THE FALL AND RISE OF ALI
It was a sad sight: Stripped of his crown, the former heavyweight champion of the world was reduced to making a paid appearance at a boat show in his hometown of Louisville. “I am not allowed to work in America, and I’m not allowed to leave America,” Muhammad Ali said in February 1968 at the start of his first full year of exile from boxing. “I’m just about broke.”
Married a year and his first child on the way, Ali was so desperate that his manager tried to arrange a bout in Arizona on an Indian reservation — outside the reach of state boxing commissions that wouldn’t let him fight. The Pima tribe rejected the proposal, saying it would defile the memory of Indian veterans who had fought for their country.
The previous April, Ali had declared himself a conscientious objector and refused induction into the U.S. Army, famously saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
By 1968, 19,560 Americans had died in the Vietnam War, and an additional 16,502 would die that year alone. It was the year the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army mounted the Tet Offensive, an ambitious campaign that helped convince the American public that the war wasn’t going as well as the generals and politicians had led them to believe.
The war was escalating, as was
opposition to it. A few weeks before Ali said no to his draft board, Martin Luther King Jr. had denounced the war. He later quoted Ali in support of his position: “As Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all — black and brown and poor — victims of the same system of oppression.”
Ali was already one of America’s greatest heavyweights. He’d won an Olympic gold medal for the USA in Rome when he was 18, and four years later, against all odds, he defeated Sonny Liston to win his first title as world champion.
In an era when most fighters let their managers do the talking, Ali thrived in the spotlight. He was the master of “rhyming prediction and derision,” biographer David Remnick wrote. He was “the greatest,” as he proclaimed himself, not just for his skills in the ring but for talking trash — and doing it in verse.
It wasn’t just what he said but how he said it, poet Maya Angelou put it.
“‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ — I mean, as a poet, I like that,” she once said. “If he hadn’t put his name on it, I might have chosen to use that.”
‘Boxing gave him his sense of self ’
Ali paid the price for refusing to serve. Convicted of violating selective service laws and sentenced to five years in prison, he was free on bail. His passport was taken away, along with his ability to make a living.
With his characteristic bluster, he insisted he didn’t ache for the money or the ring. Asked whether he missed being heavyweight champion, he deadpanned, “No, they miss me.”
Sportswriter Dave Kindred, who interviewed Ali at the boat show for the
Courier-Journal, wrote that the more Ali talked about not missing the ring, the more you realized he did.
“It was his identity,” Kindred said. “Boxing gave him his sense of self.”
“He could get moody and down,” recalled New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, who traveled with Ali in 1968. Without boxing, Lipsyte said, Ali was often alone — and he was “not a guy who liked to be alone.”
In the decades to come, his country and the world would come to embrace him as an ambassador of peace and goodwill. After his death in 2016, his legacy grew larger still.
So it is easy to forget that 50 years ago, in the tumult of 1968, Ali didn’t know how things would turn out or whether he’d ever fight again, said Bill Siegel, whose 2013 film, The Trials of
Muhammad Ali, documented Ali’s four years away from the ring.
Ali “was willing to sacrifice everything on principle,” Siegel said.
Ali cited religious reasons for refusing induction, specifically the Quran’s ban on Muslims fighting Christian wars, but his objection was far broader.
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother or some darker people or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” he said. “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people?”
It was a humbling year for Ali. Popular black athletes such as Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis denounced him. Time magazine called him “Gaseous Cassius,” a reference to what he called his slave name, Cassius Clay.
In Chicago, where he spent much of his banishment, Mayor Richard Daley refused to call him by his Muslim name, and Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner called him “unpatriotic.”
On British television, famed talk show host David Susskind excoriated Ali as “a disgrace to his country, his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession.” Ali, Susskind said, was a “simplistic pawn and a fool.”
To pay the bills and help support his wife, Khalilah, and their child, Ali embarked on a college speaking tour, earning pennies on the dollar compared with his time in the ring. His first lecture, at Philadelphia’s Temple University, paid $1,000. The next, at Cheney State College in Pennsylvania, half that.
He ended his appearance at Union College in New York with a poem: “I like your school and admire your style, but your pay is so small, I won’t be back for a while.”
At first he was a terrible speaker, Lipsyte and others recalled. He spewed religious dogma from the Nation of Islam, which he had joined four years earlier, regurgitating the words of its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
At the University of Wisconsin, students booed when he denounced interracial marriage as “a trick to keep us with the white man,” as they did the next day in San Francisco when he complained about the marijuana smell wafting from the crowd and insisted no “intelligent so-called Negro would allow his daughter to marry a white man.”
He distanced himself from the civil rights movement.
“I don’t say we shall overcome,” he said, “because I done overcame.”
Ali’s speeches got better. He warmed to the crowds, and they to him. Lipsyte said Ali, though poorly educated, was a quick study. “He had a real intellectual growth spurt,” Lipsyte said.
Ali developed his own consciousness, moving away from Nation of Islam orthodoxy. He delivered lengthy soliloquies on his objection to the war and his experience with racism in America.
Verbally sparring with students forced him to become an independent thinker, said Kindred, who wrote Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, Fateful
Friendship, a dual biography of Ali and sportscaster Howard Cosell.
‘You have to admire his courage’
As the anti-war movement grew, Ali became a hero. “Anti-war activists didn’t care what he said about Elijah or the Nation, they cared only that the most famous man on Earth shared their opposition to that war,” Kindred said.
Ali helped move black radicalism into the mainstream, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote.
He forged an unlikely alliance with King, who on the face of it had no grounds for common cause or friendship. The Nation of Islam bitterly opposed integration.
King, hoping Ali’s story would inspire others to refuse to serve in the war, singled out the boxer for praise in a sermon.
“He is giving up his fame,” King said. “He is giving up millions of dollars in order to stand for what his conscience tells him is right. No matter what you think of his religion, you have to admire his courage.”
In May 1968, a federal appeals court affirmed Ali’s conviction, saying, “Clay had been fairly accorded due process of law, without discrimination.”
Ali’s popularity was soaring, and he knew it. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a black man on a bicycle spotted Ali and thrust out his hand, Lipsyte wrote in a column. “Let me shake the hand of the only real heavyweight champion of the world,” the man said.
Ali was overjoyed.
“They made me bigger by taking my title,” he told Lipsyte. “Before, that chap on the street couldn’t identify with me. He’d say, ‘You not with me, you up on the hill with whitey.’
“There are only two kinds of men,” Ali continued, “those who compromise and those who take a stand.”
Ali told Pacifica Radio he was “proud to say that I am the first man in the history of all America, athlete and entertainer-wise, who gave up all the white man’s money, looked the white man in the eye, and told him the truth, and stayed with his people.”
Ali influenced other black athletes, as dramatically seen at the 1968 Summer Olympics when medalists John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in the Black Power salute Smith called an endorsement of all human rights.
Striding down West 52nd Street in New York in October 1968, Ali hummed a song in the cold evening air, walking with the “bright swagger of a champion,” Pete Hamill wrote in LIFE magazine. “People stepped out of a steak house to watch him go by. Auto horns beeped in salute. A middle-aged lady asked him to autograph her newspaper.
“Look at me,” Ali said softly. “Bigger than boxing. As big as all history.”
While his Supreme Court appeal was pending, Ali’s promoter arranged a fight in Georgia, which had no state boxing commission. Despite the objections of segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, Ali took on Jerry Quarry in Atlanta on Oct. 26, 1970, and beat him in the third round.
His lawyers won a court order forcing the New York State Athletic Commission to let him fight. The following March he lost the 15-round “Fight of the Century” to Joe Frazier.
On June 28, 1971, he won his biggest victory: The Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction, saying his draft board failed to specify why his conscientious objector application was denied. Throughout the war, Selective Service granted more than 170,000 men C.O. status.
Ali twice reclaimed his heavyweight championship — and the heart of the country. In 2005, wracked by Parkinson’s, his hands shaking, he accepted the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, at the White House.
“The American people,” said President George W. Bush, “are proud to call Muhammad Ali one of our own.”
“Anti-war activists didn’t care what he said about Elijah or the Nation, they cared only that the most famous man on Earth shared their opposition to that war.” Sportswriter Dave Kindred