by Jonathan Eig
It was a puzzling comment, to say the least. Ali’s statement about having no quarrel with the Viet Cong had been hugely influential. It had neatly and powerfully tied the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement. It had compelled countless Americans, black and white, young and old, to ask themselves what, if anything, they had against the Viet Cong. It had made Ali a champion to millions of people who cared not at all for boxing. Yet Ali went on to repeat this expression of regret several times through the years, leaving no doubt that he genuinely questioned the wisdom of his remark, that he felt truly sorry for upsetting so many people. It was a revealing comment. For one thing, it suggested that Ali didn’t appreciate or else didn’t care that his opposition to the war had made him an influential figure for his generation. But Ali’s comment also offered a clue to some of his deepest feelings. He loved being loved more than he loved being admired.
Less than a year later, in another interview, Ali went a step further, suggesting he was not necessarily a conscientious objector. “The way I feel,” he told Playboy magazine, “if America was attacked and some foreign force was prowling the streets and shooting, naturally I’d fight. I’m on the side of America, not them, because I’m fighting for myself, my children, and my people . . . So, yeah, I’d fight if America was attacked.”
If Ali betrayed signs of confusion or evolving values, he was nevertheless happy at this particular moment — happy to be a boxer again and not an antiwar crusader or a college lecturer, and happy to have the world watching him do the things he did best. His weight was down to 218 pounds, almost where he wanted it. When he caught himself in the mirror, he liked what he saw even more than he usually did. He said he was confident he would win, that Foreman wasn’t as tough as everyone believed, that Ali would once again be the heavyweight champion of the world, which was all he had really ever wanted.
When Ali preened, others worried about his safety.
“Ali’s had it,” said Jerry Quarry, Ali’s recent opponent. “He’s at road’s end.”
“The time may have come to say good-bye to Muhammad Ali,” Howard Cosell told television viewers, “because, very honestly, I don’t think he can beat George Foreman.”
Ali seemed unbothered. He loved Cosell, and Cosell loved Ali. Cosell had shown Ali respect when most journalists had mocked the fighter. Over time, they’d developed a good act, one that helped them each gain fame. Now, Ali responded to the broadcaster with one of their familiar toupee gags: “Cosell, you’re a phony, and that thing on your head came from the tail of a pony!” When another reporter predicted a first-round knockout victory for Foreman, Ali pulled him aside and tried to educate him. “I’m going to tell you something,” Ali said, “and I don’t want you ever to forget it . . . Black men scare white men more than black men scare black men.”
Even Ali’s wife had doubts about her husband’s chances. Belinda didn’t believe Foreman was unbeatable, but she worried that Ali was doing too much talking and not enough training, and she couldn’t understand it. Losing in Africa would be a tragedy, she told Ali. Not only would he blow his shot at the championship; he would blow the chance to be a hero to black people all over the world. She yelled at him sometimes, but the yelling only worked temporarily, as if she were blowing up a balloon with a pinprick in it. Ali would work hard for a few days, perhaps even for a week or two, and then he would slack off again.
One day, Belinda went to Hersheypark, the giant amusement park in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where she saw a gift shop that sold custom T-shirts. She decided to buy one. On the front, in block letters, she had the shop print: “I LOVE HIM BECAUSE HE’S THE GREATEST.” On the back, she had them iron on the name: “GEORGE FOREMAN.”
When Ali saw Belinda wearing the T-shirt at Deer Lake, he demanded she take it off.
“I ain’t takin’ it off until you start training seriously,” she said. “You can’t stop like that just because you worked two weeks.”
Ali got angry, saying Belinda was embarrassing him.
“You embarrassing me by not trying!” she answered, as she recalled the encounter years later. She wore the shirt several days in a row until she felt Ali had resumed his good work habits.
But tension remained. One night in August, Belinda suggested they go see the new Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles. She knew Ali loved Western movies, and she’d heard this one had a lot of racial humor, so she thought her husband would like it. Ali and Belinda brought their eldest girl, six-year-old Maryum — or May May, as everyone called her. Rahaman, C. B. Atkins, and one of Belinda’s cousins all tagged along. They all piled into Rahaman Ali’s black-and-white Oldsmobile and drove to a theater in nearby Pottsville. Blazing Saddles was very much a movie of the times. Straightforward joke telling was giving way to irony in the 1970s, just as the spirit of rebelliousness was giving way to anger and dismay over the country’s military failure in Southeast Asia and the revelations of corruption in the White House. Sincere passions that had been embraced in the 1960s seemed naive in the 1970s. In Blazing Saddles, a sly black sheriff and an alcoholic white gunslinger arrive to save a desert town’s racist white citizens. In the end, when the heroes ride off into the sunset, the camera lingers until the cowboys dismount, slap hands, hand off their horses to assistants, and step into a waiting limousine, no doubt headed back to their movie-star homes in Hollywood.
Belinda loved the movie. She laughed and laughed, but Ali watched in silence. When they left the theater, it was raining. Belinda offered to drive back to Deer Lake. As they got going, she could tell her husband was angry. Irony was not a punch Ali knew how to throw — he was, after all, one of those earnest symbols of the 1960s — and, as a result, he had either missed or failed to enjoy the wit of Blazing Saddles. “He said it wasn’t that funny, it was racist, it was this, it was that,” Belinda recalled. That, in turn, made Belinda angry. Where was his sense of humor? Why couldn’t he simply enjoy the movie instead of complaining and starting an argument?
Ali changed the subject and began bragging about what he would do to George Foreman. Even cocooned in the Oldsmobile, surrounded by family and friends, he felt compelled to boast, to psych himself up and put Foreman down. That made Belinda even angrier — about her husband’s silly reaction to the movie, about his half-hearted training, about everything. She muttered just loud enough for Ali to hear: “Yeah, you just tryin’ to convince yourself you gonna win. You ain’t gonna win . . . not the way you trainin’.”
Ali raised a fist like he was going to hit her and waved it in her direction.
Belinda ducked.
“Man, are you tryin’ to hit me?” she said, still holding the steering wheel and watching the road. “You not tryin’ to hit me!”
Ali raised his fist again. “And I’m driving a car in the rain,” she recalled, “and I took my hand and swung at him. I gave him a backhand to his face, because he was trying to hit me again, and I stopped him.” A ring she was wearing may have caught Ali over his eye. “So he gets a little mouse over his eye and he starts bleeding a little bit, because I hit him harder than I thought I hit him. And he said, ‘Man, she hit me!’ Then he looked in the mirror and saw the blood, and he started cursing. ‘Bitch! That bitch! Man, we’ll kill you! Stop the car! Stop the car!’ ”
Belinda shouted at Ali: “Don’t put your hands on me! You do not raise your hands at me again!”
The next morning, Ali apologized and bought her flowers. She hugged and kissed him and said she accepted the apology. But she reminded Ali that he had only about a month to prepare for the fight. He needed to get serious. She said she would take the kids to Chicago to stay with her parents, and when she returned, she intended to clean up the camp — getting rid of “the hangerbangers, the niggers smoking reefer up there . . . all his damn girlfriends.” She told Ali: “If you want the girlfriends, you go down to the hotel.” She was referring to the Deer Lake Motel on Route 61, where the business cards read “Discreet Lodging” under the name of the establishment and where the roo
ms all smelled of Shell No-Pest Strips. “You don’t bring ’em up in the camp no more,” she said.
Ali agreed.
He continued to promise he would retire after fighting and beating Foreman. Even with Herbert Muhammad and the IRS taking their cuts, $5 million would provide a soft landing as Ali got out of boxing and explored new career options.
“It is befitting that I leave the game just like I came in,” he said one day at a press conference in New York City, “beating a big, bad monster who knocks out everybody and no one can whup him. That’s when that little Cassius Clay from Louisville, Kentucky, came up and stopped Sonny Liston, the man who annihilated Floyd Patterson twice. He was gonna kill me! He hit harder than George. His reach was longer than George. He was a better boxer than George, and I’m better now than I was when you saw that twenty-two-year-old undeveloped kid running from Sonny Liston. I’m experienced now . . . I’m bad! I done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator . . . I done tussled with a whale, I done handcuffed lightning, throwed thunder in jail! That’s bad! Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick! I’m so mean I make medicine sick!”
He looked to his left where Don King sat, smiling. It was difficult to say which man had more riding on the fight.
“It will be the greatest spectacle in the history of the world,” King pronounced.
“Some people might pick the original Exodus,” one of the reporters countered.
“Some people,” King said, “have no imagination.”
Before taking off for Zaire, Ali showed up for a boxing exhibition at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Comedian Bob Hope told jokes. Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson waved to the crowd. Ali, Frazier, and Foreman each sparred a few rounds against partners of their own choosing.
Organizers billed the event as a fundraiser for victims of a devastating drought in Africa, but three out of every four seats went unsold and precious little money was raised. Ali composed a new poem for the occasion, one that made reference to the recent resignation of President Nixon, who had stepped down rather than face impeachment hearings related to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Ali admitted that he had not been paying attention to the details of Watergate, but he knew enough to rhyme: “If you think the world was shook when Nixon resigned / Wait till I whip this Foreman’s behind.”
The entire trip to Salt Lake City might have been forgotten if not for one thing. Upon arrival at the airport in Utah, Ali’s friend Gene Kilroy spotted someone he would later describe as “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen. The next day, Kilroy saw the woman again, and he pointed her out to Ali. The boxer agreed that the woman was truly breathtaking — tall, slender, with caramel-colored skin and flowing waves of brown hair framing the delicate features of her face. Her name was Veronica Porche (pronounced porsh), and she was one of the four women selected by Don King and his panel of judges to help promote the fight in Zaire.
Not surprisingly, very few Americans were signing up for the travel packages to Zaire. As he made his final sales push, King paid Porche and the other young women to fly to Salt Lake City, hoping they might cajole a few more boxing fans to come along with Ali and Foreman to Africa.
Porche was eighteen years old. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a registered nurse. She was one year removed from high school, still living at home with her parents, working at a department store and attending the University of Southern California in the hopes of becoming a doctor. She knew little about boxing. In her high-school chemistry class, she had once heard a classmate call Muhammad Ali a loudmouth, and that was more or less all she knew about the famous boxer. Veronica was the product of a stable, middle-class family. She always knew when her parents would be home from work and always knew what time dinner would be on the table. She had attended Catholic schools and considered herself shy and well behaved. She was completely unaccustomed to the worlds of sport and celebrity, and she had no interest in meeting Ali. She assumed that if she did meet him, she probably wouldn’t like him.
In fact, while she noticed Ali in Salt Lake City, and while Ali noticed her, they were not formally introduced. They never spoke. Ali looked at her, whispered his approval to Kilroy, and walked away.
“That was it,” Porche said of their first encounter.
But that wasn’t it.
40
“Ali Boma Ye!”
The following week, they were on their way, just Ali, his wife, his parents, his brother, his trainer, his manager, his three sparring partners, his two assistant trainers, his two photographers, his two training camp supervisors, his cook, his masseur, his biographer, and thirteen other friends and relations, all of them flying from New York to Boston to Paris to Kinshasa, Zaire, all of them, with the possible exception of Ali, contemplating that this might be their last journey together.
In Paris, they boarded one of Mobutu’s private 747s for the final leg of the trip. Ali was gambling his entire career on this fight, but he betrayed no signs of stress. The sight of two black pilots in the cockpit and an all-black team of flight attendants thrilled him. Africa had black pilots! A black president with his own 747! What other wonders did the continent hold?
“This is strange to the American Negro,” he said. “We never dreamed of this.” But Ali had in fact dreamed of this, or at least spoken of it. So had Elijah Muhammad. So had Malcolm X. The Nation of Islam had been preaching for years that black Americans needed their own country so that they, too, could make their own laws, run their own schools, own their own businesses, and, presumably, fly their own 747s. Ali had been telling people for ten years that he was fighting in order to call attention to the struggles of his people and to help spread the word of Elijah Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, who had predicted that the black man would one day throw off the shackles of his white oppressors and find true freedom. Now, here he was, a black man with a black manager and a black promoter traveling to a black nation to fight an-other black man in an event seen by the whole world. Who would have dared dream such a thing when Ali had first declared his loyalty to the Nation of Islam? And if something as unlikely as this could come to pass, why was it so difficult to believe that Elijah Muhammad’s prophecies might come true? At the very least, one might ask, why was it so difficult to imagine that Ali might be capable of another miracle in the boxing ring? Why was it so difficult to imagine that he might beat George Foreman?
To Ali, Foreman was Sonny Liston all over again. Foreman was the bad guy, and Ali was the good guy. Why should the good guy fear the bad guy? The good guy always won.
During the flight, Ali rehearsed his verbal attacks, calling Foreman a robot, a mummy, a slow-moving goon. He’d been saying for months that Foreman would crack under pressure. He was going to distract and discombobulate Foreman, same as he had Liston. Even if no one believed him, Ali scored points for consistency. He’d been boasting that 2 billion people would watch this fight — the equivalent, he said, of “100,000 new faces every night for 170 years! Imagine that!” His math was off, but his point was good. It isn’t easy performing in front of such a colossal crowd. It tries a man’s nerves, he said: “Then you got the world’s greatest fighter or one of the world’s best, taking punches at your face, your body, and little hard gloves on, and everything at stake — your future, your life, your family’s investments — everything’s at stake. This worries you. And the pressure, the excitement, the drama.”
Ali had been trying to cast Foreman as the fighter for the establishment, offering as evidence the fact that Foreman had waved an American flag when he’d won the gold medal at the 1968 Olympics. Sometimes it was hard to tell if he was saying these things to rile Foreman, to capture the attention of the press, or to convince himself that Foreman was truly the morally inferior man. “If he wins, we’re slaves for three hundred more years,” Ali told English journalist David Frost in a TV interview from Deer Lake. “If I win, we’re free.”
At a boxing writers’
dinner in June at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, for example, Ali began with his usual taunts, telling Foreman that Zaire was “my country,” that thousands of Africans would be sticking pins in their George Foreman voodoo dolls. Seconds later, Ali’s relatively benign racism grew more poisonous. “I’ll beat your Christian ass, you white, flag-waving (expletive deleted) you!” Later, when Ali put an arm around Foreman’s shoulder, Foreman slapped it away. Ali tried to grab Foreman’s championship belt. Foreman ripped Ali’s coat. Ali hurled drinking glasses at Foreman and against a drape-covered wall.
When Foreman walked away, Ali wasn’t finished. He shouted as if he wanted to continue the tussle: “What hotel that nigger stay in?”
The behavior was so repulsive that it prompted Dave Anderson of the Times to offer this wish for Ali: “If he considers Zaire his country, maybe he’ll stay there.”
Later, Ali apologized, saying he should not have impugned another man’s religion. But then, ten minutes after the apology, he did it again, saying, “I’m fightin’ to represent Elijah Muhammad. This Foreman, he represents Christianity, America, the flag. I can’t let him win. He represents the oppression of black people; he represents pork chops.”
Until then, Foreman had admired Ali. He had even entertained notions of joining the Nation of Islam. But after the encounter in New York, he lost interest. “I figured if a religion couldn’t make you into a better person,” he said, “it had no purpose at all, and if his was the true face of Islam, I didn’t want to see it in my mirror.”
With his psychological tactics, Ali might have succeeded in firing up audiences and perhaps even prejudicing referees, but he was also undercutting what he claimed to be one of his primary goals: the uplift of black people. By slurring Joe Frazier as a Tom or George Foreman as a white, flag-waving Christian motherfucker (or whatever expletive the New York Times deleted from his quote), Ali was redefining race as a state of mind. He was also denigrating strong, honorable, hard-working black men with whom he should have stood shoulder to shoulder as symbols of pride, men worthy of admiration from black and white Americans. Ali’s words not only stung Foreman and Frazier; they influenced millions of Ali’s fans. Film director Spike Lee, who was seventeen years old in 1974 and living in Brooklyn, called Ali “our shining black prince; to black people, he was like God.” Lee added, “I gotta admit, like a lot of young African-Americans, I got . . . hornswoggled by Ali, and we bought into thinking that Joe was not a black man.”