Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  To the dismay of many of his friends and supporters, Ali has a reputation for being extraordinarily trusting of those around him. He cares so little for money and is so generous with what he does have that he has always been known as a soft touch and an easy mark. As a result, he was a constant target for con men, hustlers, and outright thieves. And his entourage had always been filled with plenty of each.

  “Life around Ali was a constant hustle,” fight publicist John Condon recalled. “A lot of people in the entourage were only there to serve their own needs, and too often Ali’s interests took a back seat.”

  There were any number of ways to feed from the Ali trough. Somebody would pick up a training camp expense and ask to be reimbursed by the boxer. Then they would send the receipt to the Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago to be reimbursed again. This kind of fraud, only one of many everyday scams, was greatly troubling to the honest members of his entourage, some of whom say they were regularly driven to tears of frustration by what they saw. And when Ali wasn’t being robbed blind by those around him, he was as likely as not falling prey to a sob story by a con man whose “wife needs an operation.”

  Not all his generosity resulted in being taken advantage of, however. Once in Los Angeles, a returning Vietnam veteran was on the balcony of the ninth floor of a building threatening to jump. Ali walked out on the balcony, put his arms around the distraught man, brought him inside, and comforted him. Then he spent $1,800 on clothes and rent so the man could get his life back on track.

  His friend Lloyd Wells recalls another incident, when he accompanied Ali to the Western Union office where $1,000 in emergency funds had been wired to the boxer.

  “After he picked up the money, we went outside and there were a bunch of bums on the sidewalk looking pretty hard up. They would congregate outside the Western Union office because they knew people went in there for money. The cash had been paid to him in hundreds and he went up to each of them and gave them a hundred dollar bill. He badly needed the money himself, that’s why it had been wired to him, but that’s the kind of person he was.”

  Ali summed up his philosophy when he said, “service to others is the rent you pay for room here on earth.”

  Wherever the money went, the fact is that at the time he refused induction, Ali was broke. And, facing the loss of his professional livelihood, he had few financial prospects.

  Then, just when things looked like they could get no bleaker, they did. Ali’s lawyer Hayden Covington filed a lawsuit against his former client for $247,000 in unpaid legal bills, forcing him to sell many of his assets, including his bus.

  Eugene Dibble was a Chicago businessman and investment counselor who owned a South Side garage. He had been friends with Ali since 1965. When Ali returned to Chicago following his indictment, he pulled up at Dibble’s garage one day in his Cadillac.

  “I was amazed.” Dibble recalls. “He didn’t have a dollar to buy gasoline. He was absolutely broke. He had been robbed blind by his so-called friends and then, when his earning power dried up, all the vultures suddenly disappeared. They jumped off the ship and abandoned him.”

  For the next three years, Dibble’s garage became Ali’s unofficial headquarters in exile.

  “He would take money out of the cash register whenever he needed some cash, sometimes he would even pump gas, and he’d often ask, almost to himself, ‘where did all the money go?’” says Dibble. “He was a little depressed for a while but never bitter. And he would never blame anyone. It was obvious that he’d been used, taken advantage of and exploited by almost everybody around him but his attitude was that he was helping his friends, they must have needed the money. I remember he came to me one day and told me his electricity was about to be cut off because he couldn’t pay the bill so I wrote a check to the electric company.”

  In July, the twenty-five-year-old Ali announced he was engaged to marry a seventeen-year-old Muslim woman named Belinda Boyd. The two had met for the first time in 1961, when she was only eleven and the young Cassius Clay had visited her Nation of Islam elementary school, announcing to the students that he would be heavyweight champion of the world before he was twenty-one.

  Belinda’s mother, Aminah, was a devout Muslim and had no qualms about letting her young daughter marry an older man who was facing a long prison term. On the contrary, his political problems were what most impressed her.

  “Muhammad was always a nice person,” she later explained. “He loved children, he was truly generous. But what touched me most was when they wanted him to go into the service and he refused. I have great respect for anyone, regardless of what they believe, if they stand on conscience and don’t let themselves be dissuaded.”

  On August 17, with the nation’s youth caught up in the Summer of Love, the two were wed at a Chicago mosque. Eugene Dibble paid for the minister and the caterer.

  For his part, Ali’s seemingly imminent prison term may have been a factor in his surprise engagement and marriage. After Belinda became pregnant soon after their wedding, he pointed out his new wife to an interviewer and said, “I’m prepared, I’m thinking ahead. You see that pretty young wife. I’ll have one child, maybe two before I go to jail. Then, during the years when I’m in jail, they’ll be getting bigger, so when I get out I’ll already have them and I won’t be starting at thirty. And my wife will still be young.”

  Soon after, Ali was so hard up for money that he took a job as a sparring partner to British boxer Joe Bugner, who was training in the United States.

  “We paid him $1,000,” Bugner later recalled. “He seemed glad to oblige. I know he was broke because he tried to sell me a portable radio gadget for $1,200. He said, ‘It’s just what you need, Joe.’”

  At dawn each day, Ali and his new wife would rise, wrap themselves in shawls, and pray to Allah. Then, for three hours, the exiled boxer sat at his desk studying the Koran, the Bible, and the dictionary.

  “I’ve got a lot of lost education to make up for,” he would explain.

  Ali’s stand had made him an even greater hero to the nation’s Muslims, and he continued preaching at mosques around the country. It has often been said that what sustained Ali during this dark period was his absolute faith in Allah and devotion to Elijah Muhammad. But his longtime friend Lloyd Wells insists that it went beyond religion.

  “His faith was important to him, of course,” says Wells. “But it is something else which kept him going, something he had long before he discovered Allah. It was his personal inner being, a confidence, a quality which he was born with, which drove him. People who knew him when he was a child talk about it. It had nothing to do with religion. You have to experience it to understand it.”

  Despite his preaching, Ali was as bored and frustrated during this period as he had ever been. It seemed as if neither the prospect of jail nor being forced to stop boxing troubled him as much as the idea of giving up his place on the national stage. Ali craved attention, not so much out of vanity but because it served to fuel his remarkable, gregarious personality.

  During these days, passersby on the sidewalks of Chicago were frequently startled to see the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world come towards them, raise his arms above his head, and shout good-naturedly, “Who’s the greatest around here? I’m looking for a fight.”

  Gene Dibble correctly sensed that his friend needed an audience and arranged to take him around to a number of local high schools and colleges to speak to the students.

  “He was in his element with those students,” Dibble recalls. “He just came alive and I saw a spark in him for the first time in months. It’s exactly what he needed. He had preached all those sermons for the Muslims so he was a natural speaker.”

  Word quickly spread of Ali’s new calling, and he was approached by two professional speakers’ bureaus who offered to book him on the college lecture circuit.

  Robert Walker ran the American Program Bureau, which booked many of the nation’s most notorious radicals, including Dic
k Gregory, Abbie Hoffman, and Dave Dellinger as well as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Fonda.

  “A mutual friend told me that Ali was in dire straits, completely broke,” Walker recalls. “He suggested I book a speaking tour with him. I thought it was a great idea, there would be huge demand on college campuses. So I met with Ali a couple of times and I thought we had a deal. Then one night I was watching TV, Dick Cavett or Johnny Carson, and there was Ali announcing that he had just signed to do a college lecture tour with Richard Fulton, one of my rivals. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what happened.”

  For $1,500 a speech, hardly enough to put a dent in his huge legal bills, Ali invaded the nation’s campuses. But not before assiduous preparation. He approached his speaking tour with the same intensity as he trained for a big fight. For eight weeks he composed a series of six different lectures, putting down his ideas on little note cards and then practicing again and again in front of a mirror until he memorized each one. “Talking is easier than fighting,” he would say. Each lecture had a different theme. Students attended, expecting him to talk about boxing or express his views on Vietnam; instead they were surprised to hear him extol the importance of early childhood education or launch a diatribe against social selfishness:

  On the art of personality: “Personality is not something you’re born with. We’re born as individuals. What I’m trying to say is that personality is the development of individuality.”

  On the education of the infant: “Children go through three or four or five different colleges within themselves, even before they’re three years old.”

  On the power of suggestion: “If you suggest failure to yourself, then you’ll be a failure. Some people say ‘I’m timid’ or ‘I’m forgetful’ or ‘I’m stupid.’ And once you repeat it two or three times, it deepens your stupidity or forgetfulness.”

  On friendship: “Whenever the thought of self-interest creeps in, that means a destruction of friendship. Every little thought of profiting by it means destruction. This is what I am doing, things I am doing today. It can never develop into a real friendship, it can only develop into a business relationship. It will last as long as the business relationship lasts. Like me and Cosell. If I lose, he goes to somebody else.”

  Ali’s longtime supporter Jerry Izenberg attended a number of his lectures. “The students went wild when he talked about these things,” he recalls. “It was a little surreal.”

  Yet if each lecture was different, they all ended alike, with the fighter-turned-speaker shouting, “Can my title be taken away without me being whupped?”

  “No!”

  “One more time.”

  “No!”

  “Now I’d like to hear this from you, and I want the world to hear. Who’s the heavyweight champion of the world?”

  “You are!”

  “One more time. We don’t want no excuses. They might say the film was bad or the camera was broke. Who’s the champ of the world?”

  “You are!”

  Finally came the question-and-answer-period—usually the point where things really got interesting. “It was amazing,” recalls Lloyd Wells. “Here was this guy who just barely graduated high school matching wits with Harvard students and always getting the better of them.”

  Not all the questioners were friendly. At one stop Ali was asked, “How can you condone fighting in the ring and yet refusing to fight for your country?”

  Ali was unfazed. “It’s my country at draft-time,” he responded. “But not when I come back. Best think before you ask a question: you can lose a debate just like you can lose a fight. White boys go to Canada. George Hamilton can’t be drafted because he has to support a millionaire mother. White men tear up a whole draft board in protest and maybe get a two-year sentence. I’ve never burned a draft card, never sat on the Pentagon steps, and I get five years and a $10,000 fine. You know good and well you’re not as dumb as you look.”

  At a Christian college, he was asked about his religious background.

  “I used to be a Baptist. I used to wait for pie in the sky by and by. Now I want something sound on the ground while I’m around.”

  At all times, Ali appeared to have his eyes cast forward, intent on how he would be portrayed by history how future generations would look back on him. Asked how he could give up all the money that goes with being the heavyweight champion, he replied, “Money ain’t worth a damn thing when it comes to being a black man. What do I need money for? Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t go nowhere, don’t go running with women. I take my wife out and we eat ice cream. I’ve looked the white man in the eye. I go to sleep happy, I wake up happy. I’ll go to jail for ten years happy. When they talk about me, it’ll always be said ‘there is one who didn’t compromise.’ There are only two kinds of men, those who compromise and those who take a stand. That’s who they write history about, who they make movies about. I turned down ten million dollars in commercial royalties. They have to look at me now greater than just in the boxing ring.”

  At almost every stop, he was asked if he hated whites.

  “I don’t hate nobody and I ain’t lynched nobody,” he would reply. “We Muslims don’t hate the white man. It’s like we don’t hate a tiger; but we know that a tiger’s nature is not compatible with people’s nature since tigers love to eat people. So we don’t want to live with tigers. It’s the same with the white man.”

  For Jerry Izenberg, the most memorable moment he witnessed on the lecture tour concerned Ali’s imminent jail term. “A guy in the audience told Ali he’d serve his prison term for him in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Muhammad just shook his head and said, ‘Brother, your life’s worth more than ten thousand dollars.’”

  Many questioners seemed obsessed with the amount of money Ali was giving up for his principles. He always sounded the same theme: “I could make millions if I led my people the wrong way, to something I know is wrong. So now I have to make a decision. Step into a billion dollars and denounce my people or step into poverty and teach them the truth. Damn the money. Damn the heavyweight championship. I will die before I sell out my people for the white man’s money. The wealth of America and the friendship of all the people who support the war would be nothing if I’m not content internally and if I’m not in accord with the will of Almighty Allah.”

  Invoking the name of Allah always seemed to send Ali back to his role as minister. Occasionally, he would launch into a sermon about the strict moral code of the Nation of Islam. This struck reporter Robert Lipsyte as ironic:

  “Here was Ali preaching against pre-marital sex and drugs to all these free love, pot-smoking hippies. But they loved him. The only problem came when he denounced interracial dating. Occasionally, a mixed couple would boo him and walk out.” After each lecture, he would collect his check, hop on a bus, and head for the next campus. It was a far cry from his boxing days, when he traveled first-class, surrounded by a large entourage. Nevertheless, he remembers this period fondly.

  “During all the years I was away,” he said. “I was never lonely. Oh, I had a ball, driving to colleges, staying at the inns, and meeting students and Black Power groups and all the white hippies. We’d all have sessions over dinner on what we was gonna talk about and then we’d go to the student union building and have the meeting and they’d ask me questions—all the boys and girls, black and white. Like ‘What should we do?’ or’What do you think was going to happen here?’you know, as if I was one of those sleepy-eyed Senators up in the Capitol.”

  And wherever Ali went, he was never alone. Since his conviction, responsibility for surveillance activities against him had been transferred from the FBI to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, which kept a constant eye on his activities. One report read:

  At 1555 hours 21 May 1968, Cassius Clay arrived at Lambert Field, Missouri. He proceeded to the Carousel Motel, North Kings Highway, St. Louis, Missouri, to change clothing. At 1900 hours 21 May 1968, he arrived at the Riviera Civic Center (a ni
ghtclub in an all-Negro area), 4460 Delmar Ave, St. Louis, to attend a Black Muslim convention sponsored by the Moslem mosque #28 of St. Louis, Missouri. About 600 persons were in attendance. Clay spoke for about 45 minutes, mostly about himself and about his cause, which is to avoid being placed in a white man’s army He stayed at the Riviera from 1900 hours to 2200 hours. He departed for the Carousel Motel at 2200 hours. Shortly thereafter, he left for Lambert Air Field, and departed for Chicago at 2350 hours, 21 May 1968.

  For Miami Herald sportswriter Pat Putnam, one thing stood out about this period. “The thing that struck me,” he recalls, “is that never once during those years did I ever hear Ali complain about what was happening to him. He was going through a bad time but he never seemed bitter. God knows, he had a right to complain but I never saw it.”

  On the morning of January 30, 1968, nine months into his internal exile, Ali boarded a bus to New Haven where he was to give the thirty-sixth speech of his campus tour. Meanwhile, half the world away, on the first day of the Vietnamese New Year (Tet), the Vietcong launched their biggest offensive of the war. One thousand Vietcong troops infiltrated the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. The enemy guerrillas captured the Citadel at Hue and seized part of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It took nearly two weeks for the American army to completely rout the Vietcong troops. On the face of it, the attack proved a military disaster for the Communists: they lost over ten thousand men and failed to hold any of their objectives. Nevertheless, the Tet Offensive constituted an important symbolic victory for the Vietcong. For many Americans who had believed that the war was being won, the sight of Vietcong troops holding the U.S. Embassy proved a rude awakening, forcing them to question the truth about the American military presence. President Johnson’s approval rating plunged to 24 percent.