Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

by Thomas Hauser

  Ali’s refusal to accept induction placed him once and for all at the vortex of the 1960s. “You had riots in the streets; you had assassinations; you had the war in Vietnam,” Dave Kindred of the Atlanta Constitution remembers. “It was a violent, turbulent, almost indecipherable time in America, and Ali was in all of those fires at once in addition to being heavyweight champion of the world.”

  That championship was soon taken from Ali, but he never wavered from his cause. Speaking to a college audience, he proclaimed, “I would like to say to those of you who think I’ve lost so much, I have gained everything. I have peace of heart; I have a clear free conscience. And I’m proud. I wake up happy. I go to bed happy. And if I go to jail, I’ll go to jail happy. Boys go to war and die for what they believe, so I don’t see why the world is so shook up over me suffering for what I believe. What’s so unusual about that?”

  “It really impressed me that Ali gave up his title,” says former heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, who understands Ali’s sacrifice as well as anyone. “Once you have it, you never want to lose it; because once you lose it, it’s hard to get it back.”

  But by the late 1960’s, Ali was more than heavyweight champion. That had become almost a side issue. He was a living embodiment of the proposition that principles matter. And the most powerful thing about him was no longer his fists; it was his conscience and the composure with which he carried himself:

  KWAME TOURE [FORMERLY KNOWN AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL]: Muhammad Ali used himself as a perfect instrument to advance the struggle of humanity by demonstrating clearly that principles are more important than material wealth. It’s not just what Ali did. The way he did it was just as important.

  WILBERT MCCLURE [ALI’S ROOMMMATE AND FELLOW GOLD-MEDAL WINNER AT THE OLYMPICS]: He always carried himself with his head high and with grace and composure. And we can’t say that about all of his detractors; some of them in political office, some of them in pulpits, some of them thought of as nice upstanding citizens. No, we can’t say that about all of them.

  CHARLES MORGAN [FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE ACLU SOUTHERN OFFICE]: I remember thinking at the time, what kind of a foolish world am I living in where people want to put this man in jail.

  DAVE KINDRED: He was one thing, always. He was always brave.

  Ali was far from perfect, and it would do him a disservice not to acknowledge his flaws. It’s hard to imagine a person so powerful yet at times so naïve; almost on the order of Forrest Gump. On occasion, Ali has acted irrationally. He cherishes honor and is an honorable person, but too often excuses dishonorable behavior in others. His accommodation with dictators like Mobuto Sese Seko and Ferdinand Marcos and his willingness to fight in their countries stands in stark contrast to his love of freedom. There is nothing redeeming in one black person calling another black person a “gorilla,” which was the label that Ali affixed to Joe Frazier. Nor should one gloss over Ali’s past belief in racial separatism and the profligate womanizing of his younger days. But the things that Ali has done right in his life far outweigh the mistakes of his past. And the rough edges of his earlier years have been long since forgiven or forgotten.

  What remains is a legacy of monumental proportions and a living reminder of what people can be. Muhammad Ali’s influence on an entire nation, black and white, and a whole world of nations has been incalculable. He’s not just a champion. A champion is someone who wins an athletic competition. Ali goes beyond that.

  It was inevitable that someone would come along and do what Jackie Robinson did. Robinson did it in a glorious way that personified his own dignity and courage. But if Jackie Robinson hadn’t been there, someone else—Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron—would have stepped in with his own brand of excitement and grace and opened baseball’s doors. With or without Jack Johnson, eventually a black man would have won the heavyweight championship of the world. And sooner or later, there would have been a black athlete who, like Joe Louis, was universally admired and loved.

  But Ali carved out a place in history that was, and remains, uniquely his own. And it’s unlikely that anyone other than Muhammad Ali could have created and fulfilled that role. Ali didn’t just mirror his times. He wasn’t a passive figure carried along by currents stronger than he was. He fought the current; he swam against the tide. He stood for something, stayed with it, and prevailed.

  Muhammad Ali is an international treasure. More than anyone else of his generation, he belongs to the people of the world and is loved by them. No matter what happens in the years ahead, he has already made us better. He encouraged millions of people to believe in themselves, raise their aspirations, and accomplish things that might not have been done without him. He wasn’t just a standard-bearer for black Americans. He stood up for everyone.

  And that’s the importance of Muhammad Ali.

  MUHAMMAD ALI AND BOXING

  1996

  You could spend twenty years studying Ali,” Dave Kindred once wrote, “and still not know what he is or who he is. He’s a wise man, and he’s a child. I’ve never seen anyone who was so giving and, at the same time, so self-centered. He’s either the most complex guy that I’ve ever been around or the most simple. And I still can’t figure out which it is. I mean, I truly don’t know. We were sure who Ali was only when he danced before us in the dazzle of the ring lights. Then he could hide nothing.”

  And so it was that the world first came to know Muhammad Ali, not as a person, not as a social, political, or religious figure, but as a fighter. His early professional bouts infuriated and entertained as much as they impressed. Cassius Clay held his hands too low. He backed away from punches, rather than bobbing and weaving out of danger, and lacked true knockout power. Purists cringed when he predicted the round in which he intended to knock out his opponent, and grimaced when he did so and bragged about each new conquest.

  Then, at age 22, Clay challenged Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight crown. Liston was widely regarded as the most intimidating ferocious powerful fighter of his era. Clay was such a prohibitive underdog that Robert Lipsyte, who covered the bout for The New York Times, was instructed to “find out the directions from the arena to the nearest hospital, so I wouldn’t waste deadline time getting there after Clay was knocked out.” But as David Ben-Gurion once proclaimed, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist.” Cassius Clay knocked out Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world.

  Officially, Ali’s reign as champion was divided into three segments. And while he fought through the administrations of seven Presidents, his greatness as a fighter was most clearly on display in the three years after he first won the crown. During the course of thirty-seven months, Ali fought ten times. No heavyweight in history has defended his title more frequently against more formidable opposition in more dominant fashion than Ali did in those years.

  Boxing, in the first instance, is about not getting hit. “And I can’t be hit,” Ali told the world. “It’s impossible for me to lose because there’s not a man on earth with the speed and ability to beat me.”

  In his rematch with Liston, which ended in a first-round knockout, Ali was hit only twice. Victories over Floyd Patterson, George Chuvalo, Henry Cooper, Brian London, and Karl Mildenberger followed. Then, on November 14, 1966, Ali did battle against Cleveland Williams. Over the course of three rounds, Ali landed more than one hundred punches, scored four knockdowns, and was hit a total of three times. “The hypocrites and phonies are all shook up because everything I said would come true did come true,” Ali chortled afterward. “I said I was The Greatest, and they thought I was just acting the fool. Now, instead of admitting that I’m the best heavyweight in all history, they don’t know what to do.”

  Ali’s triumph over Cleveland Williams was followed by victories over Ernie Terrell and Zora Folley. Then, after refusing induction into the United States Army, he was stripped of his title and forced out of boxing. “If I never fight again, this is the last of the champions,” Ali said of his,
and boxing’s, plight. “The next title is a political belt, a racial belt, an organization belt. There’s no more real world champion until I’m physically beat.”

  In October 1970, Ali was allowed to return to boxing, but his skills were no longer the same. The legs that had allowed him to “dance” for fifteen rounds without stopping no longer carried him as surely around the ring. His reflexes, while still superb, were no longer lightning-fast. Ali prevailed in his first two comeback fights, against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. Then he challenged Joe Frazier, who was the “organization” champion by virtue of victories over Buster Mathis and Jimmy Ellis.

  “Champion of the world? Ain’t but one champion,” Ali said before his first bout against Frazier. “How you gonna have two champions of the world? He’s an alternate champion. The real champion is back now.” But Frazier thought otherwise. And on March 8, 1971, he bested Ali over fifteen brutal rounds.

  “He’s not a great boxer,” Ali said afterward. “But he’s a great slugger, a great street fighter, a bull fighter. He takes a lot of punches, his eyes close, and he just keeps coming. I figured he could take the punches. But one thing surprised me in this fight, and that’s that he landed his left hook as regular as he did. Usually, I don’t get hit over and over with the same punch, and he hit me solid a lot of times.”

  Some fighters can’t handle defeat. They fly so high when they’re on top, that a loss brings them irrevocably crashing down. “What was interesting to me after the loss to Frazier,” says Ferdie Pacheco, “was we’d seen this undefeatable guy. Now how was he going to handle defeat? Was he going to be a cry-baby? Was he going to be crushed? Well, what we found out was, this guy takes defeat like he takes victory. All he said was, ‘I’ll beat him next time.’”

  What Ali said was plain and simple: “I got to whup Joe Frazier because he beat me. Anybody would like to say, ‘I retired undefeated.’ I can’t say that no more. But if I could say, ‘I got beat, but I came back and beat him,’ I’d feel better.”

  Following his loss to Frazier, Ali won ten fights in a row; eight of them against world-class opponents. Then, in March 1973, he stumbled when a little-known fighter named Ken Norton broke his jaw in the second round en route to a twelve-round upset decision.

  “I knew something was strange,” Ali said after the bout, “because, if a bone is broken, the whole internalness in your body, everything, is nauseating. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel my teeth moving around, and I had to hold my teeth extra tight to keep the bottom from moving. My trainers wanted me to stop. But I was thinking about those nineteen thousand people in the arena and Wide World of Sports, millions of people at home watching in sixty-two countries. So what I had to do was put up a good fight; go the distance and not get hit on the jaw again.”

  Now Ali had a new target; a priority ahead of even Joe Frazier. “After Ali got his jaw broke, he wanted Norton bad,” recalls Lloyd Wells, a longtime Ali confidante. “Herbert Muhammad [Ali’s manager] was trying to put him in another fight, and Ali kept saying, ‘No, get me Norton. I want Norton.’ Herbert was saying, but we got a big purse; we got this, and we got that. And Ali was saying, ‘No, just get me Norton. I don’t want nobody but Norton.’”

  Ali got Norton—and beat him. Then, after an interim bout against Rudi Lubbers, he got Joe Frazier again—and beat him too. From a technical point of view, the second Ali-Frazier bout was probably Ali’s best performance after his exile from boxing. He did what he wanted to do, showing flashes of what he’d once been as a fighter but never would be again. Then Ali journeyed to Zaire to challenge George Foreman, who had dethroned Frazier to become heavyweight champion of the world.

  “Foreman can punch but he can’t fight,” Ali said of his next foe. But most observors thought that Foreman could do both. As was the case when Ali fought Sonny Liston, he entered the ring a heavy underdog. Still, studying his opponent’s armor, Ali thought he detected a flaw. Foreman’s punching power was awesome, but his stamina and will were suspect. Thus, the “rope-a-dope” was born.

  “The strategy on Ali’s part was to cover up, because George was like a tornado,” former boxing great Archie Moore, who was one of Foreman’s cornermen that night, recalls. “And when you see a tornado coming, you run into the house and you cover up. You go into the basement and get out of the way of that strong wind, because you know that otherwise it’s going to blow you away. That’s what Ali did. He covered up and the storm was raging. But after a while, the storm blew itself out.”

  Or phrased differently, “Yeah; Ali let Foreman punch himself out,” says Jerry Izenberg. “But the rope-a-dope wouldn’t have worked against Foreman for anyone in the world except Ali, because on top of everything else, Ali was tougher than everyone else. No one in the world except Ali could have taken George Foreman’s punches.”

  Ali stopped Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight championship. Then, over the next thirty months at the peak of his popularity as champion, he fought nine times. Those bouts showed Ali to be a courageous fighter, but a fighter on the decline.

  Like most aging combatants, Ali did his best to put a positive spin on things. But viewed in realistic terms, “I’m more experienced” translated into “I’m getting older.” “I’m stronger at this weight” meant “I should lose a few pounds.” “I’m more patient now” was a cover for “I’m slower.”

  Eight of Ali’s first nine fights during his second reign as champion did little to enhance his legacy. But sandwiched in between matches against the likes of Jean-Pierre Coopman and Richard Dunn and mediocre showings against more legitimate adversaries, Ali won what might have been the greatest fight of all time.

  On October 1, 1975, Ali and Joe Frazier met in the Philippines, six miles outside of Manila, to do battle for the third time.

  “You have to understand the premise behind that fight,” Ferdie Pacheco recalls. “The first fight was life and death, and Frazier won. Second fight; Ali figures him out; no problem, relatively easy victory for Ali. Then Ali beats Foreman, and Frazier’s sun sets. And I don’t care what anyone says now; all of us thought that Joe Frazier was shot. We all thought that this was going to be an easy fight. Ali comes out, dances around, and knocks him out in eight or nine rounds. That’s what we figured. And you know what happened in that fight. Ali took a beating like you’d never believe anyone could take. When he said afterward that it was the closest thing he’d ever known to death—let me tell you something; if dying is that hard, I’d hate to see it coming. But Frazier took the same beating. And in the fourteenth round, Ali just about took his head off. I was cringing. The heat was awesome. Both men were dehydrated. The place was like a time-bomb. I thought we were close to a fatality. It was a terrible moment, and then Joe Frazier’s corner stopped it.”

  “Ali-Frazier III was Ali-Frazier III,” says Jerry Izenberg. “There’s nothing to compare it with. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. And I’ll tell you something else. Both fighters won that night, and both fighters lost.”

  Boxing is a tough business. The nature of the game is that fighters get hit. Ali himself inflicted a lot of damage on ring opponents during the course of his career. And in return: “I’ve been hit a lot,” he acknowledged, one month before the third Frazier fight. “I take punishment every day in training. I take punishment in my fights. I take a lot of punishment; I just don’t show it.”

  Still, as Ferdie Pacheco notes, “The human brain wasn’t meant to get hit by a heavyweight punch. And the older you get, the more susceptible you are to damage. When are you best? Between fifteen and thirty. At that age, you’re growing, you’re strong, you’re developing. You can take punches and come back. But inevitably, if you keep fighting, you reach an age when every punch can cause damage. Nature begins giving you little bills and the amount keeps escalating, like when you owe money to the IRS and the government keeps adding and compounding the damage.”

  In Manila, Joe Frazier landed 440 punches, many of them to Ali’s he
ad. After Manila would have been a good time for Ali to stop boxing, but too many people had a vested interest in his continuing to fight. Harold Conrad served for years as a publicist for Ali’s bouts. “You get a valuable piece of property like Ali,” Conrad said shortly before his death. “How are you going to put it out of business? It’s like shutting down a factory or closing down a big successful corporation. The people who are making money off the workers just don’t want to do it.”

  Thus, Ali fought on.

  In 1977, he was hurt badly but came back to win a close decision over Earnie Shavers. “In the second round, I had him in trouble,” Shavers remembers. “I threw a right hand over Ali’s jab, and I hurt him. He kind of wobbled. But Ali was so cunning, I didn’t know if he was hurt or playing fox. I found out later that he was hurt. But he waved me in, so I took my time to be careful. I didn’t want to go for the kill and get killed. And Ali was the kind of guy who, when you thought you had him hurt, he always seemed to come back. The guy seemed to pull off a miracle each time. I hit him a couple of good shots, but he recovered better than any other fighter I’ve known.”

  Next up for Ali was Leon Spinks, a novice with an Olympic gold medal but only seven professional fights.

  “Spinks was in awe of Ali,” Ron Borges of the Boston Globe recalls. “The day before their first fight, I was having lunch in the coffee shop at Caesar’s Palace with Leon and [his trainer] Sam Solomon. No one knew who Leon was. Then Ali walked in, and everyone went crazy. ‘Look; there’s Ali! Omigod; it’s him!’ And Leon was like everybody else. He got all excited. He was shouting, ‘Look; there he is! There’s Ali!’ In twenty-four hours, they’d be fighting each other, but right then, Leon was ready to carry Ali around the room on his shoulders.”