Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (30 page)

IOC Chairperson Avery Brundage huffed, “If these boys are serious, they’re making a very bad mistake. If they’re not serious and are using the Olympic Games for publicity purposes, we don’t like it.”

The idea of a boycott started to gain some high-profile support. Jackie Robinson, who knew better than most the slights suffered by the black athlete, publicly backed the project, declaring, “I say, use whatever means necessary to get our rights here in this country. When, for three hundred years Negroes have been denied equal opportunity, some attention must be focused on it.”

Reverend Andrew Young, Martin Luther King Jr.’s top lieutenant, weighed in with his leader’s opinion only a few weeks before the assassination, writing, “Dr. King applauds this new sensitivity among Negro athletes and he feels that this should be encouraged. Dr. King told me that this represents a new spirit of concern on the part of successful Negroes for those who remain impoverished. Negro athletes may be treated with adulation during their Olympic careers, but many will face later the same slights experienced by other Negroes. Dr. King knows that this is a desperate situation for the Negro athlete, the possibility of giving up a chance at a gold medal, but he feels that the cause of the Negro may demand it.”

But support among prominent black athletes wasn’t unanimous. Jesse Owens had struck his own blow for black racial pride when he won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were organized by the Nazis as a showcase for Aryan superiority. After his unprecedented achievement, however, he was reduced to racing against horses and other humiliating ventures to earn a living. Nevertheless, Owens publicly opposed the boycott, stating, “I deplore the use of the Olympic Games for political aggrandizement.”

In February, Brundage and the IOC, intent not to appear weak in the face of the protests, voted to readmit South Africa into the Olympics. Any black athletes who were still wavering made up their minds then and there not to go to Mexico City. But the U.S.S.R. and Mexico immediately pressured Brundage to hold a special meeting, warning they could not tolerate the appearance of the white supremacist state. South Africa was once again expelled. The most important of the OPHR demands had been met.

In September, at the Olympic trials, Edwards called a meeting of the twenty-six male black athletes favored to make the team. He had decided that if less than two-thirds favored a boycott, he would change his strategy. Only thirteen—exactly half—voted to boycott. To maintain unity, the OPHR agreed that blacks would participate in the Games, try their hardest to win and, then, make an appropriate gesture on the victory stand.

Brundage immediately warned that any protest in Mexico would result in a quick trip home.

The Games began with only three black athletes boycotting the event (among them basketball star Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who decided to make their own stands in order to highlight the unmet demands of the OPHR.

The protest appeared to have fizzled, but just the opposite was true—it was about to explode onto the front pages of newspapers the world over. On October 16, two black Americans won medals in the 200-meter dash. Before the games began, Harry Edwards had explained that “The Star Spangled Banner,” the U.S. national anthem, would be the focal point of the expected victory-stand protests. “For the black man in America,” he explained, “the national anthem has not progressed far beyond what it was before Francis Scott Key put his words to it—an old English drinking song. For in America, a black man would have to be either drunk, insane, or both, not to recognize the hollowness in the anthem’s phrases.”

The three 200-meter medalists took to the podium. As the first strains of the national anthem wafted from the loudspeakers, American gold medalist Tommie Smith drove his right fist high in the air. It was enclosed in a black glove. U.S. bronze medalist John Carlos immediately followed suit, raising his glove-enclosed left fist over his head. Each wore black socks with no shoes and a black scarf around his neck. The 65,000 spectators knew they were witnessing something historic, even if they didn’t know exactly what.

After the ceremony, Smith explained to Howard Cosell the significance of their actions:

I wore a black right-hand glove and Carlos wore the left-hand glove of the same pair. My raised right hand stood for power in Black America. Carlos’s left hand stood for the unity of Black America. Together, they formed an arc of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.

The photograph of their gestures was beamed around the world, becoming perhaps the most lasting symbol of Black Power. Largely unreported was the fact that the silver medalist, white Australian Peter Norman, had stood on the podium with his head bowed, wearing the OPHR badge on his track suit in solidarity. The Olympic establishment was furious. As fast as Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title eighteen months earlier after his own defiant action, Smith and Carlos were evicted from the Olympic Village and permanently banned from Olympic competition. The U.S. Olympic Committee president apologized to the IOC and warned other athletes not to follow their example.

Two days later, three black Americans swept the 400-meter race. On the victory podium, each wore a black beret and raised their closed fists as their names were called. The USOC displayed its hypocrisy when it failed to reprimand or expel these three athletes as it did Smith and Carlos. They made up three-quarters of the 4 x 400-meter relay team, which had yet to compete. In contrast, Smith and Carlos had no more events to run when they were evicted.

Muhammad Ali watched on television with satisfaction as Smith and Carlos followed his defiant example in Mexico City. A few days later, watching the boxing finals, Ali and millions of others witnessed a different kind of political display by a black American athlete. After winning the gold medal, the new Olympic boxing champion George Foreman ran around the ring waving a little American flag and yelled “United States Power” in a deliberate dig at the Black Power demonstration of his teammates. It would take six years for Ali to let Foreman know what he thought of his action.

As America careened through its own turbulence and turmoil, Ali’s legal case moved slowly through the court system. On May 6,1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld his conviction. Judge J. P. Coleman appeared less than sympathetic to the case, ruling, “There has been no administrative process which Clay has not sought within the Selective Service System, its local and appeal boards, the Presidential appeal board and, finally, the federal courts, in an unsuccessful attempt to evade and escape from military service of his country.”

The court agreed with the claim by Ali’s lawyers that blacks were under-represented on draft boards throughout the country. In the next breath, however, the three-judge panel decided this was irrelevant to Ali’s conviction, ruling that “even the systematic exclusion of Negroes from draft boards would not render their acts null and void.” More important to the case, the court ruled against Ali’s ministerial deferment claim, insisting he was a professional boxer, not a minister.

It was yet another legal setback, and it left the Supreme Court as Ali’s sole hope for staying out of prison. Even then, the chances of convincing the nation’s highest court to hear his case were remote. Increasingly, Ali was growing frustrated at having his fate in the hands of a legal system that every day seemed more and more out of step with the times and the transformations that were wracking American society.

After the decision, he defiantly announced, “You done rolled the dice on me. Now we’re going to have to finish the game. We’ve gone too far to turn back now. You can’t cop out on me. You’ve got to either free me or put me in jail. I’m going to go on just like I’m doing, taking my stand.”

Ali would see the inside of a jail cell sooner than he thought. A year earlier, he had been driving his Cadillac when he was stopped in Miami for speeding. Upon verification, it was found that he was driving without a license. Once again, it seemed Ali was a modern-day incarnation of Jack Johnson, who had left a legacy of possibly apocryphal driving stories. On one occasion, it is said, Johnson was stopped on a highway and handed a fifty-dollar fine. He peeled off two fifty dollar bills and handed them to the traffic cop, who asked what the second bill was for. “I’m coming through again,” the notorious boxer said. Ali was well on his way to gaining such notoriety on the nation’s roads when Elijah Muhammad took away his license and assigned him a driver several months before the Miami incident. It didn’t stop him, however, from occasionally slipping away and indulging his passion for speed.

When he didn’t show up in court on the traffic violation, a warrant was quietly issued for his arrest in Dade County, Florida. Then, in December 1968, he was again stopped on a Miami street by a motorcycle cop, who found the outstanding warrant and escorted him to the local courthouse. There a judge sentenced him to a ten-day term in the Dade County jail. Considering his otherwise clean record, a large fine would have been the standard punishment for such an offense, prompting his lawyer to charge, “He got sentenced for being Cassius Clay. Everyone is caught up in the hate-Clay hysteria.”

So just before Christmas, Ali got a small taste of what lay ahead of him, barring Supreme Court salvation. He was assigned the kitchen detail, where for forty cents an hour, he sliced vegetables, washed dishes, and brought trays of food to his fellow inmates, who were excited to have a celebrity in their midst.

“Jail is a bad place,” he later recalled. “You’re all locked up; you can’t get out. The food is bad, and there’s nothing good to do. You look out the window at the cars and people, and everyone else seems so free. Little things you take for granted like sleeping good or walking down the street, you can’t do them no more. A man’s got to be real serious about what he believes to say he’ll do that for five years.”

Still, the week in jail—he was let out three days early under a Christmas amnesty—didn’t change his mind about his stand, even after the government let it be known that it wasn’t too late to make a deal.

Indeed, if anything the stint behind bars revived Ali in some ways. His poetizing, which had been temporarily (and some would say mercifully) suspended during his exile, was stimulated again by his jail experience. To the oft-repeated question, “Are you still willing to go to prison?” he began to respond in rapping verse:

Hell no,

I ain’t going to go.

Clean out my cell

And take my tail

To jail

Without bail

Because it’s better there eating,

Watching television fed,

Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead

Meanwhile, Herbert Muhammad, his manager and the Messenger’s son, thought he had found a loophole in the legal obstacles that kept Ali from boxing in any of the fifty states. He had approached an Arizona Indian reservation—which wasn’t governed by the same licensing laws as the states—and proposed a fight between Ali and Zora Folley. The closed-circuit rights alone would have been worth millions and would promise a financial cushion for the still-struggling boxer.

“The Indians have suffered at the hands of the white man just like we have,” Ali said, anticipating the fight. “They’re with me.”

He spoke too soon. The Gila River Tribal Council, citing its military and historical heritage, voted to deny the use of the reservation for the fight.

“The reason I oppose having this fight here is that it would desecrate the land some of our brave boys have walked on,” announced Mary Anna Johnson of the Tribal Council, noting that many Gila River Indians had fought bravely for the United States, including Ira Hayes, a Medal of Honor winner as a marine during World War II.

Ali’s legal prospects weren’t looking any better. The case had been submitted to the United States Supreme Court. There, before it would receive a full hearing, a majority of the nine justices would have to agree that an error in law or interpretation was likely to have been a factor in the lower court judgments. If no such majority existed, the decision of the lower court would stand and Ali would immediately go to prison. When the justices convened in closed session in March 1969, only Justice Brennan believed the appeal was compelling enough to grant a writ of certiorari (or approval to hear the case). By an overwhelming eight-to-one margin, Ali’s argument had failed; the boxer appeared to have run out of legal options. When, a week later, the Court released the list of cases it would ponder that spring,
Cassius Marsellus Clay vs. United States of America
would be absent, forcing Ali to turn himself in to serve his five-year term.

The long battle appeared over; Ali, it seemed, had lost his biggest fight. Then, out of the blue, he caught a break. In June 1968, Congress had passed a law legalizing electronic eavesdropping by federal agents with court approval in cases of national security and certain criminal contexts. A byproduct of the bill was that any eavesdropping on other grounds that had taken place before that date was considered illegal. The Justice Department was forced to concede that, indeed, conversations involving Ali had been illegally listened to at least five times before that date. Among the other high-profile cases affected by the decision were convictions against Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, antiwar protester and pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Black Panther H. Rap Brown—each of whom had also been illegally wiretapped.