Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  The press coverage of Ali (seldom called by that name) and his troubles was as misguided and excessive as the throwing of flowers in his path today. Being on the same page of empirical right, the press followed the nation and was too eager to finger a symbolic villain to stand next to a growing number of body bags being sent home and the hated anti-war movement on campuses. Why should this clown-black militant stay home to burn down your city and home? World War II and Korea were still fresh emotional wounds for Americans and newspapermen, many of whom served as war correspondents. To Jimmy Cannon, the New York Journal-American columnist and favorite of Ernest Hemingway, Clay was an affront to all the young boys he had seen die. A traditionalist, he also saw him as the embodiment of a disintegrating culture. But to say—as some liberal columnists have ventured—that Cannon was a racist who liked only good blacks like Joe Louis is absurd and politically correct to the point of being addled.

  It could hardly be said that Milton Gross, of the New York Post, was a racist. He was a rigorous liberal on a paper often hit for being a cut above Communist. He detested Ali, mainly for his shameful treatment of Floyd Patterson, and measured Ali’s courage against the grunts in Vietnam. What about the usually well-modulated Red Smith, the kindly fly fisherman, who noted the screech of Clay “who makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who object to the war”? These men were simply conditioned by another time. Their peers were Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Rocky Marciano, and Joe Louis, whose character was in their work—not their rhetoric and politics. They were sharp drama critics, with no interest in statistics and the endless hype that dominate today, but in performance and backstage. They tried to bring performers to life, sometimes without interrogation and with a bit too much sentimentality. They didn’t prattle about role models. Hardly saintly themselves, their private sins were ignored. If they had a central complaint against Clay, it was they believed him to be a phony and, sin of all sins, unheroic.

  Not all of the perspective on Ali was a mountain slide. Jerry Izenberg, of the Newark Star-Ledger, was one of the first to rally to Clay’s side, along with Sports Illustrated. Missing was Howard Cosell at ABC, who would eventually never lose a chance to characterize himself as a tower of journalistic boldness on the subject of Ali. Early on George Plimpton had gone to see Cosell to enlist his support. Cosell said his life would be snuffed out in a second if he said over the air that Ali should be allowed to fight. “I’d be shot!” he said. “Right through that window!” How could Cosell bear the drama of his life? He added: “There’s a time and a place for everything, and this is not it.” He would ultimately join himself to Ali’s hip, use him as a prop to promote himself as a man of intrepid, compassionate wisdom.

  Clay was certainly not winning any PR wars across the country. He had been under steady heat from politicians and from those within boxing, beginning with Harry Markson, a staunch liberal and head of Madison Square Garden boxing. He viewed him as a dangerous force, and when Clay showed up for the Patterson-Chuvala fight at the Garden, Markson refused to let him be introduced as Muhammad Ali. Clay walked out. Arthur Daley, of the New York Times, urged a boycott of the fighter and his hate group. Congressmen like L. Mendel Rivers (South Carolina) and Frank Clark (Pennsylvania) came down hard on him. Said Clark: “The heavyweight champion turns my stomach…a complete and total disgrace.” He wanted to see empty movie houses (the venue then for closed-circuit fights), “and that would be the finest tribute to that boy whose hearse may pass by the open doors of the theater on Main Street, U.S.A.”

  If we are to believe a Louisville friend who grew up with him, knew him like a brother, Clay was far removed from the depiction by the press and politicians. The prospect of being drafted paralyzed him with fear. The white world was a threatening environment, what more the military. “He finds it safer to be with Negroes,” the friend said. “It allays his fears of all those things his father used to tell him the whites do to him. He’s scared to death to venture away from it. The idea of going into the army with all those strangers, to put himself into that strange environment, with white people at that—man, that really hit him where he lived! He was scared to death. That was the real Cassius Clay!”

  Clay’s lawyers made a final effort in Houston on April 25, 1967. Their contention was that there were no blacks on the Louisville draft board that had called him up. They were after an injunction to prevent any arrest of Clay if he refused induction. Clay took the stand and delivered his standard speech. He said he had given up a pretty wife for his religion, given up a “fortune of business offers,” and wrapped it up by saying: “War is against the teachings of the Holy Qur’an. I’m not trying to dodge the draft. We are supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or The Messenger (Elijah). We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers.” Ali was at ease on the stand, and he looked like he might find being a martyr a nice fit to the grand estimation of himself.

  The next day Clay reported to the induction center without a traveling bag. He went through the physical, joked with the other twenty-six recruits. According to one, he said: “The Vietcong don’t scare me. If they didn’t get me, some guy from Loosiana or Texas would. I’d have to watch for them slant eyes and the guys behind me, too.” He was given sandwiches for lunch and threw away the one with ham. There were protests of young blacks outside, some shouting Muslim refrains while others tore up their draft cards; nothing like the riot Clay had predicted. Clay refused three times to step forward for induction. He was warned of “felonious action,” then he signed a statement. Clay’s legal argument had four points; no war except for Elijah; no blacks on the draft board; exemption as a working minister; and as a black he couldn’t kill other people of color. Of the last it could be said by his critics: Who killed Malcolm X? Larry, Moe, and Curly?

  The legal and illegal pace against Clay shifted into high gear. First, almost simultaneously with the induction procedure, he was stripped of his title by the New York State Athletic Commission, an action by political flunkies that, in the “best interest of boxing,” deprived him of the right to work. Forty-nine states followed the New York lead, and Clay was in a limbo that he and the Muslims hadn’t calculated. A violation of civil rights? Without question, it was an obscene example of vigilante moral vengeance in cold and blunt opposition to due process. On May 8, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston and pled not guilty. The man who signed off on the indictment was Ramsey Clark, LBJ’s attorney general, later the gushing conscience of the left and the rest of the universe.

  Clay was in poor financial shape. The Louisville syndicate that had his contract could never contain his spending. He’d buy tickets for hundreds of Muslims and just about let anybody use his hotel tab. A pair of “virginal” Egyptian women at the Patterson fight once worked his bill like they were using play money, buying two-hundred-dollar evening bags and having their hair done every day. At his previous divorce hearing, he was asked where the money had gone; he had been close to jail for missing payments to Sonji. “Seventy percent,” he said, “goes to the government. Then, I support my mother and father some. I owe my wife one thousand, thirteen hundred. I got eight hundred in a Chicago bank.” He pointed around the room, saying: “I owe him. I owe you. I owe everybody in this room.” His final divorce settlement was for $15,000, and $22,000 for her legal fees. Ali sent Sonji a note: “You give up heaven for hell.”

  Sonji might not have agreed after seeing how her husband handled money. He drifted between being a miser (as Ali, this phase would disappear entirely) and a welfare office. When someone would come by to put the touch on him, he would play a record called “Your Friends.” The two would just listen, and the borrower would say, “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’.” “Oh, no, brother,” Clay would say. “It’s just a pretty tune. But some truth in those words, don’t you think?” He and his father, Cash, fought the Louisville Syndicate fiercely over a $50,000 pension fund. Wisely invested by smart heads—which they were—t
he pension deductions surely would grow into a minor, maybe handy fortune. “It was always a battle with them,” a member of the Syndicate said. “They didn’t understand money.” Clay mainly liked the feel of cash. He’d carry $40,000 around Louisville in a satchel, and when he went to Chicago, he would put thousands on display. “I’ve seen him do it,” a close friend said. “He likes to feel it, run it through his fingers.”

  After earning $800,000 for the two Liston fights, his box office draw began to descend coincident with his throwing in with the Black Muslims. He got $300,000 for Floyd Patterson, another fight that caused public disgust, and then he had to beat it up to Canada for $66,332 and a long night with George Chuvalo. The U.S. market was tight, and might get worse. With trouble in the wings—jail or the army—he took on a torrid pace, six title defenses in eleven months, two in England, one in Germany. He saw Europe as a source of treasure, ignoring the more serious problem that he was fast running out of credible opponents. By the Ernie Terrell fight, another ugly affair, Herbert Muhammad, son of Elijah, had become his manager, placed there, as Elijah said, “to protect his money.” What did Herbert know about boxing, Angelo Dundee was asked. “He knows they use gloves,” he said. Clay’s father, Cash, chipped in: “Elijah meant to say protect our money.”

  When he was called up for induction and the Commission’s retaliation came, he had earned $2.3 million over his seven-year career, with not a great deal left. He outlined his predicament to Tex Maule, after first asserting that he would work for Elijah as a minister for $150 a week and be happy the rest of his life. It was a comment that instantly incited psalmodic flight. “People ask me,” he sang, “how you gonna eat. I say, look out there at that little robin peckin’ and eatin’. Look up at all the stars, planets in the heavens. They are not held up there on the end of long, steel poles. Allah holds them up there. If he has this power, will he let his servant starve, let a man doin’ his work go hungry?” Wasn’t the Lord’s caseload a bit heavy, what with all the death in Vietnam, the babies all over the world with big bellies and sunken eyes? Why would the Lord think Ali was so special? Not batting an eye, he said: “Well, Allah always gotta have his favorites.”

  He then pulled out a little notebook. “My wife,” he said, “she cost a hundred twenty-five thousand. Spent forty-five thousand on my mother and father. Gave her a Cadillac and a house. Give my brother twenty-five thousand for a little house. I paid Covington (Hayden, his draft lawyer) sixty-eight thousand, and he say I owe him another two hundred thousand. My home cost sixty-one thousand. My own personal expenses, say thirty thousand, not much. The government took roughly ninety percent in taxes. Not much left,” he said. He calculated $463,000. Maule’s calculations, assuming the tax bite, showed that Ali was $233,000 in the hole, not counting the $200,000 Covington was claiming. And if he stayed out of jail he was looking at a lot of money for appeals. Ali shook his head at Maule’s figures, saying: “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  Ali went to trial on June 19, 1967. Up to the last second, even during the trial, government lawyers believed he would accept a deal with the Army’s Special Services. Trouble was that the Muslims insisted he never be in uniform and never be given a rank. “The Muslims,” a lawyer said, “seem to want him smack up against the wall. They want him to go down for the cause. I don’t know. We don’t want this. They want it.” Generous and fair or sympathetic are not words that come to mind about prosecutors. They are often ruthless, spiteful, and undiscriminating in pursuit of wins for themselves and departments. But the motor for the Justice Department’s chase after Clay came from J. Edgar Hoover, the petty, abusive FBI chief, a specialist in creating wild dogs his whole career, and he saw them and rebellion around every corner. An obsessive-compulsive snoop in all sorts of corners, he loved to crush wayward groups and their symbols. Clay was not a lone, crusading, principled obstruction as is commonly believed, and had he not become a Muslim chances are he would have remained “unfit” for duty, 1-Y, after failing two previous tests that put him near the moronic level.

  Throughout the trial the next day, Ali sketched absently at his defense table. The jury soon retired, then returned in twenty minutes with a guilty verdict. Ali wanted his sentence immediately. The lead prosecutor, Morton Susman, asked Judge Ingraham for a reduced sentence, calling the outcome “a tragedy,” blaming it on the Muslims, who “could not hide behind religion” but were political up to their bow ties. Ingraham gave him the maximum five years and a $10,000 fine; his passport was turned over. He left the courtroom like a man who had heard the will and got the expected safe-deposit box and the waterfront. No bravado, no spleen or sorrow, no riffs or burlesque repartee. The drawings left on his table said more: first, a plane high up in the sky, a child’s depiction of puffy clouds and bright sun, then on the next sheet, rain and fog, and the aimed descent of the plane straight toward the top of a mountain.

  Twigs and cold fires are too often all that’s left of the trail from the kid to the life. Desperate to see the child in the man, and to reach for connecting psychological tissue, it is easy to land on a pointed head. Usually, what is strikingly apparent is all there is. Fighters, by and large, have been colorful translators of what they did and felt, that is until the intrusion of the mass press conference with its numbing etiquette, prefabricated and surface inquiry. There used to be a direct path to fighters, and lazy days could be spent in productive talk until you left with a bit of confidence as to who they were. Not so with how they were formed or grew up; they became reticent or they didn’t know how to answer, perhaps because to some of them their origins were so hideous that they looked upon it as another lifetime. There had been no other time, this was it, the closet full of clothes, the identifying car and a woman or women to match. They were contenders.

  For a good period, Joe Frazier seemed as if he had been born at the age of twenty-one. No one knew much about him. In many conversations he was agreeable enough, but there was a strained cheerfulness, and just below a restrained hostility. Or was it? Perhaps it was just a matter of confusion within that was behind his vague remoteness, a distrust of white people, a frustration with his ability to articulate or know how to act confidently, or that he hadn’t come to accept himself as a contender. He never looked you in the eyes, never seemed to want to be there. Gypsy Joe was asked about his pal’s demeanor and said: “He just a warrior. He afraid to say much.” Most likely, all of the above was true about Frazier then; he left the personality of himself up to his manager, Yank Durham, who gladly obliged. He was seldom without Durham by his side, and over the years it become discomfiting and eerie how the manager seemed to think he was the fighter, how he even ended sentences for him, like: “I don’t think this fight will go long. You won’t see any lumps on my face after this one. I wanna do some dancin’ with the girls tonight.”

  A big man of large gestures, Durham had a deep, magisterial voice and an easy personality. When he and his sidekick Willie Reddish walked into a ring in satin smoking jackets, you half expected someone to give them a brandy and a cigar. Yank, without being overbearing, relished attention. He had never been in the big time before, just a respected presence at the PAL gym in Philly. He had been an amateur boxer, then in the war a Jeep hit him, broke both his legs and put him in a hospital for over a year. He was a welder when he found Joe—and an ace hustler like Joe’s father, Rubin. He made corn liquor at his house (just like Rubin), and used Frazier in the early days to deliver it. He promoted card games and all-night craps games. “Gimme a smoky room and lots of suckers,” he used to say, “and I’m a happy man.” When he cut deals for Joe’s fights, he made backroom deals for himself, but he always gave Joe the details of them. Joe loved him like he did Rubin. “As long as I’m alive, no matter what happens,” Yank said, “this kid’ll never want for a buck.”

  It wasn’t until Ali began to humiliate Frazier about his blackness, tried to turn him into a white pawn, that he started to respond about his youth and bleak times. The last of eleven
children, Joe was raised in Laurel Bay, not far from Beaufort, South Carolina, the otherworldly low country that was the oldest and most historical settlement of the slave culture in the nation. The people there were perjoratively called Geechee, but they were actually Gullah and they spoke a language of their own. They had their own way of living, had a silent contempt for whites, and were suspicious of other blacks, who viewed them in turn as backward and dangerous, a people who had not moved beyond slavery. They were in fact a proud, independent people who clung to African ways (to assimilate was to lose their souls) with small adjustments for reality. Once there, you could never forget the people or the land, filled with large trees weeping Spanish moss, thousands of whispering, steaming waterways that easily concealed bootleg stills and smuggling. “I remember the nights,” says Burt Watson, who grew up there. “You couldn’t see your hand.”

  So did J. E. McTeer, for decades the High Sheriff of the low country; no power was larger there. He was a diligent man, benign, and ultra-sensitive to the culture. He was convincing once when he said that the “Geechee threw a bone on Ali before their first fight.” What kind of bone? “The most awful,” he said, “a black, catfish bone.” If Frazier knew a bone was in play, he said, he didn’t have to know much else, such was the enabling power of the belief in it. In order to deal with the Gullah and earn their respect, McTeer became a scholar of their thinking to the point that he became a feared purveyor of “white magic.” He wrote a book about the Sea Islands, remarking how the blackness of night was a heavy weight, how the people “rushed inside at dusk, saying nothing aloud inside of what they believed and feared.” It had an extra blackness, he wrote, “carried here by their forefathers, sensed rather than seen.” Drums beat across the swamps, “root doctors” knelt on their knees in graveyards at night and dug for the juju that would cure illness and bring good times to their patrons or evil to their enemies; the black art of “Root” pervaded. Its master and McTeer’s adversary was the legendary Dr. Buzzard, a tall man whose eyes stayed behind green-tinted glasses and who was celebrated as an “ender” of vendetta in a place where memory was long. “I don’t think Frazier knew the term Uncle Tom,” says Ricki Lights, a poet and medical doctor in Philly who was raised there. “You never heard it. To call a Gullah an Uncle Tom would be asking to die. I mean it.”