“I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want.”
A legend is born
On 26 February 1964 in Miami, not satisfied with sensationally defeating the fearsome Sonny Liston the previous night to become the youngest world heavyweight champion in history up to then, Cassius Clay has just confirmed to the assembled sportswriters and columnists that the rumours that he is a “card carrying member of the Black Muslims” are true, going on to assert his right to be “free to be what I want” in words that stand as a monument to the defiance of a preternaturally gifted boxer who would go on to make more history than any one man should be able to in three lifetimes never mind one.
With the passing of Muhammad Ali at the age of 74, after a brief battle against a respiratory illness, the world loses one of the last surviving global icons of that most tumultuous of postwar decades, the sixties, a man who along with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Che Gueva
ra, Ben Bella, and Patrice Lummumba stood at the heart of the seismic political, sporting, cultural, and social events that shaped the world thereafter in so many different ways. In this illustrious company, Fidel Castro is now the only one still with us, the last living reminder of a period in history when for a brief moment hope broke free of its chains and rose up against cynicism in a determined effort to win the right to shape the future.
The legend of Muhammad Ali dwarfs the man. It begins on the day that a 12 year old boy visits a local fair in Louisville, Kentucky with a friend one summer’s day in 1954 to take advantage of the free sweets and cakes that are on offer. Whilst there the bicycle his parents just bought him for his birthday gets stolen, leaving him distraught.
Into the picture steps a local police officer by the name of Joe Martin who in his spare time runs a boxing club in the basement of the building in which the fair is being held. Martin’s attention is drawn to this distraught young boy, standing in front of him vowing to “whup” the boy who took his precious bicycle. Martin suggests that he should learn how to fight before thinking about whupping anybody and invites him to attend his boxing gym in order to do so. The legend, as they say, was born. Before leaving this story behind it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to consider the counter factual question of what if it had not been Ali’s bicycle stolen that day but his friend’s?
Growing up in the Deep South, how could Ali not have been shaped by the racial prejudice, oppression, and apartheid Jim Crow laws legitimising segregation that obtained in this part of the world in the 1950s. It was a time when young black men like him were expected to know their place and could expect to suffer if they did not.
The extent to which the young Cassius Clay was impacted by his and his people’s treatment at the hands of a racist white establishment is measured in the racial pride and defiance he’d embraced by the time he came to public prominence. It led him to reject the received truths of his upbringing and attach himself to the Nation of Islam’s synthesis of a bastardised interpretation of Islam and black nationalism. And who better to indoctrinate Cassius with the group’s ideological and religious beliefs than Malcolm X, a legend in his own right who articulated as no other ever has the humiliation and degradation of an oppressed people?
Setting boxing on a new course
In the ring Muhammad Ali was a departure from convention in heavyweight boxing and set the division and, with it, boxing on a new course. Prior to his arrival centre stage heavyweights were typically flat footed, slow handed men with dull minds, throwing heavy ponderous punches and for the most part taking as many as they threw.
In contradistinction, Ali’s style was so outlandish for a fighter his size he was written off by every major boxing writer when he displayed it on a major stage for the first time at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Despite taking the gold in the light heavyweight division none of the boxing intelligentsia present at ringside believed he had enough power to succeed as a pro. He moved around too much, they felt, wasting energy that would inevitably see him run out of steam and wind up getting tagged. Worse, he carried his hands down at his waist when they should be up at his chin.
Ali offended their conservative sensibilities when it came to the noble art. A boxing ring was no place for flamboyance. It was an arena in which those enduring protestant values of honest endeavour and tenacity responsible for making America great were affirmed. Bad enough to witness flamboyance and braggadocio in a heavyweight fighter, but even worse they should come across it in a black heavyweight fighter.
Regardless, there was no denying Ali’s talent. His reflexes, movement, footwork and speed were extraordinary. Carrying his hands at his waist rather than up at his chin in obeisance to conventional wisdow allowed him to bend more freely at the waist, necessary when it came to slipping and pulling back from an opponent’s punches, using his head as bait to draw them before replying with stinging counters.
Married to dazzling footwork, it was a style that disoriented and frustrated every opponent he faced in the early stage of his ring career, rendering him unbeatable.
The most hated man in America and regrets over Malcolm X
The boxer known back then as the ‘Louisville Lip’ also possessed an instinct for self promotion that was ahead of its time and set the bar for future generations of hungry young contenders and champions looking to become household names. Before long he was a household name around the world, regaling the permanently huge pack of sportswriters that followed him wherever he went with a constant stream of kitsch poetry, wild predictions, and insults directed at his opponents. The staid sport of boxing had never seen anything like it. Neither had a country in which black sportsmen had become accustomed to behaving in a manner designed to ingratiate them with white America – non-threatening and passive.
Quick on the heels of Ali’s public announcement that he was a member of the Nation of Islam came the announcement that he would no longer answer to the slave name Cassius Clay and that his new name was Muhammad Ali, a name bestowed on him by Elijah Muhammad as a ploy to secure the world champion’s allegiance in his feud with former lead disciple Malcolm X. The ploy worked. Ali accepted the name and rejected Malcolm. It was a decision he would later regret while reflecting on it decades later. “I might never have become a Muslim if it hadn’t been for Malcolm,” Ali said. “If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him.”
Back then and overnight Ali found himself the most hated man in America. The country’s leading sportswriters lined up to heap scorn on him in their columns, reflecting popular sentiment in which Ali was disdained as an “uppity nigger”. Yet while his refusal to toe the line in the tradition of black athletes and celebrities may have earned him the enmity of many, it also earned him admiration – particularly among poor blacks – a demographic whose need for a hero had just been met with his arrival in their midst.
Here after all was a black man telling the white establishment that not only were blacks the equal of whites, they were better, and doing so years before the anti Vietnam War movement, civil rights movement, and black nationalist movements combined to produce a wave of radicalisation such as America had never experienced.
Indeed, given the extent of his defiance in the early to mid sixties it is astounding that Ali survived while the likes of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
His attachment to the doctrine of black separation and black pride as a member of the Nation of Islam was an especially bitter pill to swallow for liberal America, which had swung behind Martin Luther King and his espousal of non violent civil disobedience in service to the cause of integration.
Vietnam
Ali’s place in history not only as a boxer but as a lightening rod for the cause of oppressed people everywhere was assured in 1967 when he refused to step forward to be inducted into the US armed forces. As he said when first notified that his draft status had been changed and he was now deemed eligible, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
This short and simple statement succeeded in invoking outrage and inspiration in equal part. In it was contained a lucid analysis of the underlying contradiction of a war being waged overseas against a poor people with dark skin by a disproportionate number of soldiers from poor backgrounds with dark skin, young men who did not enjoy equal rights in the society that was sending them to kill and die on its behalf.
The moral courage Ali displayed in refusing to be drafted remains immeasurable. Defying his own government and the nation’s political, legal, and military establishment left him isolated, especially at a time when a majority of Americans still supported the war and viewed his refusal to be drafted as an insult to the thousands of patriotic young men who had answered the call and were fighting and dying for their country. As the sportswriter Harold Conrad said: “Overnight he became a ‘nigger’ again. He threw his life away on one toss of the dice for something he believed in. Not many folks do that.”
Conrad aside, the sentiments expressed by most of the country’s leading sportswriters were scathing at best. Here for example was Milton Gross: “As a fighter, Cassius is good”, he wrote. “As a man, he cannot compare to some of the kids slogging through the rice paddies where the names are stranger than Muhammad Ali."
At this point Ali’s future appeared bleak - stripped of his title, he faced penury and five years in prison for draft evasion. And yet still he never wavered in his stance and continued to face the potential consequences of his actions with unrelenting dignity and defiance.
It was now that Ali’s opposition to the war in Vietnam was taken up by Martin Luther King, who in fastening onto the link between the racial oppression of poor blacks at home with America’s racist war against poor Vietnamese peasants overseas to reveal a political consciousness that was leading him towards class struggle and away from liberalism.
Around this time, Ali joined King at a protest in support of housing rights while on a visit to Louisville, his home town. Addressing the crowd, Ali said: “I came to Louisville because I could not remain silent while my own people, many I grew up with, many I went to school with, many my blood relatives, were being beaten, stomped and kicked in the streets simply because they want freedom and justice and equality in housing.”
Over the next three years, the now former heavyweight champion spent his time and what was left of his money locked in a legal battle to stay out of prison. Forced to surrender his passport, he was unable to leave the country to try and make a living fighting elsewhere. His enforced exile from boxing meant that his options when it came to earning money were limited to speaking engagements at college campuses.
At one such engagement in 1968 he addressed the mainly white audience of college students thus: “I’m expected to go overseas to help free people in South Vietnam and at the same time my people here are being brutalized. Hell no! I would say to those of you who think I have lost so much, I have gained everything. I have peace of heart; I have a clear, free conscience. And I am proud. I wake up happy, I go to bed happy, and if I go to jail I’ll go to jail happy.”
Few people – whether friends, associates, or members of the Nation of Islam – helped Ali while he was exiled with legal proceedings hanging over him. One man who did help him was Joe Frazier.
Frazier had won the vacant heavyweight title after it was stripped from Ali in 1967. Now he helped him with money and with various publicity stunts designed to keep Ali in the public eye, hyping up a future fight between them and lending his voice to those calling for the former champ to be allowed to return to the ring.
Return to the ring
By 1970 mainstream political and social attitudes towards the war in Vietnam had undergone a transformation. As a consequence of the resolve of the Vietnamese people, who refused to be defeated, a domestic antiwar movement that had grown exponentially, and images of the war broadcast on the nightly news that shocked more and more people with the devastation that was being visited on a poor Third World country, the war had become so unpopular it was now an albatross round the neck of the Nixon administration.
It also produced a sea change in the popular perception of Ali in the eyes of many who’d once excoriated him for refusing to be inducted. Whereas before he was widely viewed as a draft dodging traitor, now he was feted as a man of fierce principle whose stance had been both honourable and brave. Sympathetic and influential voices began calling for him to be allowed to return to the ring. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft evasion in 1970 and his first comeback fight was scheduled to take place in Atlanta just a couple of months later against top heavyweight contender Jerry Quarry.
Atlanta was the home town of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and with a large black population and a long history of racist oppression, it was a fitting location for Ali’s comeback. Even the opposition of Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox, who attempted to have the US Justice Department block the fight, was unsuccessful. The city’s black elite had the necessary clout to have the city license the bout, buoyed by the prevailing national mood of sympathy with Ali and his stand against the war.
The excitement surrounding Ali’s return to the ring after three and half years of involuntary exile was like nothing ever seen in sport. A sold out arena and millions more at home were witness to a fight that was more akin to the national celebration and vindication of a man who three and a half years previously was facing personal ruin on a point of principle. Ali’s wheel of fortune had turned 180 degrees. Now all he had to do was prove he was still the best heavyweight on the planet and his redemption would be complete.
The burning question for sportswriters, commentators, and boxing fans was a simple one: Would the fighter who steps into the ring against Quarry after an absence of three and a half years be anything like the fighter who once electrified the sport? Quarry was a top contender and in deciding to face him in his comeback fight Ali was throwing himself in at the deep end. His years of inactivity were immediately apparent when he de-robed to reveal an increased girth.
They were confirmed after the opening bell with footwork that was markedly slower and timing that was off kilter. This was not the Ali who once devastated opponents with blinding speed and uncanny reflexes. That lithe, gangling freak of nature now appeared mortal. He still possessed his lightning whip of a jab, however, and though no longer able to step away from trouble, he compensated by tying his opponent up in clinches. The fight was stopped at the end of the third due to a cut above Quarry’s eye, but there was no denying that the win flattered Ali. He was beatable now.
A ring-style that involved holding his chin high and his right hand down by his waist, combined with a tendency to move back in straight lines, especially when he was tired, meant that Ali had always been susceptible to a left hook. Both Sonny Banks and Henry Cooper had succeeded in flooring him with the left hook during the first half of his career, when his ability to dance and move meant that most of his opponents struggled to lay a glove on him.
His lack of movement evident in a fighter who’d missed his peak due to the three and a half years he was banned from the ring, years in which his reflexes and speed had diminished, meant that he was vulnerable, available to be hit with alarming frequency by the kind of opposition that would never have troubled him previously. More significantly, for the first time Ali learned that he could take a punch - perhaps more than any fighter before or since. This realisation would prove fateful going forward into the toughest period of his career against some of the best heavyweights boxing has produced.
Rivalry with Joe Frazier
None more so in this regard was Joe Frazier. Coming in low while constantly moving his head to avoid his opponents’ punches, and with a left hook that remains one of the best in the history of the game, Frazier had the style to defeat Ali, who in turn had the style to defeat him.
The result was a trilogy of fights that rank as among the most pitiless and brutal ever seen.
The first was held at Madison Square Garden in March 1971. Dubbed the Fight of the Century, it more than matched the hype surrounding it.
Turning up at ringside by the dozen were the nation’s celebrities. Frank Sinatra filled the role of official photographer while Burt Lancaster was enlisted to help with the television commentary.
After a merciless fifteen rounds, Frazier won by unanimous decision to hand Ali the first defeat of his career. The fight was notable for the vicious left hook which Frazier landed in the last round to put Ali down on the canvas. Even more notable was the way Ali got back up within seconds of going down.
Flawed as well as great
It would be foolish not to mention dishonest and a great disservice to his legacy to try and beatify Ali as a saint when he was not. On the contrary he was all too human, flawed as well as great, a man who at various points revealed a capacity for cruelty and vindictiveness.
The manner in which he punished Ernie Terrell and Floyd Paterson in the ring for daring to call him Cassius Clay rather than Muhammad Ali have often been cited as proof of this dark side to his character. But given Ali’s political and racial consciousness, it could well be argued that by insisting on calling him by his slave name both Terrell and Paterson crossed a line and deserved the hiding they received from a fighter who by then had transcended the sport to become a symbol of resistance to the oppression of his people.
Setting those two aside, Ali is most vilified over his treatment of Joe Frazier prior to the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, the climactic and most famous fight of the trilogy they fought.
In the lead-up Ali mercilessly ridiculed, humiliated, and verbally assaulted his opponent, a man who as mentioned had helped him at a time when he stood alone as friends and former allies and supporters deserted him. In his brutal treatment of Frazier there was none of the tongue-in-cheek humour of his usual prefight antics. Ali berated him as an Uncle Tom at every opportunity, at one point even producing a toy gorilla, which he named Joe, which he punched and taunted in front of the world’s press. He described Frazier as the “white man’s champion” even though the fact that he grew up the son of a sharecropper in South Carolina, Joe Frazier’s upbringing and background made Ali’s appear aristocratic by comparison.
That being said, there is little known fact about Frazier that serves to place Ali’s treatment of him prior to their second fight into a more fitting context.
Soon after he defeated Ali and took his title in 1971, Frazier accepted an invitation to speak in front of his home state’s legislature in South Carolina. It saw him address 170 elected members of South Carolina’s political class in front of the Confederate flag, which back then still hung proud of place in the legislature’s chamber.
The irony is that neither man would have achieved the greatness they did in the ring without the other. Perhaps Ali’s need to humiliate Frazier was also a reflection of the extent to which he feared him. For there is no doubt that Smokin’ Joe was Ali’s toughest opponent, the only man he fought and described afterwards as the closest thing to death he ever experienced.
The Rumble in the Jungle
There are so many epic contests in the ring involving Muhammad Ali that it is hard to pick one out from the rest. His first fight against Sonny Liston, already mentioned, is up there, as is the Cleveland Williams fight in 1966 in which his movement in the opening round was so unreal and sublime that Williams failed to land a single punch. We also have the first and third Frazier fights; the inhuman courage he displayed in his fight against Ken Norton in 1971, ten rounds of which he fought with a broken jaw. The list goes on.
However no retrospective of Ali’s career could ever be complete without the Rumble in the Jungle, when in 1974 at the age of 36 he challenged a young, hungry, and fearsome George Foreman for his world title.
Foreman had previously knocked out Joe Frazier and Ken Norton in just one or two rounds and nobody gave Ali a prayer against him, including members of his own team. The logic seemed indisputable – Foreman had demolished Frazier and Norton, who had both defeated Ali. Surely, then, Ali was facing certain defeat. Worse, given Foreman’s awesome size and power, surely he was in danger of being seriously hurt.
Ali had long wanted to fight in Africa - to “come home” as he put it. And in the run up to the Foreman fight in Zaire, recorded for posterity in the award winning documentary When We Were Kings, Ali spared no opportunity to revel in the adulation he received in the impoverished African country. Zaire at the time was ruled by one of the most despotic and cruel dictators the developing world has ever seen in the person of Joseph Mobutu.
In 1960, as head of the army, Mobutu had toppled the left wing and pan-Africanist leader of the former Belgian colony, Patrice Lumumba, in a CIA-orchestrated coup, during which Lumumba was murdered. Mobutu was made army chief of staff by the new president, Moise Tshombe, before seizing the presidency for himself in a second coup in 1965.
Thereafter Mobutu ruled the newly created republic of Zaire with an iron fist, wherein torture, murder, and the ruthless suppression of dissent prevailed as he treated the country and its wealth as his personal possession. His motivation in staging the Rumble in the Jungle, spending millions of dollars for the privilege while millions of his people were mired in abject poverty, was to try and paint his regime in a positive light to a largely disinterested global media.
Rather than “coming home” to Africa the soon-to-be two-time heavyweight champion was inadvertently helping to recognise a ruthless US backed dictatorship.
As to the fight itself, by calling on the deep reserves of self belief that made him the unique and towering figure he was, Ali unveiled his now famous Rope-a-Dope, a tactic designed to absorb Foreman’s venom on the ropes for the best part of seven rounds, before exploding off them in the eighth to knock out him out after the younger man had punched himself out.
Never mind just boxing, the world of sport had never seen anything like it and it was entirely fitting that Ali’s greatest ever victory was witnessed by millions around the world via live telecast.
Years of physical decline
The years of Ali’s physical decline were a sad bookend to his extraordinary life. The onset of Parkinson’s was the steep price he paid for the years of glory, magic, and inspiration he gave the world. As with many fighters, the champ was unable to master himself when it came to to stepping away from the ring and the limelight. It didn’t help that he had many mouths to feed in the form of a large entourage, most of whom took far more than they ever gave.
His most public appearance in the third act of his life came at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, when he lit the Olympic torch. Standing there in the world’s glare struggling to control his shaking limbs, the circle had closed. From charismatic and precocious boxer to black rebel and symbol of pride to his people and oppressed people everywhere, Ali had morphed into a benign figure embraced by the very establishment that once reviled him.
No matter, his life was the story of a people struggling for a sense of itself during one of the most convulsive periods in America’s history. Ali was a product of that history. It shaped him and he in turn helped shape it.
The lion that roared
Muhammad Ali lived with joy, defiance, courage, and poetry in equal measure. This is what made him so unique and one of the truly towering figures of his time. He refused to bow when bowing was the default position of his people and he spent his best years defying the odds in and out of the ring. As he said after winning the heavyweight title for the first time against Sonny Liston as a precocious 22 year old: “I shook up the world. I shook up the world!”
His greatness is not and will never be truly defined by any of the titles he won or the fame he achieved. It is and will always be defined by his willingness to endure inhuman levels of adversity for principles and beliefs that marked him out as a threat to an unjust status quo.
Muhammad Ali was much more than one of the greatest heavyweight boxers and world champions in ring history. Far more enduring will be his legacy as a champion of an oppressed people who spoke truth to power as few ever have or dared.
He truly was the lion that roared.
End.
