by Jonathan Eig
Against the older, slower Archie Moore, Ali had thrown eighty-six punches in the first round. In his first fight with Liston, he’d thrown forty-seven in the first round. Now, in the first two minutes of his rematch with Liston, Ali had tried a mere eight punches, connecting with three. It was shaping up as the most inoffensive and inconsequential round of his professional boxing career, accomplishing nothing, it seemed, except to test Liston’s stamina. Around and around went Ali, circling Liston, slipping away from punches.
With a minute left, Liston backed Ali toward the ropes and marched forward, applying pressure. Ali stayed on his toes, waggling his shoulders left and right and left again, shifting his weight from side to side, making himself a moving target. Liston lunged and threw a left. Ali’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened. He pulled back his chin and let the blow hit softly below the right shoulder. Sonny cocked his right arm to throw another punch, but he was too slow. Ali fired a short right hand. It caught Liston on the temple. Liston’s head turned down, like a man who’d dropped his wallet. His right knee buckled, and his body folded at the waist.
Ali followed with a left uppercut, but the punch missed because Liston was flat on his back, hands above his head, legs wide, like a tossed rag doll. Liston was down, and it had happened so fast that many spectators missed it. Ali stood over the fallen fighter and roared, as photographers snapped and rewound their cameras frantically. Liston rolled to his right, rose to one knee, then toppled over again like a drunk who’s decided to stay down and sleep it off.
Ali jumped around the ring in joy.
After about eighteen seconds, Liston finally rose. The fight should have been over, but Walcott had never begun counting because he’d been too busy trying to control Ali, who had failed to go to a neutral corner as rules required. When Walcott realized his mistake, he hustled to the side of the ring to confer with Nat Fleischer, the publisher of The Ring magazine and the unofficial commissioner of boxing, who declared that Liston had been down for ten seconds. While Walcott was gone, Ali and Liston began fighting again. Ali threw four hooks — left, right, left, right — before Walcott returned and separated the fighters, signaling that it was all over: Ali was the winner by knockout.
Liston wandered back to his corner. Meanwhile, Bundini got to Ali first and hoisted him in the air. Then came Rahaman, who reached in his brother’s mouth and pulled out his mouth guard.
“He laid down,” Ali told Rahaman.
“No, you hit him,” Rahaman said.
“I think he . . .”
“No, man, you hit him.”
The punch was so fast, and the results so shocking, that even Ali, it seemed, was unsure what had happened. To many, it certainly looked as though Liston had been in no rush to get up from the mat. Cries of “fix” rose immediately from the crowd and persisted long after the fight. Geraldine Liston couldn’t believe such a glancing blow would crumple her husband. In his entire career, Sonny had never been knocked out, and he had been knocked down only once prior to this. Joe Louis doubted the authenticity of the knockout too, saying Ali’s short right hand to Liston’s cranium had as much effect as “throwing cornflakes at a battleship.” And because that short right hand had been so quick, so well hidden by Liston’s forward-moving body, some observers went further, insisting there had been no punch at all, that Liston had simply taken a dive. They called it “The Phantom Punch.”
There was a punch, and it did land. Slow-motion replays leave little doubt that Ali’s right hand landed hard enough to send Liston’s head moving down and to his right.
“It was a perfect right hand,” said Floyd Patterson, seated ringside.
George Chuvalo, also ringside, had doubts: “I saw Liston’s eyes,” he said. “They were the eyes of a man faking. Stunned eyes roll. Liston’s eyes were darting from side to side.”
“I didn’t think he could hit that hard,” Liston said.
After he had watched a replay on television, Ali started referring to the blow as “my karate punch” or the “famous anchor punch,” passed down from Jack Johnson to Stepin Fetchit to Ali. He heard the cries of fix, and he had an answer to them. “Sonny is too dull and too slow to be a fixer in a fight,” he said. “I hit him flush with all my two hundred and six pounds and they hated to give me credit.”
If the punch was real, the only question is whether Liston faked the fall or, once down, decided to stay down — because the mob had told him to, because the Nation of Islam had threatened him, because he was ill, or because he knew he couldn’t win and no longer wished to try. The FBI had suspicions but found no evidence to suggest a fix.
Still, even Liston’s wife had doubts.
“I think Sonny gave that second fight away,” Geraldine told a TV journalist thirty-five years later. “I don’t know whether he was paid, I didn’t see the money if he was paid to lose. I don’t know, I don’t know what went on. But I really do. That’s my belief. And I told him.”
Geraldine told her husband she thought he had thrown the fight. But Sonny denied it.
“He said, no, he said, ‘You win and you lose,’ you know? I say, ‘In the first round?’ ”
19
True Love
The day after the fight, Ali should have been overjoyed. So many things in his life were going exactly as he’d dreamed — and his dreams had hardly been modest. He’d just beaten Sonny Liston again, in front of his mother, father, brother, hundreds of reporters, and millions of spectators around the world. He possessed wealth. He possessed fame. And, as he never stopped reminding everyone, he still possessed the prettiest face the boxing world had ever seen. But one thing was not working out exactly as he’d hoped, and he was growing increasingly frustrated about it.
Ali still loved Sonji. He still wanted to have children with her, even though he was surprised that she had not yet become pregnant, given the quality and quantity of their sexual activity. The problem was her behavior in the company of Ali’s Muslim friends, and, in particular, her refusal to wear the long gowns and headscarves proscribed for female members of the Nation of Islam. Ali had explained that Muslim women were supposed to be deferential and treat their men with respect, but Sonji, who was brassy and outspoken by nature, refused to defer to Ali or any other man. She never stopped telling her husband when she felt like he was being used or cheated by some of his friends and hangers-on, including members of the Nation. She questioned everything, from the honesty of Elijah Muhammad to the very meaning of religion.
“How could I stand by seeing you act like a tiger in the ring and out of it your knees trembling before some religious superstition, like a man who believes in ghosts?” she asked her husband. She wanted a hero who would carry her away from it all, from her hard, sad life, and yet she wound up with a man who wasn’t even his own master. “I asked you to question it,” she said. “Just ask yourself the questions, and in the quiet dead of night, answer. Don’t even whisper your answer out loud. Just to yourself. You world heavyweight champion muthafucker.”
But he never did question it, or at least not to her satisfaction, and religion continued to cause friction between them, with Sonji seething every time she saw her husband cowering to the leaders of the Nation of Islam, and Ali erupting in anger whenever Sonji showed disdain or disrespect for his faith. He had made great sacrifices to join the Nation of Islam, confusing his fans, distancing his parents, losing valuable endorsements, and abandoning at least one of his closest friends in Malcolm X. Having made his choice and committed to Elijah Muhammad, he expected his wife to do the same. Some of his frustration had to do with religion, to be sure, and some of it was tied to ideas of masculinity and marriage.
In Maine, before the Liston fight, they had been at a Holiday Inn in Auburn, when Sonji leaned over a balcony and told her husband to come inside.
“I’ll be right there,” said Ali, who had been outside talking to the journalist Jerry Izenberg and Sam Saxon, the Muslim man Ali had befriended in Miami. Ali started up the stairs, but C
aptain Sam blocked his path.
“You’re the man,” Saxon said. “You don’t go when the woman says go.”
Ali stayed.
The morning after the Liston fight, the couple drove from Lewiston to Chicopee, back to the hotel where Ali had been staying while in training. In Chicopee, Ali recalled, “She put on a short short short tight dress with no sleeves or nothing . . . and she walked into the lobby in this dress, and went into the dining room in it, and I pulled her to the room and I asked her, ‘Why would you walk into the lobby . . . embarrassing me in these type sexual designed clothes showing all parts or many parts of your body?’ And she says, ‘You have won your fight. I no longer have to pretend . . . I never will be a Muslim.’ ”
The couple argued. Once again, Sonji left in anger, returning to Chicago.
Ali and Sonji didn’t see each other for two weeks. When they reunited in Chicago on June 11, Ali insisted on taking his wife to a dressmaker so she could acquire “plain and simple” floor-length dresses. One day, he pulled one of the full-length dresses he’d bought her out of the closet and laid it on the bed, but Sonji refused to wear it. It was the same old argument, the one that had caused Ali to slap Sonji at the party in Jamaica.
“That was the breaking point” for Ali, said Safiyya Mohammed-Rahmah, the daughter of Herbert Muhammad.
Captain Sam attempted to intervene. He believed the two were truly in love. Given more time, he said, Sonji might come around to the Nation of Islam. He appealed to her pragmatic side. “That man’s gonna be on top for ten years,” Saxon told Sonji. “All you gotta do is pull your dress down over your knees.”
Just as Elijah Muhammad’s son Herbert had previously drawn the couple together, he now shoved them apart. An FBI informant said that Herbert treated Ali “in a manner such as a ‘pimp’ would treat a prostitute . . . attempting to downgrade [him] as much as he can in order to keep him completely under his control.” According to Rahaman, Muhammad Ali’s brother, Herbert had tried to sleep with Sonji even after she and Ali had married. He was not the only member of the Nation of Islam making overtures toward Sonji, according to Rahaman. When Sonji refused, Herbert began maneuvering to get rid of her, whispering poisonous words and pronouncing her unfit to be a Muslim.
Rose Jennings, who worked with Herbert Muhammad and Sonji at Muhammad Speaks, said she didn’t know if sex played a role in Herbert’s frustration with Sonji, but Jennings said she was certain that Herbert felt threatened by Ali’s new wife and orchestrated her exit. “Herbert couldn’t control her,” Jennings said. “She started telling Ali what was really going on. She became influential in his business affairs. Herbert couldn’t have that. So he told Ali that Sonji was screwing a white guy. It wasn’t true, but he was trying to break them up.”
It worked. On June 23, Ali filed a complaint in the Dade County, Florida, circuit court asking a judge to annul his marriage. By seeking an annulment, rather than a divorce, he hoped to avoid paying alimony. But Sonji told reporters she still hoped to save her marriage.
“I just love my husband and I want to be with him,” she said. “It’s just this religion. I have tried to accept it, and I have explained this to him, but I just don’t understand it. It’s very hard to change to the way they want me to be.”
A week later, she told reporters she had been traveling around the country, trying to find her husband so that she could speak to him and attempt to repair their marriage. “He won’t see me,” she said. “I hear where he is and I go there. He’ll leave and I’ll follow.”
At a pretrial hearing, a judge asked Ali if he had ever loved Sonji. He answered, “I would like to say that I loved her only if she would follow me in my way of life and if she would take my name and everything else that I could give her and be what I wanted her to be. That’s the onliest reason I would love her.” The judge, perhaps unimpressed with that answer, ruled that Ali had no grounds to annul the marriage. Ali and his lawyers worked out a deal, and Sonji agreed to a divorce that paid her $22,500 for legal costs and $15,000 a year for ten years.
When it was over, Sonji pronounced her own verdict: “They’ve stolen my man’s mind.”
Ali, for his part, said he intended to marry again: “I have no one in mind, but I’ll tell you this: the next time I marry it’ll be a girl of seventeen or eighteen — one that I can raise to my way of thinking.”
It’s not clear if Ali really wanted a woman he could raise to his own way of thinking or merely one who adhered to the Nation of Islam’s way. In either case, his first marriage raised uncomfortable questions. For many a young man, marriage provides a wake-up call, a jolt that forces him to become less selfish, to put his wife’s needs ahead of his own, and then, soon after, his children’s needs, too. But that was not the case for Ali. When the Nation of Islam and Herbert Muhammad pushed him, he dropped his wife, just as he had dropped his friend Malcolm X.
Many years later, when Rahaman Ali was in his seventies, his short-term memory faded but his long-term memory sharp, when he was living out of his brother’s shadow and in poverty in a tiny, government-subsidized Louisville apartment, he was asked to name the greatest ordeal of his brother’s life. Was it one of Ali’s fights? An illness? Injury? The death of a parent? Rahaman answered without hesitation: it was losing Sonji.
“He went through hell,” his brother Rahaman said. “Not to be able to hold her, make love to her. It hurt him real bad. She’s the only one he ever really loved. His true love, his only one.”
Herbert Muhammad knew almost nothing about boxing. He was thirty-six years old, with a soft, round body that one writer said bore witness “to long and determined dining.” Odessa Clay called him “fat and piggy looking.” Cash Clay was even harsher, pronouncing, “He dirty. Muhammad dirty.”
Before his association with boxing’s heavyweight champion, Herbert Muhammad had made headlines once before, in 1962, when a woman pressed charges against him for breaking her jaw in four places. The former mistress said she had broken up with him when she learned he was married and had children. But Herbert broke into her apartment, beat her, and threatened to kill her if she left him. Soon after, the FBI began keeping tabs on Herbert. Reports from FBI agents were not always accurate, and they were often biased against minorities and others deemed by J. Edgar Hoover to be potential threats. Still, Herbert kept the agency’s operatives busy. Agents reported that Herbert received kickbacks from his father’s attorneys as well as from the publishing company that printed Muhammad Speaks, took nude photos of girls, made pornographic films, and fathered at least one child out of wedlock. “He is ‘money crazy,’ ” the bureau noted in one report,” and will do anything for money even if it is against the principles of the NOI.”
Herbert wore baggy, nondescript suits with ties that seldom matched, looking every bit like a man who wished to be overlooked. Although he may have sinned in other ways, he didn’t smoke or drink. He followed the teachings of his father so long as they didn’t interfere with his appetite for extramarital sex, large meals, and expensive home decor. “The part of being a Muslim he embraced was having a lot of wives,” said Bob Arum, a boxing promoter who worked closely with Herbert.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad wouldn’t let his children or grandchildren attend secular schools, so they were taught at home, primarily by their mother, Clara Muhammad. “Herbert Muhammad could not read,” said Rose Jennings, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing an education or from serving as one of the top editors of a newspaper. As a young man, Herbert enrolled in hypnotism classes and a Dale Carnegie correspondence course. He also studied to become a certified television repairman. It was photography he loved most, though, in part because it suited a man who lacked physical confidence, struggled to read anything more than numbers, and preferred not to be the subject of attention. With a camera strapped around his neck, he could approach beautiful girls on the beach and ask them to pose, and then invite them to visit his studio to see the resulting prints, purchase copies, and perhaps j
oin him for a steak dinner at the Tiger Lounge.
When Ali informed members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group that Herbert Muhammad was coming on board as his new business manager, no one knew exactly what Herbert would do. Soon, though, Herbert became “the ultimate decider of everything,” Arum said, “because he had the connection to the boss.” The boss, of course, was the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Herbert’s father. But Ali did not embrace the son only because he admired the father. He and Herbert developed a tight and complicated bond. It was based in part on their mutual affection for mischief and easy money, but that wasn’t all. Ali loved Herbert’s easy laugh, his optimism, and his warmth. Herbert became Ali’s manager and also one of his dearest and most trusted friends.
Yet even as his friendship with Herbert grew and his immersion in the Nation of Islam deepened, Ali remained loyal to and dependent on the Louisville Sponsoring Group, which had him under contract for one more year and which continued to handle most of his business affairs — including paying the rent on his houses; covering his medical bills; providing salaries for his trainers, chefs, sparring partners, and drivers; and setting aside money to pay his taxes. In addition, Ali had been borrowing money against future earnings — up to $5,000 at a time, with his debt climbing to $43,000 before his second fight with Liston. He gave away cash the way real-estate agents give away business cards. He would leave a hotel with five hundred dollars in his pocket, headed for lunch, and disburse it all before he sat down to eat. At even the hint of a hard-luck story, Ali would reach for the roll of cash in his pocket. Offered a chance to invest in a sure thing — any sure thing — he seldom declined. He didn’t spend much on clothes, but he installed telephones and record players in his cars, and his phone bills alone sometimes approached eight hundred dollars a month, as he tended to let reporters and anyone else in his room call long distance and stay on the line as long as they liked. He paid medical expenses for members of his entourage. He bought film and camera equipment for Howard Bingham. He ate prodigiously. But his biggest expenses may have been his vehicles — the three cars that were registered in his own name, the two in his father’s name, and the bus in his brother’s name. Ali paid the insurance on all of them — and his premiums were sky high because of his age and poor driving record.