Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (29 page)

On the morning of January 30, 1968, nine months into his internal exile, Ali boarded a bus to New Haven where he was to give the thirty-sixth speech of his campus tour. Meanwhile, half the world away, on the first day of the Vietnamese New Year (Tet), the Vietcong launched their biggest offensive of the war. One thousand Vietcong troops infiltrated the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. The enemy guerrillas captured the Citadel at Hue and seized part of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It took nearly two weeks for the American army to completely rout the Vietcong troops. On the face of it, the attack proved a military disaster for the Communists: they lost over ten thousand men and failed to hold any of their objectives. Nevertheless, the Tet Offensive constituted an important symbolic victory for the Vietcong. For many Americans who had believed that the war was being won, the sight of Vietcong troops holding the U.S. Embassy proved a rude awakening, forcing them to question the truth about the American military presence. President Johnson’s approval rating plunged to 24 percent.

The Tet Offensive also marked a pivotal moment in America’s rapidly evolving social climate and, ultimately, would have a profound impact on how the country viewed Muhammad Ali. It was only the first significant event in a year that would divide a nation and shake it to its very foundations, forcing its people to question their core beliefs while robbing them of some of their brightest hopes and luminaries. And, some would say, of its ignorance and innocence.

But meanwhile, the boxing establishment, as impervious as any to what was happening all around it, was trying to figure out a credible way to fill Ali’s vacant title. In October 1967, Robert Lipsyte wrote in the
New York Times,
“No matter who a cabal of television executives, Texas showmen, fools, and sly-fingers offer us, Muhammad Ali is the heavyweight champion of the world.”

The New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois boxing commissions met and decided they would stage a series of elimination bouts between the leading contenders, starting with Buster Mathis and Joe Frazier on March 4. The winner of the series would be awarded the heavyweight crown stripped from Ali ten months earlier.

On March 1, a coalition of black organizations held a press conference to announce their opposition to the Mathis-Frazier fight, scheduled three days later at Madison Square Garden.

“To us and to millions of other blacks at home and throughout the world, Muhammad Ali is the world’s heavyweight champion,” declared Lincoln Lynch of the United Black Front. “He is still the greatest.”

Prominent black activist LeRoi Jones echoed the sentiments, pronouncing the fight a mirage: “Even though Buster Mathis and Joe Frazier might tell white people that they are the heavyweight champion after this fight, they will never come in the black community claiming that they are the heavyweight champion. They know that little kids would laugh them out of the streets.”

At the fight, while Frazier was knocking out Mathis, a persistent chant floated down from the rafters: “Ah-lee, Ah-lee.” Real fight fans knew who the true champion was. “The only way you can take my title is by whupping me in the ring,” Ali repeated after his former sparring partner Jimmy Ellis eventually won the questionable title.

Two weeks later, on March 16, a U.S. Army lieutenant named William Calley ordered his battalion to slaughter five hundred unarmed Vietnamese villagers, including two hundred children, at the hamlet of My Lai.

Hundreds of thousands of students all over America stepped up their tactics against what they called an immoral war. For the first time, average Americans were beginning to agree. Each new poll showed increasing opposition to the American presence in Vietnam, especially in the black community, where for the first time a majority—56 percent—opposed the war, according to a
Newsweek
poll.

Bemused by the unprecedented social turmoil, the establishment looked for a scapegoat. Congressman Claude Pepper took to the floor of the House of Representatives and bellowed, “If any one individual contributed to the contagious disrespect for law and love of country, then it would have to be our disposed fighting king.”

The seismic shifts in public opinion were beginning to have their effect in Washington. On March 31, President Johnson went on national television to announce a unilateral bombing halt. At the end of the speech, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing that he would not run for a second term.

Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis on the balcony of his motel by a white assassin, sparking the worst race riots America had seen since Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title fifty-eight years earlier.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just Muhammad Ali who was under siege—it was the whole country.

Sports columnist Jerry Izenberg likes to point out a rarely discussed irony of the growing anti-war movement. “You have to remember that all those kids protesting the war were basically acting out of self-interest. They didn’t want to go to Vietnam so they did everything they could to stay out of the army. They got themselves student deferments, they fled to Canada, very few of them actually took a real stand. Compare that to Ali who put everything he had on the line and was willing to go to jail for what he believed in. I always thought about that when I watched the demonstrations on TV. And remember Ali was first. When he made his comment about the Vietcong, nobody was protesting yet. He paved the way, but they never gave him credit for that; the Abbie Hoffmans and Jerry Rubins were too busy taking credit themselves. You never saw them carry signs asking for his reinstatement. They were only looking out for themselves.”

Stokely Carmichael, one of the highest profile of these protesters, seemed to echo Izenberg’s attitude when he said, “No one risked or suffered like Muhammad Ali. I didn’t risk anything. I just told people not to go.”

Indeed, the statistics seem to confirm that this generation was less likely to take a genuine risk, compared to the generation before. In 1966, only 353 out of 1,100,000 eligible American men were convicted as draft dodgers, although this figure would climb significantly before the end of the war. This compares to one-year totals of 8,422 during World War I, 4,609 during World War II; and 432 during the Korean War.

But if the hippies never acknowledged Ali’s influence, there was at least one group determined to pay the deposed boxer his due.

By the late 1960s, black athletes in America had failed to cash in on the progress of the civil rights movement. They were no longer excluded from the major sports leagues as they had been thirty years before. But in some ways, a uniquely American form of sports apartheid continued to plague many of the country’s sports institutions.

Virtually every major athletic and country club in the country—North and South—was segregated, making it virtually impossible for blacks to break into sports such as golf and tennis.

As late as 1968, black athletes in the South and even in northern cities such as Chicago, Buffalo, and Montreal were refused service in many restaurants and were forced to stay in different hotels than their white teammates. Until only a few years before, when Northern universities played Southern colleges, they were expected to sit out their black players in deference to Southern tradition. Even when the Southern teams came north, many teams considered it a form of gracious hospitality to keep their black players out of the game.

By the 1960s, a few Southern colleges had taken to recruiting black athletes but many teams were still segregated. In 1965, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) became the first Southern university to field a black player. Still, UTEP athletic director George McCarty made it abundantly clear that his liberal attitudes on race only went so far when he explained his rationale. “In general, the nigger athlete is a little hungrier, and we have been blessed with having some real outstanding ones,” he said. “We think they’ve done a lot for us, and we think we’ve done a lot for them.”

In 1967, black athletes finally decided that they wanted a share of the racial progress sweeping the rest of society. The Revolt of the Black Athlete was born. Its architect was a former college basketball and track star named Harry Edwards.

Standing six-foot-eight and weighing 240 pounds, Edwards was a formidable presence. Five years earlier, he had rejected a number of pro football offers in favor of an academic career at Cornell. In 1967, at the age of twenty-five, he was teaching sociology at San Jose State University (SJSU), where he ignited the first spark of the revolt.

Edwards had demanded a meeting with SJSU president Robert Clark to discuss grievances about racism at the university. When he was rebuffed, he organized a rally setting out the conditions for eradicating injustice at the institution. If the conditions were not met, he threatened, the upcoming football game between SJSU and the University of Texas at El Paso would be disrupted. Refusing to cave into the demands, the president cancelled the football game, infuriating California Governor Ronald Reagan, who publicly castigated Clark for allowing himself to be coerced by Edwards.

Before long, the movement had spread to universities throughout the country, and black athletes nationwide began to demand a better deal. In December 1967, at a black youth conference in Los Angeles, Edwards gathered a number of top-ranking black athletes and formed an organization calling itself the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR).

The OPHR threatened a black boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics unless a series of demands were met. Among these:

• The appointment of another black to the nearly all-white U.S. Olympic Committee.
  
• The resignation of the controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) chairperson Avery Brundage, who had made a number of controversial racial comments in the past. Asked by a reporter, for example, why he thought black athletes had dominated the track and field events, he replied, “This is nothing new. Even as far back as 1936, one could see, particularly with Jesse Owens, how the Negroes could excel in athletics. Their muscle structure lends itself to this sort of competition about which we are all delighted.”
  
• The expulsion of South Africa and Rhodesia from the games because of their apartheid systems. South Africa, in fact, had already been banned, but it was on the verge of reinstatement by the IOC.
  

But number one on the OPHR list of demands was the reinstatement of Muhammad Ali as heavyweight champion and the restoration of his boxing license. The inclusion of Ali on the list was puzzling to many, because the IOC had nothing to do with boxing licenses.

“We put Ali on the list as a symbolic gesture to express our gratitude for the stand he took,” explains Edwards, who is today a sociology professor at Berkeley University. “We had no illusions of getting his license back. Boxing commissions are the most corrupt and contemptible institutions in sports. But we were saying thank you to Ali for what he did. When he refused to be inducted, it heightened the consciousness of all black athletes. Before Ali, the Jesse Owenses, the Jackie Robinsons, the Joe Louises had to turn the other cheek in terms of their dignity to gain access. They had to make sure they didn’t do anything to alienate white folks or to hurt black folks. I’m not faulting them. It was part of the tradition of being twentieth-century gladiators in the service of white society. Ali broke with all that. He was the forerunner in the movement to demonstrate that blacks had a responsibility to be a different kind of athlete, in terms of not buying into white society’s expectations. He had an enormous impact and we were just acknowledging that. In many ways, Muhammad Ali was the father of the Revolt of the Black Athlete.”

In January 1968, the New York Athletic Club scheduled its annual indoor track and field meet at Madison Square Garden to commemorate the club’s 100th anniversary. The meet would have been a showcase for some of the premier black athletes in the country. Edwards saw his chance to show he meant business. The NYAC, like most elite clubs, still had an all-white membership policy and the OPHR called for blacks to boycott the meet as a signal that their threat of an Olympic boycott was serious. On the day of the event, there was hardly a black face to be seen. The boycott was a resounding success, and the IOC started to get nervous.

“You can no longer count on the successors of Jesse Owens to join in a fun-and-games fete propagandized as the epitome of equal rights so long as we are refused those rights in a white society,” Edwards warned.

American track and field stars Lee Evans and Tommie Smith were the first athletes to publicly declare their intention to boycott the games as part of Edwards’s movement.
Track & Field
magazine printed a sampling of the letters the two black athletes received in response to their threat.

One letter from San Francisco read, “Smith: Thanks for pulling out. I quit being interested in watching a bunch of animals like Negroes go through their paces. Please see what you can do about withdrawing Negroes from boxing, baseball, and football.” Another Californian wrote, “How much are the communists paying you to make fools out of your fellow Americans?”