Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (2 page)

For Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., the segregation of Louisville was part of everyday life. Like most blacks, he didn’t believe anything could be done to change it. His particular beef with the white establishment came from his conviction that they had thwarted his artistic ambitions. A prolific landscape artist, Cassius Sr. couldn’t sell his artworks and had to resort to sign painting to earn his living. Turn down Market Street and you were greeted by a big sign reading
KING CARL’S THREE ROOMS OF NEW FURNITURE
with the immaculate lettering that announced it as one of Old Cash’s creations. When you saw
A. B. HARRIS M.D., DELIVERIES AND FEMALE DISORDERS,
you knew you were on Dumesnil Street.

There was nothing modest about Cassius Sr., who regularly declared, “I am the Greatest” to anybody who would listen. Years later, his son would adopt this boast as his own personal motto. By all accounts, in fact, his paintings were rather mediocre, but his sign-painting abilities were unrivalled.

Each night at the dinner table, his family would listen to Cassius Sr. rail at the many injustices suffered by Negroes. For a time, he embraced the ideas of radical black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his calls for racial pride but he stopped short of endorsing Garvey’s “Back to Africa” philosophy.

Years later, describing his childhood in Louisville, Ali lamented that “too many colored people wanted to be white.” When Cassius Jr. was born in 1942 and his brother Rudy two years later, their father was determined that his sons wouldn’t be among those people.

“Why can’t I be rich?” young Cassius would ask his father as he saw the elegant Louisville whites flaunting their fancy cars and expensive clothes. “Look there,” said the father, pointing to his brown hands, “that’s why you can’t be rich.”

This reality was driven home one day when his mother Odessa, in an experience she would describe over and over again years later, took five-year-old Cassius downtown on a hot summer day. As the sun blazed down, the little boy started crying for a drink of water outside Woolworth’s five-and-dime, at which blacks were allowed to shop but couldn’t eat at the lunch counter. She took him in and asked the clerk for some water, only to be told, “If we serve Negroes in here, we lose our jobs.”

Biographer David Remnick, in his thorough account of Ali’s early years,
King of the World,
describes such incidents as the “accumulated slights of mid-century American Apartheid.”

Around the same time, young Cassius asked his father, “Daddy, I go to the grocery and the grocery man is white. I go to the drugstore and the drugstore man’s white. The bus driver’s white. What do the colored people do?”

Odessa Clay took odd jobs as a maid in the houses of rich white Louisville families. She would get up at the crack of dawn, take a bus to the white part of town, and spend the day cooking, cleaning toilets, and looking after children. It was menial and, at four dollars a day, low-paying work. But the fact that the Clays were a two-income family has prompted most of Muhammad Ali’s biographers to describe him as a product of the black middle class. Ali vigorously disputes this characterization. “The truth is that most of my life in Louisville was one of poverty—semi-poverty,” he writes in his autobiography. “While there was a black middle class in Louisville, even some affluent blacks, and the neighborhoods were not as ghetto-looking as in some big cities, my part of the Clay family was not among them until my ring earnings made it possible.”

Black Louisville is divided into three sections. The worst part of town, the slums, is the East End, known as “Snake Town.” The black middle class lives in the “California Area,” and the most populated, where the Clays lived, is the West End. Blacks quickly learned where they could and could not go.

“Growing up,” Rudy (Rahaman) Clay later recalled, “the only problems Muhammad and I had with whites were if we were walking in a certain part of town. If we were in the wrong place, white boys would come up in a car and say, ‘Hey, nigger, what are you doing here?’”

One of the most often-told anecdotes about the young Cassius Clay—and one of the most printed after he became known nationwide—was his habit of racing the bus to school every morning. He would tell people he was running to get into fight condition because he was going to be heavyweight champion one day. Years later, he confided the real reason. There was seldom enough money for his brother and him to both have bus fare to school. As the oldest, he let Rudy ride and he would run, too proud to reveal why.

Today Ali describes his family life as close-knit and loving but the Louisville police blotter indicates a certain discord. Odessa was forced to call the police at least three times to protect her from her husband, usually when he was drinking heavily. Cassius Sr. was arrested four times for reckless driving, twice for disorderly conduct, and twice for assault and battery. Ali, however, insists that his father never touched him.

According to a member of the family, Cassius Sr. was “a mean drunk. He took out his frustrations as a failed artist and could get very violent. His wife wouldn’t put up with it and would throw him out of the house for days at a time. But he’d turn on that charm of his and she’d always take him back.”

Stories still abound in Louisville about another of Cash’s bad habits, his womanizing. Ali later acknowledged his father’s philandering ways, calling him “a playboy with an eye for the ladies.” What effect this all had on the young Cassius is a matter of speculation. Their relationship over the years ranged from coolness to estrangement to an uneasy detente, but in interviews Ali always gives his father his due for “making me what I am.”

His relationship with his mother Odessa was much closer. She called him “G.G.,” he called her “Bird” and the two would spend hours playing games or reading the bible. It’s as if they were creating their own oasis from the harsh realities of life with Cassius Sr. and the world outside their door.

In 1954, when Cassius Clay was twelve, the United States Supreme Court handed down the historic
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision desegregating American schools. The judgment had a ripple effect throughout the South but didn’t have much of an impact on the young Clay, who would attend all-black schools throughout his youth.

At around the same time
Brown
heralded a new era for American blacks, an event took place more than eight thousand miles away that would prove to have a much greater impact on the future of Muhammad Ali.

In May, French forces in Indochina were surrounded by the communist guerrilla army of Ho Chi Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and forced to surrender. The resulting peace agreement led to the partition of the country into North and South Vietnam. It was the height of the Cold War. Senator Joe McCarthy was in the last stages of his witch hunt. Members of Congress were urging President Eisenhower to send U.S. troops to the region to beat back the communist threat before a domino effect could engulf Asia in a Red tide.

In America, this drumbeat towards war was raising alarm bells for the black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson, who expressed his views on potential American involvement.

“Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi be sent to shoot brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?” asked Robeson in a remarkably prescient speech. Robeson, himself a former All-American athlete during his days at Rutgers University, would later be persecuted by the American government, labeled a traitor, and have his passport taken away for supposed un-American activities. Today Ali claims he had never heard of Robeson during this period.

Ali lore traces the beginnings of his rise as the greatest boxer in history to an incident—“
the
incident”—which took place in October of that year. Cassius Jr. had just received a brand new bike as a present from his parents—a red-and-white Schwinn. Its cost? Sixty dollars, which may explain later descriptions of Ali as a product of the black middle class. In fact, Cassius Sr. had just won a lucrative sign-painting contract and was eager to share his largesse with the family after a long period of austerity.

Eager to try out and show off his new bike, Cassius and a friend rode downtown to a black bazaar called the Louisville Home Show. The merchants were giving out free popcorn and candy and the two boys spent most of the afternoon feasting on junk food. When it was time to leave, they returned to the side of the building where they had left their bikes. The new Schwinn was gone.

Clay was fit to be tied. The usually easygoing youngster erupted in fury and started to yell for a policeman. Somebody told him there was an officer downstairs in the auditorium, which housed the Columbia Gym. In tears, he stormed down to the basement and came face-to-face with Joe Martin, an off-duty Louisville policeman who trained young boxers in his spare time. He demanded Martin arrest whoever had stolen his bike. “He said he was gonna whup whoever stole it,” Martin later recalled. “And I brought up the subject, I said, ‘Well, you better learn how to fight before you start challenging people that you’re gonna whup.’” He invited Cassius back to the gym for some lessons.

The twelve-year-old boy was an unlikely prospect for boxing lessons. Painfully skinny at only eighty-nine pounds, he had never shown any signs of aggression before the bike was stolen.

When he walked into the gym a few days later to take Martin up on his offer, he knew he had found his calling. “When I was eight and ten years old, I’d walk out of my house at two in the morning, and look up at the sky for an angel or a revelation or God telling me what to do. I never got the answer. Then my bike got stolen and I started boxing and it was like God telling me that boxing was my responsibility,” Ali told Thomas Hauser in the definitive biography/oral history
His Life and Times.

Six weeks after joining Martin’s gym, Cassius made his ring debut and won a three-round decision over another beginner named Ronnie O’Keefe. When the referee raised his arm to signal Clay had triumphed, the victorious boxer shouted to the crowd the words which would soon become a familiar refrain. “I’m gonna be the greatest of all time!” And he was going to do whatever he had to do to ensure the words were no idle boast. From then on, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was a study in determination. Each morning he rose at 4:30
A.M.
and ran five miles. For breakfast, he would down a quart of milk mixed with two raw eggs. He went everywhere carrying a solution of bottled water mixed with garlic, insisting it would keep his health perfect. When his mother questioned his unusual eating habits, he told her he was going to be the champion and buy her a big house one day.

While his friends experimented with drugs and alcohol, Cassius refused to do anything that might jeopardize his goals. The closest he ever came to a vice, he later admitted, was taking the cap off a gas tank and smelling the gas for a hallucinogenic sensation. “Boxing kept me out of trouble,” he says.

He didn’t have much use for other sports. He tried tennis a few times and wasn’t bad but football definitely wasn’t for him. “I tried it once, that’s all,” he says. “They gave me the ball and tackled me. My helmet hit the ground, pow! No sir. You got to get hit in that game, it’s too tough. You don’t have to get hit in boxing, people don’t understand that.”

Elsewhere, in the wake of
Brown vs. Board of Education,
a fuse was being ignited. A year after Clay first stepped into the ring, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the Montgomery Bus Boycott and raising a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

Today Ali claims he wasn’t paying much attention to King’s activities. “I was too focused on boxing to follow all that stuff,” he says. As he racked up victory after victory in the amateur ranks, the struggle for integration was beginning in earnest. For the black community of Louisville, even then, King and his new movement were being watched closely.

“We followed King and the bus boycott pretty much from the beginning,” recalls Ali’s cousin Coretta. “What he was doing was exciting. Remember, Louisville wasn’t as bad as Montgomery, but we had to sit in the back of the bus too. We needed the voice, we needed the leadership. I guess Ali was pretty caught up in his career to follow King. Some people think that’s why he never really took to the whole integration cause.” The one time he marched in an integration rally, Ali remembers today, somebody dumped a bucket of water over his head.

But if Dr. King’s activities failed to capture the imagination of the young Clay, it wasn’t because he was unaware of the turmoil spreading throughout the South. Three months before Rosa Parks was arrested, Cassius Clay Sr. came home shaken one day with a copy of the national black magazine
Jet,
insisting his sons look at it. “This is what they do to us,” he repeated over and over.

Inside, young Cassius and Rudy were shocked to see a number of gruesome photos showing the mutilated corpse of a young black boy.

In August 1955, Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black northerner from a middle-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. His mother had relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi, population 350. Her uncle Mose suggested she send Emmett down to visit for a couple of weeks to get some fresh air and down-home cooking before school started.

Mamie Till Bradley was nervous about sending her son to the heart of the Deep South. Chicago wasn’t exactly a model of race relations—its neighborhoods were segregated, Emmett himself went to an all-Negro school, and blacks were discriminated against on a daily basis. But Emmett had a few white friends, and the city had recently seen a number of intermarriages, which were heavily frowned upon but reluctantly tolerated by blacks and whites.

In contrast, the Mississippi Delta was the heart of Southern Jim Crow society. Four hundred sixty blacks had been lynched in the state since the Civil War, and the state’s elected officials were committed racists who vowed to oppose integration at every turn. The governor, J. P. Coleman, had recently declared blacks unfit to vote. And the
Brown
desegregation decision the year before had put the state in a fighting mood. In fact, Mississippi Senator James Eastland asserted that the decision had “destroyed the Constitution” and Mississippi was not obliged to obey it. State senator Walter Givhan claimed the real purpose of the NAACP’s campaign to end school desegregation was “to open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men.”