Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight

by Howard Bingham

  “If he loses tonight,” declared Jesse Jackson, who had been one of King’s top lieutenants, “it will mean, symbolically, that the forces of blind patriotism are right, that dissent is wrong; that protest means you don’t love the country, this fight is Love-it-or-leave-it vs. Love-it-and-change-it. They tried to railroad him. They refused to accept his testimony about his religious convictions. They took away his right to practice his profession. They tried to break him in body and in mind. Martin Luther King used to say, ‘Truth crushed to the earth will rise again.’ That’s the black ethos. And it’s happening here in Georgia of all places, against a white man!”

  Ali understood more than anybody the burden he carried. “I’m not just fighting one man,” he said before the fight. “I’m fighting a lot of men, showing them here is one man they couldn’t conquer. Lose this one, and it won’t be just a loss to me. So many millions of faces throughout the world will be sad. They’ll feel like they’ve been defeated. If I lose, for the rest of my life I won’t be free. I’ll have to listen to all this about how I was a bum, how I joined the wrong movement and they mislead me. I’m fighting for my freedom.”

  On the morning of the bout, Ali ran into Joe Louis, who was hired to participate in the pre-fight promotion.

  “Who are you picking, Joe?” he asked his boyhood idol.

  “Why?” responded the legendary boxer, aware he was being taunted.

  “Because if you’re picking me, I’m scared to death. Everybody you pick is a loser. When I fought Liston the first time, you picked Liston’ When I fought Liston the second time, you picked Liston; When I fought Patterson, you picked Patterson. When I fought Chuval Terrell, Cleveland Williams, Bonavena, you picked them.”

  “Well,” said Louis, “if we go by that, Quarry’s the next champion because I’m picking you.”

  That afternoon Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader, presented Ali with the first Martin Luther King Memorial Award for his contribution to the “cause of human dignity,” proclaiming that the boxer was carrying on her husband’s legacy as “a champion of justice and peace.”

  As Ali entered the ring for the fight, cheered on by the 90 percent black crowd, his corner man Bundini Brown yelled out, “Ghost in the house, ghost in the house.” The ghost he was referring to was Jack Johnson, who had emerged from his own exile to fight a white boxer sixty years earlier. For the last few days, Ali had been watching old Jack Johnson fight films to inspire him for the Quarry fight. Later he would say, “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image. I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger the white folks didn’t like.”

  It had been forty-three months since Ali last set foot in a ring, what his trainer Angelo Dundee refers to as the “lost years,” when the exiled champion would have been at his peak as a fighter and which he could never win back. Still, it took him only three rounds to dispose of Quarry and lay to rest any lingering doubts as to whether he was still a force to be reckoned with after such a prolonged absence. He was a little slower, his timing wasn’t what it once was, but he still had it.

  Beyond its symbolic importance, the Quarry victory was actually quite meaningless. The only fight that counted was against Joe Frazier, to determine who had the right to call himself the true heavyweight champion. Before that could happen, however, Ali would have to win another battle—against the New York State Athletic Commission to get back the license they had stripped from him three years earlier.

  Before going the legal route, Ali had tried another tactic to gain back his New York license. In 1969, he appealed for help to Jackie Robinson, who had supported Republican New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in his election bid. Rockefeller had only to say the word and Ali would be given his license back by the politically appointed athletic commission. But Robinson told the boxer it was no use asking Rockefeller. He was too close to Richard Nixon and, according to the aging baseball great, Cassius Clay was “Nixon’s pet peeve.”

  In 1967, shortly after the commission’s arbitrary decision to revoke his license, Ali’s legal team had been approached by Michael Meltsner, a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The Fund—which was actually a separate entity from the NAACP—specialized in civil rights litigation dating back to the historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. Meltsner believed he could employ a strategy to win back Ali’s license under a provision of the law called Civil Disabilities, which seeks to remedy the indirect consequences of a criminal conviction—in this case the withdrawal of a boxing license. At the time, Meltsner was rebuffed by Ali’s original lawyer, Hayden Covington Jr., who wasn’t interested.

  Two years later, the legal team—now minus Covington—reconsidered. Chauncey Eskridge contacted Meltsner and gave him the go-ahead to pursue his strategy. In 1969, the Fund brought a case against the New York State Athletic Commission, claiming that Ali’s Constitutional rights had been violated by the denial of his ring license. Among the many arguments in the initial motion was what appeared at the time to be a minor point—that other criminals had received licenses in the past. In late 1969, a District Court judge ruled against Ali but didn’t dismiss the case out of hand, suggesting he was willing to hear further evidence on the history of licenses being granted to criminals.

  “I grew up in New York City listening to the Friday night fights,” explains Meltsner almost thirty years later. “My father was an intense sports fan and if you followed boxing, you knew that just about every famous boxer had spent time in jail. It almost seemed that being a felon was a requirement for being a champion. So when the Athletic Commission tried to argue that they took away Ali’s license to keep boxing safe from felons, it was absurd. The case was obviously political.”

  Meltsner assigned a young Defense Fund lawyer named Ann Wagner to comb the records of the New York State Athletic Commission to confirm his suspicions.

  “Ann was an extremely dedicated young attorney who had worked as a clerk and was quite familiar with legal files and documentation,” says Meltsner. “She spent months searching through the records and it paid off. She struck pay dirt.”

  What Wagner found shocked Ali’s legal team. In the course of her research, she discovered 225 convicted felons who had been granted boxing licenses by the commission in the past. Of these, ninety had committed murder, armed robbery, sodomy, or rape. And, since Ali had been charged with a military offense, Wagner produced fifteen cases of men convicted of military crimes, such as desertion or assaulting an officer, who had also been granted licenses.

  When Meltsner presented a list of these offenders, Judge Walter Mansfield could barely contain his anger and immediately ruled in Ali’s favor, saying he was “astounded” by what he had heard.

  “The action of the Commission in denying Ali a license because of his refusal to serve in the armed forces, while granting licenses to hundreds of other applicants convicted of other crimes and military offenses involving moral turpitude appears on its face to be an intentional, arbitrary, and unreasonable discrimination against plaintiff, not the even-handed administration of the law which the Fourteenth Amendment requires,” the judge said.

  The commission’s lawyers attempted to differentiate Ali’s case from the hundreds of examples cited by Meltsner, arguing that, unlike the list of convicted felons, Ali had not yet served his time. Mansfield was in no mood to hear this nonsense, declaring, “Defendants have offered no evidence tending to refute or rebut the overwhelming and undisputed proof of arbitrary capricious, and unfounded discrimination furnished by plaintiff.”

  His license restored, Ali only had one comment. “Bring on Frazier.”

  The hype leading up to the Ali-Frazier fight took on a life of its own. The drama of the occasion spoke for itself. Two legitimate champions would decide once and for all who had a genuine right to wear the crown.

  The fight was being billed as the “Patriot vs. the Draft Dodger,” which infuriated Ali, who seemed to take his anger out on the soft-spoken Frazier, by all accounts a
decent guy.

  In the weeks leading up to the fight, Ali engaged in his usual psychological baiting—but this time with a slightly sadistic edge, repeatedly calling Frazier an “Uncle Tom” and equating him with the white establishment that desperately wanted to see Ali beaten. “Frazier’s no real champion,” he taunted. “Nobody wants to talk to him. Oh, maybe Nixon will call him if he wins. I don’t think he’ll call me. But ninety-eight percent of my people are for me. They identify with my struggle. Same one they’re fighting every day in the streets. If I win, they win. If I lose, they lose.”

  In a boorish moment which angered even his black supporters, Ali called his opponent “gorilla”—a taunt which Frazier has never forgiven.

  In what was becoming a tradition, Joe Louis turned up in Frazier’s camp, as he did with all Ali’s opponents, hoping his nemesis would finally get what he deserved.

  Ali wanted to donate closed-circuit proceeds of the fight to help ghetto children, but Frazier’s camp rejected the idea, fuelling Ali’s accusations even further.

  Television personality Bryant Gumbel would later describe the emotions he felt as a young black teenager anticipating the first Ali-Frazier fight: “If Ali lost, it was as though everything I believed in was wrong …. He was a heroic figure, plain and simple. In every sense of the word, he was heroic. So what you had that night were two undefeated heavyweight champions. One was the very symbol of black pride, parading black feelings about black heritage, speaking out against racial injustice. And the other guy was more like your parents were. He just kind of went along. He did his job. He wasn’t a proponent of the old order, but he didn’t fight it either. One guy was dead set against the war, the other didn’t seem to have much feeling about it, but was supported by those who backed the war. We’d all seen those pictures of the people with flags and hard hats beating up kids with long hair who were protesting, and this was our chance to get even in the ring. Our side was right, and their side thought it was right, and whoever won the fight, damn it, that’s how it was. There was no middle ground.”

  The fight itself was one of the most epic battles ever fought in the squared circle. Ali had anticipated the scene with one of his typical poems:

  Joe’s gonna come out smokin’

  But I ain’t gonna be jokin’

  I’ll be pickin’ and pokin’

  Pouring water on his smokin’

  This might shock and amaze ya

  But I’m gonna destroy Joe Frazier

  The crowd made it clear from the start who they were supporting. “It was like good vs. evil,” recalls Jerry Izenberg. “I think they wanted Frazier to kill him.”

  For the first time in his professional career, Ali seemed to have met his match. Each boxer absorbed devastating punishment throughout the fight. Ali had rarely if ever been really hit by an opponent before. As voices from the crowd—reminiscent of the Liston fight—cried, “Pound that nigger, Joe!” Frazier proved his fighting abilities, taking whatever Ali delivered and returning a brutal volley of blows. In the eleventh round the momentum clearly went to Frazier, who stunned Ali with the hardest punch he had ever received, a left hook that sent him reeling. Still, Ali survived and proved why he had been undefeated for more than seven years. He recovered from the setback and summoned a few crushing blows of his own, taking the fight to Frazier until the final round, when the younger boxer once again sent a left hook against Ali’s jaw, knocking him on his back for the first time in his professional career. To the amazement of the onlookers, however, Ali sprung right back up to his feet and held his own until the final bell.

  The fight was so close that nobody in Madison Square Garden that night knew who won until the decision of the judges was announced. When the referee held Frazier’s arm up, signaling his victory, tears ran down the cheeks of many blacks in the crowd and millions more throughout the country. Cornell University’s black student leader Donald Reeves later summed up his feelings in the New York Times, writing, “When Ali tasted defeat for the first time, I was crushed. Few things have so destroyed my spirits as to see Ali lose. I had so much of myself in Ali that I think he took his defeat better than I did.”

  In the White House, Richard Nixon was ecstatic, jumping up and down and celebrating the defeat of “that draft dodger asshole,” according to his chief of staff. His joy echoed the feelings of a large segment of the population who had finally seen the uppity Ali put in his place.

  Ali was gracious in defeat, congratulating Frazier and calling him a “fine champion.” To his friends, he couldn’t help but voice his opinion that he thought he had won. This may have been more than sour grapes. In the New York Times, veteran sportswriter Robert Lipsyte voiced the first suspicion that the ring officials were at least subconsciously biased by the conviction that a Frazier victory would be good for boxing and for America. Judging a boxing match involves a great deal of subjectivity, so there may be something to Lipsyte’s charge.

  Certainly, anybody who saw the two boxers after the fight couldn’t have guessed the victor. Ali’s face was unblemished. He went to the hospital for an Xray, which turned up nothing serious, and left an hour later. In contrast, Frazier’s face was grotesquely swollen, and he ended up spending three weeks in the hospital recovering.

  Longtime boxing writer Larry Merchant covered the fight and, like Lipsyte, believes the judges may have been biased. “In any boxing match, there is what is known as the house fighter, the favorite,” he explains. “Sometimes being the house fighter can help you win one or two close rounds. There is no question Frazier was the house fighter that night. I was scoring the fight myself and I’m one of the few writers who actually had Ali ahead. I had no problem with the decision of the judges, it was certainly close, but I thought Ali had won.”

  When Ali fought a rematch against Frazier three years later, Merchant—who now covers boxing for HBO—was still uneasy about the result of the first fight: “Just before the rematch, I decided to screen the film of the first fight with a friend of mine, another boxing writer. Originally, at Madison Square Garden, I had Ali beating Frazier but my friend thought Frazier had won. So we decided it would be interesting to sit there and score the fight again round by round, punch by punch. Well, the results were telling. After we screened the fight, I came away convinced more than ever that Ali was robbed and my friend changed his mind completely and also thought Ali had won. I know, people will say you can’t score a fight that way, and I’d normally be the first to agree. But this was quite blatant. In one round, I think Ali landed nineteen punches, many of them solid, to Frazier’s three, and one of the judges scored it a draw. Come on. How unfair can you get? In the original scoring, the referee only had Frazier winning eight-six with one draw. That means Ali would have only had to win one more round for the fight to be a draw. Some of those rounds were damn close, nobody can tell me with any credibility that Frazier won the fight hands down. The eleventh round, maybe, but let’s get serious.”

  While his supporters and detractors continued to debate who won the Frazier bout, Muhammad Ali knew that his most important fight still lay ahead—and it would not be decided in a ring.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  Vindication

  WHEN THE CASE OF Cassius Marsellus Clay vs. the United States of America came before the Supreme Court in January 1971, little had happened to change the minds of the justices since they first voted not to hear it almost two years earlier. At that time, only the last-minute revelation of illegal government eavesdropping had prevented the Court from announcing its decision, allowing Ali’s conviction to stand and sending him to prison.

  But even if each justice had already made up his mind in March 1969 and not changed it since, Justice William Brennan was conscious of the country’s changing social climate, especially on racial issues. He believed it was important to at least give the high-profile appellant a hearing so that justice would be seen to be done.

  There was also a new precedent to consider. During the interim, the Court ha
d decided another conscientious objector case that might have a bearing on the Ali appeal. In the 1970 decision Welsh vs. United States, the Court had ruled in favor of a young man named Elliot Welsh who refused to serve in Vietnam because of his deeply held moral opposition to war. Previously, a conscientious objector was required to object on religious grounds and hold a belief in a Supreme Being. In the Welsh decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote:

  What is necessary for…conscientious objection to all war is that this opposition to war stem from … his moral, ethical or religious beliefs about what is right or wrong and that these beliefs be held with the strength of traditional religious convictions ….

  To most of the justices, the Welsh decision seemed irrelevant to Ali’s case, because it required a moral objection to all wars and each justice believed that Ali’s objection was limited to selective wars. Nevertheless, Brennan convinced his reluctant colleagues to grant cert (approval to hear the case) on the basis of Welsh. None of them, including Brennan, expected Ali to prevail.

  “Cert would never have been granted if the petitioner was not Muhammad Ali,” reveals Thomas Krattenmaker, who at the time was a clerk for Justice John Harlan. “It was a very high profile case so they agreed to hear it. Nobody believed he’d win.”

  Jonathan Shapiro had recently joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York after two years trying civil rights cases in Mississippi. The Fund, which was already involved in the case to restore Ali’s boxing license, had been asked by Chauncey Eskridge to join the appeal of the boxer’s conviction. Shapiro had unsuccessfully argued the wiretap ruling in the Federal Court of Appeals a year earlier and was convinced that it was this issue that might reverse Ali’s conviction before the Supreme Court.