Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (27 page)

When Ali was convicted, many Americans believed he had got what was coming to him and looked forward to his five-year prison sentence. When it was reported that the convicted boxer would remain free on appeal, his attackers seemed to feel cheated. They took out their hostility on his local draft board, which received an avalanche of mail demanding Ali be jailed immediately.

“Dear Skunks: You yellow-bellied scum—you are as bad as those picketing against the U.S. and those burning their draft cards,” read one angry missive. Another letter writer smelled “a rat—or maybe a payoff! That Black Bastard Cassius Clay should be in Vietnam right now with our fighting men instead of hiding behind some phony heathen religion. He is a disgrace to the sports world—his race—and his country—and so are you for letting him get away with such crap.”

President Johnson was also inundated with a new round of letters from outraged Americans. “Dear Mr. President,” wrote one Texas citizen. “It amazes me and so many, many others that three hours after Cassius Clay’s refusal to take the oath and be inducted into the Army, that you have not ordered his immediate arrest, without bond and a trial in the morning to send him and his Black Muslim pals to jail for treasonable acts, because what they and his attorneys are advising is treasonable. If you want to close your credibility gap a little, do the incredible thing and see this case is disposed of.”

Three days after his conviction, Ali appeared for the first time at one of the increasingly frequent anti-war demonstrations sweeping the country. This one was in Los Angeles, where President Johnson was attending a fundraiser. Despite Elijah Muhammad’s edict that members of the Nation must divorce themselves from white politics, Ali—who had become the most visible symbol of resistance to the increasingly unpopular war—stood on top of a garbage can and addressed the crowd of thirty thousand protesters.

“I’m with you,” he shouted. “Anything designed for peace and to stop the killing I’m for one hundred percent. I’m not a leader. I’m not here to advise you. But I encourage you to express yourself and to stop this war.”

After Ali left, the mayor of Los Angeles unleashed more than a thousand LAPD officers on the demonstrators, attacking them with police batons after they staged a nonviolent sit-in in front of the Century Plaza Hotel where L.B.J, was speaking. Some 275 demonstrators were injured in the police riot. California’s right-wing governor, Ronald Reagan, who had placed the National Guard on alert, made it clear how he thought the protesters should be handled. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement,” he declared.

As Ali watched the brutality on television that night, he vowed to himself not to participate in any more anti-war demonstrations. But his stepped-up rhetoric against the war infuriated J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered continued surveillance of the boxer. In a July 25 memo to the director, an FBI agent reported:

Cassius Clay, alias Muhammad Ali, is an admitted active member of the Nation of Islam, which is a highly secretive organization whose membership is made up entirely of selected Negroes who advocate and believe in the ultimate destruction of the white race and complete control of the civilized world by the Negro cult. The Muslims, as members of this organization are referred to, hold highly secretive meetings which exclude all persons not Negro, which exclude all non-Muslims. The Muslims promote segregation, and they advocate that their members not serve in the military service of our country. Within their organization, however, they train their members in military tactics, conduct classes in physical conditioning and karate, and utilize the paramilitary training normally used by secret militant type groups. Clay, who purports to be a minister in this organization, has utilized his position as a nationally known figure in the sports world to promote through appearances at various gatherings an ideology completely foreign to the basic American ideals of equality and justice for all, love of God and country.

As attorney general, Ramsey Clark was technically Hoover’s boss. He explains why the FBI chief considered Ali a threat.

“He was totally out of touch with the reality of Muhammad’s influence,” Clark says. “He thought Ali was some sort of a pied piper leading all these soldiers not to go to Vietnam. It was a fantasy. He was never able to contain himself about his hatred for Dr. King but he also had this thing about black leaders in general. This is a guy who grew up in the South in another era. I remember I was with Bob Kennedy when we met with Hoover and asked him why there were no blacks in the FBI. Basically, he was an anachronism.”

Two weeks later, Hoover’s paranoia toward black activists prompted the FBI to launch the
COINTELPRO
program, which was designed to “neutralize militant black nationalists.” The agency recruited thousands of informants to infiltrate and disrupt these organizations—an operation so successful the Bureau extended the program to destabilize the anti-war movement as well.

Things were heating up. Dr. King’s message of nonviolence was being usurped by the late Malcolm X’s calls for confrontation. The Black Power movement intensified its rhetoric, and urban unrest increased in every American ghetto.

Ali, however, conscious of his growing influence and wary of inciting violence, distanced himself from it all as he prayed toward Mecca five times a day and mentally prepared himself for a long prison sentence.

The Black Panthers had adopted the slogan “We’re the Greatest.” Whether or not this was in tribute to Ali is open to speculation, but Panther leader Stokely Carmichael had recently called Ali “my hero.” Panther Minister of Defense H. Rap Brown—anxious to capitalize on the boxer’s popularity with ghetto youth—had organized a demonstration outside the Houston induction center to show support for Ali. But Ali, in Houston to appeal the confiscation of his passport, told a reporter, “Rap Brown and these boys can say what they like because they’re nobody. Nobody gives a damn. With me it’s different. If I went to a Negro district they’d come running. It would just take some young fool to throw something and that would be it. He don’t care anything about race. He wants publicity. He wants to see a nice fire. I want to keep away from that stuff.”

Ali’s restraint failed to impress Jackie Robinson, who had been a frequent defender of the boxer’s religious freedom. The increasingly conservative black baseball pioneer told the media, “He’s hurting the morale of a lot of young soldiers in Vietnam. The tragedy is that he’s made millions of dollars off the American public and now he’s not willing to show his appreciation to a country that’s giving him a great opportunity. This hurts a great number of people.”

At the Houston appeal hearing to get back his passport, Ali’s lawyer Hayden Covington played recordings of his client’s appearances on the
Tonight
Show and other public events to demonstrate that Ali had said nothing anti-American. But his appearance at the Los Angeles antiwar rally the month before seemed to undermine this argument. The judge ruled that this event “proves Mr. Clay demonstrates a ready willingness to participate in anti-government and anti-war activities.” The appeal was rejected.

By the fall of 1967, the war had escalated significantly. Five hundred thousand U.S. troops were now stationed in Vietnam; 9,353 Americans were killed in combat that year. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians suffered a similar fate. Ali’s uncharacteristically quiet dignity and principled stand were beginning to resonate in marked contrast to the graphic images beamed into American living rooms each evening.

While the majority of the media continued to support the war and attack Ali,
Freedomways
magazine ran an editorial expressing a sentiment which would one day be echoed by many. At the end of 1967, however, it was still a lonely, almost heretical, voice:

“I won’t wear the uniform,”
declared the world heavyweight champion. Of all the rhetoric used to express opposition to the Vietnam War, these words may prove to be the most eloquent as a statement of personal commitment. They are words which should echo among the youth in every ghetto across this land. In taking his stand as a matter of conscience, the world heavyweight champion may be giving up a small fortune, but he has undoubtedly gained the respect and admiration of a very large part of humanity. That, after all, is the measure of a Man.

CHAPTER EIGHT:

Exile

I
N
1967,
THE ERA OF MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR
boxing purses was still in the future. Nevertheless, the heavyweight crown had always brought its bearer vast sums of money, and Muhammad Ali was no exception. Millions of dollars had passed through his hands since 1964—$3.8 million from the ring, to be exact, and almost as much in endorsements and ancillary income. Yet at the time he refused induction in April 1967, virtually every penny had already disappeared.

Taxes and alimony payments to Sonji accounted for some of this financial attrition, but what happened to the rest has always been a matter of speculation. Cassius Clay Sr. and others believed that the coffers of the Nation of Islam were being filled with the earnings of its celebrity cash cow. Like all members of the Nation, Ali was expected to contribute a 10-percent tithe of his income. But Ali has always insisted that the Nation never asked him for money and, on the contrary, twice loaned him $25,000 when he was short of funds. Where, then, did all the money go?

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.”