Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  According to Jeremiah Shabazz, one of Ali’s earliest spiritual advisers, the comment angered Muhammad, “because to him it was like Ali saying he’d give up his religion for the white man’s money.”

  Eugene Dibble recalls his friend’s reaction to the suspension. “He was shattered. The Muslims were his life. First he got his title taken away and they threatened to send him to prison but that was nothing compared to his suspension from the Nation. He acted like a little boy who had been spanked for being bad.”

  For years the Nation of Islam had controlled every facet of Ali’s life. Suddenly, he was on his own. Elijah Muhammad had been like a father to him—so much so that he had virtually shunned his own father for more than five years. Now Cassius Clay Sr. re-entered his son’s life and was shocked to discover his son’s financial state. This only confirmed his longstanding suspicion of the Muslims, who he believed had stolen his son’s money.

  For his part, Ali was shaken by the suspension but believed it was just one more test by Allah. On the lecture circuit he continued to invoke the name of Elijah Muhammad and constantly praised his spiritual leader. He seemed to show genuine remorse for his words, but continued to call himself Muhammad Ali despite the Messenger’s prohibition.

  “I made a fool of myself when I said that I’d return to boxing to pay my bills,” he told one student who asked about the suspension. “I’m glad he awakened me. I’ll take my punishment like a man and when my year’s suspension is over, I hope he’ll accept me back.”

  Suddenly shorn of his Muslim entourage, Ali enlisted his old fight publicist Harold Conrad to drum up some paying gigs. The ever-struggling Ali had virtually disappeared from the national radar screen. Before long, though, appearances on national TV shows such as What’s My Line? and Memo Griffin reminded Americans that Ali was still around and still defiant.

  Typically, his TV appearances were lighthearted. On the Tonight Show, he unveiled a poem he had written that has been acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World’s Records as the shortest in history—“Wheel Me!” But the famous conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., well known for his debating skills, was anxious to challenge Ali’s views on race and booked him on his weekly TV show for a more serious discussion. In a memorable exchange that proved Ali could hold his own against any opponent, in or out of the ring, Buckley fired the first salvo: “You have said that the white man is your enemy. Well,. I happen to know this is not true. I believe you have been poisoned by your leader.”

  Ali jumped right in. “How can you say Elijah Muhammad is poisoning us to believe the white people are our enemy? It’s you who taught us that you’re our enemy. It was white people who bumped off Martin Luther King, it was white people who bumped off Medgar Evers, it was white people who bumped off Adam Clayton Powell. We didn’t imagine this.”

  Buckley has rarely, if ever, publicly admitted being wrong. More inconceivable still would be an admission that he was bested by a mere athlete. But after the debate he told an interviewer, “I started out thinking he was simply special-pleading on his own behalf, but I ended up thinking he was absolutely correct.”

  Two years earlier, at the height of the nation’s hostility toward Ali, Bertrand Russell had assured him, “The air will change, I sense it.” Now it finally seemed the philosopher’s prophecy was coming true.

  A number of high-profile media figures were beginning to register their own doubts about the war, including “the most trusted man in America,” CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who in 1968 said on the air, “The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate.” This prompted President Johnson to tell his advisers, “If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost Mr. Average American Citizen.”

  Soon after Tet, a draft resister named Raymond Mungo told his draft board that the United States was the “greatest force for evil, the worst hater of mankind, unscrupulous murderer, alive today,” charging that the country was on the verge of a civil war. Mungo compared America’s leaders to Nazis and defiantly told the board, “I don’t intend to play Jew for any of you.”

  On November 15, 1969, more than 250,000 protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., for the largest-ever anti-war demonstration. A month later, polls showed for the first time a majority of Americans disapproved of America’s participation in the war. Richard Nixon had been elected president a year earlier on a platform vowing to bring U.S. troops home, and by the end of the year, the United States had begun to de-escalate.

  For the increasing numbers of Americans who were turning against the war, Ali’s stand no longer seemed treasonous; instead it was principled, even prophetic. For many, however, the issue was still hugely divisive. As boxing writer and long-time Ali supporter Budd Schulberg observed, “By this time, the name of Ali was a recognized shibboleth. He divided sheep from goats, peaceniks from gung-hoers, leftists and liberals from conservatives and reactionaries. Did Ali have the right to practice his brawny and brutal trade while his celebrated case was still being judged by higher and higher courts? If your answer was negative, we would know how you stood on a dozen front page issues, on the ABM and the SST [missiles], on the CIA, the FBI, and Kent State, on the Nixon doctrine and the law-and-order bills. Never before had there been a heavyweight champion who provided this kind of touchstone. Never before in this ideological sense had there been a champion of the world. Never before a champion fighting for millions of people in the United States against the government of the United States.”

  Perhaps the best illustration of the new attitude toward Ali came from his long time detractor, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. In early 1970, Cannon seemed to capture the spirit of both the boxer and the era when he wrote, “The athlete of the decade has to be Cassius Clay, who is now Muhammad Ali. He is all that the sixties were. It is as though he were created to represent them. In him is the trouble and the wildness and the hysterical gladness and the nonsense and the rebellion and the conflicts of race and the yearning for bizarre religions and the cult of the put-on and the changed values that altered the world and the feeling about Vietnam in the generation that ridicules what their parents cherish….The sixties were a bad time, but some of the years were wonderful. And, because I make my living writing sports, Cassius Clay is the sixties for me.”

  For the first time, it was relatively safe to defend Ali. Howard Cosell began to support the former champion loudly and publicly. But Robert Lipsyte, Jerry Izenberg and a handful of others had never stopped—even at the height of the boxer’s vilification—and they were gratified to see the tide turning.

  “At some point, you could sense a change in attitude toward Ali,” recalls Izenberg. “I never stopped getting hate mail, so he was still very controversial, but now there was a sense that he had some support for his stand. I don’t know how much of it had to do with America’s changing attitude about the Vietnam War or whether people started to respect his principles. It was good to see but what I didn’t like is that it seemed to start the canonization of Ali. As much as I like and respect Muhammad, he was no saint, believe me.”

  The unspoken implication of Izenberg, and many others who knew Ali well, was that—like his two fathers, Cassius Clay Sr. and Elijah Muhammad—the remarkably handsome and charismatic boxer was a notorious womanizer. While his wife Belinda cared for his new baby daughter, Maryum, back in Chicago, Ali spent more than half the year on the road, where the temptations were constant.

  “The women would throw themselves at him wherever he went,” says his friend Lloyd Wells, who frequently arranged trysts for Ali. “His only rule was that he wouldn’t ever sleep with a white woman.”

  The revelation of Ali’s womanizing stands him in sharp contrast with his former mentor Malcolm X, who abided so strictly to the Muslims’strict moral code that he felt utterly betrayed by Elijah Muhammad’s adultery. What some have called Ali’s hypocrisy was highlighted by his frequent lambasting of blacks who were not willing to “live a righteous life.” In a 1966 profile, Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated atte
mpted to capture the enigma of the man he once described as a “symphony of paradoxes”:

  Figuring out who or what is the real Cassius Clay is a parlor game that has not proved rewarding even for experts. Clay’s personality is like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were cut by a drunken carpenter, a jumbled collection of moods and attitudes that do not seem to interlock. Sometimes he sounds like a religious lunatic, his voice singsong and chanting, and all at once he will turn into a calm, reasoning, if sometimes confused, student of the Scriptures. He is a loudmouthed windbag and at the same time a remarkably sincere and dedicated athlete. He can be a kindly benefactor of the neighborhood children and a vicious bully in the ring, a prissy Puritan, totally intolerant of drinkers and smokers, and a foul-mouthed teller of dirty jokes.

  In early 1970, Esquire magazine—one of Ali’s few media supporters—ran a cover story featuring more than one hundred prominent Americans who supported the former champion’s reinstatement. Under the headline, WE BELIEVE THAT MUHAMMAD ALI, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD, SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DEFEND HIS TITLE, a virtual who’s who of writers, artists, entertainers, and activists signed their names. Among the high-profile signatories were Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sammy Davis Jr., Truman Capote, Isaac Asimov, Marshall McLuhan, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Fonda, Harry Belafonte, and Jim Morrison. Two surprise names on the list were Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, who both had been critical of Ali’s efforts to stay out of the army. The most ironic and controversial name on the roll was the director Elia Kazan, who had long been shunned by the liberal establishment for naming names and perpetuating the notorious Hollywood blacklist twenty years earlier.

  According to one well-known American who was asked to lend his name to the Esquire story but refused, “I had this sense that Ali was just the latest liberal cause for these people. They were supporting him because it was fashionable, sort of like having a Black Panther at your cocktail party. I didn’t want to be part of that.”

  America wasn’t the only place where the tide was turning against the war and in support of Ali. In late 1969, Time reporter Wallace Terry traveled to Vietnam to conduct a follow-up to his 1967 survey of black soldiers. This time he found a radically different attitude than he had encountered two years earlier.

  In 1967, blacks in Vietnam overwhelmingly condemned the anti-war stand of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. Now he found Ali—along with Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver—was a hero to the increasingly militant black soldiers, with an approval rating of 69 percent.

  Terry also discovered that half the black soldiers were so bitter about their treatment that they would consider taking up arms against white society when they returned home. “When you come back to the States and the Man’s going to say, ‘Sorry, son, but I’m going to give you these rights, but you ain’t ready for the rest of them yet after I put my life on the line. Uh-uh. The man who says that, I’m going to kill him. If I can’t kill him, he’s going to wish he were dead,” Marine Sergeant Randolph Doby told Terry.

  Some 45 percent of the soldiers Terry surveyed said they would likely have joined in the race riots that had recently swept the nation. “There’s going to be more violence back in the world because we’re going back,” another black Marine told Terry. “Hell yes, I’d riot. If they’re kicking crackers’asses, I’m going to get in and kick a few myself. I’m just doing what my grandfather wanted to do and couldn’t.”

  Today, Terry believes the black community didn’t have the luxury of following Ali’s stand. “He was a rich athlete with a lot of resources to back up his convictions,” he says, “but the average black person would have found himself in jail with no supporters if they had done what he did.”

  Terry believes the black community still hasn’t recovered from the experience of Vietnam. “Look what happened when they returned, a lot of them ended up homeless, addicted to drugs, committed suicide. They had no support. The left considered them baby killers, the right believed they lost the war. It caused a lot of social unrest. That all stemmed from their experiences in Nam,” he says. “I think white America has recovered but blacks are still feeling the impact.”

  Coincidentally or not, Ali’s financial fortunes improved dramatically following the Nation of Islam’s disassociation from the exiled boxer. With Cassius Sr., Gene Dibble, and lawyer Chauncey Eskridge supervising Ali’s business affairs, the two-year period of austerity quickly came to an end.

  Ali signed on for two high-profile ventures, each designed to bring in about $10,000. The first committed him to participate in a laudatory documentary project called A/K/A Cassius Clay, in which he appeared in several scenes.

  The second project, one Ali would always regret, involved a computer fight against former heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano, who had retired from the ring thirteen years earlier. The two boxers filmed seventy-five staged one-minute rounds, each one with a different scenario. A variety of different endings were filmed. In one, Ali knocked out Marciano. In another, the former champion knocked out Ali. Another had Ali being stopped on cuts. The idea was that data on each boxer would be fed into a computer and the computer would determine the winner. The resulting ending would be shown in theaters. In the end, however, it was political considerations, not the computer data, that would determine the outcome. In the version shown in the United States, where Ali had been vilified, Marciano emerged the victor, knocking out his opponent in the thirteenth round. But the version shown in Europe, where Ali was still popular, had Ali beating Marciano on cuts.

  When the fictional American version showed the undefeated Ali getting a come uppance that no American had seen in real life, the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrated the outcome, informing Ali:

  The Computer knows who’s who in the equation. Take you, a loud-mouth black racist who brags I’m the Greatest! I’m the King!’You won’t submit to White America’s old image of black fighters, you won’t even submit to white America’s Army….Every self-respecting made-in-American knows how to add that up. They killed you off but can’t get rid of the ghost you left behind. And there’s not a white fighter around to chase it away.…They want your ass whipped in public, knocked down, ripped, stomped, clubbed, pulverized and not just by anybody, but by a real great white hope, and none’s around. That’s where the computer comes in.

  Soon after, Ali’s new advisers dropped Richard Fulton Inc. as his Speaker’s agent and signed on with the American Program Bureau, headed by Robert Walker.

  “Ali was afraid to fly,” recalls Walker. “We promised him that we could get him a private jet to go from speech to speech. He loved that idea. He signed on and he was immediately our most popular speaker. He was in huge demand on the campuses. We were getting him $15,000 to $25,000 a speech, which was unheard of back then. It would be like the equivalent of $225,000 today. The Student Unions had a lot of money and they all wanted him.” Under Richard Fulton—a contract negotiated by the Nation of Islam—he had only been receiving $1,500 to $2,000 a lecture.

  At the end of 1969, Ali was approached by a Broadway producer named Ron Rich about appearing in a “Black Power” musical called Buck White on Broadway. The money was right and Ali would have a new outlet for his theatrical instincts.

  To everyone’s surprise, the boxer-turned-actor could actually sing. Sporting an Afro wig and a beard, he took to the stage every night with a musical message very similar to the one he had been espousing in real life. In one number, he sang:

  We came in chains, we didn’t volunteer

  And yet, today, the fact remains

  We’re still held captive here

  Now we say, cut us loose

  Though that may go against your grain

  Still, there is no excuse

  We came in chains, and now your choice must be

  To either blow out all our brains

  Or else just set us free

  Better now than later on,

  Now that fear of death is gone,

&n
bsp; Never mind another dawn.

  Notwithstanding the fact that the New York Times had always been hostile to Ali’s stand against the war, its theater critic Clive Barnes was impressed by the neophyte actor’s talents. “How is Mr. Clay?” he wrote in the review. “He emerges as a modest naturally appealing man. He sings with a pleasant slightly impersonal voice, acts without embarrassment, and moves with innate dignity. He does himself proud.” The rest of New York’s demanding theater critics were equally kind to Ali’s performance, if not to the play itself, which closed after only three weeks.

  Meanwhile, Chauncey Eskridge had negotiated a deal that seemed destined to make the recently impoverished ex-boxer a rich man again without setting foot back into the ring. Ali lent his name and image to a chain of hamburger restaurants called “Champburger” in return for six-percent ownership in the company and one-percent of gross sales. When Champburger stock was issued in 1969, Ali received a check for $900,000.

  The first thing he did with his windfall was to buy himself a gray Cadillac limousine at a cost of $10,000. For a man who cared little for material possessions, the purchase was symbolic of his battle against adversity, a way to tell the establishment they couldn’t beat him, no matter how hard they tried.

  He made this explicit one day when he arrived in Manhattan for a meeting at Random House, which had recently offered to publish his autobiography. As he pulled up at the publisher’s midtown office, a small group of people recognized the ex-champ and gathered around his shiny new car.