by Mark Kram
Except in the ring, Ali would never fit his model. Ray was a prince of the night, lighting down wherever the champagne flowed and girls whispered in his ear, a smooth boulevardier in Saville Row suits with a small entourage in his wake and a manner that lit up London and Paris. He once said after a lengthy stay in the latter: “I left my legs in Paris.” Until the second half of his career, Ali never left his legs anywhere. Early on, he saw women as temptation, was uneasy in their presence, to the point that many of the old hustlers in boxing thought he was homosexual. He was generous to family and friends, frugal with his own spending, dressed usually like a timekeeper on a construction job, black shirt and pants and heavy boots. He would far surpass Sugar’s entourage; he ended up with one the size of those old unemployment lines.
The two first met in 1960 prior to Clay’s trip to the Olympics in Rome. He had been waiting outside of Sugar’s Harlem nightclub for hours. When Ray finally stepped out of a flamingo pink Cadillac, such was the maestro’s glitter that the young Clay thought of beating it down the street. But he suddenly pounced, picking Sugar up at the curb and ringing his ears with a nonstop petition. He was going to be the heavyweight champion, and he wanted Sugar to manage him. “I can’t manage you,” he told the teenager. “I’m a fighter.” Clay wasn’t hearing too well. “I want you to teach me all your tricks,” he said. “You the best ever, Mr. Robinson.” Sugar kept walking, and said, “Good luck, a…a…a…” Clay blurted: “Cassius. Cassius Marcellus Clay. Got a nice sound, don’t it?” Sugar opened the door, saying, “Cassius, right. Good luck in Rome, Cassius.” A few minutes later, Sugar turned and saw Clay’s face up against the window, looking in wistfully.
Over the next ten years, they saw each other on occasion, mainly because Ali kept seeking him out. Ali grew on Robinson, though Sugar didn’t like his loud “line of bullshit,” his tendency toward the manic, almost a berserk attitude in a ring. If the ring was art to Sugar, he also knew it to be a very sober matter, and was fond of relating what Jean Cocteau, his friend and fight enthusiast, once told him in Paris when talking of artists. Cocteau looked upon Ray as an artist and said the real artist was always conscious of what was at stake, if only to himself. “The Muses,” he said, “open the door and silently point to the tightrope.” The young Clay didn’t see any of that. Sugar tried to explain it to him once in so many words. “Where? A tightrope?” he asked. “I don’t see any tightrope.” Sugar wanted him to develop a sense of craft, an imperturbable ring presence; Ray himself strode into a ring as if he were going to buy the building, hair pomaded, no sweat, all cool Italian marble. As Ali rose in the ranks, Ray became concerned for him, suspected that he wasn’t emotionally arranged yet for living or his work. He was childlike, easily led, with an innocence that pulled you to him and also made you fear for him. “That boy’s going to get hurt one day,” Sugar told his manager George Gainford.
Despite Clay’s exterior, Sugar sensed that he was often unhappy. He sent Drew Bundini Brown, from his own entourage, to cheer him up. Bundini would stay on with Ali to the end and was the father of “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and almost all the rhyming doggerel that TV loved and made dogs run. Prior to the Liston fight, Clay persuaded Sugar to come to Miami, saying he needed him there to beat Liston, he didn’t know how to take Sonny. Robinson found a camp in chaos, too many people, too much noise, a fighter not paying attention; he’d run two blocks, turn, and come back. Ray didn’t tell him what to do, said only that for big fights he himself never felt secure without running five miles a day. Thereafter, Clay did his five miles, too, with urgency.
Clay wanted Sugar to quit the ring, to stay with him. He said: “Elijah Muhammad will give you seven hundred thousand, collect a dollar from each member, if you become a Muslim.” Ray brushed off the fantasy offer; he didn’t trust Muslims. And there were only twenty thousand of them even with tampered roll keeping. “When are you going to wake up?” he asked Clay. “You can’t be a country boy all your life. Be your own man.” How to beat Liston? With a lot of cape, and then the sword. The matador and the bull, just the way he had done it with Jake LaMotta. “I couldn’t match the strength of LaMotta. I had to outsmart him. Wear him down for the kill. He was a tough bull. Like Liston.” The two watched a film of the LaMotta fight night after night. Bundini took Ray aside one day and said: “Sugar, you right, he just a country boy. I love him. But he’s got a fistful of mean in him the Muslims give him, and he’s gonna be a lot of trouble down the road.”
Ironic, though: Clay had rushed toward the Muslims like an orphan, while the sect saw no utility in him, no gain, despite Malcolm X’s interest. Clay was a Muslim in his own mind, that’s all. Elijah Muhammad had forbade Malcolm to talk to Clay, though he had been cultivated by Muslim underlings working on their own long before Malcolm’s arrival. The Muslim hierarchy barely knew who Clay was, while the troops in Miami filled his head with dogma and privately laughed at the idea of Clay beating Liston. His name was also a minor point of derision at the Chicago headquarters. The focus there remained on Malcolm’s disobedience; he was meddling again and would bring ridicule to Elijah with his “association with a fool fighter.” Muhammad Speaks did not even send a reporter to cover the Liston fight. Besides, old Elijah hated boxing, fighters were “slaves run by fat men with cigars who stole their money.” No black man should perform in any capacity for a white man; had Clay lost he would have been dropped, or drifted away, without a single Muslim hand reaching for him.
When Sugar showed up at Loew’s, he was met by a young Clay who was gathering tread, if not much wisdom. He had been married and divorced from Sonji Roi, a petite woman with the slink and catlike knowing of an Eartha Kitt. Herbert Muhammad, son of Elijah, had introduced them and was amazed when Ali married her almost instantly. Sonji didn’t care about the Muslims; they were whacked-out robots to her. She saw Ali as a tender, confused man who didn’t know much. She tried to adapt to being a Muslim woman, no short skirts, no smoking, no painted face, yet he wanted her to reek sex when they were alone. Her sexual electricity overwhelmed him as well as the status of his own Muslim face. To Herbert, she was a bad influence. She was planting doubt. She wanted a house and family. Ali said the Muslim Mother Ship was going to bomb all the whites, pick up all the Muslims, no need of a house. Why then, she asked, was Elijah padding around in a mansion in Chicago?
Ali began to see her as a temptress, a betrayer. She had too much to say. The Muslims began to cast her as a mistake for Ali, a slick bar girl, a woman after his money, and circulated false rumors that she had been a hooker. She tried with Ali, but she wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life in long dresses and looking up to the sky for the Mother of Planes; it was insane, demeaning. They fought often, once so loud and physical that Sugar Ray raced into their room to intervene, and Ali warned him to go away or he was going to cut him up the way Jake LaMotta never did. Herbert, through Ali, forced her out. A member of Ali’s entourage years later capsulized his dilemma of spiritual loftiness and lust. “Aren’t we all hypocrites?” he said. “Ali wouldn’t think twice about that now.”
Malcolm X was gone, too, assassinated by the Muslims who feared his worldly new direction and his steady inquisition of Elijah’s financial practices and his diddling of young Muslim women. Malcolm saw Ali as a new kind of Muslim, wanted to protect him. They passed each other in Ghana airport, with Malcolm in a white robe and carrying a prophet’s staff. Ali turned to Herbert, laughing: “He’s so far out he’s out completely. Elijah is the most powerful. Nobody listens to Malcolm anymore.” It was Elijah, the prophet’s teachings, that had turned Malcolm from a drug pusher and a thief into a leader; that’s what Ali saw. Malcolm’s power belonged to the old man. His murder would jolt Ali, drive home a point that he had given no thought; the Muslims played for keeps.
In Africa to broaden his world appeal, Ali stayed long enough to insult the looks of Nigerian women and, saying it was just a little place, he beat it to Egypt, the fortress of mighty Islam a
nd home to the women he had remembered from Cecil B. DeMille epics. Gamal Nasser, the leader of Egypt and irritant to U. S. policy, was the kind of messianic strongman Ali found hard to resist. He reacted to power, the real kind that could hurt people or save them. Power was impenetrable, spooky. Nasser was a basilisk of control. They sat in his office, and Ali was mesmerized when a single fly landed on Nasser’s prodigious nose and the great man made no unmessianic effort to disturb it until Ali wanted to swat it himself; power was about control. They drifted down the Nile together, Nasser in a shimmering white suit, being fanned, and later Ali in native dress rode a camel to the pyramids. Squinting up to the sun, he said: “No white devil make anything like this, could they?”
With the arrival of the Black Panthers and their street sweepers, the Black Muslims by 1968 had become a revolutionary antique. Worse, the Muslims’ businesses, shops, newspapers, bakeries, were failing through systematic self-looting and bad management. Membership began to wane; they had always looked for confused kids, small-time thieves and whores; they were strong in prison, where inmates took a correspondence course from Chicago. There were rigid rules: Never eat pig, dress right, and pull your own weight; never forget the devil white man. They wanted contribution of man-hours and money. If you sold their paper, Muhammad Speaks, on the streets and didn’t make your quota, or if you were a backslider, they took you back to the temple and worked you over. Women were reduced to chattel. The Muslim goals were self-love and separatism; they wanted the United States to cede them a state.
“Ali is the Muslims,” Bundini Brown said, weary of the cadre of Muslims in black suits and little bow ties acting self-important. Were it not for Ali’s name the Muslims would be looked upon as a social club of dozing members. Whether he liked it or not, Elijah had a big cigar in his mouth, was the manager, overseer of a mere fighter, a long way from the day a strange man, W.D. Fard, tugged his arm on a Detroit street, said he was an emissary of Yacub, or God, said he wanted the white man destroyed, wanted Elijah to free the black race. Elijah became a prophet on the spot and, with a dash of science fiction, put up the Mothership, a mile wide, in the sky. Black men were at the controls, and they never smiled. There was no up or down, heaven or hell; that was a Christian concept. Just that plane up there, circling, watching, and waiting for the old man’s orders. Elijah was a wisp of a man, his face mottled by age spots, and he favored a hat with half-moons and stars. He was seldom in public view, had no flair for oratory. Did Ali and Elijah ever sit down much and talk?
“He too busy to talk,” he said. “He makes plans. He so wise.”
“Does he play cards? To pass time, maybe?”
“Prophets don’t play anything. Next thing you wanna know what he eats.”
“Does he?”
“Just soup and gruel.” He paused. “Hey, we’re not talkin’ ’bout an ordinary man. Do he eat? That’s not funny.”
Ali was sitting on the bed, eyes downcast, when Robinson entered his Loew’s room. Sugar said: “You got a fight tonight. You need sleep.” Ali got up and handed him a thousand dollars in cash. “What’s this for?” Sugar asked. “I told you I can’t be in your corner. I don’t have a second’s license.” Ali said: “Keep it. You’re a good friend.”
“What’s the trouble, champ?” Sugar asked.
“The army. They’re gonna want me soon. But I can’t go.”
“But you have to go. What’s this ‘can’t’?”
“Elijah Muhammad told me,” Ali said, “that I can’t go.”
Ray said: “You won’t see a gun. Box some exhibitions. It’ll be a snap. If you don’t, they’ll send you to jail, pick up your license. You want to blow up your career, all you have, for nothing.”
“Well,” Ali said, “Elijah Muhammad told me.”
“Forget the old man,” Ray said, annoyed now. “Is Elijah going to go to jail, and all those other Muslims?”
“But I’m afraid, Ray, I’m really afraid.”
“Afraid of what? Of the Muslims if you don’t do what they told you?”
Sugar pressed for an answer; he never got one. Years later he recalled: “He never answered. The kid was terrified. I left him with tears in his eyes. If you ask me, he wasn’t afraid of jail. He was scared of being killed by the Muslims. But I don’t know for sure.”
Malcolm had told Clay long before: “Nobody leaves the Muslims without trouble.” Hardly a comment easily forgotten. Now that Malcolm was pointing at the Muslims as a criminal organization, with extensive ties to the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, his every move was being tracked. The Muslims, who owned his house in Queens, evicted him—with a firebomb. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s wife, went to Clay for help, saying: “You see it. You know. Stop it if you have any feeling at all.” Clay shrugged: “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ to him.” After Malcolm’s killing, if his name came up and a remark was made about what a loss it was to black people, Ali would mumble: “What people? Malcolm was a leader of one. Himself.” Sunni Khalid, a print and broadcast journalist and a student of Ali and the Nation of Islam, says: “Ali threw Malcolm away like a pork chop. Even today, those who really know can never forgive him.”
But Clay had no import in Muslim decision-making; he was merely a follower, a useful idiot with a name to them. Yet his lack of empathy stung followers of Malcolm. Clay had been far more than just nurtured by Malcolm. He had listened to his every word and wanted desperately to be like him, even to the point of taking on his mannerisms. Clay, like Malcolm, would turn away from the camera while a question was posed, then look directly and challengingly into it while answering; like Malcolm, he would also poke the index finger of his right hand into his cheek while listening. When Malcoln was on the ropes with the Muslims, Clay asked him if he should stay in the movement. Fearing for his own life, Malcolm told him to stay in line—for the moment.
At the time, the police were wary of a black civil war. Only hours after Malcolm was killed, a fire broke out in Clay’s second floor apartment at Seventy-first and Cregir on the Chicago South Side. Conveniently, Clay was having dinner with his wife, Sonji, at the Arabian Sands Hotel in Chicago when John Ali, the Muslims’ executive secretary, called him with the news. Firemen later called the blaze an accident, but it looked suspicious; the neighboring apartments were hardly damaged. Insiders believed the fire was an attempt by the Muslims to remind Clay to stay in line. Much more worldly and observant than Clay, Sonji suspected that her husband was being watched and tracked closely by the Muslims, and hinted to him that the Muslims had set the fire. “Nobody knew where we were having dinner,” she said. “The night of the day Malcolm X was murdered! It was too coincidental.” Retaliation by followers of the fallen Malcolm would come later, not against Ali but Elijah. While the bomb squad was summoned to his Chicago mansion, only to spend a long time opening a delivery that contained a ticking grandfather clock, the real thing later exploded in his Harlem mosque. Elijah was cordoned off, and Clay relied on a small group of guards, called the Fruit of Islam (Fruit of the Loon to detractors), who walked about with ears laid back and dead eyes. They would always be at Clay’s side. Tex Maule, of Sports Illustrated, who could forgive Clay almost anything, showed up at Clay’s quarters prior to the Folley fight, and he was amazed how easily the Muslims pushed him around.
Maule was trying to console Ali about the military draft, saying, “The way they’ll treat you, it will be like you’re on vacation.” Ali was clearly agitated, like a man who was seriously divided about a decision he must make, and time was running out. He asked Tex if he had ever been in jail. “Tex!” one of the Muslims intruded. “Man with that name never been to jail. He put people in jail.” He was referring to the fact that Maule was from Texas. Another Muslim added: “He say no problem. Why, that white trash out there send your ass to Nam in a second. And they’ll lynch you way up in a banana tree.” Tex tried to dispute their fantastic analysis of Ali’s situation. A Muslim waved him off, saying: “Some bullneck cracker corporal put a blade in him b
efore he even get to Nam.” Another quickly added: “You be doin’ the stockade shuffle. Jist ’cause you don’t wanna wash dishes.” Tex urged Ali not to believe “this bullshit.” Ali said: “I don’t know what to believe.” A Muslim walked over to Ali: “Champ, go take a walk.” Ali said, “I don’t feel like it.” The Muslim said: “Listen to me! Jist get out, okay?” When Ali left, the three Muslims moved close to Maule, one of them pointing his finger and saying, “You best stay outta our business. Now haul your white ass outta here. You got nothin’ to say here.”
Current hagiographers have tied themselves in knots trying to elevate Ali into a heroic, defiant catalyst of the antiwar movement, a beacon of black independence. It’s a legacy that evolves from the intellectually loose sixties, from those who were in school then and now write romance history. The sad truth was that Ali was played like a harp by the Muslims, a daft cult with a long record of draft dodging from Elijah (who went to prison) on down. His posture was not about unjust war, it was mainly a stratagem by the Muslims to keep themselves on the revolutionary scoreboard, to flex their power and image. Everyone who knew anything about racial politics then knew the press exposure given them was extravagant. They were into profit and running things like Papa Doc ran Haiti. They were, in fact, anti–civil rights, despised Martin Luther King, and nowhere near as serious as the Panthers, who were anarchic, helpful to the poor, and “ready to die on the spot.” Malcolm X had wanted Ali to be a man of the world, to be a leader; Ali, mindlessly or fearfully, settled for being attached to a string on an old man’s hand in Chicago.
