Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (15 page)

But according to Jerry Izenberg, who has been covering Ali since the 1960 Olympics, “You just have to spend five minutes with him to understand how bright he is. I’ve never encountered a quicker, or a more intuitive, mind. The truth is that he’s a hell of a lot smarter than any of the reporters who covered him, and that probably includes me.”

Ali later discussed his educational limitations with
Life
magazine photographer Gordon Parks. “My mother always wanted me to be something like a doctor or lawyer,” he revealed. “Maybe I’d a made a good lawyer. I talk so much. I guess I got that from my father. I’m really kinda shy. Didn’t get as much schooling as I wanted to. But common sense is just as good.”

Malcolm X seems to have been one of the first to understand the extent of Ali’s intellect. In Miami he told George Plimpton, “Not many people know the quality of the mind he’s got in there. He fools them. One forgets that though a clown never imitates a wise man, the wise man can imitate the clown. He is very shrewd—with as much untapped mental energy as he has physical power.”

His high school guidance counselor Betty Johnston insists that his school record and his army aptitude test do not in any way reflect his intelligence. “I now believe we failed him in high school,” she says. “We only had one guidance counselor for seventeen hundred students and he kind of got passed by. It’s possible he may have even had a learning disability, dyslexia perhaps, but we just didn’t know about those things then. One thing is clear. This is a highly intelligent person and only a fool can’t see that.”

Typical Americans seemed to sense the same thing. News of Ali’s draft-exempt status prompted a deluge of angry letters to President Johnson, the Commander-in-Chief. Most found it impossible to believe the quick-witted boxer wasn’t smart enough for the Army. A sampling of these letters indicates the pressure the Johnson Administration faced:

“Dear Mr. Johnson: As a citizen of the most wonderful country in the world, and the mother of a young boy that has just been drafted, I would like to ask a few questions. I hope you will take the time to answer them for me,” wrote one Pennsylvania housewife. “I read in the paper that Mr. Clay was not being drafted because he was not mentally acceptable. Mr. President, I can hardly believe that! Is it because he is a millionaire and pays a lot of taxes? Is it because he is heavyweight champion of the world? Is it because he is colored and colored people are being handled with’kid gloves’these days?”

Another citizen wrote the president, “Unless Clay is drafted into the army, you will be
personally
sorry.”

Johnson felt he needed a capable, high-ranking government official to deflect the furor and handle the situation, so he assigned the dossier to Secretary of the Army Stephen Ailes. In a letter to Carl Vinson, chairperson of the House Armed Services Committee, who was demanding a public hearing on the matter, Ailes explained the decision to classify Ali 1-Y. “In my judgment, we must depend on the established standards which our mental tests measure in a very accurate degree. The requirements of today’s Army do not allow acceptance of those personnel not offering a reasonable value to the defense effort.”

But Johnson was so sensitive to public criticism of the Ali matter that he ordered Secretary Ailes to personally write letters to some members of the public, a job usually designated to a much lower official. In one of these letters, Ailes unwittingly reveals the extraordinary attention the government paid to Ali’s induction exam and certainly lends credence to the theory that the boxer was singled out.

To an Idaho man who wrote the president speculating that Ali had faked his results, Ailes wrote, “You are concerned as to whether Clay misled the army into believing he could not acquire the needed skills. So was I. For this very reason I asked that he be re-tested. Furthermore, I sent the senior Army civilian expert in the testing field to Louisville to review the test results, to observe Clay during the test, and to observe the subsequent interview between Clay and the Army psychologist. Clay’s attitude was cooperative and our people were convinced that he made a sincere effort on the tests. Accordingly, we had no basis for inducting him.”

In April, anxious to leave the draft controversy behind, Ali set off on his previously scheduled tour of Africa. In contrast to the chilly reception he now received in his own country, huge crowds greeted the world champion, especially in the predominantly Muslim countries where Ali was considered a hero of the faith as well as a sporting great.

When he had announced his planned African trip at the UN two months earlier, Ali had promised, “Malcolm X will be at my side.” Now, however, the two were completely estranged; indeed, they had not spoken since Malcolm had announced the formation of his new movement the month before. In the meantime, the former champion of black supremacy had visited Mecca and seen white and black Muslims worshipping side by side. The sight and its significance had prompted a profound shift in his thinking. Malcolm now believed the Nation of Islam was a racist movement and that he had been misguided in his own long-held views.

By coincidence, during the course of Ali’s African trip, the boxer arrived in Ghana—through which Malcolm X was passing on his way to Mecca. At one point, the two passed each other in a marketplace but didn’t speak. Moments later, Ali turned to Herbert Muhammad—the Messenger’s son who was travelling with him—and offered an assessment of his former teacher.

“Man, did you get a look at him? Dressed in that funny white robe and wearing a beard and walking with a cane that looked like a prophet’s stick? Man, he’s gone so far out he’s out completely. Doesn’t that just go to show that Elijah is the most powerful; nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.” This conversation was captured in an FBI surveillance report.

Ali sounds like a man trying to convince himself he had done the right thing in choosing the Messenger over Malcolm. In later years, he would feel shame about turning his back on the man who had advanced his spiritual growth, guided his thinking, and been like family to him. But the most ironic aspect of their split was that Malcolm’s new philosophy—a more flexible version of black nationalism, international solidarity, and economic self-help without the racism—closely paralleled the vision of Ali, who in the years to come sounded a lot more like Malcolm X than like Elijah Muhammad.

CHAPTER FIVE:

“I Ain’t Got No Quarrel
with Them Vietcong”

S
HORTLY AFTER
A
LI RETURNED
from Africa in the spring of 1964, thousands of college students—black and white—from across America began to pour into Mississippi to register black voters, who had long been denied the franchise in America’s most racist state. It was the start of Freedom Summer.

On June 21, three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were arrested on a trumped-up charge by Cecil Price, a deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who also happened to be a member in good standing of the local Ku Klux Klan. After alerting his Klan brothers, Price released the three activists—two of them white—late at night. Twenty minutes later, they were brutally murdered on a dark road. If John F. Kennedy’s assassination seven months earlier had marked the end of America’s innocence, then the deaths of the three civil rights martyrs marked a transition for a generation of youth from idealism to defiance.

Eight thousand miles away, defiance was already creating Vietnam’s own martyrs. Images of Buddhist monks pouring gasoline over themselves and going up in flames to protest the brutal dictatorship of South Vietnam were helping to fuel an indigenous revolt. To quell it, President Lyndon Johnson sent five thousand American troops to South Vietnam on July 21, the first official combat troops not disingenuously designated “advisers.” The United States was wedding itself to a murderous regime it considered the only alternative to communism, but whose actions were increasingly driving the people to support the communist Vietcong “liberators.”

Two weeks later, on August 5, Johnson ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and “certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam” after a number of alleged attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on routine patrol in the area on August 2—and that North Vietnamese military boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” on a pair of U.S. ships two days later. But it was revealed years later that there was no second attack by North Vietnam—no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” The Johnson administration, seeking an excuse to escalate the conflict into a full-scale war, lied to Congress and the American people and set the stage for America’s longest war.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam—sailed through Congress on August 7. The resolution authorized the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, opposed the resolution. The overwhelming majority of Americans, believing their president, supported the new war.

Muhammad Ali had other things on his mind. “I vaguely recall hearing about the ships getting hit but I wasn’t really paying much attention,” he says. A month earlier, he had fallen in love with a twenty-three-year-old cocktail waitress named Sonji Roi. A week after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed, the two were married in Gary, Indiana.

After a brief honeymoon, Ali signed to fight a rematch against Sonny Liston. And he persisted in proselytizing for his new faith, travelling to mosques all over the country preaching the Black Muslim message and raising the ire of the white establishment.

His new religion was already proving costly. He told
Ebony
magazine that joining the Nation of Islam had cost him “some $500,000 in possible commercial contracts. I have turned down another $500,000 from several concerns because they wanted me to do something I think is dead wrong—chase white women in films.” He revealed that he had turned down an offer to play Jack Johnson in a movie because the part would have forced him to be portrayed marrying a white woman.

The media continued to register their disgust. The dean of America’s boxing writers, Jimmy Cannon, called Ali’s affiliation with the Nation of Islam “the dirtiest in American sports since the Nazis were shilling for Max Schmeling as representative of their vile theories of blood.” For his part, Ali calmly deflected the mounting criticism as if he were fending off jabs in the ring. “Elijah isn’t teaching hate when he tells us about the evil things the white man has done any more than you’re teaching hate when you tell us about what Hitler did to the Jews. That’s not hate, that’s history.”

Pat Putnam covered boxing for the
Miami Herald
during this period. He remembers the attitude of some of his colleagues. “Some of the old-line boxing writers absolutely hated him,” he recalls. “He didn’t fit into their mold. I think there was some racism involved. Cannon idolized Joe Louis, he believed every boxer should be like him. Here comes this brash, loud-mouthed kid and he couldn’t handle it. There was this hysteria around the Muslim thing. People were afraid of the Muslims. I think some of the old block writers were saying, ‘look at those scary black men, they’re going to rape my sister.’”

Ali was assuming the role that Malcolm X had vacated when he left the Nation of Islam. And, like Malcolm, he was good for recruitment. Meanwhile, Malcolm continued to spread his message through his newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, advocating that blacks achieve their freedom “by any means necessary” and decrying the racism of his former movement. As he did so, the Nation of Islam turned against him with a fury.

As he traveled the globe, Malcolm repeatedly predicted that he would be killed by the Nation, which had accused him of high treason and labeled him the “Chief Hypocrite.” And he had good reason to worry. For months he had been receiving reports from inside the Nation that an order had been issued from the highest levels for his death. In December 1964,
Muhammad Speaks
contained an article written by Louis X, the Nation’s rising star who had taken over the interim ministership of Malcolm’s old Mosque number seven in Harlem.

“The die is cast and Malcolm shall not escape,” wrote the man later known as Louis Farrakhan. “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” Two months later, on February 21,1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by five Nation of Islam gunmen while he was speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Farrakhan later attempted to spread the never-substantiated theory that the FBI was actually behind the killing.

That night, while Ali was at his Massachusetts training camp, his Chicago apartment building was gutted by fire. Rumor quickly spread that, as the Nation of Islam’s highest profile representative, he was being targeted for revenge by Malcolm’s followers. Five FBI agents showed up at his camp and told him they were assigning a plainclothes police guard to protect him.

The Liston rematch had been postponed in November after Ali collapsed with a hernia three days before the fight. It was rescheduled for May 26 in Lewiston, Maine. Liston was a five-to-one favorite to win his title back, despite his crushing defeat a year earlier. The pundits believed the first fight was a fluke and refused to concede Ali’s superiority. Some rumors even had it that the Muslims had fixed the first fight, threatening Liston if he didn’t take a dive.

Syndicated columnist Jerry Izenberg, one of Ali’s earliest and most ardent supporters, one of the few who insisted on calling him by his Muslim name, remembers an “ugly atmosphere” surrounding the second Liston fight. “Malcolm was dead, and there were rumors that Ali was going to be killed, maybe even in the ring, in retaliation. A lot of it was hysteria fuelled by the press but even so the fear was there….Somebody asked something about Malcolm, it was a reporter who asked, ‘You’ve heard the stories about Malcolm’s people making an attempt on your life?’… and Ali looked up and said, ‘What people? Malcolm ain’t got no people.’ And I remember, I got mad because in my mind Malcolm stood for certain things. And I thought,‘you son of a bitch. One minute, Malcolm is great, and then all of a sudden he’s nobody because somebody tells you he’s nobody’ I was really pissed about it.”