Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (32 page)

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
attempted 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.