Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (20 page)

The day the board’s decision was announced, Ali knew he was left with only two choices—go into the army or go to jail.

CHAPTER SIX:

The Step

I
N
1966
THE REPERCUSSIONS
of his anti-war stand continued to haunt Ali, overshadowing his dominance in the ring. Like Jack Johnson a half century earlier, pariah status forced the unpopular champion into a self-imposed exile as it became increasingly obvious he was unwelcome in his own country. After beating George Chuvalo in Toronto, he successfully defended his title overseas three times within the space of six months, twice in England and once in Germany.

Syndicated sports columnist and longtime Ali defender Jerry Izenberg covered the Chuvalo fight in Toronto. “I went to Toronto to ask Ali one question,” he recalls. “All these guys had been running to Canada to avoid the draft and here was Ali forced to leave his own country because of his attitude toward the war. I thought maybe he was going to stay in Canada. So when I got to Toronto for the Chuvalo fight, I asked him that question and I still remember his answer. He said, America is my birth country. They make the rules, and if they want to put me in jail, I’ll go to jail. But I’m an American and I’m not running away.’”

But leaving behind the hostility of America for adoring crowds in Europe, Ali seemed to regain his old spirit, temporarily forgetting his legal troubles back home, although he lamented to the British press that he had “been driven out of my country because of my religious beliefs.” In London to fight Henry Cooper, he began to write poetry again. For one journalist, he recited:

Since I won’t let critics seal my fate
They keep hollering I’m full of hate
But they don’t really hurt me none
‘Cause I’m doing good and having fun
And fun to me is something bigger
Than what those critics fail to figure
Fun to me is lots of things
And along with it some good I bring
Yet while I’m busy helping my people
These critics keep writing I’m deceitful
But I can take it on the chin
And that’s the honest truth my friend
Now from Muhammad you just heard
The latest and the truest word
So when they ask you “What’s the latest?”
Just say, “Ask Ali. He’s still the greatest.”

But the fun was short-lived. Back home, his lawyers were studying tactics to delay the inevitable draft call, which now seemed imminent. The anti-war movement was picking up steam as thousands of college students demonstrated against the escalating war, shouting Stokely Carmichael’s slogan—originally referring to black draftees—“Hell no, we won’t go!” Ali watched these developments on television, and his resolve to stay out of the army intensified. On a side trip to Cairo, he told reporters, “My main concern now is to go back to the States and try to beat the draft.”

After accompanying him for several days, during which he seemed to ignore his legal problems,
Life
magazine photographer Gordon Parks finally asked Ali, “What about your draft situation?”

“What about it?” came the reply. “How can I kill somebody when I pray five times a day for peace? Answer me. For two years the Army told everybody I was a nut. I was ashamed! My mother and father was ashamed! Now, suddenly, they decide Fm very wise—without even testing me again. I ain’t scared. Just show me a soldier who’d like to be in that ring in my place. I see signs saying, ‘L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’Well, I ain’t said nothing that bad. Elijah Muhammad teaches us to fight only when we are attacked. My life is in his hands. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s got to be.”

Back in America, college students weren’t the only ones questioning the legitimacy of the war. Martin Luther King Jr. was in the process of debating his conscience and his SCLC Board, which was still reluctant to incur the wrath of the Johnson Administration and its support of the civil rights agenda.

King had begun to shift his priorities from the battle against segregation in the South to the fight for economic justice in the rest of the country, acknowledging that his movement’s legislative and judicial victories “did very little to improve the lot of millions of Negroes in the teeming North.” The civil rights leader was at first uncomfortable with the increasing militancy of the new generation of young black leaders, labeling Black Power a “slogan without a program” and fearing it would lead to violence. Indeed, black ghetto unrest had already resulted in a number of urban race riots as increasing numbers of blacks began to see Dr. King’s call for nonviolence as irrelevant to their situation. In October 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was formed in Oakland, California—the most militant of the Black Power groups to date. Their members carried rifles—to defend themselves against police brutality, they claimed.

Martin Luther King Jr. rejected the tactics of the Black Panthers and other militant Black Power groups. But on one issue he was becoming increasingly sympathetic. In 1964, King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in civil rights. Privately, he would often note the irony that he was given the world’s most prestigious symbol of peace but could not speak out against the brutal war in Vietnam. In fact, he had made his personal views known in a number of interviews, but he had not yet linked the civil rights movement with the burgeoning peace movement.

“Martin really agonized over the decision of whether he should come out sooner than he did,” recalls his widow Coretta Scott King. “He said, ‘People who were with me on civil rights will not be with me on this issue, and we have to count those costs.’ It was very difficult for him because he really felt very strongly from the very beginning on this whole issue of the Vietnam War and he could see the injustice of it all and how the people who were the poorest people in the country were more directly affected by it.”

King was somewhat reticent about militant black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael. But he always seemed to have a soft spot for Muhammad Ali, despite the boxer’s early advocacy of black separatism and his rejection of integration—the cause to which King had devoted his life. “King was the only black leader who sent me a telegram congratulating me after I won the title from Liston,” Ali recalls.

Attorney Charles Morgan Jr. served on the board of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was one of the few board members who advocated a public anti-war stand. Morgan, the only white on the board, also represented Julian Bond, who was still fighting to be seated in the Georgia legislature because of the outcry over his comments about Vietnam. He remembers that King greatly admired Ali’s courage in speaking out against the war.

“Martin had opposed the war for a long time but his hands were tied by our Board,” recalls Morgan. “Then Ali spoke out publicly, he took the consequences, and I believe it had an influence on Martin. Here was somebody who had a lot to lose and was willing to risk it all to say what he believed.”

Sitting with Morgan on the board of the SCLC was fellow lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, who had been retained by the Nation of Islam to represent Ali in his fight to stay out of the army. Eskridge, who also represented King, regularly reported developments in the Ali case to the civil rights leader, who was seriously considering a public declaration against Vietnam. Eskridge eventually recruited Morgan onto the boxer’s legal team, and together the two continued to persuade the board to come out against the war.

The popular black entertainer Harry Belafonte was a close friend and political supporter of Dr. King and the most important financial contributor to the civil rights movement, repeatedly bailing King and other freedom marchers out of jail after they had been arrested for civil disobedience. He believes Ali’s public stand had an important impact on King’s own evolution. “Muhammad Ali was the genuine product of what the movement inspired,” Belafonte says. “He took on all of the characteristics and was the embodiment of the thrust of the movement. He was courageous. He put the class issues on the line. He didn’t care about money. He brought America to its most wonderful and naked moment. He said,’ I will not play in your game of war. I will not kill on your behalf. What you ask is immoral and unjust, and I stand here to attest to that fact. Do with me what you will.’ He was very inspirational. He was in many ways as inspiring as Dr. King, as inspiring as Malcolm. Out of the womb of oppression, he was our phoenix. He stood courageously and said,‘I put everything on the line for what I believe in.’ They could not break his spirit nor deny his moral imperative.”

As King grappled with one of his greatest dilemmas, Ali’s case worked its way slowly through the system. His lawyers attempted a series of last-minute legal maneuvers to keep him out of the army. The media continued to portray him as a hate-monger for his affiliation with the Nation. But those who spent time with him saw a different side.

Gordon Parks recalls a scene he witnessed while Ali was training in Miami. “I never witnessed the hate he is assumed to have for whites. But I did see him stand in the burning sun for an hour, signing autographs for Southern white children.”

Miami Herald
sportswriter Pat Putnam echoes Ali’s affinity for children. “It’s amazing,” he says. “Ali has always been drawn to kids and they have always been drawn to him. He has infinite patience for children and will never refuse a request for an autograph or a request to visit a kid in the hospital. Kids can always spot a phony but they are always drawn to him.”

In February, Ali fought Ernie Terrell in the bout that had been cancelled a year earlier because of his Vietcong remarks. During the pre-fight hype, Terrell refused to call Ali by his Muslim name, prompting the champion to label his opponent an Uncle Tom and vowing, “I want to torture him. A clean knockout is too good for him.”

The fight itself was brutal. Ali repeatedly pounded his opponent, screaming, “What’s my name?” with each punch. “What’s my name? Uncle Tom! You white man’s nigger!”

The media’s reaction was somewhat ironic. The very same reporters who were mercilessly attacking Ali for not going to war were now lambasting him for being too violent in the ring.

Gene Ward of the
New York Daily News
called the fight “a disgusting exhibition of calculating cruelty, an open defiance of decency, sportsmanship, and all the tenets of right vs. wrong”. Jimmy Cannon, Ali’s long-time nemesis, wrote, “It was a bad fight, nasty with the evil of religious fanaticism. This wasn’t an athletic contest. It was a kind of lynching.” Responding to reports that Ali had applied for military exemption as a minister, Cannon wrote, “What kind of clergyman is he? The Black Muslims demand that Negroes keep their place. They go along with the Klan on segregation. It seemed right that Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro. The heavyweight champion is a vicious propagandist for a spiteful mob that works the religious underworld.”

Ali was puzzled about the commotion, explaining he was merely plying his trade. “It’s just a job,” he said. “Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”

Even before the fight, the Nation of Islam and Ali’s legal team had known that, for his conscientious objector claim to be taken seriously, it was essential to convince the world he was a legitimate minister. Ali’s apparent cruelty in the ring didn’t make this task any easier. But the Black Muslim public relations machine did its bit.

On March 3, the Nation’s newspaper,
Muhammad Speaks,
carried a story headlined W
ORLD
C
HAMPION
M
OVES
S
TEP
C
LOSER TO
F
ULL
-T
IME TASK AS
M
UHAMMAD’S
M
INISTER.
The article announced that Ali “took complete charge” of the Muslim mosque in Houston, replacing the regular minister while he went on a leave of absence.

“Reaction to the young athlete’s assumption of his spiritual duties,” the article declared, “was not only highly favorable among the believers, but exclamations of admiration were many among leaders of the black community here.”

Until that point, only two heavyweight champions had failed to receive an invitation to meet the president at the White House, Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali. On March 14, however, Ali received a different kind of invitation from President Johnson. It read:

ORDER FOR TRANSFERRED MAN TO REPORT
FOR INDUCTION

FROM: The President of the United States
TO: Mr. Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.
AKA Muhammad Ali
5962 Ardmore Street
Houston, Texas 77022

Greetings:

Having heretofore been ordered to report for induction by Local Board No. 47, State of Kentucky, Louisville, Kentucky, which is your local board of origin, and having been transferred upon your own request to Local Board No. 61, State of Texas, Houston, Texas, which is your Local Board of Transfer for delivery to an induction station, you will therefore report to the last named Local Board at 3rd Floor, 701 San Jacinto St. Houston, Texas 77022 on April 28,1967, at 8:00
A.M.

The induction had been originally scheduled for April 11 in Louisville, but Ali’s attorneys had requested a transfer to Houston, Texas, because he had taken up residence there to assume his ministership duties at the mosque.

Still, the day after Ali received his induction notice he was in Chicago, where, walking through the streets, he was accosted by a group of American Legionnaires as they emptied out of a tavern.

“Hey, is that Cassius Clay? That looks like Cassius Clay!” one shouted. A drunken member of the group waved a small American flag in his face, exclaiming, “They gotcha! They gotcha! Sonofabitch! Thank God they gotcha.” Another waved that day’s edition of the
Sun Times
with its headline:
ARMY TELLS CLAY—PUT UP OR SHUT UP
!