Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  Chicago’s police superintendent Orlando Wilson weighed in on the dispute, urging the fight be called off because of “the unpatriotic statements attributed to Clay” and their potential to provoke public disorder.

  Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times called Ali a “black Benedict Arnold” and warned him “not to go near the statue of Lincoln. Those will be real tears running down his cheeks.” Former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey announced, “Muhammad Ali is finished as a fighter. Regardless of the outcome of his next fight, he is finished. He should be careful. It’s not safe for him to be on the streets.”

  Ali clearly wasn’t prepared for the turmoil he had unleashed. His declaration two years earlier that he was a Muslim was nothing compared to this. And back then, Malcolm X had helped prepare him for the backlash and given him an inner strength. The attacks this time were not only more vicious, but there was no Malcolm to counsel him.

  Around the country, editorial writers heaped scorn on the boxer. He was “a self-centered spoiled brat of a child,” “a sad apology for a man,” “the all-time jerk of the boxing world,” “the most disgusting character in memory to appear on the sports scene,” “bum of the month, bum of the year, bum of all time.” For once, Ali was confused about how to handle the situation.

  “It was as though I had touched an electric switch that let loose the pent-up hatred and bitterness that a section of white America had long wanted to unleash on me for all my cockiness and boasting, for declaring myself’The Greatest’ without waiting for their kind approval,” he later wrote. “For frustrating their desire to see me whipped ‘for the good of the country.’”

  To the athletic and political establishment, observes historian Randy Roberts, Ali had become the enemy.

  Behind the scenes, Ali’s handlers were furiously working to deflect the controversy and save the fight, which promised to be a financial bonanza. When the World Boxing Association stripped Ali of his title in 1964 after he declared his Muslim faith, Ernie Terrell had been awarded the championship in an elimination bout. Although the WBA didn’t carry much weight, the upcoming match was being billed as “the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world” and, as such, it was attracting global attention. A deal was quickly struck by one of the fight promoters, Ben Bentley, without Ali’s knowledge, which would have him appear before a meeting of the Illinois Athletic Commission to retreat from his anti-war remarks. Bentley had convinced the mayor, the governor, and the influential Chicago Tribune to back off if the recalcitrant boxer would apologize.

  Ali was at first wary of the arrangement. Only that morning he had received a telegram from former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney that read, “You have disgraced your title and the American flag and the principles for which it stands. Apologize for your unpatriotic remarks or you’ll be barred from the ring.” Now Bentley was arguing that Tunney was right, that Ali’s career was in jeopardy.

  After a phone call from members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group and his lawyer Edward Jocko, Ali finally relented. He called Athletic Commission Chairperson Joe Triner and reluctantly apologized for whatever embarrassment he had caused, explaining that he had “popped off out of turn.” Triner was satisfied but insisted Ali appear before the entire three-person commission to issue his apology. A meeting was scheduled for the coming Friday.

  The news was immediately leaked to the media, which reported, CLAY SET TO APOLOGIZE in blaring headlines. On Friday, February 21, Ali arrived from his Miami training camp at Chicago’s O’Hare airport for the Commission hearing, scheduled for noon that day. To symbolize his new “closed-mouth” policy, the promoter placed several Band-Aids over Ali’s mouth to the delight of the assembled reporters.

  From the airport, Ali drove to Elijah Muhammad’s mansion for a meeting with his advisers. On the way, he happened to read a story in that day’s Chicago Sun-Times claiming to be based on “secret information from inside Muslim headquarters.”

  The exclusive story, written by Jack Mabley, reported that “Clay’s instructions, if pressed, are to give evasive answers. It is believed, however, that if it appears necessary, Clay may say at this stage that he would be willing to serve in the Armed Forces … if he finds it necessary to make this statement, it will be relatively simple for him to change his mind after the fight, but before he is inducted.”

  Ali was torn. To him, honesty was one of the cornerstones of his religion. Where did these “instructions” come from? When he arrived at the mansion, Elijah Muhammad—who, of course, had spent four years in prison for draft evasion during World War II—assured him that the decision was his. “Brother, if you felt what you said was wrong, then you should be a man and apologize for it. But if you felt what you said was right, then be a man and stand up for it,” Ali reported him as saying.

  At noon, Ali and his entourage arrived at the Illinois State Building, only to be greeted by a huge line of demonstrators in World War II uniforms, with signs reading, CLAY! APOLOGIZE TO AMERICA! and CLAY! LOVE AMERICA OR LEAVE IT! A small group of supporters stood across the street waving signs saying, WE AIN’T GOT NO QUARREL WITH NO VIETCONG EITHER!

  As Ali was ushered down the corridor to meet the waiting commissioners, his lawyer—Edward Jacko—handed him a prepared typewritten statement outlining Ali’s apology. They entered the conference room where the three commissioners presided.

  “I understand you have a statement to read,” Chairperson Triner said in a sympathetic tone.

  At that moment, Ali came to his decision. Principle was more important than expediency. He discarded the paper and began to speak.

  “I have no prepared statement. What I said in Miami, I should have said to the officials of the draft board, not to reporters. I apologize for not saying it to the proper people.”

  The commissioners looked shocked. One of them said, “To whom you made the remark is not important. It’s the remark itself. Do you apologize for your unpatriotic remark, regardless to whom you said it?”

  Beside him, Edward Jacko was apoplectic. He whispered into his client’s ear, “Tell them you apologize. Go on. Tell them.”

  Triner again intervened. “Cassius Clay,” he said from his podium, “do you apologize to the American people, to the governor of this state, to the mayor of this city? Do you apologize for your unpatriotic remark?”

  Ali was resolute. “No, I do not apologize for what I said. I do not apologize.”

  Turning red, Triner began, “Cassius Clay ….”

  “The name is Muhammad Ali,” he said, getting up and heading for the door. The hearing was over. So was the boxing career of Muhammad Ali, declared the national press the next morning.

  “The glove was thrown and I had picked it up,” Ali reflected. “I had no apologies inside me.”

  For Ali’s part, his sudden turnaround seemed to give him a new strength, a clearer vision of his anti-war sentiments. For the first time since he was reclassified 1-A, he seemed almost anxious to confront the white media and explain his stand, linking his actions to the plight of American blacks.

  “The Negro’s been lynched, killed, raped, burned, dragged around all through the city hanging on the chains of cars, alcohol and turpentine poured into his wounds,” he told Sports Illustrated. “That’s why the Negroes are so full of fear today. Been put into him from the time he’s a baby. Imagine! Twenty-two million Negroes in America, suffering, fought in wars, got more worse treatment than any human being can even imagine, walking the streets of America in 1966, hungry with no food to eat, walk the streets with no shoes on, existing on relief, living in charity and poorhouses, twenty-two million people who faithfully served America and who have worked and who still loves his enemy are still dogged and kicked around.” The influential magazine—the bible of the American sports world—seemed unsympathetic, labeling his attitude on race “a tortured confusion of truth, half-truth and untruth based on hatred and distrust of the oppressing whites.”

  Shortly after the hearing, Illinois Attorney Gen
eral William Clark ruled that the Ali-Terrell bout violated state law on a number of dubious grounds, including the fact that Ali had not signed his legal name when applying for his license. The fight was off.

  As state after state refused to sanction the bout—Ali “should be held in utter contempt by every patriotic American,” said the governor of Maine—the boxing pariah became increasingly defiant, refining his controversial anti-war remarks into his trademark doggerel whenever reporters came to call:

  Keep asking me, no matter how long

  On the war in Vietnam, I sing this song

  I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong

  His hometown of Louisville expressed strong interest in hosting the Terrell fight until local veterans groups threatened to launch mass demonstrations if the fight went ahead. The Kentucky Senate quickly passed a resolution expressing its opinion on the bout and Ali’s character: “His attitude brings discredit to all loyal Kentuckians and to the names of the thousands who gave their lives for this country during his lifetime.”

  A half century earlier, Jack Johnson had been forced to fight outside of the United States because America wanted nothing to do with a black champion who spoke his mind. Now Ali was receiving the same treatment. Still, there was a larger world beyond the borders of the United States. Toronto, Canada, came forward and offered to host the fight, but Terrell announced he would have no part of it. He was to have been paid a percentage of the receipts, but veterans groups had succeeded in convincing most theaters to back out of closed-circuit telecasts. Therefore, there was no financial incentive for Terrell to fight. Instead, Canadian champion George Chuvalo was chosen to challenge Ali.

  Even relocating the fight to another country didn’t satisfy Ali’s detractors. Arthur Daley of the New York Times urged a boycott.“Clay could have been the most popular of all champions. But he attached himself to a hate organization, and antagonized everyone with his boasting and his disdain for the decency of even a low-grade patriotism,” he wrote. “This fight should not be patronized either in person or on theater TV. Not a nickel should be contributed to the coffers of Clay, the Black Muslims, or the promoters who jammed this down so many unwilling throats.”

  On the floor of Congress, Representative Frank Clark joined the attack: “The heavyweight champion of the world turns my stomach. To welch or back off from the commitment of serving his country is as unthinkable as surrendering to Adolf Hitler or Mussolini would have been in my days of military service.”

  With the media, the government, and the entire boxing establishment bearing down on their client, Ali’s legal team decided to change course. Drawing on the central teachings of the Koran and the tenets of the Nation of Islam, they filed a request for conscientious objector status.

  In 1658, a Maryland Quaker named Richard Keene became the first conscientious objector in American history when he refused to participate in the colonial militia because his religious beliefs opposed military activities. Like Keene, most of the other early conscientious objectors were Quakers and Mennonites, who believed the Bible forbade them from participating in wars of any kind.

  The first nationwide draft by the U.S. federal government came in 1863, during the American Civil War. President Lincoln was sympathetic to conscientious objectors and introduced legislation that acknowledged the validity of their objections and permitted them to perform public service in hospitals as an alternative.

  During World War I, many objectors refused to cooperate with the war in any way, including alternative service, and the War Department ordered all conscientious objectors court-martialed. Of the 450 who were found guilty, 142 were sentenced to life in prison.

  In 1917, the Draft Act officially exempted men who objected to war for religious reasons, but the exemption applied only to those who belonged to a “well recognized religious sect or organization … whose existing creed or principles forbade its members to participate in war in any form.”

  During World War II, 72,000 Americans requested objector status and more than 6,000 were sent to prison for refusing alternative service, including Elijah Muhammad and many of his followers.

  During the Korean War, Malcolm X had registered as a conscientious objector. He later recounted his response when officials asked him if he knew what the term meant: “I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.”

  The Vietnam War created a new type of conscientious objector, one who did not condemn all military activities, just a specific war. This provided a new challenge for the courts to interpret the validity of an individual’s objection.

  When Ali’s legal team filed its first request for draft exempt status in February 1966, it stuck to strictly procedural grounds. But on March 17, Ali appeared before the Louisville Draft Board with a new argument. Once again he testified that his parents would suffer undue financial hardship if he entered the army and earned only eighty dollars a month. But for the first time, he invoked his religion, saying that the Holy Koran forbids Muslims from fighting wars on the side of unbelievers. The presiding officer was skeptical and questioned his famous applicant’s sincerity.

  “I am sincere in every bit of what the Holy Koran and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad tell us and it is that we are not allowed to participate in wars on the side of non-believers,” Ali responded. “This is a Christian country, not a Muslim country, and history and the facts show that every move towards the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is made to distort and to ridicule him….We do not take part in any part of war unless declared by Allah himself or unless it’s an Islamic World War, or a Holy War, and we are not to even so much as aid the infidels or the non-believers in Islam….This is not me talking to get the draft board or to dodge nothing.”

  Back in Washington the Johnson White House, the FBI, and the military establishment watched Ali’s actions nervously. Anxious to deflect the fallout, newspapers in cities with large black populations were issued press releases reflecting the government line. The Atlanta Journal carried a story that unwittingly helped make the case for black critics of the war: “Pentagon officials are praising the Negro as a gallant, hard-fighting soldier. New figures show that proportionately more Negro soldiers have died in Vietnam than military personnel of other races.”

  In fact, more than 29 percent of all soldiers who died in Vietnam that year were black, even though Blacks made up only 11 percent of the country’s population. At the same time, large numbers of middle-class whites were being exempted from military service because of student deferments, prompting Stokely Carmichael to charge, “Blacks are being used as cannon fodder for a white man’s war.”

  In late March, Ali’s draft exemption request was again denied, prompting an appeal six weeks later before the Kentucky Appeal Board. By law, before the appeal board could make a decision, it was required to refer Ali’s file to the U.S. Justice Department for an advisory recommendation. This would require a special hearing at which the appellant would be allowed to testify and call witnesses.

  Hearing the case would be a retired Kentucky judge named Lawrence Grauman. In order to prevail, Ali would have to convince Grauman of his “character and good faith.” He would also have to satisfy three basic tests of conscientious objector status as set out by the Selective Service Act. First, he must show that he is conscientiously opposed to war in any form. Second, he must show that this opposition is based on religious training and belief, as interpreted in two key Supreme Court rulings. Third, he must show that his objection is sincere.

  Since his announcement two years earlier that he had joined the Nation of Islam, the FBI had compiled an extensive dossier on Ali, documenting his public statements, his friends, and his travels. These were based mostly on newspaper clippings and information supplied by informants. But in May 1966, J. Edgar Hoover ordered Ali to be placed under official FBI surveillance—the first boxer so honored since Jack
Johnson, fifty years earlier.

  Agents interviewed more than thirty-five friends, acquaintances, and family members. According to the FBI report, “These people all spoke highly of Clay and none of them provided any information that would have supported a denial of his [conscientious objector] claims.” While Hoover himself was consorting with mobsters, gambling heavily, and engaging in a homosexual relationship while purging gay agents from the FBI, the thorough investigation turned up nothing more damaging against Ali than seven traffic violations over a five-year period. This information was turned over to the appeal board, along with a report that Ali had purchased a gun at a Miami pawn shop in 1964—which a member of his entourage promptly threw into the ocean—and a summary of Ali’s recent appearance on the Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson.

  On August 23, 1966, the special hearing was convened. After Grauman heard from Ali’s parents and a minister from the Nation of Islam, the reluctant recruit testified under oath:

  Sir, I said earlier and I’d like to again make that plain, it would be no trouble for me to go into the Armed Services, boxing exhibitions in Vietnam or traveling the country at the expense of the government or living the easy life and not having to get out in the mud and fight and shoot. If it wasn’t against my conscience to do it, I would easily do it. I wouldn’t raise all this court stuff and I wouldn’t go through all of this and lose the millions that I gave up and my image with the American public that I would say is completely dead and ruined because of us in here now. I wouldn’t jeopardize my life walking the streets of the South and all of America with no bodyguard if I wasn’t sincere in every bit of what the Holy Koran and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad tell us and it is that we are not to participate in wars on the side of nonbelievers. We are not, according to the Holy Koran, to even as much as aid in passing a cup of water to the wounded. This is there before I was born and it will be there when I’m dead and we believe in not only part of it, but all of it.