Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (12 page)

Then he uttered the words that would become his personal anthem, the defining philosophy for the rest of his life: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

In Chicago, the Messenger and his associates were as stunned as the boxing establishment at Clay’s victory. The Nation of Islam newspaper
Muhammad Speaks
was perhaps the only paper in the country that didn’t cover the Liston bout. Elijah Muhammad’s advisers quickly updated him on the boxer’s commitment to the Nation and his close allegiance to Malcolm X. Despite the strict prohibition against following sports, a number of Nation of Islam officials had grown up following boxing and were well aware of the influential platform that came with the heavyweight title, not to mention the vast quantities of money to be made.

For some time, Elijah Muhammad was troubled by reports that Malcolm was planning to break away and form his own movement. By some accounts, this was enough of a threat to prompt the Messenger to consider having his former disciple assassinated. Now, the thought of Malcolm leaving and taking Cassius Clay with him sent alarm bells through the organization. The combination of two charismatic forces with the media platform accorded the heavyweight champion would have enormous appeal to young blacks throughout the country. Elijah Muhammad knew it, Malcolm X knew it, and one other person knew it—J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI wiretaps were keeping him well informed of the situation.

The only key player who didn’t know that Cassius Clay was about to become a pawn in a giant power struggle was Cassius Clay, who that evening received a congratulatory phone call from the man he had revered from afar for more than five years, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The long-standing taboo on sports, it seems, was temporarily lifted.

The next morning, bolstered by the call officially welcoming him into the movement, Clay called a second press conference, at which he finally laid to rest any lingering doubt about his religious affiliation:

Islam is a religion and there are 750 million people all over the world who believe in it, and I’m one of them. I ain’t no Christian. I can’t be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed by dogs, and they blow up a Negro church and don’t find the killers. I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They tell me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood. I don’t want to be blown up. I don’t want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind.

I’m the heavyweight champion, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can’t move into. I know how to dodge booby-traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I’m no troublemaker. I don’t believe in forced integration. I know where I belong. I’m not going to force myself into anybody’s house. I’m not joining no forced integration movement, because it don’t work. A man has got to know where he belongs.

People brand us a hate group. They say we want to take over the country. They say we’re Communists. That is not true. Followers of Allah are the sweetest people in the world. They don’t carry knives. They don’t tote weapons. They pray five times a day. The women wear dresses that come all the way to the floor and they don’t commit adultery. All they want to do is live in peace. They don’t want to stir up any kind of trouble. All the meetings are held in secret, without any fuss or hate-mongering.

I’m a good boy. I have never done anything wrong. I have never been in jail. I have never been in court. I don’t join any integration marches. I don’t pay any attention to all those white women who wink at me. I don’t carry signs. I don’t impose myself on people who don’t want me. If I go in somebody’s house where I’m not welcome, I’m uncomfortable, so I stay away. I like white people. I like my own people. They can live together without infringing on each other. You can’t condemn a man for wanting peace. If you do, you condemn peace itself. A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I am crowing.

Reaction to his declaration was swift and furious.
New York Times
reporter Robert Lipsyte, who was in Miami covering the fight, recalls the uproar. “Before the Liston fight,” he says, “even the old-line columnists, the ones like Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young who were hostile to him, didn’t feel threatened by Clay because they thought he was going to lose. If anything, Clay gave them a chance to fulminate about how boxing was taking yet another bad turn. First you had the criminal element, and now you had the encroachment of a show-business clown. They took boxing totally seriously, way out of proportion to its true worth. They were saying, ‘This is the worst thing that ever happened to boxing.’ And soon, that escalated to,’ This might be the worst thing that ever happened to the youth of America, which needs a proper role model.’ Basically, what they were talking about was the heavyweight champion, usually black, always poor, being a safe role model for the underclass. When he said ‘I don’t have to be what you want me to be,’ among the things he didn’t have to be were Christian, a good soldier of American democracy in the mold of Joe Louis, or the kind of athlete-prince white America wanted.”

Under normal circumstances, Clay’s conversion to Islam may have been dismissed as just more foolishness from a blowhard athlete instead of sparking a national fury. But the old guard of the sports-writing fraternity were determined to elevate his Muslim ties to the level of a catastrophe for America. These were the same writers who could be seen drinking every evening with the mobsters who controlled Sonny Liston—murderers, gamblers, and pimps. But Clay’s association with clean-living Muslims could not be tolerated.

The dean of boxing writers, Jimmy Cannon, fired the first salvo in the
New York Journal American.
“The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports,” he wrote. “But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of mass hate. It has maimed the bodies of numerous men and ruined their minds but now, as one of Elijah Muhammad’s missionaries, Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness in an attack on the spirit. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”

The day after the second press conference, Elijah Muhammad publicly ushered Clay into the Muslim fold, telling five thousand followers gathered for the movement’s holiday, Savior’s Day, “I’m so glad that Cassius Clay admits he’s a Muslim. He was able, by confessing that Allah was the God and by following Muhammad, to whip a much tougher man. Clay has confidence in Allah, and in me as his only messenger.”

Malcolm X understood what was happening. He was engaged in a tug-of-war with the Messenger for the allegiance of Clay. The prize? A very important national forum, a loud media platform, and the hearts and minds of millions of young black boxing fans. He told reporters, “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. The white press wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But the prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”

Indeed, few had noted the blinding speed and dazzling footwork, nor the innate ability to think on his feet—what pundits later called “ring genius”—that had enabled the new champion to prevail against his supposedly invincible opponent.

“Before the first Liston fight, I wasn’t terribly impressed by Ali’s boxing skills,” recalls syndicated sports columnist Jerry Izenberg. “When Liston failed to get up off that stool, I knew that I was witnessing the real deal. This kid was good.”

Behind the scenes, after the fight, Malcolm confided in Clay for the first time his plan to start a new black nationalist movement and urged his young protégé to come with him. Clay was noncommittal.

Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz recalled his efforts. “My husband was planning to break away from Elijah Muhammad and he wanted Cassius to join him. He knew that Cassius could provide the kind of publicity and influence to propel his organization into immediate success.”

On March 3, an FBI surveillance report informed J. Edgar Hoover that “Malcolm X might oppose the Nation of Islam leadership of Elijah Muhammad with the assistance of Clay in the near future.” Hoover immediately ordered an FBI file opened on the new heavyweight champion.

Malcolm, however, hadn’t counted on one thing. For more than a decade, he had preached—and practiced—complete and total loyalty to Elijah Muhammad. When he first began to counsel Clay, he instilled this same sense of loyalty. Each spiritual lesson was preceded by, “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us…” As much as Clay admired Malcolm, he considered him only a conduit for the teachings of the Messenger.

NFL football star Jim Brown was a friend of Clay and remembers witnessing a crucial stage in the power struggle. “Ali took me to a little black motel with Malcolm and three or four other Muslim ministers. Malcolm said to me, ‘Well, Brown, don’t you think it’s time for this young man to stop spouting off and get serious?’And I agreed, but that night made it clear to me that Malcolm’s swan song was coming as far as Ali was concerned. Ali took me into a back room. It was just the two of us. We talked for about two hours. And he told me how Elijah Muhammad was such a little man physically but such a great man, and he was going to have to reject Malcolm and choose Elijah.”

The man called Cassius Clay spent his last days with Malcolm in New York, where he announced he was changing his name to Cassius X Clay. ‘X’ is what the slave-masters used to be called,” he said incorrectly, proving he was still slightly confused about the nomenclature of the sect. In fact, the “X” was meant to symbolize a black American’s lost African identity. Malcolm and Clay toured the United Nations together, attracting a huge media throng. At the UN, Clay announced he was planning to tour Africa and Asia with Malcolm X at his side.“I’m champion of the
whole
world,” he told reporters, “and I want to meet the people I’m champion of.” Asked whether he thought Clay would do any formal preaching, Malcolm responded, “You don’t preach our philosophy, you live it.”

The same day, a small item in the
New York Times
reported a rumor that Clay had failed his army test the month before. Asked about the report, Clay said, “I tried my hardest to pass.” Asked if he would consider filing for conscientious objector status, he responded, “I don’t like that name. It sounds ugly—I wouldn’t want to be called anything like that.” Years later he admitted he didn’t know what the term meant.

At his old Harlem mosque, Malcolm told subordinates, “The Nation is finished.” He believed his departure, with Clay in tow, would result in an exodus of thousands of young Muslims, causing the movement to self-destruct.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Elijah Muhammad was alarmed at Clay’s announcement of his upcoming Africa trip. This was just the international platform Malcolm could use to launch a new movement. Incensed at the prospect, Muhammad went into action. That evening, he appeared on radio and announced that he was renaming Cassius Clay “Muhammad Ali,” meaning “One who is worthy of praise.” The Messenger declared, “This Clay name has no divine meaning. Muhammad Ali is the name I will give to him, as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.” This move to give the champion an “original name” was very unusual, for it was one of the movement’s highest honors, one not bestowed on many lifelong followers—including Malcolm X. It was Muhammad’s ploy to secure the allegiance of the boxer once and for all. An FBI wiretap caught Malcolm’s reaction to the move. “He did it to prevent him from coming with me,” he told his associates.

When Malcolm attempted to contact Ali that evening, his access was blocked. Elijah Muhammad had assigned his own security detail to the boxer, and their first assignment was to cut off all communications with the upstart minister. The next day, Muhammad finished the task of isolating Malcolm, informing him in a letter that his suspension was indefinite because he had not sufficiently “rehabilitated” himself.

The same day, Malcolm was secretly informed by Ali’s press secretary, Leon 4X Ameer, that an order had been issued that “Malcolm had to be taken down.” Ameer couldn’t bear to see Malcolm harmed and felt it necessary to warn his former spiritual mentor. A member of Elijah Muhammad’s powerful new inner circle, Louis X (now known as Louis Farrakhan), was assigned to take over as minister of Malcolm’s former Harlem temple.

On March 8, Malcolm held a press conference formally announcing his resignation from the Nation of Islam. “Internal differences have forced me out of it. I did not leave of my own free will.” He proposed to start a new black nationalist party to engage in political activities and “social action against the oppressor.” In the coming months, he would launch a very public attack against the Nation of Islam, which he accused of racism. After travelling to Mecca, where he worshipped with white Muslims, he renounced many of his former views and declared that the enemy was “not white people but white racists.”