‘My friend Cassius’ had no time for hate
Larry Boeck was a longtime sports journalist who covered Muhammad Ali for years. Boeck died in 1972. Here is an excerpt from a profile he wrote in 1966:
Some people say that my friend Cassius Clay is an arrogant, overbearing young man. They don’t like his Muslim religion, and they don’t like the things the heavyweight champ has said about the war in Vietnam and about his Selective Service status.
They say my friend hates white men.
Well, if he does, he’s colorblind. During a recent visit home to Louisville, he talked about these things. He explained that the vanity he once spouted was “show biz, trickery” — a way to get a shot at the title — the title he is to defend again on Saturday.
The Muslims preach racial segregation; their leader descries white men as “white devils.”
Cassius says, “If total integration would make them happy, the whites as well as the blacks, I would totally integrate. If total separation, every man with his own, would make them happy, I’ll do that.
“Whatever it takes to make people happy, where they won’t be shooting and hiding in the bushes and blowing each other up and killing each other, rioting. But I don’t think total integration can work.”
Here’s what he says about hate: “I treat everybody right. I haven’t done nothing you could find to show I hate nobody. Hate will run you crazy, going around hating everybody. I don’t have time to hate.”
If my friend, whom some people call the Louisville Lip, pays any more than lip service to the “white devil” tenet, it’s news to me. If he does, he ought to find me particularly loathsome, for I once told him that the Muslim campaign to establish a nation of its own merely ducks the civil rights issue. This was about three years ago, shortly after Cassius Clay had defeated Sonny Liston and become champion, Muslim and Muhammad Ali.
“You’re an underrated fighter and you’ll be champion for a long time,” I told Clay then. “As effective as you are in the ring, I feel you’re as equally ineffective out of it because you aren’t fighting for the Negro.”
Clay objected. “My religion teaches our people should be with their own,” he said.
“Then the Muslims simply are sweeping the whole civil rights issue under the rug,” I countered.
“I am fighting!” he said. “I’m fighting for the black man, not the Negro. There ain’t no such thing as Negro. I am a black man, and I am fighting for the black man and his right to own his own land and raise his own food and live his own life with his own people on that land.”
Since then, I have often thought about that conversation, especially now that Clay has pro- voked politicians, writers and certain “patriotic” groups with his ill-timed “I ain’t mad at the Viet Congs” when he was classified 1-A in the draft.
Perhaps Clay should have kept his mouth shut, but to me, that’s hardly the point. Professionally, he has been chased out of the country and must fight abroad because of his remarks. His exercise of free speech has proved mighty costly.
Conversely, when I condemned several Muslim tenets, he did not retaliate. He did not ban me from his fight camps or cold-shoulder me. Indeed, he went out of his way to be helpful. Perhaps Clay is more democratic than some of his detractors.
Unless, as I said, he’s colorblind and hasn’t noticed that I am white and so is Bill Faversham.
When Faversham, onetime adviser for the Louisville Sponsoring Group which got Clay started in the professional ranks, had a severe heart attack, the champion drove all night from Chicago to visit him in a Louisville hospital.
Clay sometimes makes it difficult to peer into this corner of his personality. Yet if this controversial and complex young man is to be understood, his life must be studied.
The champ doesn’t smoke, drink or gamble. He is generous. Having read that he gave a hospital bed to a needy child, I chided him for not having told me about it. It turned out that the story had come from a neighbor’s telephone tip.
Cassius would have preferred that no one “had the story.”