Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Later, when Ali visited the house in Blue Island where Belinda lived with her parents, it was as if Sidney Poitier had pulled into the driveway. Neighbors stepped out of their houses to see him. Here was a girl of seventeen, a girl who had never traveled, a girl with little education beyond that offered by the Nation of Islam, and she found herself suddenly courted by one of the most handsome and famous men in the world, a real-life hero, an older man who had already traveled the planet, already been married, already met important people. He was so big and so good-lucking, too. She felt giddy in his presence, she said. But she made up her mind not to show it. She had the feeling that Ali, beneath the bluster, was an insecure little boy who wanted to be told what to do. She sensed that she needed to show him strength.

  Belinda was a virgin. While they were courting, Ali never pressured her about sex, even as they began to discuss marriage. But one day when Ali was visiting her at home, he asked if he could see her legs. “I wanna see what I’m getting,” he said. There was humor, not menace, in the way he asked, but Belinda wasn’t laughing.

  “You ain’t seeing nothing,” she said. “You ain’t touching nothing. You ain’t tasting nothing. You ain’t smelling nothing.”

  Getting involved with a man like Ali, with his mighty ego and matching libido, wasn’t easy, especially for a girl so young. But Belinda was no pushover. In her view, Ali had only begun to appreciate the power and beauty of Islam. He had only begun to behave the way a proper Muslim man should. “I wanted to mold him,” she said, “so he could be like my father.”

  Her friend Safiyya had a different perspective, saying Belinda, too, wanted to be molded. Belinda knew everything about Ali. She quoted Ali. She imitated Ali. Although she didn’t box, she did practice karate, which may have been her way of trying yet again to be like the champ. “She loved Ali so much,” Safiyya said, “she wanted to be Ali.”

  They were married on August 18, 1967, by a Baptist minister, Dr. Morris H. Tynes, in a ceremony at Ali’s home at 8500 South Jeffery Boulevard in Chicago. Ali’s parents flew to Chicago for the service but arrived too late, making it in time only for the reception. Herbert Muhammad stood beside Ali as his best man. The wedding, oddly, was a Christian one, as the Chicago Defender noted, because “Muslims have no marriage ceremony of their own,” although Tynes did include references to Islam in his remarks.

  For their honeymoon, the couple traveled to New York City. The trip was a wedding present from Minister Louis X of the Nation of Islam, whose name had recently been changed to Louis Farrakhan.

  Belinda was overjoyed, but she was also beginning to see that she and her new husband would not be living like royalty.

  It dawned her only gradually, she said: “I married a man with no job.”

  While Ali awaited trial on charges of draft evasion, boxing officials began planning for a tournament of televised bouts to decide the next heavyweight champion. Even white sportswriters who had consistently maligned Ali admitted that none of the contenders — Oscar Bonavena, Jimmy Ellis, Leotis Martin, Karl Mildenberger, Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry, Thad Spencer, and Ernie Terrell — were superior or even equal to Ali. The winner of the tournament would probably fight Sonny Liston, the fading star, or Joe Frazier, the rising star.

  The mediocre talent pool left some boxing executives wondering if they could somehow persuade Ali to accept a symbolic role in the U.S. military. If he would agree to perform boxing exhibitions for soldiers as Joe Louis had during World War II, Ali would avoid prison and he might be cleared to return to boxing in a year or two. If he continued to resist the draft, on the other hand, he might never fight again.

  The Louisville Sponsoring Group had already tried to change Ali’s mind by explaining how much money he stood to lose. Now, in the spring of 1967, Bob Arum, the lawyer who led Main Bout, planned to try again. That year, Main Bout was still a side project for Arum, who practiced law in New York. One of the senior partners at his firm, Arthur Krim, was a powerful entertainment lawyer and a top advisor to President Lyndon Johnson. “Krim went to see Lyndon Johnson,” said Arum, “and that’s when Lyndon Johnson proposed a deal . . . that he [Ali] doesn’t have to go in, he doesn’t have to wear a uniform, he just does exhibitions at the Army bases.” If Ali took the deal, he might have been allowed to continue fighting professionally even while he served his country, Arum said.

  Arum asked football’s Jim Brown, one of his partners in Main Bout, to help sell the deal to his friend Ali. Brown organized a meeting of many of the nation’s leading black athletes, including Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Curtis McClinton (of the Kansas City Chiefs), Bobby Mitchell (Washington Redskins), Sid Williams (Cleveland Browns), Jim Shorter (Redskins), Walter Beach (Browns), Willie Davis (Green Bay Packers), as well as Carl Stokes, a prominent black attorney in Cleveland who would go on to become the first black mayor of a major American city. The meeting was held in Cleveland, in the offices of Brown’s Negro Industrial Economic Union. Years later, the gathering would be described by Brown and journalists as a test of Ali’s sincerity, an opportunity for his black peers to declare their support for the boxer’s principled stand. After listening to Ali’s passionate speech and challenging him with hard questions, this impressive lineup of men agreed to address the media and lend their support, or so the story went years later.

  In truth, the meeting was about money first, principle second.

  Arum, Brown, Herbert Muhammad, and the other partners in Main Bout would lose a great source of income if Ali never boxed again. Main Bout depended on closed-circuit TV revenues to thrive, and it seemed unlikely that millions of customers were going to line up outside movie theaters to watch Jerry Quarry versus Thad Spencer. Nor was there any guarantee that other fighters would sign contracts with Main Bout. Ali was committed to the company because of his loyalty to Herbert Muhammad. Ali was the company’s greatest asset, but he was worthless to them if he wasn’t fighting. Arum hoped that Brown and the other leading black athletes would persuade Ali to make a deal with the military and continue boxing, and Arum was prepared to reward the athletes by cutting them in on Main Bout’s business. He promised a kind of affirmative action plan — promising that black athletes would receive closed-circuit franchises in some of the nation’s top markets. If Ali could be convinced to return to boxing, those athletes — including several of the men meeting in Cleveland — stood to make money from Ali’s fights.

  That was the main purpose of the gathering, according to Arum: “to convince Ali to take the deal because it opened up tremendous opportunities for black athletes.” The average salary for a professional football player in 1967 was about $25,000. Professional basketball players made an average of about $20,000 a year. With closed-circuit deals, some of the athletes would double or triple their annual income, and they would continue to make money from their franchises long after their athletic careers ended.

  “But I wasn’t setting it up for the athletes to rally around Ali,” Arum said of the meeting in Cleveland. “Who the fuck cared at that point?”

  When Brown met with Ali the night before the summit, Ali made it clear he would not be swayed. Still, Ali would not be facing an easy crowd. The men assembling in Cleveland were strong-willed. Several of them were military veterans. Others believed that Elijah Muhammad’s ideology was racist and, if followed through, would lead to an American apartheid. They arrived intent on lecturing Ali, if not changing his mind.

  “My first reaction was that it was unpatriotic,” recalled Willie Davis, who played defensive end for the Packers. Davis said he intended to tell Ali that he owed it to his country to serve in the military.

  But when Ali walked in the room, everything changed. Usually, Ali could count on his size and physical grace to make an impression when he entered, using his presence alone the way he used his jab, to set up the big right hand, which, in this case, was his gregarious personality. This time, almost everyone in the room was big, strong, and confident. Still, A
li managed to stand out, overpowering the men with his energy and steady stream of lightning-fast speech. He never stayed in his seat long. He interrupted others to crack jokes, and when his turn came to speak at length, he walked quickly and purposefully, like a preacher working the aisles of his church, establishing eye contact, calling the men by their first names, making each person in the room feel as if he were addressing them individually. When the others aimed hard questions at him, Ali never got defensive. He spoke passionately and confidently and with good humor, clearly enjoying the debate.

  “Well, I know what I must do,” he told the group. “My fate is in the hands of Allah, and Allah will take care of me. If I walk out of this room today and get killed today, it will be Allah’s doing and I will accept it. I’m not worried. In my first teachings I was told we would all be tested by Allah. This may be my test.”

  John Wooten confirmed that the point of the meeting was business, not morality. But, at the same time, he said, the men wanted to hear Ali explain why he was refusing the draft.

  Curtis McClinton, a halfback with the Kansas City Chiefs, was a member of the U.S. Army’s active reserves at the time. He told Ali that while he respected the boxer’s religion, it was important to remember his nationality, too. McClinton said he told Ali: “Hey, man, all you’d do is get a uniform and you’d be boxing at all the bases around the country . . . Your presence on military bases gives that motivation to military men . . . that we recognize them and give them respect.” Ali seemed to think about it, as if he could see the value in his service. “It was a very dynamic conflict within him,” said McClinton, who compared Ali to a child on the verge of adulthood, realizing that he faced a life-changing decision and the options were not black and white. “The whole issue of his transition to Islam, all of that had to be laid out and baked like a good cake. He knew all the ingredients. But what was he really?” If Ali laughed a lot during the meeting, McClinton said, it probably reflected his uncertainty. “If you knew Muhammad Ali,” he commented, the laughter “was really a way of dealing with it to move forward.”

  Bill Russell was fascinated by Ali’s position. It would have been easy for the boxer to compromise, Russell said. Ali could have kept his faith but played it down in public. He could have convinced himself and others that he would be no good to the Nation of Islam and no good to the movement for Black Power if he had to spend time in jail. Russell said the men gathered in Cleveland were prepared to help Ali if he changed his mind and sought a compromise. The men were ready to say they had persuaded the boxer to cut a deal with the government so that he could continue to fight — in the ring and for his people. They were prepared to accept their share of criticism from the black community if Ali was attacked for waffling. But it was clear throughout the meeting, Russell said, that Ali would not compromise.

  “Three, four, five hours — I don’t know how long we stayed in that back room,” Jim Brown recalled. “Everybody had a chance to ask him all the questions they wanted to. Eventually, everybody was satisfied that his stand was genuine based on his religion and that we would back him.”

  Brown led the group to a press conference. Ali, Brown, Russell, and Lew Alcindor sat at a long table, the rest of the men standing behind them.

  “There’s nothing new to say,” Ali announced, perhaps recognizing that reporters expected him to make big news by backing down from his antiwar stand.

  “We heard his views and know he is completely sincere in his beliefs,” Brown told the media.

  In an article for Sports Illustrated written shortly after the meeting, Russell wrote that he envied Ali: “He has something I have never been able to attain and something very few people I know possess. He has an absolute and sincere faith . . . I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”

  Two weeks later, an all-white jury needed only twenty minutes to find Ali guilty of draft evasion. Judge Joe Ingraham handed down the maximum sentence: five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Ali was permitted to remain free while his lawyers appealed the ruling, but his passport was taken as a condition of his bail. The severe punishment was no doubt intended to send a message to others contemplating draft evasion, and there were a growing number. The day of the conviction, Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend the draft four more years. Another vote, inspired by antiwar protesters, made desecration of the American flag a federal crime.

  Boxing officials had already stripped Ali of his title. Now, as he faced more serious punishment, white newspaper reporters attacked again, calling him a coward and a traitor, wondering why he wasn’t more thankful for all that America had done for him, allowing him (as if he had needed permission) to rise from modest circumstances to become one of the most famous men of his time, with the opportunity to be a hero to his people and example to youth.

  Black journalists were sometimes more even-handed. While some complained that the boxer was letting down his country, others said he was clearly a victim of discrimination, that the government had targeted him for his race and religion. “Clay should serve his time in the Army just like any other young, healthy all-American boy,” wrote James Hicks in the Louisville Defender. “But what better vehicle to use to put an uppity Negro back in his place than the United States Army.” Before, Ali had been seen as a great athlete and a rebel with peculiar taste in religion; now, at least in some eyes, he was a martyr, a victim of racism, a battler of excessive American power, and a fighter for something bigger than money or championship belts.

  Three days after his conviction, Ali stood atop a garbage can and addressed antiwar protesters in Los Angeles. “I’m with you,” he said. “Anything designed for peace and to stop the killing I’m for one hundred percent. I’m not a leader. I’m not here to advise you. But I encourage you to express yourself and stop this war.” Soon after Ali left the scene, police attacked the protesters. When Ali saw the ensuing riot on television that night, he vowed not to participate in further demonstrations.

  The growing number of antiwar protests infuriated J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. Hoover used the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in an attempt to neutralize the growing movement of black activists who, like Ali and Martin Luther King, seemed to be expanding the scope of their protests. FBI agents watched Ali’s house in Chicago, according to Ali’s cousin, Charlotte Waddell, who lived for a little while in the basement and said FBI agents approached her and asked for her help in gathering information about the Nation of Islam and Ali. Waddell said she refused.

  Hoover may have been paranoid. He may have been racist. He may have been behaving like an authoritarian. But he also may have had reason to worry: When people like Ali and King challenged the merits of the war in Vietnam, more Americans questioned the necessity of the military campaign; more people asked why they should send their sons to fight and die in a conflict they didn’t fully understand. When Ali refused to fight, the civil rights activist Julian Bond said, the action reverberated. “You could hear people talking about it on street corners,” Bond told writer Dave Zirin. “It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war — black and white — began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.” Ali’s stance wasn’t the only reason people began to think more critically about the war. Reporters in Vietnam sent back TV and newspaper stories about the horrors and seeming futility of the combat. At the same time, more young men were being called to service. The ripples, as Julian Bond called them, formed questions: Why was America willing to sacrifice so many lives for Vietnam? Why were black Americans suffering disproportionate numbers of casualties? Why were so many wealthy young white men avoiding service by enrolling in college or by hiring lawyers to exploit technicalities in draft laws while poorer men got swept up in the draft? And, as a leaflet distributed by the Students for a Democratic Society asked, “What kind of America is it whose response to the pov
erty and oppression in Vietnam is napalm and defoliation? Whose response to poverty and oppression in Mississippi is silence?”

  In Newark, delegates at the First National Conference on Black Power voted to recommend that black athletes boycott the Olympics and all boxing matches until Muhammad Ali’s status as champion was restored. “We’ve got to boycott all boxing, all fights, every sponsor on a national level,” Dick Gregory told the assembly. “Wherever they are fighting. And only this will make them give him [Ali] back his title.” The delegates, many of them in African clothing, also voted to boycott Negro publications that accepted advertisements for hair straighteners and bleaching creams.

  Freedomways, a magazine aimed at black readers, was one of the few publications to recognize immediately the larger point of Ali’s latest fight, writing in an editorial: “Mr. Ali’s case raises questions of great import for the entire country, and most especially for the 22,000,000 Americans of African descent. This is quite aside from any consideration of the blatant immorality of the particular war against the Vietnamese people which Muhammad Ali is protesting together with millions of other Americans. It is also aside from considering his constitutionally guaranteed right to practice his religious beliefs as a matter of conscience.

  “While we are not claiming any special privilege for Negro Americans, what we are challenging is the moral right of this nation, based upon its record, to insist that any Black man must put on the military uniform, at any time, and go thousands of miles away from these shores to risk his life for a society which has historically been his oppressor.”

  In one of the final poems before his death, Langston Hughes reflected on the white racist reaction to the civil rights movement and to the growing criticism among blacks of the war in Vietnam. In “Backlash Blues,” Hughes wrote that America gave blacks second-class homes and second-class schools. He asked,