Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (33 page)

When the fictional American version showed the undefeated Ali getting a come uppance that no American had seen in real life, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
celebrated the outcome, informing Ali:

The Computer knows who’s who in the equation. Take you, a loud-mouth black racist who brags I’m the Greatest! I’m the King!’You won’t submit to White America’s old image of black fighters, you won’t even submit to white America’s Army….Every self-respecting made-in-American knows how to add that up. They killed you off but can’t get rid of the ghost you left behind. And there’s not a white fighter around to chase it away.…They want your ass whipped in public, knocked down, ripped, stomped, clubbed, pulverized and not just by anybody, but by a real great white hope, and none’s around. That’s where the computer comes in.

Soon after, Ali’s new advisers dropped Richard Fulton Inc. as his Speaker’s agent and signed on with the American Program Bureau, headed by Robert Walker.

“Ali was afraid to fly,” recalls Walker. “We promised him that we could get him a private jet to go from speech to speech. He loved that idea. He signed on and he was immediately our most popular speaker. He was in huge demand on the campuses. We were getting him $15,000 to $25,000 a speech, which was unheard of back then. It would be like the equivalent of $225,000 today. The Student Unions had a lot of money and they all wanted him.” Under Richard Fulton—a contract negotiated by the Nation of Islam—he had only been receiving $1,500 to $2,000 a lecture.

At the end of 1969, Ali was approached by a Broadway producer named Ron Rich about appearing in a “Black Power” musical called
Buck White
on Broadway. The money was right and Ali would have a new outlet for his theatrical instincts.

To everyone’s surprise, the boxer-turned-actor could actually sing. Sporting an Afro wig and a beard, he took to the stage every night with a musical message very similar to the one he had been espousing in real life. In one number, he sang:

We came in chains, we didn’t volunteer

And yet, today, the fact remains

We’re still held captive here

Now we say, cut us loose

Though that may go against your grain

Still, there is no excuse

We came in chains, and now your choice must be

To either blow out all our brains

Or else just set us free

Better now than later on,

Now that fear of death is gone,

Never mind another dawn.

Notwithstanding the fact that the
New York Times
had always been hostile to Ali’s stand against the war, its theater critic Clive Barnes was impressed by the neophyte actor’s talents. “How is Mr. Clay?” he wrote in the review. “He emerges as a modest naturally appealing man. He sings with a pleasant slightly impersonal voice, acts without embarrassment, and moves with innate dignity. He does himself proud.” The rest of New York’s demanding theater critics were equally kind to Ali’s performance, if not to the play itself, which closed after only three weeks.

Meanwhile, Chauncey Eskridge had negotiated a deal that seemed destined to make the recently impoverished ex-boxer a rich man again without setting foot back into the ring. Ali lent his name and image to a chain of hamburger restaurants called “Champburger” in return for six-percent ownership in the company and one-percent of gross sales. When Champburger stock was issued in 1969, Ali received a check for $900,000.

The first thing he did with his windfall was to buy himself a gray Cadillac limousine at a cost of $10,000. For a man who cared little for material possessions, the purchase was symbolic of his battle against adversity, a way to tell the establishment they couldn’t beat him, no matter how hard they tried.

He made this explicit one day when he arrived in Manhattan for a meeting at Random House, which had recently offered to publish his autobiography. As he pulled up at the publisher’s midtown office, a small group of people recognized the ex-champ and gathered around his shiny new car.

“See my new limousine?” he asked them. “They think they can bring me to my knees by takin’ away my title and by not letting me fight in this country, and by taking my passport so I can’t get to the $3 million worth of fight contracts that are waiting for me overseas. Shoot! I ain’t worked for two years and I ain’t been Tommin’to nobody and here I’m buying limousines—the President of the United States ain’t got no better one. Just look at it! Ain’t it purty? Y’all go and tell everybody that Muhammad Ali ain’t licked yet. I don’t care if I never get another fight. I say, damn the fights and damn all the money. A man’s got to stand up for what he believes, and I’m standin’ up for my people, even if I have to go to jail.”

A week later, Random House gave him a $200,000 advance for the book that would appear five years later as
The Greatest.
Ali was once again a millionaire. This time he was determined that his funds would not be frittered away as they had the last time. During his two-year stint as an impoverished celebrity, he had dreamed about what he would do if he ever came into the kind of money he had before. Once again, however, his trusting nature proved his undoing.

“As soon as he was back on his feet again,” laments Gene Dibble, “the vultures came right out of the woodwork. And Ali never seems to learn. He had all this money from the hamburger chain and he was starting to make big bucks on the lecture circuit. He wanted to use his money to help the poor blacks in the ghetto. He had been talking to people like Jim Brown and reading a lot about economic justice, helping blacks start their own businesses, stuff like that. He was very excited about it, he thought he was going to eliminate poverty. All these lawyers got involved helping him put together a foundation or something but in the end it was the same story. They ripped him off.”

Ali was so passionate about his dream that in early 1970 he decided that he had no desire to ever box again. Instead, he would devote his life to his plan for black economic justice. In May,
Esquire
magazine—a long-time supporter of his anti-war stand—offered Ali its pages to outline his economic plan and explain what he would do if he were President of the United States. In a five-page treatise headlined
I’M SORRY, BUT I’M THROUGH FIGHTING NOW
, he announced that the only way he would go back into the ring would be to fight a series of exhibitions with the current heavyweight champion Joe Frazier to help relieve poverty.

“We can go to Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor, Arthur Ashe, and all the top black athletes, and all of us can go down to Mississippi and do something to help the poverty people,” he wrote. “We’ll take all this fame the white man gave to us because we fought for his entertainment, and we can turn it around. Instead of beating up each other, and playing ball games, and running miracles for the entertainment of white folks, we will use our fame for freedom. I want Joe Frazier to join me. I’m getting together a dope-addict program, rehabilitating addicts. And there are some black welfare women in Los Angeles who want my help because they don’t have clothes for their children. They’re trying to buy a shop where they can make their own clothes, but they can’t get the money. All they’ve got is the seven dollars the government gives them to live on. Me and Joe could put on one boxing exhibition and get them more sewing machines than they could use in a life-time.”

In response to the question of what he would do if he were President, he envisioned his State of the Union address to the American people: “Now, fellow Americans, we owe these black people for four hundred years of back labor,” President Ali would announce. “They’ve done a lot for us. They died in the Japanese war, the German war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. We’re repaying them. I’m going to take this $25 billion I was gonna spend on helicopters in Vietnam, and it’s going to Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi, and pay for $25 billion worth of houses, nice brick houses. Each black man who needs it is going to be given a home. Now, black people, we’re just repaying you. We ain’t giving you nothing. We’re guilty. We owe it to you.”

At the time, much critical attention was being given to the American government’s policy of destroying huge quantities of food and paying farmers not to grow crops as a means of keeping agricultural commodity prices artificially high. President Ali reserved his harshest words to address this situation: “Now, after all the boys get back to America [from Vietnam], I’m going to tell you people that’s been getting paid for not growing food that you’ll get the electric chair if I catch you destroying any more food. We need that food. I’m gonna hire a bunch of people with all those billions we’ve been spending on the war. I’m going to pay them $300 a week to help their brothers. And I’m gonna say, ‘General Motors, listen here. I want you to make 50,000 diesel trucks. I’m gonna fill those trucks up with canned goods and all the food that you people have been throwing away. We’re gonna take it all down to the people of Mississippi and charge them nothing.’”

For the rest of his career, Ali would continue to speak out on and fight for economic justice, later extending his efforts to help poor whites as well. He also repeatedly challenged other successful black celebrities to help revitalize the ghettoes. But this side of Ali’s personality and character, perhaps the most serious and important, was consistently ignored by the media or denigrated as “naive.”

Once, after witnessing one of Ali’s anti-poverty speeches, which were traditionally relegated to a paragraph on the sports pages if they were written about at all, celebrated American author Roger Kahn complained, “Christ, I thought, here is someone who wants to give away a fortune. Here is a man who cannot read without the most painful pauses between words making a stirring and even profound speech. Here is a black millionaire, socialist, populist and revivalist and most of all idealist. Yes mostly that. Idealist. And in a society that forever confuses value and net worth, this aging, baby-faced champion, this dreamer finely tuned to reality, throws out a mighty blow with his checkbook. What do the papers report? Ali to concentrate on body blows [in his next bout].”

Jerry Izenberg was also intrigued by Ali’s burgeoning economic philosophy. “He told me something very interesting around this time,” recalls the sports columnist. “He told me that his boxing career was only a tool. He said, ‘Fighting hunger, fighting illiteracy, these are the things I really want to do. That’s what my boxing fame made possible.’”

Ali may have been publicly announcing his intention never to box again professionally, but his friends had other ideas. They sensed that the political and social climate had changed sufficiently since 1967 and that America was ready to accept the exiled fighter back in the ring.

Fight publicist Harold Conrad especially believed he could arrange a comeback. As far back as 1968, he had put out feelers, approaching twenty-eight different states about granting Ali a license, only to be turned down each time. He came closest to success in California, where the chairperson of the state athletic commission polled its members and discovered they had enough votes to let Ali fight. Before the decision was announced, however, California Governor Ronald Reagan got wind of the impending fight and declared, “That draft dodger will never fight in my state, period.”

Chicago Tribune
sports editor Arch Ward’s description of Ali as the “unpopular, undefeated, heavyweight monster-in-exile” seemed to capture the mood as Conrad persisted in his quest. One of the most ironic rejections he suffered during this period came from Nevada. The governor believed an Ali fight would be good for tourism and was ready to sanction the Las Vegas bout. At the time, however, the Chief Executive didn’t pull that much weight. Instead, the desert state was controlled by two forces: the mob and right-wing billionaire Howard Hughes. The former had no problem with the fight. Not so Hughes. He had strong political connections with Richard Nixon and let it be known that he strongly disapproved of Ali’s politics and would not tolerate the boxer’s presence in Las Vegas—the American capital of gambling, prostitution, and vice. Once again, Conrad was rebuffed. When Ali was informed of the decision, he seemed genuinely puzzled. “Me corrupt Las Vegas?” he asked with a bemused grin.