by Hana Ali
“No!” he said emphatically. “I would never want to relive my life again. Before, I didn’t know what I was going to live—what pains I would have to suffer. I didn’t have any answer. Now that I know, I say never again! I’ve made sixty million dollars and still I wouldn’t live the same life.”
My father was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942. The first horror story he ever heard was the one his father told him about when he was born—how he almost killed his mother in the process.
“Your mother was so overdue the doctors couldn’t figure it out. It was your big head,” his father said. “It was too big to come out! They tried everything. Pushing it out, pulling it out, praying it out! But your mother stayed in labor . . . Finally, when enough of your head was showing, the doctors used forceps to yank you out, leaving two faint marks on your neck that are still visible today.”
My father was almost named Rudolph Clay. My grandfather always loved the name Rudolph, but my grandmother convinced him his firstborn son should be named after him, and that’s how Dad came to be Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. His parents weren’t happy when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali; the Clay name had a long and complicated history.
The original Cassius Marcellus Clay was a slave owner best known for being a Southern abolitionist and US ambassador to Russia. He was also a lawyer, a politician who worked closely with Abraham Lincoln, a newspaper publisher, a farmer, and a soldier in the first Kentucky Cavalry, ranking as a captain and major-general in the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War. He was married and divorced twice, had eight children, and died in Madison County, Kentucky, on July 22, 1903, at the age of ninety-two.
My grandfather was proud to carry the Clay name, but my father saw it as a constant reminder that his ancestors were once in chains. All slaves were stripped of their names and became the property of the people who bought them. If you were sold to the Smith family, you became Smith’s property. If you were bought by the Anderson family, you were Anderson’s property. If you were sold or traded at auction, you took on the name of your new owner. And so on. Cassius Marcellus Clay emancipated his slaves, but they carried his name nonetheless, passing it down from one generation to the next. Until my father’s great-grandfather, John Herman Clay—who was a slave born in Virginia in 1861, owned by the family of Henry Clay, the US senator from Kentucky—married Sarah Fray and they had nine children together. One of their sons, Herman Heaton Clay, was my father’s grandfather. Herman married Edith Greathouse and had four girls and eight boys with her. He named their second child, my grandfather, after the only man to whom he could trace his genealogy, Cassius Marcellus Clay.
My father loved the way his name sounded. But as he grew he learned more about its history, and his name became a symbol of slavery. He was free, and he wanted a name that represented freedom. So, in 1964, after he became a Muslim, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. “Muhammad means worthy of all praise, and Ali means most high,” he told an enquiring reporter a few days before receiving a letter informing him he’d been drafted into the United States Army.
When my father’s parents brought him home from Louisville General Hospital, the rest of the world was preparing to fight the Second World War. It was a hectic time in America. Only a month before, Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. Little did my grandparents know, world wars and political controversy would play a major role in their son’s life story—but all that would come later.
Even getting my father home from the hospital was eventful. After he was born, they almost lost him. The nurse put the wrong baby in my grandmother’s bed. She was satisfied for a while until she noticed the child in her arms wore a tag that said “Brown,” not “Clay.”
“We should have known something was wrong because that baby was far too quiet, and you came out kicking and screaming! Waking up all the other babies in the ward. But you sure were a beautiful baby,” Grandpa told him.
My grandfather was always telling my father that he was “as pretty as a picture” and warning him not to mess up his beauty. When Dad was in grade school, he slipped and hit his forehead on his aunt Coretta’s dining-room table.
“Cassius fell and tore the skin on his forehead,” Coretta explained.
“My God!” my grandfather said. “I hope he didn’t mess up that pretty face!”
The next thing my father knew, he was at the mirror, saying to himself, “I hope I didn’t mess up this pretty face.”
As I read all the old newspaper articles and listened to my father’s recordings, I thought of the stories my grandparents told about my father when he was young, how he used to run around the house in his diapers, misbehaving. My grandmother would throw her fox fur coat in the middle of the living-room floor, and he’d crawl into the corner and wouldn’t move. “That’s how I used to tame him when he was running wild,” she told my mother. “He wouldn’t come out of that corner until I picked that fur up. He thought it would come to life and bite him.”
And then there was the story of how my father always liked to be the leader. “Today I’m going to be the daddy,” he’d say when playing with his friends and his younger brother, Rudy. When Dad changed his name to Muhammad Ali, Rudy also changed his, to Rahman. My father was always protective of his brother. When he was five years old and my grandmother tried to spank him, Dad ran and grabbed her hand. “Don’t you hit my baby!” Only eighteen months separated them. My father loved Rudy from the day he was born. And as they grew, he and his brother remained close. They did everything together.
I imagined my father and his brother at seven and eight years old, making horses out of broomsticks, running out the front door of their little pink house (my grandfather painted it his favorite color), playing cowboys and Indians on the front lawn. “I’m the cowboy, Rudy,” Daddy would say. “You can be the Indian.”
I thought, too, about the sound of my grandmother’s voice, her sweet Southern accent calling after them: “Don’t get your clothes dirty; dinner will be ready soon.”
“Okay, Bird,” they’d call back to her as they shaped their fingers into mock guns and began shooting.
“Bang! Bang!” my father would shout. “I’m the meanest cowboy in town!” he’d holler, chasing his brother down the block. Ronnie King and Laurence Montgomery, their childhood friends, would join in the fun too.
Sometimes they’d play tag football, and Dad would ask his brother to throw small rocks at him to see if he could hit him. But he never could. Dad was too fast.
Years later, my father ran into the actor Clint Eastwood. For those too young to know him, Clint was once best known for his role as Dirty Harry, but he also starred in cowboy films. When Dad met him for the first time in the waiting room of a popular television talk show, he looked at him wide-eyed and said, “Clint, walk across the room, turn around, and tell me, ‘You’ve got three days to get out of town.’” He did, and they became fast friends.
My father thought his mother was “pert and sweet,” and she had a little bird nose, so he christened her “Mama Bird,” and he called his father “Papa Cash.” I imagine the four of them sitting around the television after dinner, watching westerns: Bonanza and Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. After my father began his professional boxing career, Hugh came to a few of his early fights, cheering for my father the way Dad had once cheered for him when he was a boy watching him on the television in the living room. There he would watch boxing greats like Joe Louis and, his favorite, Sugar Ray Robinson—the first boxer in history to win a divisional world championship five times. It stirred something deep within him—a vision and a dream.
“I wanted to be just like him,” my father once said. “I used to listen to his fights over the radio. ‘And still the welterweight champion of the world . . . Sugar Ray Robinson!’ I’d jump around the living room, shadowboxing—throwing punches in the air, pretending I was Sugar Ray.” He did all this never knowing that one day he’d meet Sugar Ray, who’d
break his heart, and they’d later become friends.
My father thought Sugar Ray was classy, well-dressed, and well-spoken. And he sure knew how to draw everyone’s attention. He traveled with a huge entourage and drove around in a big pink Cadillac. My father used to dream about buying a pink Cadillac just like it, and one day he did. When he started his professional boxing career, Dad also traveled with a large entourage, and he chose black-and-white Everlast boxing trunks, just like his boyhood hero wore.
“That’s the kind of fighter I want to be,” he said to his family when he was a young boy. “Fast, classy, and PRETTY!”
Eleven years later, when my father was twenty-two, he stood on the podium at a press conference in Miami Beach, Florida, after winning his first world championship fight against Sonny Liston, aka the Bear. It was February of 1964, and Sugar Ray Robinson was standing beside him, smiling up at the new heavyweight champion. He playfully tried to cover my father’s mouth as he shouted, “I shook up the world!” He’d won the fight no one believed he could. “I’m so pretty! I don’t have a mark on my face . . . I must be ‘The Greatest’!”
But there’s another scene I heard about, which was set five years before, when my father was still an unknown, dreaming teenager—two years away from winning his gold medal at the Olympic Games. A sixteen-year-old aspiring athlete, passing through New York City on the way to winning his second Golden Gloves tournament, was patiently waiting outside Sugar Ray Robinson’s Harlem nightclub, Sugar Ray’s, to get his autograph.
“Sugar Ray!” my father called, after waiting six hours in the cold. “My name is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. I’m training for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. I’m going to be the heavyweight champion of the world one day. I’ve watched all your fights. Can I please have your autograph, sir?”
“Sorry, kid,” Ray said. “I don’t have time for autographs.”
Then he climbed into his pink Cadillac and drove away, leaving my heartbroken father standing in the parking lot.
The pain of being rejected by his childhood idol hurt so deeply he vowed that when he became famous he would sign his autograph for every person who asked him. And he did. Sometimes he didn’t wait for people to ask. Whether we were in restaurants or airports, Dad would sign his name on a pamphlet or card with one of his favorite sayings—Serve God, he is the goal—and he’d pass those cards or pamphlets out to everyone he came across, sometimes startling people in the process.
“Oh, thank you,” they’d say, taken aback. “Wow! Muhammad Ali!”
* * *
I sat on my bed, with all the newspaper articles spread out around me, thinking about the stories my grandparents told. I envisioned my grandfather, Papa Cash, sitting on a stool painting his signs on all kinds of delivery trucks: the cleaner’s, the baker’s, the grocer’s, and the milk trucks. His murals were displayed on tavern walls, churches, and above factories all over Louisville.
I thought of how he sometimes brought my father to work with him. Dad, then Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., a ten-year-old boy, would be up at midnight watching his father paint pictures of Moses on Mount Sinai, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Angels, and his famous portrait of the Crucifixion, which my father said was “so beautiful it made people cry.”
I pictured my father helping his father as a bucket boy, running up and down the ladder, bringing Papa Cash the paint, both of them shivering in the cold as they climbed back down to the truck every ten minutes to get warm again. My grandfather’s pay for the job: twenty-five dollars and a chicken dinner, the latter of which he shared with his son.
Cash taught him about the art of sign painting, and my father admired him for the great care and pride he put into his work, whether it was a sign on a door or a mural on a tavern wall. And Cash loved singing his favorite tunes while he worked, “Mona Lisa” and “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.”
“Boy, did Cash love to sing,” my father once told me. “And his voice was beautiful. He always said, if times had been different for blacks in America when he was growing up, things might have turned out differently for him. He might have been a great singer—like Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole.”
My father admired his father’s talent, hard work, and determination, but he knew he wouldn’t follow in his footsteps. And my grandfather didn’t want him to. “You’ll be a teacher or a lawyer,” he’d say. But after he saw his son in the ring, that changed. He was the first to shout: “This is going to be the next world champion!” It startled Dad at first; he’d only had one fight. But Cash couldn’t help himself. “I’ve got another Joe Louis!” he’d boast.
His loud and dramatic encouragement spurred my father on. Not long after, Dad won his first fight on a local television show called Tomorrow’s Champions, against Ronnie O’Keefe, a name my father would always remember. Cash took him to see a telephone pole that Joe Louis had once leaned against when he was a champion. My grandfather just stood there with his hand pressed against it, staring at it.
“I remember watching my father and the way he looked at that pole,” said Dad, “and thinking that one day I wanted to have that effect on people.”
The telephone pole was the neighborhood shrine. He and Rudy used to stand around it and touch it for luck. Neither of them suspected then just where it would lead.
It was through watching his father’s struggle for recognition and success that he concluded early in life that there was little future in Louisville for a talented black artist. Nowadays the South is different, but when my father was growing up, Louisville was segregated, and all he wanted to do was change it. He, too, sometimes wondered what might have been had things been different for blacks when his father was growing up.
“He might have become a famous painter or singer.”
My grandfather was a natural actor. He liked to imitate the movie stars, especially the lovers. When my father was a little boy, Cash used to sit in a corner and paint as he sang, “Mona Lisa . . . many dreams have been brought to your doorstep . . .”
My father had a close, loving family growing up, but they had their share of problems too. My grandparents were an affectionate couple, but they were always arguing. Cash was arrested a few times for reckless driving, disorderly conduct, and assault and battery. He had even once spent the night in jail after hitting my grandmother. Papa Cash liked to chase women, and his indiscretions caused discord at home. My father often witnessed his parents arguing when he was growing up, but he never spoke about those memories. I learned most of what I know about my paternal grandparents from my father’s recordings, family members, and old interviews.
Dad would run to his room and hide beneath his covers until the yelling stopped. Probably remembering the time he was accidently slashed by the knife his father was waving around in a drunken rage. Luckily, Cash had a quick temper that cooled as swiftly as it heated. But he was also known around town for being a drinker and had a reputation for bar fighting. His womanizing was no secret either. Cash was far from perfect, and made a handful of mistakes, but he was known for his softer side too. He wasn’t afraid to show affection. He was always hugging and kissing Dad, Rudy, and my grandmother.
My grandparents were so different I often wondered how they came together. Cash was high-spirited and outspoken, and Mama Bird was sweet and gentle. Cash liked to hang out in smoky jazz clubs and taverns, dancing and drinking. She was a homemaker who cooked and cleaned. He was a Methodist who seldom went to church. She was a Baptist who worshipped regularly. He protested the wrongs of racial injustice. She held her head high and grieved silently. But for all their differences, the one thing they shared was their love for family and laughter. Cash and Bird were opposite in many ways, but together they blended to make the perfect recipe of Muhammad Ali—fire and love, conviction and forgiveness.
My grandparents weren’t wealthy. Sometimes Dad and his brother would get a new shirt for Christmas, but most of their clothes came from Goodwill. Including thei
r secondhand shoes. Having had to make his own shoes last as a child, Papa Cash was an expert at cutting out cardboard and fitting it inside the lining.
As I sat in my room thinking about my father’s childhood, I wondered how deeply he was affected by what his youthful eyes had seen, growing up in his little pink house on Grand Avenue, in the west end of Louisville, Kentucky.
“I remember one summer my mother didn’t have bus fare,” my father once said. “So we walked all the way from downtown Louisville. It was hot and I was thirsty, so Bird walked me into a five-and-dime store and asked the clerk if she could have a cup of water for her son.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t serve Negros. I could lose my job.”
Then the store manager asked my grandmother to leave and even escorted them to the door. Tired, hot, and thirsty, Daddy cried all the way home. But his most heartfelt pain still lay ahead of him. “Nothing would ever shake me up more,” he said, “than the story of Emmett Till.”
Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who spent the summer of 1953 in Mississippi with his uncle. He was taken from his front porch by a group of young white men and beaten to death, beyond recognition, for whistling at a white woman. The four white men who kidnapped him from his uncle’s front lawn were identified in court by eyewitnesses, but the all-white male jury let them go free.
“I cried for months just thinking about it,” my father said. “We were almost the same age and we looked so much alike. It could’ve happened to me.”
My father was born into a segregated, prejudiced world during the Second World War. A world that wouldn’t give a pleading mother a cup of water for her thirsty three-year-old son on a scorching summer day. Yet somehow he managed to keep love and forgiveness in his heart, just as his mother did, and she taught him, as he taught us, that prejudice and hate were wrong, no matter who did the hating. “Cassius,” she said to my young father, “the world can be cruel and unfair, but you must always treat people with respect, kindness, and love.”
