Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (38 page)

Hardly a pundit in Zaire that night in 1974 believed an aging Ali could overcome the overwhelming odds. But cunning triumphed over clout and in the eighth round Foreman went crashing to the canvas. Muhammad Ali had reclaimed the heavyweight championship, seven years and four months after it was stripped from him. It was a feat that his forbears Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were never able to accomplish.

But it was more than a boxing title he won that night. Suddenly, a nation that reviled him only a few years earlier signaled that all was forgiven. The first sign of the changing attitude came when
Ring
magazine bestowed on Ali the “Fighter of the Year” designation it had refused him in 1967 because he set a bad example for American youth.

Then, a little more than seven years after he received a letter from President Johnson ordering him to report for induction, Ali received a different kind of White House invitation. Gerald Ford beckoned the redeemed champion to the Oval Office in what was billed as a great gesture of reconciliation after the trauma of Vietnam and Watergate.

It was more likely a cynical Republican ploy to court black voters. Years later, Ford explained to Thomas Hauser why he issued the invitation. “When I took office, we as a nation were pretty much torn apart. There were conflicts between families, in colleges, and on the streets. We’d gone through some serious race problems; the Vietnam War had heightened differences; and of course there was the heritage of Watergate. And one of the major challenges my administration faced was how we could heal the country. Not that everybody had to agree, but at least we should lower our voices and listen to one another and having Muhammad Ali come to the Oval Office was part of our overall effort… and he was a man of principle. I know there were some who thought he evaded his military responsibility, but I’ve never questioned anybody’s dedication to whatever religion they believe in. I give people the maximum benefit of the doubt when they take a stand predicated on conscience. That’s always been my philosophy, so I never joined the critics who complained about what he did and didn’t do during the Vietnam War. I accepted his decision.”

Ford, who served in Congress during Ali’s exile period, may not have publicly joined the critics who denounced the champion’s induction refusal, but the record shows he never used his influential moral platform to support the boxer’s stand or praise him as “a man of principle.” In the years to come, many people would attempt to jump on the bandwagon of Ali’s growing popularity by retroactively supporting his stand. But despite their historical revisionism, at the time Ali desperately needed these people’s support, only a handful were there.

For Ali, a decade of pariah status had taken its toll and in his typically generous way he welcomed the new acceptance. But some of his supporters were not so forgiving.

“When Ali came back from exile,” recalled Jim Brown, “he became the darling of America, which was good for America because it brought black and white together. But the Ali that America ended up loving was not the Ali I loved most. I didn’t feel the same about him anymore, because the warrior I loved was gone. In a way, he became part of the establishment. And I suppose, in a sense, there’s nothing wrong with that, because if you can come to a point where you make all people feel good, maybe that’s greater than being a fighter for black people, but I didn’t like it.”

But Ali’s longtime defender, columnist Jerry Izenberg, has a different view of the boxer’s new social acceptability. “It wasn’t that Ali changed,” he explains. “He was the same as he always was. It was the rest of America that changed. The country went through Watergate and Vietnam and the turbulence of the ‘60s and it had a profound impact. Ali kept preaching the same message but now America could listen to it without going through convulsions.”

Indeed, as the resurrected boxer continued to rack up victories in the ring—including two magnificent triumphs over Joe Frazier to avenge his first defeat—the money rolled in and Ali vowed to use his earnings to fund his dream of black economic justice. But one thing hadn’t changed.

“After the Foreman fight,” recalls Gene Dibble, “there were millions of dollars pouring in, huge sums of money, more from one fight than Ali had made in his entire career. He was very excited about using the money in the ghettoes for community economic development to eliminate poverty. These lawyers took the money to invest and start a foundation in Chicago. Next thing you knew, the money was gone. It was the same old story.”

When he wasn’t being robbed blind by those around him, says Dibble, he was giving his money away. “I remember one night I got a call from Ali, who was in New York. He had been watching the local news and he saw a report about this Jewish senior citizens’ community center in the Bronx which served Holocaust survivors. They were about to shut down because they owed $100,000. Ali had called them and said he was sending a check over to bail them out. Trouble is that, as usual, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. He wanted me to figure out where he was going to get the money he had promised them. I called a friend at the Chase Manhattan Bank and arranged a loan against Ali’s next fight purse. The center was saved.”

On February 25, 1975, the association that had brought Ali spiritual meaning and sense at the same time as it caused him terrestrial grief and ostracism came to an end with the death of Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam didn’t disappear with its guiding light and leader, but it did fracture—and Ali chose to follow its most moderate faction. This decision made the boxer that much more palatable to mainstream society.

The Messenger’s son Wallace Muhammad immediately took the movement in a new direction. Wallace, who was at one time a close friend of Malcolm X, had been suspended from the Nation by his father several times for questioning Nation doctrine and had a very different philosophy. His first action was to change the name from the Nation of Islam to the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. He resurrected the memory of Malcolm and stressed his positive contributions. But most significantly, he de-emphasized racial issues and aligned the movement to traditional orthodox Islam, announcing the new organization would accept people of all races for membership.

Many militant members of the Nation were infuriated by the shift in direction. But Ali immediately embraced the changes, declaring on the CBS news show
Face the Nation
that it was necessary for Elijah Muhammad to speak of white devils because during much of the first half of the twentieth century, black Americans were “castrated; lynched; deprived of freedom, justice, equality; raped.” But as the result of the improved racial conditions in society, “Wallace Muhammad is on time. He’s teaching us it’s not the color of the physical body that makes a man a devil. God looks at our minds and our actions and our deeds.”

In fact, the new philosophy closely reflected what Ali had believed and preached from the beginning, and what Malcolm X espoused during the last year of his life.

But despite Ali’s endorsement, not everybody accepted the new ways. Louis X changed his name to Louis Farrakhan and led a breakaway movement of followers who refused to reject the old teachings.

To this day, Farrakhan’s movement continues to thrive in America’s inner cities, combining Elijah Muhammad’s philosophy of economic self-help and racial pride with a fanatical anti-semitism much stronger than anything heard under the Messenger’s regime. “Hitler was a great man,” Farrakhan said on one occasion, before claiming to have been quoted out of context. On another, he declared: “The Jews are responsible for the majority of wickedness in the world.”

At first, Ali was silent about Farrakhan’s leadership. But after a particularly anti-semitic outburst was reported in the media, Ali declared, “What he teaches is not at all what we believe in. We say he represents the time of our struggle in the dark and a time of confusion in us and we don’t want to be associated with that at all.”

As his boxing skills waned, many of Ali’s friends and supporters urged him to retire while he was on top. But for the vultures and hangers-on, this would have meant the elimination of their cash cow. Each time the aging boxer publicly contemplated retirement, he was convinced to put on the gloves “one more time.”

After losing to a journeyman boxer named Leon Spinks, in 1978 he became the first three-time heavyweight champion by winning the rematch seven months later, insisting Spinks had merely “borrowed” his title. The Spinks defeat wasn’t humiliation enough and, like a parody of the fighter who doesn’t know when to quit, Ali left retirement and returned to the ring twice more to put on ever-sadder spectacles and enrich the parasites in his entourage.

Almost as disturbing to his old friends was his brief political flirtation with Ronald Reagan, the man who did more to set back the cause of civil rights than any other politician. To the chagrin of the black community, Ali endorsed Reagan for President in 1980, citing the right-wing candidate’s promise to restore prayer to public schools. He later blamed this decision on “bad advice.”

In September 1984, Ali checked into the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York for a series of routine diagnostic tests, complaining of slurred speech and trembling hands. A week later, the results were released. Ali was suffering mild symptoms of Parkinson’s Syndrome, an ailment which is
not
the same as the degenerative, and more serious, Parkinson’s Disease.

Even more significant than what the test diagnosed is what it ruled out. The supervising physician, Dr. Stanley Fahn, declared, “Ali does not suffer from dementia pugilistica, commonly referred to as ‘punch-drunkenness.’ Ali’s mind is impressively alert and well-oriented.”

This diagnosis is especially significant because, in the ensuing years, the myth that Ali’s condition is related to the punishment he suffered in the ring during his later career has been widely accepted. In public appearances, his trembling hands and slurred speech—which has become more pronounced over the years—has caused the once spell-bindingly articulate and expressive man to be portrayed as a tragic figure, suffering from brain damage—a prisoner inside his own body.

In fact, anybody spending more than a few minutes with him today soon discovers Ali’s mind is completely intact. His quick wit and practical jokes are still there and apparent to anybody who takes the time to listen to his slowed speech, muted to a near whisper. Parkinson’s Syndrome, in fact, can be controlled by medication but Ali is often reluctant to take chemical substances and it is often a losing battle to get him to take his medicine.

Despite the self-righteous tones of those who use Ali’s condition to call for a ban on boxing, significant scientific evidence has emerged in recent years that his Parkinson’s Syndrome was caused not by too many blows in the ring, but by too much exposure to pesticides. During the last decade of his career, Ali trained in a complex at Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Each of the buildings was made of wood, which neccessitated liberal coatings of a chemical pesticide to keep away termites. A number of medical studies have linked this and other pesticides to Parkinson’s, although there is still an ongoing debate in the scientific community, and boxing certainly hasn’t been ruled out as the cause of his condition.

In 1975, sportswriter Gary Wills contemptuously downplayed Ali’s social and political significance, arguing that his only contribution to society came from his boxing skills. “For some reason, people don’t want fighters just to be fighters,” he wrote. “They have to stand for an era, for the color of hope, for a metaphysics of spirit. … Ali will be a celebrity as long as he lives—like the Duke of Windsor. But he only
rules
from the ring. He has nothing, really, to say, except with his fists.”

After he retired once and for all in 1981, however, Ali proved just how wrong Wills was. Rather than rest or reflect on past glories, the former champion turned his energies full-time to a crusade that had been a life-long passion—social justice.

Perhaps the best evidence of Ali’s continued energy, in spite of his disability, is the fact that he still spends more than two hundred days a year on the road as a roving ambassador for human rights.

For a man who is afraid to fly, his travel itinerary is impressive. During the past decade, he has visited more than fifty countries, crusading against world poverty and oppression. His latest passion is the Jubilee 2000 campaign—an international movement to cancel Third World debt. His access to world leaders makes him an especially effective advocate, a fact proven in 1998 when he convinced British Prime Minister Tony Blair to support the movement. Both Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro have called Ali their “hero.”

Polls continue to show Ali is the most recognized and admired man in the world and huge crowds assemble wherever he travels, giving him a continued platform for his message of tolerance and economic development.

In the introduction to his 1998 book,
The Muhammad Ali Reader,
Gerald Early attempts to deflate the significance of Ali’s induction refusal, arguing “Ali cannot be taken seriously as a Martyr.” He points out that other athletes such as Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Ted Williams and others lost several years of their athletic prime serving in the Armed Forces during their careers. “No one seems to think this was tragic,” he complains, noting Ali didn’t end up paying a price for his dissent.

Early, who condescendingly writes that Ali hadn’t a single idea in his head, clearly misses the point and fails to acknowledge that Ali was fully prepared to pay a harsh price by going to prison for his beliefs.

Activist Dick Gregory’s assessment seems closer to the mark.

“I don’t know of anyone who’s had as great an impact on people as Ali. Not just black people; not just Muslims….He got our attention; he made us listen. And then he grew within people who weren’t even aware he was there. Whatever the Universal God Force meant for him to do, it’s out of the bottle, and it isn’t ever going back. Ali is inside all us now, and because of him, no future generation will ever be the same.”