Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  After that demonstration of his sincerity, Ali testified, he was given the name Muhammad Ali—meaning “one who is worthy of praise.” He then became a minister of his religion, one that is known as the “Lost Found Nation of Islam in North America.” He told the judge that there were seventy-five Muslim mosques in the U.S. and he had spoken at eighteen of them. He said his job was as a Muslim minister, at which he spent 160 hours per month. “My sideline is being the heavyweight champion of the world,” he explained to the amusement of the courtroom.

  Ali finished his plea with an explanation of why he couldn’t serve in the armed forces: “It’s against the teachings of the Holy Koran. I’m not trying to dodge the draft. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or by the Messenger. Muhammad was a warrior fourteen hundred years ago but he was a holy warrior fighting in the name of Allah. We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers. We aren’t Christian or Communist.”

  The judge seemed intrigued by his explanation. He bent forward and asked, “In a conflict between Communism and Christianity, which side would you take?”

  “Neither side, judge,” came the reply.

  The prosecutors argued that Ali had not yet exhausted his administrative remedies—the legal criterion for being granted a restraining order. The judge agreed and denied the motion, as expected.

  As Ali left the courthouse with his entourage in tow, he contemplated the consequences of the next day’s induction ceremony out loud. “I want to know what is right, what’U look good in history. I’m being tested by Allah. I’m giving up my title, I’m giving up my wealth, maybe my future. Many great men have been tested for their religious belief. If I pass this test, I’ll come out stronger than ever. IVe got no jails, no power, no government, but six hundred million Muslims are giving me strength. Will they make me the leader of a country? Will they give me gold? Will the Supreme Being knock down the jails with an earthquake, like He could if He wanted? Am I a fool to give up all this and go to prison? Am I a fool to give up good steaks? Do you think I’m serious? If I am, then why can’t I worship as I want to in America? All I want is justice. Will I have to get that from history?”

  Parting from the group, Ali’s assistant trainer Bundini Brown went across the street with a white friend to the Brown Derby Lounge for a drink. When his friend placed their order for two drinks, the barmaid informed him, “Sorry, señxor, we don’t serve no colored people.”

  There was a car waiting for Ali and his two lawyers, and they sped off to discuss their next step. Ali asked to be driven to Texas Southern University, where Stokely Carmichael had led a student riot a few days earlier. Ali usually got his best receptions on college campuses, and he was anxious for a sympathetic audience the day before his big decision. As they arrived on campus, Ali jumped out of the car, yelling, “I’m ready to rumble.”

  About a hundred students were milling about and they instantly recognized their famous visitor.

  “Hi, soul,” somebody yelled.

  “Hi, brother,” shouted Ali.

  “Stokely, he tell the world to burn Whitey,” said one student.

  “I’m telling you religion,” Ali countered.

  “Naw, not religion. We want to burn Whitey.”

  “Don’t do nothing violent. We’re not violent,” Ali counseled.

  “This is rebellion, man. They take you in the Army, they see a rebellion.”

  “Stokely say burn their babies.”

  “We don’t want violence,” Ali repeated.

  “You don’t put down a black brother,” said a student defiantly.

  Finally, Ali returned to the car. “They’re a bunch of young fools,” he told his lawyers. “I don’t want any of this violence. I hear there’ll be demonstrations tomorrow morning in New York, Chicago, London, Egypt. There are sixteen thousand Muslims in Cleveland who’ll demonstrate. Nearly every Negro is a Muslim at heart. The trouble is, first thing you got to do to be a Muslim is live a righteous life. Most people, white or black, don’t want to do that.”

  When they arrived back at the hotel, there was a message for Ali to call his mother.

  “G.G., do the right thing,” she implored, using the pet name she had given to him as a child. “If I were you, I would go ahead and take the step. If I were you, I would join the Army. Do you understand me, son?”

  Ali reassured her that he understood how she felt. “Mama, I love you. Whatever I do, Mama, remember I love you.” As she began to cry, he hung up, visibly shaken by the exchange.

  He went to the hotel coffee shop for dinner, followed by a bevy of reporters. As he ate his soup, they peppered him with questions about his intentions. Ali handled his inquisitors the way he received his opponents’ blows in the ring, sometimes deftly deflecting their queries, often meeting them head-on, his quick mind as agile as his famous footwork.

  Somebody pointed out that he would be in danger whether he went into the army or jail. “Every day they die in Vietnam for nothing. I might as well die right here for something,” he replied.

  One reporter asked, “What about just playing the game like other big-time athletes? You wouldn’t be sent to the front lines. You could give exhibitions and teach physical fitness.” Ali was constantly being reminded of this option, the same one given to his boyhood idol, Joe Louis, when he was drafted into the army during World War II. Louis avoided combat by boxing exhibitions and entertaining the troops. Lately Louis had been publicly badmouthing Ali for his lack of patriotism, implying Ali was afraid to go to Vietnam, to which Ali responded, “Louis is the one without courage. Louis, he doesn’t know what the words mean. He’s a sucker.”

  Now, Ali dismissed the reporter’s question, making it clear that putting on an army uniform was tantamount to going to battle against an enemy with whom he “had no quarrel.”

  He leaned forward to make his point. “What can you give me, America, for turning down my religion? You want me to do what the white man says and go fight a war against some people I know nothing about, get some freedom for some other people when my own people can’t get theirs here?

  “You want me to be so scared of the white man I’ll go and get two arms shot off and ten medals so you can give me a small salary and pat my head and say,’ Good boy, he fought for his country’?”

  A report earlier that week had disclosed that the Pentagon was expecting fifty thousand civilian casualties in Vietnam that year. Statistics like these, which he would often cite to underscore his opposition, seemed to fuel Ali’s decision as much as his Muslim beliefs. He was also fond of pointing out that black Americans accounted for a disproportionate amount of American troop casualties, as much as 30 percent, even though they only made up 11 percent of the U.S. population and 22 percent of the soldiers.

  In answering another reporter, who asked whether he was prepared to go to jail for his beliefs, Ali revealed that he had been visiting prisons to get accustomed to them. “They say you’re all right in them federal places. You can pay for your own food. You get TV. Only thing you don’t get is your girlfriends.”

  Somebody at the table volunteered how it was sad that such a handsome and gifted young man should have to even contemplate death and imprisonment. One of those present, describing his reaction to this lament, noted that “his eyes became bright again like a martyr’s flames.” Ali responded philosophically: “Allah okays the adversary to try us. That’s how He sees if you’re a true believer. All a man has to show for his time here on earth is what kind of a name he had. Jesus. Columbus. Daniel Boone. Now, take Wyatt Earp. Who would have told him when he was fighting crooks and standing up for principles that there’d be a television show about him? That kids on the street would say, ‘I’m Wyatt Earp. Reach.’” At this, he recited one of his trademark poems, seemingly composed on the spot:

  Two thousands years from now,

  Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali,

  He roamed the Western Hemisphere,

  He was courageous an
d strong,

  He called the round when the clown hit the ground.

  Tell little children whatever they believe,

  Stand up like Muhammad Ali.

  With that, he retired to his room, leaving no one present with any doubt as to what he would do the next day when his name was called at the induction center.

  Although he had left his companions with the impression that he was very calm with his impending decision, Bundini Brown later recalled that Ali couldn’t get to sleep; he had too many things on his mind, and the two stayed up talking until 2 A.M.

  “It was like the night before a fight,” Brown later said. “The champ has got to talk and talk until he can fall asleep without tossing and turning.”

  By morning, when his lawyers came by to fetch him, he seemed to have slept off his jitters. “He was a lot cooler than we were,” recalled his lawyer Quinnon Hodges.

  His coolness quickly turned to fury as he read the New York Times over breakfast. Sportswriter Arthur Daley had written a patronizing column about Ali’s decision. Daley, like most journalists, still refused to call him Muhammad Ali, writing:

  People change in seven years and few have changed more than Clay The delightful boy of 1960 has become a mixed-up man. If there was skepticism about the sincerity of his motives when he first fell under the sway of the Black Muslims, it exists no longer. He has been so thoroughly brainwashed that he now believes what he says even if the words are put into his mouth by the Muslims ….

  The Muslims, who direct his every move, have gained a meal ticket and lost a martyr. The shrewd men at the head of the movement must think that sacrificing him is worth the price …. As a fist-fighter, Cassius might very well have become the greatest. But we’ll never know. Instead, he seems fated to bring about his own destruction.

  Daley’s sentiments were almost universally shared by the American media, which was still a long way from turning against the war in Vietnam. A reporter defended Ali at his own peril—as syndicated sports columnist Jerry Izenberg discovered when he took up Ali’s cause. “The backlash was unbelievable,” he recalls. “The first time I defended him, my column was being carried by twenty-six newspapers. That night, half of them cancelled. I received death threats, many of them with an anti-Semitic element, telling me they wished I had died in the concentration camps. I used to drive a gray Monte Carlo. One day, I pulled up at a light at the same time another gray Monte Carlo pulled up in the opposite direction. A couple of guys got out of a car, ran up to the other Monte Carlo, and smashed its windshield with a sledgehammer. They thought it was me.”

  As Ali finished breakfast, a reporter asked him about the prospect of losing his title if he refused to take the step that morning.

  “They can strip me of it at the boxing commission but not in the eyes of the people,” he responded. “The people know the only way I can lose my title is in the ring. My title goes where I go. But if they won’t let me fight, it could cost me $10 million. Does that sound like I’m serious about my religion?”

  His lawyer Hayden Covington interrupted. “Come on, champ, come on. We’ve got twenty-five minutes.”

  “If we’re one minute late, they’re liable to shove you behind bars,” Hodges pleaded.

  They jumped in a taxi and rode to the municipal courthouse where the induction was scheduled for 8 A.M. They passed Muhammad Ali Street, named for the champ with much fanfare five months earlier, after he fought Cleveland Williams in Houston. The next day it would be quietly changed back to its old name,Thomas Jefferson Street. When they arrived at the courthouse, about a dozen demonstrators were waiting with a banner reading, STAY HOME, MUHAMMAD ALI, and shouting, “Don’t go! Don’t go!”—a far cry from the mass demonstrations Ali had predicted. Black Panther H. Rap Brown led a group of black protesters in a chant of “Hep! Hep! Don’t take that step.”

  Robert Lipsyte, who covered the induction for the New York Times, reveals that the scene was actually a media charade.“You have to understand that Ali still didn’t have a lot of support,” he recalls. “Other than some students and black militants, the country was still solidly against him and for the war. They were expecting thousands of demonstrators at the courthouse and it just didn’t happen. So the TV guys rounded up a bunch of secretaries and curious bystanders and promised them exposure on the evening news if they would carry signs and whip up a pro-Ali demonstration. It was actually a big scam.”

  Not everybody was a prop, however. An elderly woman ran across the street as Ali emerged from the cab, grabbing his hand and whispering, “Stand up, brother. We’re with you. Stand up, fight for us. Don’t let us down!”

  Reporters cried out, “Muhammad, give us the answer!…Are you going in? … What will your stand be?”

  Across the street, FBI agents with walkie-talkies surveyed the scene. Ali’s lawyers pointed them out to him, whispering, “G-Men.”

  Forty-six recruits were scheduled to be inducted that morning. One of them, a white twenty-two-year-old named John McCullough, was asked by reporters what he thought of Ali’s impending action. “It’s his prerogative if he’s sincere in his religion,” he said, “but it’s his duty as a citizen to go in. I’m a coward, too.”

  Howard Cosell stood in front of the courthouse with an ABC television crew. As Ali passed, he yelled out, “Are you going to take the step, Muhammad? Are you going to take the step?”

  Ali grinned and said, “Howard Cosell—why don’t you take the step?”

  “I did,” Cosell snapped back. “In 1942.”

  As Ali entered the building, he was led into a large room along with the other recruits, each carrying a canvas overnight bag—all except Ali, who knew he wouldn’t be leaving with them on the 6 P.M. bus to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

  “It was great the way he came in,” inductee Ron Holland later told reporters. “He told us we all looked very dejected and said he was going to tell us some jokes. He was very cheerful. He cheered us all up. He told us his mind was made up. He said if he went into the army and some Vietcong didn’t get him, some redneck from Georgia would. He was in good spirits. I got his autograph.”

  Ali describes his own thoughts as he entered the courthouse: “That day in Houston when I went into the induction center, I felt happy, because people didn’t think I had the nerve or they don’t have the nerve to buck the draft board or the government. And I almost ran there, hurried. I couldn’t wait to not take the step. The world was watching, the blacks mainly, looking to see if I had the nerve to buck Uncle Sam, and I just couldn’t wait for the man to call my name.”

  After a long wait, an Army officer came out and took roll call, then dispersed the recruits in groups of ten to take a physical. When Ali’s group was called, they were brought to another large room furnished with eight canvas-covered cubicles, each one manned by a doctor.

  “Strip down to shorts,” barked an officer.

  Ali complied and was led to a booth, where one of the doctors stood by a table. “His eyes lit up when he saw me, as though that’s why he came to work that day,” Ali later recalled.

  The doctor got right to business. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Muhammad Ali.”

  The doctor frowned. “It’s Cassius Clay,” he said emphatically.

  Ali kept quiet.

  “It’s Cassius Clay,” he repeated. “Isn’t it?” “Well, it used to be, but—”

  “It’s still Cassius Clay,” he said angrily. “That’s who you’re registered as.” The doctor turned to his assistant.“Put down Cassius Clay,” he said.

  As this episode was unfolding, Ali flashed back to an incident that took place when he collapsed shortly before he was scheduled to fight the rematch against Sonny Liston in 1964. He was diagnosed with a hernia and told that he needed an operation immediately.

  “What’s your name?” one of the doctors asked on that occasion.

  “Muhammad Ali.”

  “No, that’s not your real name,” he said in an irritated tone. “Wha
t’s your real name?”

  “Muhammad Ali is my real name.”

  “Listen, I’m not going to send you up to the operating room until you tell me your legal name.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” Ali responded as the pain ripped through him like hot knives. “My name is Muhammad Ali and I’ll die right here before I answer to any other name.”

  Finally, another doctor ordered that he be rushed to the operating room.

  While Ali proceeded through pre-induction in Houston, Congress continued to agonize over the merits of the escalating Vietnam War. In Washington that morning, General William Westmoreland, the commander of the U.S. Forces in Vietnam, addressed the Senate, vowing that “American forces will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor.” A day earlier he had told a convention of newspaper publishers that “unpatriotic acts at home” were encouraging Hanoi and the Vietcong to continue fighting.

  As the medical checkup progressed, Ali moved from cubicle to cubicle, each doctor conducting his own routine exam. As he was ushered into the last stall, the doctor snapped, “Gimme your papers,” in a strong Southern drawl. Then he ordered Ali to remove his shorts so he could check for a hernia. The doctor jabbed his hand into Ali’s testicles and told him to cough. As he pressed harder, he sneered, “So you don’t want to go and fight for your country?” As this was happening, Ali later recalled, he thought back to the days when castration and lynchings were common in the South.

  When the checkup was finished, the recruits were given a short break and handed a box lunch. Ali ate almost everything but tossed aside the ham sandwich in deference to Muslim dietary laws.

  Meanwhile, outside the courthouse, some genuine protesters had arrived from the nearby Southern Texas University. Five black students burned their draft cards while others marched in a circle carrying placards and a Black Power flag. They read from the writings of Malcolm X and shouted, “America is a house on fire. Let it burn, let it burn.”