so, the Nation of Islam turned against him with a fury.

  As he traveled the globe, Malcolm repeatedly predicted that he would be killed by the Nation, which had accused him of high treason and labeled him the “Chief Hypocrite.” And he had good reason to worry. For months he had been receiving reports from inside the Nation that an order had been issued from the highest levels for his death. In December 1964, Muhammad Speaks contained an article written by Louis X, the Nation’s rising star who had taken over the interim ministership of Malcolm’s old Mosque number seven in Harlem.

  “The die is cast and Malcolm shall not escape,” wrote the man later known as Louis Farrakhan. “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” Two months later, on February 21,1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by five Nation of Islam gunmen while he was speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Farrakhan later attempted to spread the never-substantiated theory that the FBI was actually behind the killing.

  That night, while Ali was at his Massachusetts training camp, his Chicago apartment building was gutted by fire. Rumor quickly spread that, as the Nation of Islam’s highest profile representative, he was being targeted for revenge by Malcolm’s followers. Five FBI agents showed up at his camp and told him they were assigning a plainclothes police guard to protect him.

  The Liston rematch had been postponed in November after Ali collapsed with a hernia three days before the fight. It was rescheduled for May 26 in Lewiston, Maine. Liston was a five-to-one favorite to win his title back, despite his crushing defeat a year earlier. The pundits believed the first fight was a fluke and refused to concede Ali’s superiority. Some rumors even had it that the Muslims had fixed the first fight, threatening Liston if he didn’t take a dive.

  Syndicated columnist Jerry Izenberg, one of Ali’s earliest and most ardent supporters, one of the few who insisted on calling him by his Muslim name, remembers an “ugly atmosphere” surrounding the second Liston fight. “Malcolm was dead, and there were rumors that Ali was going to be killed, maybe even in the ring, in retaliation. A lot of it was hysteria fuelled by the press but even so the fear was there….Somebody asked something about Malcolm, it was a reporter who asked, ‘You’ve heard the stories about Malcolm’s people making an attempt on your life?’… and Ali looked up and said, ‘What people? Malcolm ain’t got no people.’ And I remember, I got mad because in my mind Malcolm stood for certain things. And I thought,‘you son of a bitch. One minute, Malcolm is great, and then all of a sudden he’s nobody because somebody tells you he’s nobody’ I was really pissed about it.”

  It took longer to sing the national anthem than it did for Ali to knock out Sonny Liston in the first round and prove the first fight was n
o fluke. Despite renewed speculation by Ali’s detractors that the challenger had taken a dive—the FBI investigated the rumors and found no merit to them—it was clear to the boxing world that Muhammad Ali was a force to be reckoned with.

  “Even those who didn’t like him—and there were plenty—had to respect him after the second Liston fight,” says Robert Lipsyte. “For a little while at least, people stopped dwelling on all the controversy and began to admire his boxing skills.”

  A month after the Liston fight, Ali had his marriage to Sonji Roi annulled on the grounds that she had failed to follow the tenets of the Muslim religion. To many, this signaled the increasing grip of the Nation of Islam over every facet of his life. And not without some foundation: Elijah Muhammad had assigned his son Herbert to handle Ali’s business affairs, and a large Muslim entourage traveled with the champion wherever he went.

  “They’ve stolen my man’s mind,” Sonji charged after the annulment. “I wasn’t going to take on all the Muslims. If I had, I’d probably have ended up dead.”

  Meanwhile, the boxing world searched in vain for somebody to send Ali back to oblivion. In Jack Johnson’s day, the call had gone out for a “white hope” to silence the upstart champion. Now a similar call went out but this time with an ironic twist. The challenger this time would have to be a black “white hope”—and it looked like there was only one man to fit the bill.

  Floyd Patterson had been a popular heavyweight champion before he lost the title a few years earlier to Sonny Liston in a humiliating first-round knockout. A rematch between the two fighters had ended even more quickly. In marked contrast to Ali, Patterson was soft-spoken, humble, and well-loved by the black and white establishments. He had marched for integration with Martin Luther King Jr., moved into an all-white neighborhood before being hounded out by angry neighbors, and even married a white woman. As historian Jeffrey Sammons once observed, “Ironically in Jack Johnson’s era, Ali would have been the hero and Patterson the villain.”

  Shortly after the first Ali-Liston fight, Patterson had drawn the battle lines by announcing his intention to “bring the title back to America.” This attack didn’t sit well with Ali, who countered, “If you don’t believe the title already is in America, just see who I pay taxes to. I’m an American. But he’s a deaf dumb so-called Negro who needs a spanking …. We don’t consider the Muslims have the title any more than the Baptists had it when Joe Louis was champ.”

  Ali agreed to a title match with Patterson, vowing not to let “one old Negro make a fool of me.” Patterson, a Catholic, made much of his own religious ties, and the fight was billed as a modern-day holy war between the forces of Christianity and Islam, even though the real issues had more to do with racial ideology and patriotism than religion.

  At a press conference, Patterson declared, “The Black Muslim influence must be removed from boxing. I have been told Clay has every right to follow any religion he chooses, and I agree. But by the same token, I have the right to call the Black Muslims a menace to the United States and a menace to the Negro race.”

  While Ali surrounded himself with an entourage of Muslims, Patterson traveled with an array of civil rights workers, liberal whites, and celebrities—including Frank Sinatra, who supplied Patterson with his own personal physician. All were rooting for him to shut Ali up once and for all.

  The spectacle was not lost on the outspoken champion, who was offended by Patterson’s constant invocation of his civil rights credentials. “When he was champion,” Ali charged, “the only time he’d be caught in Harlem was when he was in the back of a car waving in some parade. The big shot didn’t have no time for his own kind, he was so busy integrating. And now he wants to fight me because I stick up for black people.”

  On November 22,1965, the two fighters took their holy war into the ring. Ali had never been known as a brutal fighter. His artistry in the ring regularly reminded observers why boxing was known as “the sweet science.” A few months before the Patterson fight, he had even publicly contemplated retiring from the sport, declaring, “I don’t like hurting people.” But the constant attacks against his religion and his character had taken their toll and he was clearly out for revenge. What seemed to irk him most was Patterson’s declaration that he would never call his opponent by his Muslim name. Addressing the challenger, he vowed to “give you a whipping until you call me Muhammad Ali.” Before the fight, he announced his intentions poetically:

  I’m gonna put him flat on his back

  So that he will start acting black.

  Because when he was champ he didn’t do as he should.

  He tried to force himself into an all-white neighborhood.

  The fight was no contest. Yet rather than putting the outmatched Patterson flat on his back quickly, Ali toyed with him, inflicting one brutal punch after another—but always holding back from ending it so as to prolong the agony. Finally, the referee showed mercy on the ex-champ and ended the fight in the twelfth round. Shocked by Ali’s uncharacteristic cruelty, the media—even those few reporters previously sympathetic to him—turned against him. Life magazine called the fight “a sickening spectacle in the ring.”

  In his black cultural manifesto Soul on Ice—written shortly after the Patterson fight—Eldridge Cleaver explained the outpouring of negative reaction against Ali. “Muhammad Ali is the first ‘free’black champion ever to confront white America,” he wrote. “In the context of boxing, he is a genuine revolutionary, the black Fidel Castro of boxing. To the mind of ‘white’ white America and ‘white’ black America, the heavyweight crown has fallen into enemy hands, usurped by a pretender to the throne. Ali is conceived as ‘occupying’ the heavyweight kingdom in the name of a dark, alien power, in much the same way as Castro was conceived as a temporary interloper, ‘occupying’ Cuba.”

  At the time, only a handful of white reporters were willing to defend Ali. Although he wouldn’t use the same fiery rhetoric as Cleaver, Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times seemed to sense the parallels between Ali and Jack Johnson as far back as November 1965. Analyzing the mounting backlash against the champion, he wrote, “The public—through the press—was not ready to receive the antithesis of Louis and Patterson. Once before it had been presented with a nonconforming Negro champion, and society rejected, harassed, and eventually persecuted Jack Johnson.”

  Nobody was more aware of Ali’s refusal to bow to the whims of the establishment than Joe Louis, who had perfected this role to become the first black man ever to be embraced by white America. Louis, who had once been Ali’s hero, had showed up in Patterson’s camp to give support to the challenger and took every opportunity to denounce Ali’s religion and fighting skills.

  “Clay has a million dollars worth of confidence and a dime’s worth of courage,” he said. “He can’t punch; he can’t hurt you … I would have whipped him.”

  Ali seemed to have Louis in mind when he later explained his rationale for speaking out. “When I first came into boxing, tied up as it was with gangster control and licensed robbers, fighters were not supposed to be human or intelligent… A fighter was seen but hardly heard on on any issue or idea of public importance. They could call me arrogant, cocky, conceited, immodest, a loud mouth, a braggart, but I would change the image of the fighter in the eyes of the world.”

  The outpouring of disgust reached the highest levels of Washington, where President Johnson continued to receive hundreds of angry letters from citizens demanding to know why Ali wasn’t serving his country.

  One of the most telling letters, indicating how little some racial attitudes had changed in a hundred years—not to mention the level of backwardness of the boxing establishment—was sent to General Lewis Hershey, director of the U.S. Selective Service, by the legal advisor to the World Boxing Association.

  “I have watched with disgust the publicity surrounding the draft status of Cassius Clay, the boxer,” wrote Robert M. Summitt. “It now appears that Clay and his owners axe going to attempt further to
evade the draft through your organization or even to the President of the United States [our italics].”

  Americans still overwhelmingly supported the war in Vietnam. But, little by little, the first voices of dissent began to be heard. In June 1965, black civil rights activist Julian Bond—who had co-founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) five years earlier—was elected to a seat in the Georgia legislature in a special vote called to fill a vacancy. On January 6,1966—four days before Bond was scheduled to take his seat in the legislature—SNCC issued a “white paper” on the Vietnam War denouncing the United States for its conduct in the war and calling for resistance to the draft. “We are in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to the military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in the name of the ‘freedom’we find so false in this country,” read the controversial paper. The media descended on Bond and asked him if he endorsed the SNCC manifesto. When he answered in the affirmative, he was widely lambasted as a traitor and a renegade. By a vote of 184 to 12, the Georgia House refused to seat him. Bond had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. on the bloody battlegrounds of the fight for civil rights and considered King his mentor. But in 1965, America’s most respected black leader had still not publicly come out against the war.

  “At the time of the controversy, when they refused to seat me, it seemed like I was all alone,” recalls Bond. “Dr. King called me to express his support. He knew the war was unjust and he wanted to take a stand but his board at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) wouldn’t let him. President Johnson was supporting civil rights legislation and they didn’t want to alienate his administration.”