by Jonathan Eig
Ali’s team requested a formal hearing before the Illinois State Athletic Commission. Bob Arum, who flew with Ali from Miami, thought the fight could be saved if Ali presented his political views tactfully. But before the hearing, Ali visited Elijah Muhammad, who was furious to hear that the boxer was considering another apology. That got Ali’s attention, apparently. When he addressed the committee, Ali expressed regret for anyone who would be hurt financially by cancellation of the fight and for politicians who’d been put in an uncomfortable spot. But when a commission member asked if he was sorry for his unpatriotic comments, Ali said no, “I’m not apologizing for anything like that because I don’t have to.” About half an hour after the hearing, Illinois Attorney General William Clark, citing technicalities in licensing procedures, declared the match illegal. As Arum put it, “That’s when they threw us out of Chicago.”
Whether Ali was inspired by religion, politics, or devotion to Elijah Muhammad, many Americans had underestimated his commitment. His decision stoked the anger of white people, who said that the heavyweight champion was supposed to stand as a role model for American youth and a symbol of American strength. Perhaps less obvious was his effect on the black community, and in particular on young black men, for whom Ali was emerging as a powerful icon. For many young and rebellious black people, Ali’s religion didn’t matter; the important thing was that he stood up to white authority and spoke out forcefully against racism. He proved it before the Athletic Commission in Illinois and in the ring against Patterson. As Eldridge Cleaver wrote in his 1968 autobiography Soul on Ice: “If the Bay of Pigs can be seen as a straight right hand to the psychological jaw of white America then [Ali/Patterson] was the perfect left hook to the gut.” One sign of Ali’s growing impact: in 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes, Alabama, chose the symbol of a black panther for its logo and attached to it a slogan inspired by the champ, “WE Are the Greatest.” Suddenly, a blast of ego became a call to arms. Huey Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panthers, said that while he had no interest in God or Allah, the speeches of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali were crucial in the process of his politicization.
Ali described his growing cultural influence in a 1970 interview in the Black Scholar: “I was determined to be the one nigger the white man didn’t get. Go on and join something. If it isn’t the Muslims, at least join the Black Panthers. Join something bad.”
The Terrell fight fell apart. Ali had to choose a new opponent in a hurry. In the two years since he’d become champ, he’d only fought twice. It was time to make money, to cash in as quickly and as often as possible, especially given that the U.S. Army wanted to put him in uniform and out of work. But now Ali’s team had to scrounge for a deal. After being rejected by Illinois and warned by several other locales that he was unwelcome, Ali and his managers turned to Canada, announcing a fight against George Chuvalo on March 29 at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
Being forced to leave his own country filled Ali, once again, with a sense of his own importance. “It doesn’t look right to the free world, the way I’m being treated,” he said. “This all makes me bigger. I always knew I was meant for something. It’s taking shape, a destiny. To be great you must suffer, you must pay the price.”
Members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group tried to persuade Ali to compromise on his military service. They called in favors and received assurances from powerful men in government that if Ali agreed to serve his country, he would be assigned a role that kept him far from combat. In all likelihood, he would perform a series of boxing exhibitions for soldiers just as Joe Louis had done during World War II. Gordon Davidson, representing the group, flew to New York to make the pitch to Ali. Davidson believed that Ali was a fine young man but very impressionable. “Elijah Muhammad pumped a lot of poison into him,” Davidson said. “Ali didn’t believe all that.” The lawyer hoped to impress upon the boxer how much he would lose by refusing the draft. He found Ali in a suite at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, surrounded by about a dozen Muslims, all of them dressed in black suits. “I had on my desk contracts worth more than $1 million from various companies, including Coca-Cola,” Davidson said. “I told him, ‘You know, they’re all going to go whoosh, out the window.’ ”
But Ali would not be moved.
“The conversation lasted two hours,” Davidson recounted. “And at the end he said, ‘I want to thank you because I know you had my best interests at heart.’ He was very gracious and appreciative.”
Chuvalo was one of those fighters, like Rocky Marciano, fueled by pride and guts, a tough guy who didn’t mind taking a punch for every one he gave. For Arum, who was promoting the fight and using his personal credit card to cover his expenses, it was not an easy event to sell. Chuvalo’s size and battered face would give even the toughest man pause in a bar fight, but the Canadian was considered no match for Ali. In an attempt to raise interest in the lackluster matchup, Ali called it an international battle pitting Canada’s champ against America’s and did his best to make it sound as if he were worried about losing. As a “warrior on the battleground of freedom,” Ali said, he had been too busy in recent months to train properly. When one of Ali’s sparring partners, Jimmy Ellis, knocked him down during a practice session, sportswriters concluded the champ was telling the truth.
Chuvalo was twenty-eight years old, with a record of thirty-four wins, eleven losses, and two draws, but he was big and strong, and he’d never been knocked out. In the pre-fight media flurry, Chuvalo promised he would not go down easily, as Liston had. “Hell, my kid could’ve taken a better punch than that,” he said, referring to the so-called phantom punch thrown in Lewiston, Maine. A journalist asked if Chuvalo meant his eldest son, who was six years old. “No, no,” Chuvalo corrected. “I mean Jesse, the youngest. He’s two. It would be an insult to the oldest to say he can’t take a harder shot than Liston did.”
The bell rang. Ali jabbed. Chuvalo let him. Every time Ali stopped jabbing, Chuvalo moved inside and pounded Ali’s ribcage. At one point in the opening round, Chuvalo banged fourteen consecutive right hooks to the same spot on Ali’s left side before Ali moved away and hit back.
“Harder! Harder!” Ali said.
In the second round, Ali raised his hands and stood still, inviting Chuvalo to hit him in the stomach again. Chuvalo obliged.
“It’s the chance of a lifetime for Chuvalo,” the ringside announcer said. Chuvalo outpunched Ali in the first four rounds, 120 to 92. That was startling enough. But even more important was Chuvalo’s advantage in power punches. Ali landed only 30 of them in the first four rounds; Chuvalo landed 107.
Chuvalo exposed the weaknesses that legendary trainer Eddie Futch had spotted in Ali. The champ didn’t have a great knockout punch, and he never worked the opponent’s body, Futch said. And Ali’s defense, the trainer said, was “monolithic,” relying almost entirely on his ability to back away from punches rather than ducking or deflecting them. Ali made up for it, Futch said, with “his speed and his good reflexes and his big heart.” Big heart, in boxing language, meant the ability to remain conscious while getting batted about the head. Ali and Chuvalo both had plenty of heart.
More than any man Ali had ever faced, Chuvalo forced the champ to fight all out, to abandon gimmicks and draw on the full extent of his talent, mixing jabs and hooks, punching until his arms grew weary and his hands sore.
In his first fight against Liston, Ali had landed 95 punches. In the rematch, he had needed only 4 punches. Against Patterson, he had landed 210 blows over twelve rounds. Now, against Chuvalo, Ali would land 474 punches while absorbing 335 — including more than 300 power punches. It was the heaviest beating Ali had ever taken. “In my own mind,” Chuvalo once said, “I was, like, special . . . I always said to myself that I couldn’t be hurt. I felt, a crazy part of me felt, indestructible.” After the fourth round, Ali may have begun to sense that Chuvalo was indeed indestructible, or that he at least believed in his own indestructibility. Ali s
aid after the fight that Chuvalo’s head was “the hardest thing I’ve ever punched.”
Pacing himself, Ali circled the ring. He fought like a man who expected a long night and recognized that the judges — not a cut to the head and not a knockout blow — would likely decide the outcome. Chuvalo more than any other fighter to that point had revealed how Ali might be beaten: plan for a long night of work, stay inside, work the body, and keep pounding. He gave Ali a vicious beating, forcing him to go fifteen rounds for the first time. But the judges, in a unanimous decision, named Ali the winner.
Chuvalo finished the night with a lumpy face yet an unbroken spirit. He noted years later that Ali had to go to the hospital after the fight because he was “pissing blood” from so many kidney shots.
“Me?” Chuvalo said. “I got to go dancing with my wife.”
22
“What’s My Name?”
At the moment when Ali should have been the king of boxing and the undisputed champion of sports commerce, he was so unpopular that he couldn’t get a fight in the United States. One after another, politicians proved their patriotism by banning Ali from their provinces. Even Louisville refused him.
The Chuvalo fight, while entertaining enough, did not provide a windfall. The arena had sold out, but closed-circuit ticket sales were scant, in part because the fight had been arranged on short notice and in part because fans had not expected much from Chuvalo. Ali understood that his career might be halted at any moment if the army forced him to enlist. Meanwhile, he was broke. He had fifty thousand dollars socked away in the trust fund that the Louisville Sponsoring Group had all but forced upon him, and that was all.
So Ali did what Ali did best. He fought. Over the next twelve months, he would defend his heavyweight title six times. Not since the heyday of Joe Louis in 1941 had a champion fought so often.
“I am a fighter, and a fighter’s years in business are not very long,” he said. “So I stay in action, stay alert, stay on target. And because I can go into the ring and come out again without being hurt, I can afford to keep going, doing twice the amount of work other champions have done, because it takes less out of me.” Or, as Herbert Muhammad put it: “Standard Oil doesn’t try to sell a small amount of oil each year.”
In those six fights, though his opponents were not uniformly top-rate, Ali lived up to his braggadocio. No one knew, of course, that they were seeing the boxer in his prime for the last time.
On May 21, 1966, before 46,000 people at the Arsenal Football Stadium in England, Ali fought Henry Cooper again. Starting slowly, Ali waltzed around the ring, throwing insignificant punches here and there, like a man bothered by a fly in the room. At last, in the fourth, he attacked, and from that point on he hit Cooper wherever and whenever he wanted. In the sixth, an Ali right ruptured the skin over Cooper’s left eye — a cut that would require sixteen stitches to close — and the referee stepped in to stop a contest that was never much of one.
Less than three months later, once again in England, Ali needed only three rounds to knock out Brian London. In this fight, anyway, he proved that he really could go into the ring and come out unhurt. London landed only seven punches.
For his next fight, in Frankfurt, Germany, against Karl Mildenberger, Ali did not have the company of his brother, who had recently gotten married. Ali’s parents tagged along instead. Three hours after taking off from Chicago, the champ was asleep when Odessa, the only woman in the traveling group, awakened her son with kisses on the forehead.
“Is my baby okay?” she cooed.
“Yes, Mama, I’m fine,” he softly replied. “I’ll bet you’re nervous, huh, Mom — 35,000 feet up?”
“No, baby,” she said. “As long as I’m with you, Mama’s fine.”
Mildenberger was a tough, experienced fighter, with a record of forty-nine wins, two losses, and three draws. He was also a lefty, a species that had given Ali trouble since his earliest days as an amateur.
Sure enough, Ali struggled. He couldn’t jab as often as he liked. When he threw hooks, Mildenberger ducked them with ease. Only a quarter of Ali’s punches were landing. Usually, he landed better than one in three. With each passing round, the crowd of more than fifty thousand at Frankfurt’s Waldstadion cheered more loudly for the ten-to-one underdog Mildenberger. It was the first heavyweight championship fight ever held in Germany. Still, Mildenberger was more nuisance than hazard, like a developing nation trying to make the threats of a superpower. In the eighth round, Ali seemed to decide enough was enough and took control. An Ali right buckled the German’s knees. As Mildenberger teetered, Ali shoved him to the mat. Mildenberger got up, but Ali dropped him again in the tenth. By now the challenger was a bleeding mess. Finally, in the twelfth, another straight right by Ali left Mildenberger dazed and helpless, and the referee stopped the fight.
The Mildenberger bout was Ali’s last under the Louisville Sponsoring Group. On October 22, as the business relationship ended, members of the group received a summary of their investment in the boxer. It showed total income of $2.37 million, with $1.36 million of that, or about 58 percent, having gone to Ali. After expenses, the group’s net profit amounted to about $200,000, to be divided thirteen ways. Ali had paid back his loans to the group, he had paid his taxes, and he had about $75,000 in a trust fund. Though the boxer had not taken good care of his money, and though the members of the Louisville Group had not seen much of a return on their investment, the businessmen felt satisfied. They’d helped guide the young boxer’s career as he rose to become champion and helped him earn a great fortune. From 1964 to 1966, Ali had earned more than $1.2 million. Baseball’s highest paid player during those same years was Willie Mays, who had earned only about $100,000 a year. Even adjusting for inflation, Ali was almost certainly the best-paid athlete in American history up to that point, and by a wide margin. Unfortunately, he had burned through his money quickly. He still had his trust fund, but that was about the extent of his savings. At one point in 1966, his personal bank account showed a balance of $109.
Gordon Davidson said the Louisville Sponsoring Group’s primary goal had been to help Ali become champion. They had not only managed his career and his money well; they had also stuck with him when he joined the Nation of Islam. Ali appreciated it. At a boxing exhibition in Louisville near the end of his contract, he asked the members of the group to step into the ring so that he could thank them publicly. All things considered, Davidson said, the members of the group would look back on their time with Ali with enormous pride. They helped launch one of the greatest careers in American athletic history, he said, and “we also showed young men they can reach the top in the fight game without selling their souls.”
Before his next fight at age twenty-four, Ali spoke of retirement. His back ached. His hands hurt. Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams would be his next opponent, he said, and probably one of his last. This time, Ali found a venue in the United States willing to let him fight. The bout would be held in America’s newest temple of sport, Houston’s Astrodome, the nation’s first indoor stadium, then called the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Money would pour in not only from ticket sales but also, once again, from closed-circuit TV broadcasts in nearly fifty countries. The match would air on live TV in Mexico and Canada. Ali said he wanted to fight Williams, then Ernie Terrell, and then retire “with money in the bank.”
Ali called Williams his “most dangerous opponent,” and there was a time when that might have been true, but two years earlier Williams had been shot in the stomach by a .357 magnum bullet from a police officer’s gun, and it had taken four operations to save his life. He hadn’t been the same since.
More than 35,000 spectators filled the Astrodome for the fight, which turned out to be entirely one-sided. In the first round, Ali scored almost at will, moving fast around the ring, throwing jabs, hooks, and four-punch combinations. In the second round, Ali found an even easier target in the plodding big man. Ali’s fists circled and sliced, furling lines in countless
new ways, each line ending abruptly on Williams’s chin. A spectator who had never boxed might think Ali was feeling good in the ring, like an artist in the moment of soulful expression, but for an athlete, unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Boxing tortures the nerves. It requires complete attention, complete exertion. Ali said it many times: boxing was his job, not a means of expression. If he took the time to think about how he felt, if he allowed his concentration to flag for a moment, he might have found himself flat on the floor, staring up at the lights, felled by a single punch. Ali would appreciate his brilliance later, watching his fights on film, but never in the ring. In the ring, he was all energy and improvisation and fury, a warrior, not an artist.
With a left-right combination, Ali sent Williams to the canvas. Then he did it again. When Williams got up the second time, blood streamed from his nose and mouth. Ali moved in relentlessly and knocked him to the floor once more. This time Williams was saved by the bell. In most fights, the referee will declare a knockout if a fighter falls three times in a round, but this was a championship bout, so the rule had been waived. As Williams rose unsteadily from his stool to begin another round, Ali raked his opponent’s face with more punches. More blood drizzled to the floor. Down went Williams. One last time the wounded fighter struggled to his feet, “manfully and uselessly,” as Sports Illustrated noted, but Ali piled punches upon punches until the referee stopped the fight.
Boxing writers and former boxers continued to criticize Ali’s unorthodox boxing style and to question his toughness. “Trouble with Clay, he thinks he knows it all,” Joe Louis wrote in The Ring magazine. “He won’t listen . . . With room to move, Clay’s a champion, real dangerous. But he doesn’t know a thing about fighting on the ropes, which is where he would be if he were in there with me.” Still, Ali was winning, and winning impressively. Even grizzled boxing veterans admitted that the champion’s performance against Williams had been extraordinary; seldom had one fighter inflicted so much damage while suffering so little. No one knew if Ali had been serious about retirement, but had he truly intended to quit boxing, this would have been a fine moment for it. He was one of the most handsome and handsomely paid men on the planet. He was largely undamaged by a sport that crippled and stupefied even its best practitioners. And he had just given a brilliant performance in front of one of the largest audiences to ever witness a sporting event. Had he quit then, it might have been enough to go down in history as one of the greatest boxers of all time.