by Jonathan Eig
Boxing’s long-term hazards have been studied since 1928, when an American doctor first used the term punch-drunk to describe fighters suffering cognitive dysfunctions including memory loss, aggression, confusion, depression, slurred speech, and, eventually, dementia. Today, punch-drunkenness is referred to as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive trauma. Scientists now understand that even small jolts to the brain, when repeated, can cause lasting damage. Researchers have studied the effects of head injuries on football players, and the National Football League has taken steps to make the game safer. But boxers absorb many more blows to the head than football players, and boxers don’t wear helmets to mitigate the damage. A boxer with a busy schedule probably takes more than a thousand shots to the head a year in his bouts and thousands more in sparring sessions. Over a ten-year career, a boxer will likely absorb tens of thousands of blows to the head. But boxing has no policy to determine when in the course of a career a fighter has had enough. State commissions govern the sport. A boxer who can’t get a license in one state merely tries another. No national or international governing body sets the rules and offers accountability.
Did Ali suffer for all those blows to the head? In all likelihood, he did. Even as he entered what would later be described as the greatest phase of his career, there were signs of trouble, clues that have might have raised a warning, and they were noticeable every time Ali opened his mouth beginning around 1971.
The act of speaking is not as simple as it seems. Speech and language circuits in the brain work together to form a message, translate that message into movement across more than one hundred muscles from the lungs to the throat to the tongue and lips, and execute those intricate muscle movements to produce sound waves. It’s a lot harder than throwing a jab or ducking one. That’s why slurred speech is often one of the first indicators of moderate to severe neurological damage or disease. That’s why drunks and stroke victims and victims of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or Lou Gehrig’s disease often slur their words. The signals from the brain to the body are too impaired to get the job done smoothly. In 1967, Ali spoke at a rate of 4.07 syllables per second, which is close to average for healthy adults. By 1971, his rate of speech had fallen to 3.8 syllables per second, and it would continue sliding steadily, year by year, fight by fight, over the course of his career, according to a study published in 2017 by speech scientists at Arizona State University. The study examined Ali’s speech by evaluating dozens of recordings of television interviews and analyzing Ali’s voice over time. An ordinary adult would see little or no decline in his speaking rate between the ages of twenty-five and forty, but Ali experienced a drop of more than 26 percent in that period. His ability to clearly articulate words also declined significantly.
The brash boxer was slowly being hushed, and not by the government or by his critics; he was doing it to himself.
Ali had always said he would never wind up the way so many old fighters did — drooling, incoherent, memories fogged, displaying the effects of all those punches for the rest of their lives like shadows in a trophy case.
But those fighters never saw it coming, and neither did Ali.
One hundred fourteen days after his fight against Ellis, Ali fought Buster Mathis. Ticket sales for the Astrodome fight were moving sluggishly, and Ali couldn’t think of anything nasty to say about Mathis to stoke interest in the competition. His act was getting old. His poems had grown familiar. His teasing of Howard Cosell had the feel of a well-polished routine. His bragging no longer startled. Ali still knew how to entertain, but he no longer rankled or surprised.
When the publicity man Bob Goodman complained to Ali that they needed something to attract attention, Ali lit up. “I got it!” he told Goodman. “You can have me kidnapped! Set me up in a cabin in the woods. I’ll train up there. Nobody will know. A few days before the fight you can find me!” Goodman humored Ali and said it was a good idea — except that people probably weren’t going to buy tickets to a fight when one of the combatants had gone missing. A crowd of only 21,000 showed up as Ali beat Mathis by a unanimous decision in twelve rounds.
Thirty-nine days later, Ali fought Juergen Blin, winning in a seven-round knockout. Ninety-seven days later, he fought Mac Foster, who lasted fifteen hopeless rounds. Thirty days later, Ali fought George Chuvalo for the second time and beat him for the second time. Fifty-seven days after that, he stopped Jerry Quarry on cuts in the seventh round. Twenty-two days later, he punished Alvin Blue Lewis before taking him out in the eleventh round. After another sixty-three days, he danced around with Floyd Patterson for a few rounds before landing a punch that opened a cut over Floyd’s eye and caused the fight, Patterson’s last, to be stopped. Sixty-two days later, Ali knocked out Bob Foster in the eighth round (Foster fired off a lot of sharp jabs and one of the best lines ever uttered about the difficulty in fighting Ali: “He was never in one place at the same time!”).
Eighty-five days after that, on St. Valentine’s Day 1973, Ali battered Joe Bugner but couldn’t knock him out, winning it in a bloody unanimous decision.
Ali made it all look easy — nothing remotely like reality. That thudding jab, that smooth footwork, that surprising power. He delivered it all with confidence and grace: “Sorry, man,” he seemed to say, “but I’m Ali.”
He was on the road constantly, happy as could be. He trained in the morning and watched TV at night. He enjoyed a steady stream of women. He joked with Bundini. He played pranks on Dundee — the same sorts of pranks he’d played on his parents as a child, tying a cord to the blind in his hotel room and running it out the door, hiding in the closet and jumping out with a sheet over his head. Among his boxing friends, Ali could be the child again.
After the Bugner fight, Ali had padded his record to forty wins and one loss. Were all those fights necessary? Probably not. But they did help him recover some his finesse as a boxer, and it was clear that he was not ready to give up his athletic career.
He certainly had options. Warner Brothers had offered him $250,000 plus a percentage of revenues to star in Heaven Can Wait, the remake of a 1941 film called Here Comes Mr. Jordan, about a boxer who is removed from his body prematurely by an overanxious angel and who returns to life in the body of a recently murdered millionaire. When Ali turned down the part, director Warren Beatty cast himself in the lead role and changed the character from a boxer to a football player. The movie, released in 1978, performed extraordinarily well at the box office and earned glowing reviews. If Ali had taken the part, and if his performance had been well received, there’s no telling whether his career path might have changed. For the time being, he remained a boxer. Hollywood was a possibility, but boxing was a certainty, and the money was simply too good to resist. Unfortunately, he also paid a price. Even in those ten relatively easy fights, Ali took more than 1,200 punches.
The problem, in part, was that Ali lacked the punching power to put a quick end to fights, even against middling competition. Bob Foster got knocked down seven times in his fight with Ali, but when it was over, he was dismissive of his opponent’s power. When Joe Frazier hit him, Foster said, “I saw birds and all different colors, you know? They say I got up, but I don’t remember.” Not so with Ali. Even when Ali won easily, he seldom overwhelmed opponents. “He wasn’t knocking them guys out,” Foster said. “Shit, them guys was just getting tired. They were running out of gas and failing . . . He had me down six, seven times, but he never hurt me, you know . . . Ali know he didn’t hurt me!”
36
Trickeration
It’s never about the money. It’s always about the money.”
It was one of Bob Arum’s favorite lines, and the truth of it never failed the promoter. Boxers would say they loved to box. They would say they did it for the thrill of the competition, to settle scores, to prove their skills, to earn a place in the pantheon of greats. These boxers would say that when the time came to hang up t
heir gloves, they would do so without hesitation — only to hesitate, time and time again, unable to resist the money. When his jaw was swollen after his clash with Frazier, Ali had announced he was ready to quit. Two or three more fights, culminating with the rematch with Frazier, and that would be it. He would be set for life, done.
Then he went on to fight ten times in twenty-four months, with Arum arranging most of the events. Ali still spoke eagerly of getting another shot at Frazier, but he no longer seemed to be in a hurry, not when he could make millions beating up men like Juergen Blin and Joe Bugner.
“Don’t let nuthin’ happen to Joe Frazier,” Ali said, as he knocked off one tomato can after another.
He admitted the money mattered. “It ain’t too late to start saving,” he said. “I get $100,000 for a fight, I buy something costing $8,000, something else cost $24,000, and the one-hundred goes like hell. It costs me $10,000 a month to live. I can’t keep that up.”
His assets included two Rolls-Royces, a small collection of Cadillacs, a home in New Jersey, and a home for his parents in Louisville. Gene Kilroy, who served as Ali’s all-purpose facilitator and handled many of his day-to-day business transactions, introduced Ali to accountants at Peat Marwick International, and the accountants told Ali that he could save a fortune in taxes by writing off more of his business expenses. With that in mind, Ali bought a six-acre property in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles north of Reading. Ali had the land cleared and began building log cabins. This would be his new training center, where he could get away from the hustle and hustlers of New York and Miami, and where he could prepare in isolation for his upcoming fights. He planned to build enough cabins to house about twenty, he said, so that his sparring partners, his cooks, his wife, his children, his friends, and his entourage members would always have a place to sleep. With Ali, isolation was a relative term.
The training camp would help save money too, Ali said, because he would no longer have to pay for gym time and hotel rooms. Ali had other ideas for cutting back on spending. “I’m going to make my wife make her own clothes,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “She don’t have to, but I’m going to make her do it.” His goal, he said, was to put 75 percent of his income into savings until he had a million dollars socked away. He estimated that he had earned about $7 million before taxes so far in his boxing career. He and Belinda had four children now: Maryum, the twins Jamillah and Rasheda, and a four-month-old boy they called Muhammad Jr. The children spent most of their time with Belinda’s parents, who lived in a working-class suburb of Chicago.
“It was very normal,” Jamillah said, recalling the years spent primarily with her grandparents, “and that’s why my grandmother took on the responsibility, because she wanted us to have a normal childhood.” When their father visited, Jamillah said, it was like a holiday. The children put on their nicest clothes. Neighbors rang the doorbell to see Ali and get his autograph. Herbert Muhammad and others dropped by. When Ali left, their ordinary lives resumed.
Ali said he wanted to see the children more often. “I’m never home too much and they don’t know me too well,” he said. He told reporters that he and Belinda planned to sell their home in New Jersey and move to Chicago soon.
Ali liked to play with his children, but he had little interest in the day-to-day work of being a father, little interest in setting and enforcing rules. Certain parental responsibilities, he said, belonged solely to women. When the Sports Illustrated photographer Neil Leifer visited Ali one day and asked if he could take a picture of Ali changing his son’s diaper, Ali plopped little Muhammad on a bed and wrapped a diaper around his middle, but he had no idea what to do with the safety pins. And this was his fourth child. “Belinda,” he said, after the pictures had been taken, “come on over here and finish this job.”
Ali said his role as a father was to make sure his children understood the importance of education and had enough money to live comfortably. “I don’t want nobody whispering, ‘See that waitress, that’s Muhammad Ali’s daughter.’ That’s pitiful when you think about it . . . But it ain’t gonna happen. I’m going to be the first black fighter you can look at and say, ‘There’s a wise, wealthy man with property, camps, businesses, and $2 million in the bank.’ ”
Ali was still waiting to fight Frazier, but no date had been announced. In the meantime, he continued scheduling bouts against men who were less than top contenders. His next fight, he said, would be in South Africa, where he had been offered a tremendous payday. The plans for a bout in South Africa never came together, but Ali’s announcement was enough to irk a black reporter, who asked why the boxer would support a government that imprisoned Nelson Mandela and forced black people to live under a brutal system of apartheid.
Ali responded, “Because my black brothers there haven’t seen me.”
Herbert Muhammad and Bob Arum made most of Ali’s business decisions, consulting with Ali and Angelo Dundee in choosing opponents as they plotted Ali’s path toward a rematch with Frazier. But in the summer of 1972, a new figure entered Ali’s life and made a play to supplant Arum as promoter.
Don King was a hustler from Cleveland, a large man (at about six-foot-three, 240 pounds) given to large assertions. “I transcend earthly bounds,” he once told a journalist. “I never cease to amaze myself; I haven’t yet found my limits. I am ready to accept the limits of what I can do, but every time I feel that way, boom! — God touches me, and I do something even more stupendous.” It was no wonder he and Ali hit it off. King carried himself like the black Al Capone, with a big afro, lots of sparkling jewelry, and pockets full of cash. The writer Jack Newfield called him “a street Machiavelli, a ghetto Einstein” who “dressed like a pimp, talked like an evangelical storefront preacher, and thought like a chess grand master.” Mark Kram of Sports Illustrated called him “a 50-carat setting of sparkling vulgarity and raw energy, a man who wants to swallow mountains, walk on oceans, and sleep on clouds.” Before his foray into boxing, King ran a gambling operation. To make it work as smoothly as possible, he ratted on competitors. In the late 1960s, he was said to be grossing fifteen thousand dollars a day, most of that money coming from poor, black Cleveland men and women who hoped to hit it big playing his rigged numbers games.
One day in April 1966, King had walked into the Manhattan Tap Room in Cleveland. Sam Garrett, a former employee of King’s operation, sat at the bar. Garrett owed King six hundred dollars, and King wanted the money. An argument turned into a fight, and the fight turned into a beating, with Garrett on the sidewalk outside the bar and King kicking the smaller man in the head until blood flowed from Garrett’s ears and King’s footprints marked his victim’s cheekbone. Garrett later died. A jury found King guilty of second-degree murder, punishable by life in prison. But, in a move that puzzled prosecutors and raised suspicions of bribery, the judge hearing the case reduced the conviction to manslaughter. King emerged from prison after serving three years and eleven months, and he was later pardoned. A few years after his release from prison, King arranged for Muhammad Ali to campaign for the judge and record a radio commercial endorsing his reelection.
In 1971, on his first day out of prison, King got a visit from his friend Lloyd Price, the legendary singer and songwriter who had gained fame with the songs “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Stagger Lee,” and “Personality.” The men talked about what King would do now that he was free. King said he was interested in the boxing business because it would give him a legitimate way to make money and asked if Price could arrange an introduction to Ali. Price knew Ali well. The men had met when Ali was a teenager hanging around music clubs in the West End of Louisville, and they had been friends ever since.
Price arranged first for King to speak to Herbert Muhammad. King told Herbert he wanted to bring Ali to Cleveland for a boxing exhibition that would raise money for a hospital in a black neighborhood that was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Even over the phone, Don King was a force of nature.
He shouted with ear-splitting force, using laughter for exclamation points. He blustered and blew so fiercely and at such length that, eventually, more often than not, he got what he wanted, and when he didn’t get what he wanted, he would get down on his knees and cry, pounding his fists on the floor like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. In prison, he had borrowed heavily from the library and memorized passages from Shakespeare, which he quoted liberally. But his favorite expressions were curses, and his favorite curse, unequivocally, was “motherfucker,” along with its adjectival form, “motherfucking.” He once said, “We’re blacks and we have nothing. We don’t have expensive suits, or big houses, or luxury vacations. We’re poor. All we got is the word. Our only invention that belongs to us is a word. And that word is motherfucker! Nobody can take that away from us. That’s our word. That’s a black word. It’s our heritage . . . We should be standing on top of buildings, shouting our word — motherfucker!”
What King wanted from Herbert Muhammad was Ali. Ali, he said, had to come to Cleveland. Ali had to save this black hospital. Ali had to come to Cleveland or else poor black people would die and black doctors would lose their motherfucking jobs! Herbert Muhammad agreed. Ali went to Cleveland to box a ten-round exhibition for charity on August 28, 1972. Later, Boxing Illustrated reported that the hospital got only fifteen thousand dollars from the benefit. The hospital closed its doors a few years later. But from King’s standpoint, the exhibition was a huge success because it allowed him to establish a working relationship with Ali and Herbert Muhammad.