Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  At around the same time Brown heralded a new era for American blacks, an event took place more than eight thousand miles away that would prove to have a much greater impact on the future of Muhammad Ali.

  In May, French forces in Indochina were surrounded by the communist guerrilla army of Ho Chi Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and forced to surrender. The resulting peace agreement led to the partition of the country into North and South Vietnam. It was the height of the Cold War. Senator Joe McCarthy was in the last stages of his witch hunt. Members of Congress were urging President Eisenhower to send U.S. troops to the region to beat back the communist threat before a domino effect could engulf Asia in a Red tide.

  In America, this drumbeat towards war was raising alarm bells for the black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson, who expressed his views on potential American involvement.

  “Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi be sent to shoot brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?” asked Robeson in a remarkably prescient speech. Robeson, himself a former All-American athlete during his days at Rutgers University, would later be persecuted by the American government, labeled a traitor, and have his passport taken away for supposed un-American activities. Today Ali claims he had never heard of Robeson during this period.

  Ali lore traces the beginnings of his rise as the greatest boxer in history to an incident—“the incident”—which took place in October of that year. Cassius Jr. had just received a brand new bike as a present from his parents—a red-and-white Schwinn. Its cost? Sixty dollars, which may explain later descriptions of Ali as a product of the black middle class. In fact, Cassius Sr. had just won a lucrative sign-painting contract and was eager to share his largesse with the family after a long period of austerity.

  Eager to try out and show off his new bike, Cassius and a friend rode downtown to a black bazaar called the Louisville Home Show. The merchants were giving out free popcorn and candy and the two boys spent most of the afternoon feasting on junk food. When it was time to leave, they returned to the side of the building where they had left their bikes. The new Schwinn was gone.

  Clay was fit to be tied. The usually easygoing youngster erupted in fury and started to yell for a policeman. Somebody told him there was an officer downstairs in the auditorium, which housed the Columbia Gym. In tears, he stormed down to the basement and came face-to-face with Joe Martin, an off-duty Louisville policeman who trained young boxers in his spare time. He demanded Martin arrest whoever had stolen his bike. “He said he was gonna whup whoever stole it,” Martin later recalled. “And I brought up the subject, I said, ‘Well, you better learn how to fight before you start challenging people that you’re gonna whup.’” He invited Cassius back to the gym for some lessons.

  The twelve-year-old boy was an unlikely prospect for boxing lessons. Painfully skinny at only eighty-nine pounds, he had never shown any signs of aggression before the bike was stolen.

  When he walked into the gym a few days later to take Martin up on his offer, he knew he had found his calling. “When I was eight and ten years old, I’d walk out of my house at two in the morning, and look up at the sky for an angel or a revelation or God telling me what to do. I never got the answer. Then my bike got stolen and I started boxing and it was like God telling me that boxing was my responsibility,” Ali told Thomas Hauser in the definitive biography/oral history His Life and Times.

  Six weeks after joining Martin’s gym, Cassius made his ring debut and won a three-round decision over another beginner named Ronnie O’Keefe. When the referee raised his arm to signal Clay had triumphed, the victorious boxer shouted to the crowd the words which would soon become a familiar refrain. “I’m gonna be the greatest of all time!” And he was going to do whatever he had to do to ensure the words were no idle boast. From then on, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was a study in determination. Each morning he rose at 4:30 A.M. and ran five miles. For breakfast, he would down a quart of milk mixed with two raw eggs. He went everywhere carrying a solution of bottled water mixed with garlic, insisting it would keep his health perfect. When his mother questioned his unusual eating habits, he told her he was going to be the champion and buy her a big house one day.

  While his friends experimented with drugs and alcohol, Cassius refused to do anything that might jeopardize his goals. The closest he ever came to a vice, he later admitted, was taking the cap off a gas tank and smelling the gas for a hallucinogenic sensation. “Boxing kept me out of trouble,” he says.

  He didn’t have much use for other sports. He tried tennis a few times and wasn’t bad but football definitely wasn’t for him. “I tried it once, that’s all,” he says. “They gave me the ball and tackled me. My helmet hit the ground, pow! No sir. You got to get hit in that game, it’s too tough. You don’t have to get hit in boxing, people don’t understand that.”

  Elsewhere, in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, a fuse was being ignited. A year after Clay first stepped into the ring, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the Montgomery Bus Boycott and raising a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

  Today Ali claims he wasn’t paying much attention to King’s activities. “I was too focused on boxing to follow all that stuff,” he says. As he racked up victory after victory in the amateur ranks, the struggle for integration was beginning in earnest. For the black community of Louisville, even then, King and his new movement were being watched closely.

  “We followed King and the bus boycott pretty much from the beginning,” recalls Ali’s cousin Coretta. “What he was doing was exciting. Remember, Louisville wasn’t as bad as Montgomery, but we had to sit in the back of the bus too. We needed the voice, we needed the leadership. I guess Ali was pretty caught up in his career to follow King. Some people think that’s why he never really took to the whole integration cause.” The one time he marched in an integration rally, Ali remembers today, somebody dumped a bucket of water over his head.

  But if Dr. King’s activities failed to capture the imagination of the young Clay, it wasn’t because he was unaware of the turmoil spreading throughout the South. Three months before Rosa Parks was arrested, Cassius Clay Sr. came home shaken one day with a copy of the national black magazine Jet, insisting his sons look at it. “This is what they do to us,” he repeated over and over.

  Inside, young Cassius and Rudy were shocked to see a number of gruesome photos showing the mutilated corpse of a young black boy.

  In August 1955, Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black northerner from a middle-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. His mother had relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi, population 350. Her uncle Mose suggested she send Emmett down to visit for a couple of weeks to get some fresh air and down-home cooking before school started.

  Mamie Till Bradley was nervous about sending her son to the heart of the Deep South. Chicago wasn’t exactly a model of race relations—its neighborhoods were segregated, Emmett himself went to an all-Negro school, and blacks were discriminated against on a daily basis. But Emmett had a few white friends, and the city had recently seen a number of intermarriages, which were heavily frowned upon but reluctantly tolerated by blacks and whites.

  In contrast, the Mississippi Delta was the heart of Southern Jim Crow society. Four hundred sixty blacks had been lynched in the state since the Civil War, and the state’s elected officials were committed racists who vowed to oppose integration at every turn. The governor, J. P. Coleman, had recently declared blacks unfit to vote. And the Brown desegregation decision the year before had put the state in a fighting mood. In fact, Mississippi Senator James Eastland asserted that the decision had “destroyed the Constitution” and Mississippi was not obliged to obey it. State senator Walter Givhan claimed the real purpose of the NAACP’s campaign to end school desegregation was “to ope
n the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men.”

  It was into this climate that a nervous Mamie Bradley packed off her son one August day. But not before she cautioned him “not to fool with white people down there.” Emmett was known to be a bit brash and fun-loving, and she warned him against his usual sass. “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly,” she told him.

  The first few days of his visit were uneventful. He hung out with his cousin Simeon and went fishing with his great uncle Mose. He couldn’t help notice the differences between his Northern friends and relatives and these new kinfolk who were openly fearful of whites and consciously subservient, answering “Ya suh” and “Naw suh” when they were spoken to. It was an oppressive atmosphere for the young teenager, but he was determined not to demean himself.

  One day, hanging out with his cousin and some friends in front of Bryant’s general store, Emmett—who was known as a prankster—took a picture of a white girl out of his wallet and showed it around, announcing “that’s my girl.”

  His friends were skeptical. They told him there was a pretty white woman working in the store at that moment and dared Emmett to go inside and talk to her. Accepting the challenge, he went inside and bought some candy. On the way out, he turned to her and said loudly so his friends could hear, “Bye, baby.” One witness inside the store claimed Emmett had whistled at her.

  The sales clerk’s husband, Roy Bryant, was out of town trucking shrimp. When he came back three days later and heard the story, he paid a visit to the hut of Emmett’s great uncle Mose Wright, accompanied by his brother-in-law J. W. Milam. “We come to get the boy who done the talkin’,” they announced.

  Mose told them Emmett was just a visiting Northerner unaccustomed to the ways of the South. He tried to convince them to let him off with a “good whipping.”

  Unimpressed, they dragged Emmett out of the hut and dumped him in the back seat of the car, where they drove him to the nearby Tallahatchee River. At their destination, they made him carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the riverbank, ordered him to strip, beat him with a pipe, gouged out his eye, and then shot him in the head. They dumped the body into the river, where it was found so badly mangled that Mose Wright could only identify his nephew’s remains from his ring.

  The body was brought back to Chicago, where authorities wanted to bury it immediately. But Emmett’s mother was determined to have an open casket funeral so the “world would see what they did to my boy.” Hundreds of thousands of mourners came to view the body, photos were printed in the black press, white editorialists around the country condemned the savage act, and the resulting publicity captured the imagination of Americans.

  When the two men went on trial for murder, the case was closely watched across America. Lynchings were commonplace throughout the South, but this was the murder of a child. The trial took place in the nearby town of Sumner, whose ironic motto was “A Good Place to Raise a Boy.” Despite the testimony of Mose Wright, who bravely identified the men who kidnapped his nephew—knowing the risks of testifying against the white defendants—the men were acquitted of the crime and set free.

  The verdict shocked a nation and is widely credited as a catalyst for the imminent civil rights movement.

  For the young Cassius Clay, it was a traumatic event. “I felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was,” he would write. In fact, Clay was six months older, but the Till incident unquestionably had a deep impact on him and he has brought it up several times in subsequent years. In his autobiography, he describes his reaction to the verdict, although many believe this is another concoction like the diner incident, designed for effect by the ghostwriter.

  “I couldn’t get Emmett out of my mind, until one evening I thought of a way to get back at white people for his death ….It was late at night when we reached the old railroad station on Louisville’s West Side. I remember a poster of a thin white man in striped pants and a top hat who pointed at us above the words UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU. We stopped and hurled stones at it ….” He and his friend then sabotaged the railroad track, running away as a train ripped up the railway ties.

  It is possible this incident happened, and Ali insists it did. But the next words of his autobiography stretch credulity and are clearly fiction. “It took two days to get up enough nerve to go back there. A work crew was still cleaning up the debris. And the man in the poster was still pointing. I always knew that sooner or later he would confront me, and I would confront him.”

  While Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights pioneers fought for racial justice, however, Cassius Clay just kept fighting one opponent after another in the ring, racking up amateur victory after victory, including six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, two National Golden Gloves tournaments, and two National Amateur titles before he was eighteen. Those around him were already detecting a special quality in and out of the ring. “You could see that the little smart aleck—I mean, he’s always been sassy—had a lot of potential,” recalled Joe Martin, the Louisville policeman who taught the young Cassius to box and continued to cultivate the fighter. “He stood out because he had more determination than most boys. He was a kid willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve something worthwhile in sports. I realized it was almost impossible to discourage him. He was easily the hardest worker of any kid I ever taught.”

  His hard work in the ring didn’t translate to the classroom, where his marks were below average. All he could think about, he says, was his boxing career. “In school, sometimes I’d pretend they were announcing my name over the loudspeaker system, saying, ‘Cassius Clay, heavyweight champion of the world.’”

  One often-told story has it that some of his teachers, unimpressed with their poor student’s athletic ability, wanted to fail him, but the school principal, Atwood Wilson, wouldn’t hear of it. It was obvious that Cassius was going places, and he wasn’t going to stand in the way. At a faculty meeting one day, Wilson silenced the talk of failing the school’s young star. “Cassius is not going to fail in my school,” he announced. “One day the greatest claim to fame of Central High will be that we produced Cassius Clay. If every teacher in this room fails him, he’s still not going to fail, not in my school. I’m going to say I taught him and I’m going to be proud.”

  Those who knew him at the time came to have a very different impression than the fans who were coming out in increasing numbers to watch Clay box. “Cassius was a very easy-to-get-along-with fellow,” recalled Joe Martin’s wife Christine who would drive him to bouts. “He was very easy to handle, very polite. Whatever you asked him to do, that’s what he’d do. On trips, most of the boys were out looking around, seeing what they could get into, whistling at pretty girls. But Cassius didn’t believe in that. He carried his Bible everywhere he went, and while the other boys were out looking around, he was sitting and reading his Bible.”

  Her description would have come as quite a surprise to those who saw him box. Already he was being dubbed the “Louisville Lip” by the media and the fans who were witnessing the evolution of his brash style. Each Saturday night, Clay’s bouts were televised on a local TV show called “Tomorrow’s Champions,” and thousands would see Cassius taunt his opponents with cries of “You can’t lay a glove on me, I’m the Greatest.” Before a match, he would pay a visit to his opponents’ dressing rooms and hone the psychological warfare that would infuriate his future professional nemeses. “I’m going to whup you and you’re going to beg me to stop,” he warned them.

  When he came into the arena for a match, the crowds would root against him, yelling for his opponent to “Whip the Lip.” One night he told a local reporter that his opponent wouldn’t last one round, reciting a poem to make his point.

  This guy must be done

  I’ll stop him in one

  Sure enough, the fight lasted less than a minute and a new tradition was born, calling the round. His predictions didn’t always p
an out, but that didn’t matter; the mystique was growing.

  Amateur boxing official Chuck Bodak, who coached at the Golden Gloves tournaments, recalled the impression Clay made on him. “You had to be blind not to see how good this kid was. I told his mother once, ‘Cassius must be from outer space, because I’ve never seen anyone like him in my life.’”

  Clay himself certainly saw it. The day after out-of-town tournaments, people staying at the same hotel as the young boxer remember buying newspapers and finding the sports section missing. Cassius would be up in his room with a scissors and fifteen sports sections, cutting his own picture out of each one.

  By 1960, Clay had proven himself as one of the best amateur boxers in the country but was still a relative unknown in the media. The Olympics could change that, but first he had to get by the trials, which would be held in California. And that meant taking his first airplane trip, a bumpy, turbulence-ridden flight that left the usually supremely confident Clay with white knuckles. He prevailed at the Olympic trials and qualified to represent the United States in Rome. But that meant an even longer flight, and Clay was determined never to set foot on another airplane. Nobody could change his mind. His friends and family implored him to gó, arguing this was his big chance. Joe Martin finally appealed to his dream. “I finally took him out to Central Park in Louisville and we had a long talk for a couple of hours and I calmed him down and convinced him if he wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, that he had to go to Rome and win the Olympics,” Martin later recalled.

  The world was about to be introduced to one of the century’s most unforgettable characters.

  Much has been written about Clay in Rome, strutting around the Olympic Village, making friends with athletes who didn’t even speak his language, impressing the media with his unique style and personality. But beyond the brashness, the jollity, the confidence, at least one witness saw something beneath the surface of Clay’s act, something almost messianic. Skeeter McClure was a fellow member of the U.S. boxing team, and Clay’s roommate in Rome. The two had met several times at tournaments, and Cassius had even visited McClure’s home in Ohio for a meal after a match. “When I first saw him when he came to our home in Toledo, his pants were up at his ankles, his sports coat was too short, but it’s like the clothing was irrelevant because he glowed,” McClure told Thomas Hauser. “It’s like there was a star when he was born that fated him to do what he was going to do and to have an impact on mankind around the globe, and there’s nothing that he could have done to prevent it and nothing he could have done to make it happen.”