Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  As America careened through its own turbulence and turmoil, Ali’s legal case moved slowly through the court system. On May 6,1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld his conviction. Judge J. P. Coleman appeared less than sympathetic to the case, ruling, “There has been no administrative process which Clay has not sought within the Selective Service System, its local and appeal boards, the Presidential appeal board and, finally, the federal courts, in an unsuccessful attempt to evade and escape from military service of his country.”

  The court agreed with the claim by Ali’s lawyers that blacks were under-represented on draft boards throughout the country. In the next breath, however, the three-judge panel decided this was irrelevant to Ali’s conviction, ruling that “even the systematic exclusion of Negroes from draft boards would not render their acts null and void.” More important to the case, the court ruled against Ali’s ministerial deferment claim, insisting he was a professional boxer, not a minister.

  It was yet another legal setback, and it left the Supreme Court as Ali’s sole hope for staying out of prison. Even then, the chances of convincing the nation’s highest court to hear his case were remote. Increasingly, Ali was growing frustrated at having his fate in the hands of a legal system that every day seemed more and more out of step with the times and the transformations that were wracking American society.

  After the decision, he defiantly announced, “You done rolled the dice on me. Now we’re going to have to finish the game. We’ve gone too far to turn back now. You can’t cop out on me. You’ve got to either free me or put me in jail. I’m going to go on just like I’m doing, taking my stand.”

  Ali would see the inside of a jail cell sooner than he thought. A year earlier, he had been driving his Cadillac when he was stopped in Miami for speeding. Upon verification, it was found that he was driving without a license. Once again, it seemed Ali was a modern-day incarnation of Jack Johnson, who had left a legacy of possibly apocryphal driving stories. On one occasion, it is said, Johnson was stopped on a highway and handed a fifty-dollar fine. He peeled off two fifty dollar bills and handed them to the traffic cop, who asked what the second bill was for. “I’m coming through again,” the notorious boxer said. Ali was well on his way to gaining such notoriety on the nation’s roads when Elijah Muhammad took away his license and assigned him a driver several months before the Miami incident. It didn’t stop him, however, from occasionally slipping away and indulging his passion for speed.

  When he didn’t show up in court on the traffic violation, a warrant was quietly issued for his arrest in Dade County, Florida. Then, in December 1968, he was again stopped on a Miami street by a motorcycle cop, who found the outstanding warrant and escorted him to the local courthouse. There a judge sentenced him to a ten-day term in the Dade County jail. Considering his otherwise clean record, a large fine would have been the standard punishment for such an offense, prompting his lawyer to charge, “He got sentenced for being Cassius Clay. Everyone is caught up in the hate-Clay hysteria.”

  So just before Christmas, Ali got a small taste of what lay ahead of him, barring Supreme Court salvation. He was assigned the kitchen detail, where for forty cents an hour, he sliced vegetables, washed dishes, and brought trays of food to his fellow inmates, who were excited to have a celebrity in their midst.

  “Jail is a bad place,” he later recalled. “You’re all locked up; you can’t get out. The food is bad, and there’s nothing good to do. You look out the window at the cars and people, and everyone else seems so free. Little things you take for granted like sleeping good or walking down the street, you can’t do them no more. A man’s got to be real serious about what he believes to say he’ll do that for five years.”

  Still, the week in jail—he was let out three days early under a Christmas amnesty—didn’t change his mind about his stand, even after the government let it be known that it wasn’t too late to make a deal.

  Indeed, if anything the stint behind bars revived Ali in some ways. His poetizing, which had been temporarily (and some would say mercifully) suspended during his exile, was stimulated again by his jail experience. To the oft-repeated question, “Are you still willing to go to prison?” he began to respond in rapping verse:

  Hell no,

  I ain’t going to go.

  Clean out my cell

  And take my tail

  To jail

  Without bail

  Because it’s better there eating,

  Watching television fed,

  Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead

  Meanwhile, Herbert Muhammad, his manager and the Messenger’s son, thought he had found a loophole in the legal obstacles that kept Ali from boxing in any of the fifty states. He had approached an Arizona Indian reservation—which wasn’t governed by the same licensing laws as the states—and proposed a fight between Ali and Zora Folley. The closed-circuit rights alone would have been worth millions and would promise a financial cushion for the still-struggling boxer.

  “The Indians have suffered at the hands of the white man just like we have,” Ali said, anticipating the fight. “They’re with me.”

  He spoke too soon. The Gila River Tribal Council, citing its military and historical heritage, voted to deny the use of the reservation for the fight.

  “The reason I oppose having this fight here is that it would desecrate the land some of our brave boys have walked on,” announced Mary Anna Johnson of the Tribal Council, noting that many Gila River Indians had fought bravely for the United States, including Ira Hayes, a Medal of Honor winner as a marine during World War II.

  Ali’s legal prospects weren’t looking any better. The case had been submitted to the United States Supreme Court. There, before it would receive a full hearing, a majority of the nine justices would have to agree that an error in law or interpretation was likely to have been a factor in the lower court judgments. If no such majority existed, the decision of the lower court would stand and Ali would immediately go to prison. When the justices convened in closed session in March 1969, only Justice Brennan believed the appeal was compelling enough to grant a writ of certiorari (or approval to hear the case). By an overwhelming eight-to-one margin, Ali’s argument had failed; the boxer appeared to have run out of legal options. When, a week later, the Court released the list of cases it would ponder that spring, Cassius Marsellus Clay vs. United States of America would be absent, forcing Ali to turn himself in to serve his five-year term.

  The long battle appeared over; Ali, it seemed, had lost his biggest fight. Then, out of the blue, he caught a break. In June 1968, Congress had passed a law legalizing electronic eavesdropping by federal agents with court approval in cases of national security and certain criminal contexts. A byproduct of the bill was that any eavesdropping on other grounds that had taken place before that date was considered illegal. The Justice Department was forced to concede that, indeed, conversations involving Ali had been illegally listened to at least five times before that date. Among the other high-profile cases affected by the decision were convictions against Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, antiwar protester and pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Black Panther H. Rap Brown—each of whom had also been illegally wiretapped.

  The Supreme Court could have overturned Ali’s conviction on this basis alone. Instead, it granted him a different form of reprieve. On March 11,1969, the Court ruled that Ali’s case would be sent back to a lower court to determine if the wiretaps had had any influence on his prosecution.

  “It wasn’t the best thing which could have happened,” says his lawyer Charles Morgan, “but it kept him out of prison and gave us another chance to pull something out of our hat.”

  Ali’s new hearing was scheduled for Federal District Court on June 4,1969. Two days before the hearing was scheduled to begin, Morgan filed a motion demanding the government produce complete records of the wiretap information against Ali or drop the case. The U.S. Attorney agreed to allow Morgan to inspect four of the five transcrip
ts, but the fifth was being withheld “for national security.”

  Two days later, the hearing got underway with an explosive revelation. Under examination by Charles Morgan, FBI agent Robert Nichols took the stand and testified that the Bureau had maintained a telephone surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. for several years before the civil rights leader’s assassination. For the many people who had long suspected that King was being monitored, this represented the first official confirmation.

  Nichols then produced the transcript that affected Ali’s case. It contained a condensation of a September 1964 telephone conversation between Ali and King that had been initiated by lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, who represented the two men. It read, in sum:

  Chauncey to MLK, said he is in Miami with Cassius, they exchanged greetings. MLK wished him well on his recent marriage. C. invited MLK to be his guest at his next championship fight. MLK said he would like to attend. C. said that he is keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother and is with him 100 percent but can’t take any chances and that MLK should take care of himself, that MLK is known worldwide and should watch out for them Whities, said that people in Nigeria, Egypt, and Ghana asked about MLK.

  But Ali’s lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, who had also represented King, then testified that he had placed this particular call from Ali’s Miami home to Dr. King’s home in Atlanta, and that Ali had talked from an extension. He said the conversation had lasted forty-five minutes and included a discussion about Ali’s religious activities. This prompted Morgan to demand a complete transcript of the entire conversation; however, the FBI agent claimed the original recording had been destroyed.

  On the initial copy provided to the court, the FBI had altered the document to take out Nichols’s handwritten name and remove the comma at the end of the transcript, to make it appear that the conversation was much shorter than it had, in fact, been.

  “They were committing legal fraud,” recalls Morgan. “Luckily we caught them at it and we forced them to produce the original log. But we still only got ten lines of a forty-five-minute conversation.”

  Among the other conversations the FBI released were several between Ali and Elijah Muhammad, whose phone had been bugged since 1960. In one, the Messenger told Ali that he would “not be a good Minister” until he gave up boxing.

  The fifth conversation remained a mystery. The judge concurred with the U.S. Attorney that divulging its contents would compromise “national security,” a decision that helped fuel rumors that the conversation involved a member of a foreign government. If this was indeed the case, its disclosure would confirm that the U.S. government was illegally bugging foreign embassies, which would have resulted in a highly embarrassing international incident.

  The next day, FBI agent Warren L. Walsh testified that two of Ali’s bugged conversations had been sent from the FBFs Phoenix office to the Bureau’s office in Louisville, the location of Ali’s draft board. But Oscar Smith, former head of the Justice Department’s Conscientious Objector Section—the man who ruled against Ali’s conscientious objector claim—denied that he had ever heard of the monitored conversations.

  This was enough for Judge Joe Ingraham, who ruled the wiretap evidence was irrelevant to Ali’s draft case and re-sentenced the boxer to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Before handing down his sentence, the judge asked if Ali had anything to say.

  “No, sir,” came the polite reply. “Except I am sticking to my religious beliefs. I know this is a country which preaches religious freedom.”

  Soon after the hearing, Ali was invited to the opening of a new Broadway play called The Great White Hope, with James Earl Jones starring as Jack Johnson. As he approached the theater, Ali looked up at the blown-up photograph of a black man with a shaved skull in bed with a white woman.

  “So that’s Jack Johnson,” he said to himself, pursing his lips in a silent whistle. “That was a b-a-a-a-d nigger!”

  As the curtain rose, Jones appeared on stage in the persona of the notorious black boxer, mocking sportswriters at a press conference. He told the reporters that the reason he smiled so much in the ring was because “Ah like whoever ah’m hitting to see ah’m still his friend.” When Jones told a white opponent that he looked as if he were “about ta walk da plank,” Ali laughed and said to his seatmate, “Hey! This play is about me. Take out the interracial love stuff and Jack Johnson is the original me.” It appeared to be the first time Ali had ever made the connection.

  At the end of the first act, Johnson decides to leave the country rather than be sent to prison and be stripped of the title he won in the ring.

  As Ali stood in the lobby signing autographs during intermission, he said, “Hey, that Jack Johnson just gave me an idea.”

  “If you went to Canada,” said a white middle-aged businessman, “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “Sssh,” Ali said, looking around in mock terror and then smiling. “I couldn’t do that. They’d raise hell with my people.”

  A while later, he repeated his joke about going to Canada to a young black woman.

  “Oh don’t do that,” she pleaded. “We need you here in this country.”

  When a reporter asked him if he could ever really contemplate fleeing the country, he said, “You understand? They done picked up my passport and took my job. But I couldn’t leave this country like Jack Johnson did even if I wanted to. But you know I’ve been visiting jails just to get used to it. Man, that is a bad place, jail. All cooped up, nothing to do, eating bad food. Oh, man.”

  After the play, Ali visited the cast backstage. He said to Jones, “You know, you just change the time, the date, and the details and it’s about me.”

  “Well, that’s the whole point,” said the actor.

  Ali’s tone became somber. “Only one thing is bothering me.”

  “What?”

  “Me,” he said. “Just what are they gonna do fifty years from now when they gotta write a play about me.” He paused and thought about it. “I just wish I knew how it was gonna turn out.”

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Return from the Wilderness

  BY THE SPRING OF 1969, two years of exile from the ring had left a mark on the marginalized champion. His grueling lecture tours brought in barely enough money to pay his outstanding lawyers’bills and his recent week-long jail stint had forced him to confront the reality of what likely lay ahead. He had long since been dismissed as a boxing footnote by the time his old friend Howard Cosell invited him to appear for an interview on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in early April.

  Revisionist history notwithstanding, Cosell had yet to publicly call for the reinstatement of Ali’s heavyweight title almost two years after he had refused induction. During the course of the interview, however, he asked his old verbal sparring partner if he had any desire to return to boxing. Ali’s answer was offhand and curt. Still, it was enough to tear apart his world.

  “Yeah, I’d go back if the money was right,” he responded. “I have a lot of bills to pay.” As Ali spoke, Elijah Muhammad watched the interview at his Chicago mansion with his lieutenant John Ali. That week’s edition of Muhammad Speaks had already been sent to the printers. The Messenger made a phone call and stopped the presses. Two days later, the Nation’s 500,000 members were stunned by the front-page headline, WE TELL THE WORLD WE’RE NOT WITH MUHAMMAD ALI. In a signed editorial, Elijah wrote:

  Muhammad Ali is out of the circle of the brotherhood of the followers of Islam under the leadership and teaching of Elijah Muhammad for one year. He cannot speak to, visit with, or be seen with any Muslim or take part in any Muslim religious activity. Mr. Muhammad Ali plainly acted the fool. Any man or woman who comes to Allah and then puts his hopes and trust in the enemy of Allah for survival is underestimating the power of Allah to help them. Mr. Muhammad Ali has sporting blood. Mr. Muhammad Ali desires to do that which the Holy Qur’an teaches him against. Mr. Muhammad Ali wants a place in this sports world. He loves it.

  The next edition
of the newspaper took the shocking punishment a step further, announcing that the Nation’s most famous recruit would be referred to by his old slave name Cassius Clay rather than be recognized “under the Holy Name Muhammad Ali.”

  The paper carried a statement from the Messenger’s son, Herbert Muhammad, that he was “no longer manager of Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay)” and furthermore that he was no longer “at the service of anyone in the sports world.”

  Sensitive to the widespread assumption that the boxer’s huge fortune had been plundered by the Nation of Islam, John Ali wrote that the champion’s need to fight to pay off debts resulted from his own “ignorance and extravagance” by failing to follow the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who advised all of his disciples to be prudent in handling their money.

  “Neither Messenger Muhammad, the Nation of Islam, nor the Muslims have taken any money from Muhammad Ali,” stated the movement’s National Secretary. “In fact, we have helped Muhammad Ali. Even Muhammad Ali’s sparring partners made better use of their monies than Muhammad Ali, who did not follow the wise counsel of Messenger Muhammad in saving himself from waste and extravagance.”

  It would be the last reference to Muhammad Ali in the newspaper for almost three years. It is difficult to accurately gauge the Nation’s motives in disassociating itself from its most celebrated member, but Elijah Muhammad’s biographer Claude Clegg doesn’t buy the Messenger’s official explanation. “That Ali’s stated desire to be financially rewarded for his boxing talents was suddenly offensive to Muhammad is not credible,” writes Clegg. “For the past five years, the fighter had made his living in the sport. By 1969, Muhammad’s tolerance of the exceptionality of Ali among his followers was simply no longer necessary. In the era of Black Power, the boxer was no longer an essential factor in the appeal of the Nation to young African Americans, and his ouster would not have a significant impact on membership. On another level, the suspension of Ali was reminiscent of the isolation of Malcolm X during 1964. It seemed to raise many of the same issues of authority, generational tensions, and jealousies. Arguably, the punishment was meant to be a reassertion of Muhammad’s dominion over the Nation—a reminder to followers who had become a bit too enamored of Ali.”