Blood Brothers (41 page)

After Ali returned from Africa, reporters and businessmen learned that if they wanted to meet with him privately, they had to see Herbert Muhammad. Herbert controlled everything. Following his father's orders, he began promoting Ali as a righteous and devoted follower of the Messenger, turning
Muhammad Speaks
into a photo album of the heavyweight champion. Inside the Nation's newspaper, readers found pictures of Ali learning from Elijah, meeting Nkrumah, shaking hands with Nasser, and playing with black children. Herbert also created opportunities for the Nation to profit from Ali's likeness. For only two dollars, kids could join the Muhammad Ali International Fan Club and receive a personally autographed photo of the champ, wallet-size membership card, membership button, and newsletter.
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As a famous black athlete, Ali proved invaluable to the Nation of Islam. Jeremiah X recalled, “People wanted to hear what he had to say, so his visibility and prominence were of great benefit to the Nation. His voice carried throughout the world, and that was a true blessing for us.”
Ali's appearances at Muslim rallies, even the possibility that he
might
appear, enticed blacks to attend the Nation's meetings. “There's no doubt,” Jeremiah said, “our following increased enormously, maybe a hundred percent, after he joined the Nation. When he went to a temple, there were overflowing crowds.”
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With Malcolm out of the picture, Ali became the Nation's most visible symbol of redemption. Like Malcolm once did, he exaggerated how the Nation's moral code transformed him, crediting Elijah Muhammad for purifying his soul. “Well, before I became a Muslim, I used to drink,” he said disingenuously. “Yes, I did. The truth is the truth. And after I fought and beat somebody I didn't hardly go anywhere without two big, pretty women beside me.” People would be stunned to learn how much he had changed after becoming a Muslim, he said. Being a Muslim gave him the strength to resist sinful temptations, especially with so many women throwing themselves at him. “All types of women—white women, too—make passes at me. Girls find out where I live and knock at the door at one and two in the morning. They send me their pictures and phone numbers, saying, ‘Please, just telephone me.'”
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A few weeks after Ali returned from Africa, Herbert introduced him to Sonji Roi, a beautiful cocktail waitress who spent her evenings socializing at Chicago nightclubs. During the daytime, she answered phones for Herbert at the office of
Muhammad Speaks
and occasionally posed for pictures at his photography studio. She had lived a hard life, losing both parents before she was nine years old. When she was a teenager, Sonji became pregnant, dropped out of school, and began working to support her baby. On the night she met Ali, he asked her to marry him. Stunned at his proposal, Herbert warned him that he was making a terrible mistake. Ali did not realize that Herbert had arranged for him to meet Sonji only for a night of fun. Herbert simply wanted her to show the champ a good time. “Man, you don't marry this girl,” he said. “She works at a cocktail place wearing one of those little bunny things on her behind. You don't marry no girl like this.”
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The Louisville Sponsoring Group had reached the same conclusion. When they discovered that Ali had become involved with Sonji, they conducted their own investigation and compiled a dossier. They discovered police reports charging her with solicitation. Although the group
followed a policy of never interfering with Ali's personal life, they harbored deep reservations about his relationship with Sonji, doubting the wisdom of his marrying her.
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But Ali did not care that she was not a Muslim. He wanted her, and that's all that mattered. On August 14, forty-one days after they met, Ali and Sonji wed in a private ceremony in Gary, Indiana. He made it clear that he expected her to be a submissive wife who obeyed his rules and the Nation's. The only reason he married her, he said later, was “because she agreed to do everything that I wanted her to do.” He told her that she could no longer wear makeup or short skirts. She had to quit drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and eating pork. Sonji complied, accepting the Nation's religious code. When they were alone, Ali revealed his affectionate side, singing her love songs and blowing her kisses. Gradually, though, friction developed between them. When Ali explained that they could not buy a house because the Mother Ship would arrive in three years and take them away, she asked him why, then, did Elijah Muhammad live in a mansion? Ali objected to her questioning him and Elijah. “Woman,” he scolded her, “you're too wise. Don't be asking them questions.”
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As time went on, Sonji noticed that when the Muslims were around, Ali became more controlling. “When nobody was around, he'd want one thing from me; and then in public it was another. I couldn't understand his two faces.” Too often, she said later, the Muslims interfered with their marriage. “They wanted to control his entire life.” Being the wife of the Muslim champ became an isolating experience, especially after they began renting an apartment in Chicago to be closer to the Nation's headquarters. When she wanted to eat at a restaurant, he took her to the Muslims' luncheonette. When she wanted to go shopping, they visited the Muslims' department store. When she wanted to see her old friends, he said that she had all the friends she ever needed at the mosque. And when she thought it would be a good idea to do interviews, he reminded her that she could not speak to reporters unless Herbert had sent them from
Muhammad Speaks
.
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Not even the best investigative reporters knew much about her. When Myron Cope asked if he could interview Sonji, Ali replied that he had to make a phone call and see “if they'll give me permission.” The following day, Ali told Cope that Sonji could not talk to him because
“they” had denied the request. “They” said it was time for Ali to quit messing around with Sonji and get back in the ring.
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In the six months since he last fought, Ali had hardly trained and had gained nearly thirty pounds. In mid-September, after he signed a contract for a rematch against Liston that would take place at the Boston Garden, Angelo Dundee urged him to get back to work. The trainer worried that the champ was losing interest in fighting. The problem, Dundee discerned, was that Ali knew that he would fight Sonny again, but he no longer feared him.
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Yet Ali still had something to prove against Liston. Most observers still believed that his last victory was a fluke or, worse, a fix. Some of his friends would not admit it publicly, but even they questioned whether he could beat Sonny again. After all, Ali didn't knock Liston out, and many people still wondered how he had won the fight after being temporarily blinded. When Sonny refused to rise from his stool, Ferdie Pacheco said, “it tarnished the victory.” It seemed almost too easy, like Liston had handed him the title. “All you knew for sure somehow was that this kid had survived,” Pacheco reflected. “There was some doubt.”
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A
LI DIDN
'
T QUITE
remember it that way. In his mind, there had never been any doubt that he would defeat Sonny Liston. In Miami, when he was not training at the 5th Street Gym, he liked to replay the fight film, reliving his moment of glory, round by round, blow by blow. Studying the film, he recognized that he was too fast for Sonny. He could see that Liston had become slow and predictable, planting himself before he threw a punch. Liston could only hit a man who moved forward, but Ali dodged his punches, bouncing forward and backward and side to side. The film did not lie: Liston had become a shell of himself, “a shadow on the wall—bleeding, tired, suddenly aged, an imposter.”
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When Ali was not training, Myron Cope followed him around Miami. Since he last wrote a profile of him in 1962, Cope learned, the boxer's innocence had faded as he was hardened over time by the pressures of fame and politics. Two years after their first meeting, the “Muslim champ” sounded more like an evangelical preacher at a tent meeting than a boxer, “convinced he is a beacon of righteousness in a wicked world.” Looking back on his time with the young contender in 1962,
Cope realized that even then, before any reporter knew that he had been attending the Nation's meetings, the boxer hid a part of himself. At that time, Cassius Clay had schooled the writer about the dangers of pork without explaining that his dietary views came directly from the Muslims. “Poke ninety percent maggots,” he had told Cope.
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Upon reflection, Cope realized that the boxer had a “history of calculated deceptions,” prompting sportswriters to wonder, who is the real Muhammad Ali? Harold Kaese of the
Boston Globe
asked, “Is Clay the fellow who boasts like a Viking when he has an audience, hurls venomous insults at Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, and makes listeners giggle with his silly little rhymes?” Or, Kaese pondered, is he “the fellow who when alone with a few friends is quiet, serious, calculating, modest, and eminently sane?” Observing Ali, one could hardly separate the man from the myth, the boxer from the actor, because he deliberately cultivated a dual identity.
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Although he displayed no genuine animosity toward individual whites, many writers painted him as a villainous automaton, filled with hatred. Ali's ties to the Nation, Jimmy Cannon wrote, were “the dirtiest in American sports since the Nazis were shilling for Max Schmeling as a representative of their vile theories of blood.” Yet Ali was not the naive racist that Cannon, made him out to be. His feelings toward whites were more complicated. He told Cope that whites who sacrificed their lives “for colored people” were not really devils. “It's not the color that makes you a devil,” he said, “just the deeds that you do.”
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Many white writers who had known him before he joined the Nation refused to believe that he wholly accepted the Black Muslims' ideology. He may have preached separatism, but he did not articulate a sophisticated view beyond that basic principle. “People seem[ed] to believe this man was a threat to America's values because of his affiliation with the Muslims, which was seen as a racist organization,” George Plimpton observed. “What they didn't seem to realize is that Ali himself wasn't going around calling whites ‘devils.' He seemed to have a mind of his own on that matter.”
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Jerry Izenberg suggested that Ali performed for everyone, including the Black Muslims. “He'd be talking with you about something, and one of the Muslims would come into the room and the conversation would change completely.” Ali would do anything to please Elijah
Muhammad and gain the approval of the Muslim officials around him. “He wanted desperately to be taken seriously, to be respected, and told that he was special.”
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Ali sounded sincere when he talked about Malcolm X. Probing for answers about their relationship, Cope asked Ali about their time together in Miami on the eve of the Liston fight. Irritated, Ali snapped, “I didn't invite him down here. He came down here on his own. He's nothing now.” Under Elijah's trance, Ali assaulted Malcolm's character. Taking the well-worn Muslim line, Ali said, “Our teacher took him off the streets, a jailbird, a hoodlum, and it was Elijah Muhammad's teachings that made him able to go on any TV. But he failed. Who is he gonna represent now?” Listening to him fume, there was no doubt that Ali had buried Malcolm somewhere in Africa.
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After Ali was called back from Africa, he adopted a new role as the noble warrior, a Muslim mercenary defending Allah's Messenger. Whenever reporters asked him about Malcolm, Ali erupted into a scornful harangue against “that chief hypocrite.” Out of the war between Elijah and Malcolm emerged the “ugly period” of Ali's life, a viciousness aimed at anyone who opposed the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In his zealousness, Ali believed that Malcolm had crossed “The Messenger of all mighty God.” And that, he prophesied, would prove a grave mistake. “Mr. Muhammad will destroy him through Allah. You just don't buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it.”
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B
Y THE TIME
he arrived in Boston, Muhammad Ali looked like a new man. The champ had shed the excess weight around his stomach and looked stronger, broader, and more toned. His biceps measured seventeen inches around and his thighs twenty-seven inches, both two inches larger than before the Miami fight, though his waist remained the same size, a svelte thirty-four inches. He'd never felt better. Standing in front of a department store mirror, admiring his physique, he declared, “I'm so beautiful I should be chiseled in gold. Look at that build. It's pretty. I mean, it's ready to dance. Right now!”
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On Thursday, November 12, for more than an hour, he danced around the ring, jumped rope, and hit the speed bag at the Boston Arena annex. When he finished working out, he showered while Clarence X and a few other large men abruptly ordered his fans to leave. A few minutes
later, the champ reappeared for his daily news conference. Ali sat on the wooden stands, flanked by two court jesters, Bundini Brown and Lincoln Perry, better known as “Stepin Fetchit,” the first black movie star of the 1920s and 1930s. No one really knows how Fetchit met the champ, but his presence in Ali's camp puzzled reporters. Once billed as “the World's Laziest Man,” the tall, lanky comic had created a minstrel caricature based on the worst stereotypes of black men as lazy, shiftless, and ignorant. Writers could not comprehend how Ali, the embodiment of racial pride, could ever befriend an actor who denigrated blacks with his performances. “It would be difficult to find a more incongruous situation than the Clay-Fetchit association,” one writer suggested. “The world's perhaps most famous and most arrogant Negro, Cassius Clay, has among his entourage the Negro who probably has done more than any man to label his race with all things Clay isn't.”
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