Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  But if there was a star guiding the boxer’s destiny, it seemed to many that for the next decade it was taking him in the wrong direction.

  In 1960 boxing was still a dirty business, populated by mobsters and corrupt to its core. Countless congressional and media investigations uncovered ties between organized crime and boxing’s leading promoters, managers, and fighters. From the 1940s until his arrest in 1959—and from prison for years thereafter—a petty New York hood named Frankie Carbo virtually controlled boxing, including its mecca, Madison Square Garden. Fights were fixed, boxing writers supplemented their meager salaries with weekly envelopes filled with cash courtesy of Carbo, and many of the country’s greatest fighters, including Joe Louis, ended up penniless while the mob reaped the benefits.

  When Cassius Clay returned from Rome with his gold medal and a reputation, Cassius Clay Sr.—savvy to the sport’s reputation—was determined for his son to end up in the right hands. He located a West End lawyer to safeguard his son’s interests and was ready to start taking offers, which were already pouring in.

  “There were a lot of people who wanted to take him over when he came back from the Olympics,” recalled the elder Clay years later, “And I saw he could take care of himself in the ring, but I wanted to see he was well taken care of out of it too. He was underage, and didn’t know how to handle himself in business.”

  The most attractive of these offers came from a group of eleven white Louisville businessmen, who called themselves the Louisville Sponsoring Group. The group represented a who’s who of old-line Kentucky breeding. Ali called them the “men with the connections and the complexions.” There were the oil tycoons J. D. Coleman; the steel baron Elbert Sutcliffe; the refined horse breeder Patrick Calhoun Jr., who admitted, “What I know about boxing you can put in your eye;” and plenty of tobacco and whiskey money thrown in to the mix.

  None of these men needed the money, to be sure, but most of them regarded it as a bit of a lark—the chance to attach themselves to a hometown hero and have a bit of fun. Cassius Clay and his father, of course, couldn’t meet to discuss the terms at the exclusive Pendennis Club, to which all of the Sponsoring Group’s members belonged. The only way they could enter that Louisville institution would be by the back door as janitors or busboys.

  The group represented its motivation as purely magnanimous, but one of its members, Vertner Smith, while having a drink with a reporter from Sports Illustrated one day, let slip his real aims.

  “Let me give you the official line—we are behind Cassius Clay to improve the breed of boxing; to do something nice for a deserving, well-behaved Louisville boy; and finally to save him from the jaws of the hoodlum jackals. I think it’s fifty percent true, but also fifty percent hokum. What I want to do, like a few others, is to make a bundle of money.”

  Each member of the syndicate contributed $2,800, a paltry sum for them, even by 1960 standards, so they didn’t have a lot to lose. Whatever their motivations, the contract they offered Clay was extremely generous and certainly met his father’s objectives of safeguarding the fighter’s interests. He was to receive a $10,000 signing bonus and a guaranteed draw of $4,000 a year against earnings. The group would underwrite all travel and training expenses and they would split earnings fifty-fifty. To safeguard Clay’s future, 15 percent of all income would be set aside into a pension fund that he couldn’t touch until age thirty-five or his retirement from boxing. It was a long way from Frankie Carbo.

  Louisville is, of course, the home of the famed Kentucky Derby. Each member of the Sponsoring Group had at some time or another been involved with racehorses. But if the men thought their new acquisition could be controlled by pulling on his reins, they were in for a surprise.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  Those Who Came Before

  ALL SPORT CAN BE SEEN AS A METAPHOR, even a proxy, for conflict and war. But none comes closer to fulfilling that metaphor—its superficial role as athletic competition to become something bigger, a more potent symbol—than boxing. From the days when gladiators fought to the death in the middle of packed Roman coliseums as part of a carefully orchestrated strategy to keep the people from revolting, organized combat between two men has transcended mere sport.

  Boxing historian Budd Schulberg has observed that just as the people get the government they deserve, each era gets the heavyweight boxing champion it deserves, one who reflects the social and political currents of the day. To take his theory a step further, it can be argued that the history of black heavyweight champions has always mirrored the history of American race relations.

  For Muhammad Ali, who was about to irrevocably shape his own era, there were two forebears who illustrated Schulberg’s maxim perfectly, whose careers would serve as precursors for his own.

  The first black boxers were plantation slaves who fought each other in vicious, anything-goes matches for the amusement of the slaveholders and the other slaves. In the most celebrated interplantation matches, the slaves gave everything they had in pursuit of the victory prize—their freedom. Nineteenth century African-American philosopher Frederick Douglass described these matches as “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” At the peak of his career, Muhammad Ali captured Douglass’s skepticism in describing how he felt when he performed for the crowd: “We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.”

  Following the Civil War and the liberal abolitionist spirit that accompanied it, blacks made significant gains in the sporting arena. Even in the South, where Reconstruction forced their temporary acceptance as full citizens, Blacks were integrated into most major sports. But the end of Reconstruction in the 1880s saw a rapid turnaround in the way Americans viewed Blacks. Suddenly, as historian Frederic Jaher observed, “Court decisions, legislative and executive actions, publicly and privately sanctioned terrorism, the ‘findings’of biologists and social scientists, and the metaphors of writers and movie makers denied blacks economic opportunities, separated them from whites in all but servile interactions, and stigmatized them as childlike brutes genetically incapable of participating in civilized society.”

  Athletics was one of the first segments of American society to feel the changing attitudes. Blacks were formally barred from most sporting institutions because it was believed their victories over whites would significantly undermine the growing arguments about their inferiority.

  The impact was profound: fourteen of the fifteen jockeys in the 1875 Kentucky Derby were black; by 1911, however, Blacks were completely barred from the race. Despite the widely held notion that Jackie Robinson was the first black to break baseball’s color barrier, there were in fact several prominent Black Major League players during the 1870s. Yet the next decade saw the institution of segregation on the nation’s diamonds, a baseball apartheid that would last nearly seventy years. As early as 1809, the former slave Tom Molineaux had fought for the heavyweight boxing championship. By the end of the century, however, white champions routinely insisted on only fighting men of their own color.

  There was no rule per se that Blacks could not fight for the heavyweight championship. But a succession of champions, the most celebrated personalities of their era, simply refused to fight a black man. From John L. Sullivan, the first boxer to defend the title under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, to Jim Corbett, to Bob Fitzsimmons, no champion would risk his prestige by losing to a lowly Negro, although blacks could still contest the crown of lower divisions. This informal ban lasted for more than two decades, until 1905, when the so-called “golden age of boxing” came to an end with the retirement of the champion Jim Jeffries.

  Jeffries’s departure from the sport is considered by some as the end of the greatest era of boxing. It also set the stage for the man who would shake America to its foundations.

  A
fter the retirement of Jeffries, the championship was won by a journeyman Canadian named Tommy Burns. Boxing had lost its lustre and the crop of white contenders was mediocre, failing to entice the fans that had turned out in droves to see the colorful personalities of the previous era. While there was clearly no white contender worthy of a title bout, and more importantly none who could attract the kind of gate that would make a promoter take notice, there was one fighter whose feats were gaining widespread attention.

  Jack Johnson was born in 1880 to former slaves in Galveston, Texas. In the fifth grade, he dropped out of school to do odd jobs and help support his six siblings. After beating up a local bully, he began training to box, and by 1897 he had turned professional. From 1902 to 1907, Johnson won more than fifty matches, most of them against other black boxers. But in 1906 he fought Bob Fitzsimmons, the ex-heavyweight champion, and knocked him out. None of the boxers who had succeeded Fitzsimmons would agree to fight Johnson because of his color.

  After Burns won the crown in 1906, there was a growing chorus of voices arguing that Johnson deserved a chance at the title. Confident that Johnson, nicknamed “Little Arthur,” would easily be handled by his racially superior foe—“the match will set to rest for all time the matter of fistic supremacy between white race and colored”—the New York Sun chided Burns to accept Johnson’s challenge. Finally, Burns relented.

  The bout was to be fought in Australia, so the expected American outrage over a fight between a black challenger and a white champion was somewhat tempered. Still, feelings ran strong. Jack London, author of Call of the Wild, is best known as an adventure novelist and a fervent socialist. But he was also one of America’s greatest boxing aficionados and would frequently cover matches for the New York Herald. Sent to Australia to cover the Johnson-Burns bout, scheduled for Christmas Day, 1908, London signaled the attitude of most Americans in his pre-fight dispatches. “I am with Burns all the way,” he wrote. “He is a white man and so am I. Naturally I want to see the white man win.”

  London and millions of white Americans were shocked at the result. It was bad enough that Johnson displayed a complete mastery over the hapless Burns, knocking him out in the fourteenth round. But the way he did it made things much worse. The challenger continuously taunted Burns, a smile on his face as he toyed with the champion, dancing around, jeering for his opponent to “come get me.” Sixty years later, these kinds of tactics would infuriate boxing fans when employed by Muhammad Ali, who would claim to be the reincarnation of Johnson. But in 1908, reports of this kind of behavior by a Negro sent the nation into a blind rage. One letter to the editor called Johnson’s victory “a calamity in this country worse than the San Francisco earthquake.”

  The search began in earnest for a “white hope” who could put Johnson in his place. In his report on the Burns match, London implored the former champion Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement and restore the title to white America. A series of mediocre white contenders came forward to challenge Johnson in 1909 and he knocked out each one in succession, delivering a taunt with every punch.

  By the end of the year, cries for a Jeffries fight had reached a fevered pitch, with London leading the charge, describing the retired champion as the “chosen representative of the white race.”

  Finally, the financial lure proved too much for Jeffries to resist. Anticipating the largest gate in the history of prizefighting, a sleazy promoter named Tex Rickard offered him a huge sum of money to take on Johnson. Announcing that he was succumbing to “that portion of the white race that has been looking for me to defend its racial superiority,” Jeffries signed on for the fight.

  Rickard was anxious to exploit the growing racial fear and hostility of Americans, and he heavily promoted the fight as a battle for racial supremacy. The nation was whipped into a frenzy. Editorial cartoons portrayed Johnson as a gorilla or a watermelon-eating brute and Jeffries as a Superman. From pulpits all over the nation, ministers took up the theme that the fight would be the salvation of white pride. One Baltimore minister warned his congregation that a Johnson victory would make it unsafe for white women and children to walk the streets. The three-time Democratic presidential nominee and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan telegraphed Jeffries before the fight: “God will forgive everything you do to that nigger in this fight… Jeff, God is with you.”

  The fight—and the hooplah leading up to it—was sending shock waves through the west coast. Originally scheduled to take place in San Francisco, it was moved to Reno, Nevada, after fifty ministers held a prayer vigil at the California State Capitol to convince the governor to reject the controversial bout.

  But overwhelmingly, the country was hypnotized by the promotion of the fight as an epic duel between black and white. A song was penned by Dorothy Forrester in a typical vaudeville Italian-style dialect, popular in those days, capturing the mood of the country:

  Commence right away to get into condish

  An’you punch-a da bag-a day and night

  An’-a-din pretty soon, when you meet-a da coon,

  You knock-a him clear out of sight.

  Chorus: Who’s dat man wid-a hand like da bunch-a

  banan!

  It’s da Jim-a-da-Jeff oh! da Jim-a-da-Jejf,

  Who give-a da Jack Jonce one-a little-a tap?

  Who make-a him take-a one big-a long nap?

  Who wipe-a da Africa off-a da map?

  It’s da Jim-a-da-Jeff!

  White Americans weren’t the only ones aware of the symbolic implications of the fight. The black press used the match as a rallying cry against thirty years of backwards progress for Negro Americans. The Chicago Defender assured its readers that Johnson would be fighting “Race Hatred,” “Prejudice” and “Negro Persecution.” In a sermon the Sunday before the match, the black Chicagoan Reverend William Ransom declared that the match had deep significance in the struggle for Negro advancement. “The darker races of mankind, and the black race in particular, will keep the white race busy for the next few hundred years in defending the interests of white supremacy… what Jack Johnson seeks to do to Jeffries in the roped arena will be more the ambition of Negroes in every domain of human endeavor.”

  The stakes were much higher than just a boxing match, and it seemed everybody in the country was anxiously awaiting the verdict. When the fight finally took place on the holiday of July 4,1910, eighteen thousand spectators greeted Johnson as he stepped into the ring by singing another song popular that year: “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” The song was inspired by Jeffries’s remark several years earlier when he refused to fight Johnson.

  None were more aware of the significance of the bout than Johnson himself. When the bell sounded, he answered the years of scorn, abuse, and hostility he had been forced to endure with a punishing series of blows, delivering each with a smile and a taunt. “Package being delivered, Mr. Jeff,” he announced as he rained one punch after another on his humiliated opponent. As the crowds looked on in disbelief, he finally finished off Jeffries with a fifteenth-round knockout.

  JEFF MASTERED BY GRINNING, JEERING NEGRO, trumpeted the headlines in the evening papers. Within hours, a race riot was raging across the nation. Eight blacks were killed as rioting broke out in most of the country’s major cities, the worst urban unrest America would witness until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. nearly sixty years later. “The fear, frustration, and anger generated by the Reno debacle,” writes historian Frederic Jaher in his analysis of the hysteria, “was not confined to criticism of the victor, blacks, and boxing; rationalizations about the meaninglessness of Jeffries’s defeat; or advice to the Negroes not to depart from the servility which reassured whites about the’race problem’in America. Violence was still the ultimate weapon against the ‘uppity nigger’ and many Americans were not reluctant to resort to it when they felt the need to’keep the Negro in his place.’”

  While the riots were an extreme manifestation of America’s anger and largely confined to the mo
st unruly elements of the white population, the liberal intelligentsia was not immune from racist overreaction to Johnson’s victory. “For the colored population we fear that the victory of Mr. Johnson will prove a misfortune,” wrote the New York Times. “It will be natural for Negroes to proclaim Johnson’s victory as a racial triumph and in doing so they incite hostility… supremacy in a civilized state does not rest on physical force,” the influential journal opined, adding that it hoped America had seen the “last prizefight between representatives of different races.”

  Such was the symbolic importance of the heavyweight championship on the nation’s collective consciousness then and for many generations to come.

  For some urban blacks, according to historian Lawrence Levine, “the very extent of white anger and frustration made Johnson’s victory even sweeter.” A popular street song sprang up, which seemed to thumb its nose at white resentment:

  The Yankees hold the play

  The white man pulls the trigger

  But it makes no difference what the white man say