Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (34 page)

Meanwhile, on the legal front, the United States Court of Appeals had rejected Ali’s appeal of the wiretap ruling, leaving him only one chance to stay out of prison, the U.S. Supreme Court, which had once before refused to hear his case. A decision was not expected until early 1971, giving the boxer at least one more year of freedom.

Conrad’s next stop was an unlikely setting—Mississippi, America’s most racist state, where there was no love lost for Ali, at least among the governing elite. Still, after two weeks of negotiations, the intrepid promoter had an agreement with the state’s governor and the mayor of Jackson along with a bona fide boxing license. In return, Ali had to pledge to donate the entire gate receipts of the fight to the Salvation Army.

The long exile appeared to be finally over. But when the citizens of the state and, in particular, the American Legion got wind of the deal, the political firestorm was too much for the politicians to bear. Despite the fact that his signature appeared on the license already in Conrad’s possession, the governor promptly denied its existence.

A similar deal came close to being struck in Michigan before the governor there also pulled a hasty about-face after public opposition once again made the fight politically unpalatable. The
Detroit Free Press
described the atmosphere that continued to thwart Conrad’s efforts. “Approving a fight for Clay would appear to the public to be approving of his way of life,” the paper editorialized, “and this includes draft evasion. This is a difficult thing for anyone to do, especially a public figure … the public sentiment against him seems to be so strong that no one wants to take the responsibility for sanctioning a fight against him.”

But Ali was never convinced public opposition was really behind the repeated attempts to deprive him of his livelihood. When Conrad informed him of his latest setback, blaming public opinion for his troubles, Ali cut him off.

“It’s not the public,” he protested. “It’s never been the public, not the mainstream of the people. I travel all the time. Wherever I go, whether the Deep South like Alabama or Louisiana, or from Maine to California, since the day I left the draft board, people white, black, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, welcome me, crowd around me, tell me they’re with me. They tell me how ashamed they are about what’s happening to me….It’s not the public, it’s political, from somewhere big.”

Ali was only partially right in this assessment. Despite growing support for the exiled fighter throughout the country, millions of Americans still reviled him. But, as he sensed, there also seemed to be powerful political forces behind the continuing rejections.

In May 1970, Conrad appeared to have finally found a city to host his fight. Charleston, South Carolina, had approved a charity boxing exhibition involving Ali and a fighter to be named later. The contracts had been signed and it looked inevitable that Ali would finally get his chance to step into a ring. Suddenly, however, the Charleston city council announced the fight was off. It seemed that the mayor had received a phone call from longtime Ali detractor and South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who headed the powerful House Arms Appropriation Committee. “You’re making me the laughing stock of Washington by letting that draft-dodging black sonofabitch fight in my hometown,” Rivers complained. The fight was off.

If America didn’t want the fight, however, plenty of other places were all too happy to host Ali’s comeback. Tijuana, Mexico, only minutes away from the American border, offered its bullring for a match. Ali would have only been required to leave the United States for two hours. The State Department refused to grant permission.

Toronto, Canada, made a similar offer. This time, Chauncey Eskridge petitioned the Supreme Court for approval. He offered to put up a $100,000 cash bond. Ali would travel by car, which the Justice Department could staff with as many U.S. marshals as it deemed necessary to assure the boxer’s return. Seventy percent of the total onemillion-dollar purse would be put in escrow. In his petition, Eskridge pointed out that Ali had never failed to make an appearance in federal court since he was indicted three years earlier. Justice Hugo Black was unimpressed and turned down the petition. These rejections were particularly suspicious because there was ample precedent of Americans being given permission to leave the country while their sentences were being appealed. Only the year before, radical activist Abbie Hoffman was allowed to travel to communist Cuba for twenty-six days while his own five-year sentence for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was being appealed. Once again, it appeared that Muhammad Ali, whose only previous offense was a traffic violation, was being singled out for special treatment.

Just when it appeared that any further attempts to secure a license were futile, Ali received a call from Georgia State Senator Leroy Johnson, the first black to be elected to the state senate in the South since Reconstruction. Johnson let it be known that he was in a position to arrange an Ali-Frazier title bout in Atlanta if the right strings were pulled. Georgia was one of the few American states without a state licensing commission. A year before, when Conrad had secured an agreement with the city of Macon, Georgia, to stage an Ali bout, it had been vetoed by the state’s conservative firebrand governor Lester Maddox On that occasion, Maddox vowed, “I’il give Clay a license after he serves his term in the Army, or his term in jail. Then maybe I’ll think of allowing him in Georgia.”

But Johnson was insistent that he had the clout to arrange the Atlanta match. The senator was indeed influential. He had recently delivered the votes that enabled a liberal Jew named Sam Massell to win the Atlanta mayoral race. Massell’s support would be crucial to securing the fight and Johnson could assure it. For years, Leroy Johnson trumpeted his role in arranging the fight as altruistic. But Harold Conrad would later reveal that Johnson insisted on being cut in for a piece of the action.

When the idea of an Atlanta match was first floated, memories of the Macon rejection still lingered.
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist John Carmichael poured water on the prospect, writing, “I advise Muhammad Ali to call it quits. He is an outcast, a fistic pariah. Maddox, will never let him fight in Georgia.”

But Carmichael and the other doubters underestimated Johnson’s clout. His ability to control the state’s black vote intimidated even Maddox, and the governor surprised everyone when he took to the airwaves and announced his approval for the fight. “There has been a lot of controversy about this fellow Clay. When he rejected the draft, I’m sure it hurt him. He’s paying for it. We’re all entitled to our mistakes. This is the way I see it. I see nothing wrong with him fighting here.”

The governor’s approval took everybody off guard, from the state’s large racist population to Ali’s detractors in Washington, who believed Maddox had betrayed patriotic Americans. Within days, the governor was inundated with hate mail from his constituents and phone calls from members of Congress demanding he reverse his decision. Reports out of the Georgia Statehouse had Maddox fielding a call from the U.S. Justice Department exerting pressure on the governor to stop the fight by any means at his disposal.

Meanwhile, Joe Frazier—the reigning heavyweight champion and pretender to Ali’s old throne—announced he would not fight Ali in Atlanta. Instead, promoters enlisted a leading white contender, Jerry Quarry—a genuine “Great White Hope.” It was to be the first time Ali would fight a white opponent since 1962. The prospect of a white boxer silencing the uppity Negro added significantly to the anticipated fight revenues.

The pressure being exerted on Maddox finally became too much for him to resist. Two weeks before the scheduled bout, the Governor’s office issued a statement announcing that Maddox “urges all Atlantans to boycott the fight of Clay and Quarry. He further urges all patriotic groups in the city to let promoters know how they feel about it. We shouldn’t let him fight for money if he didn’t fight for his country.”

Jerry Izenberg was in Atlanta to cover the fight.

“Maddox was feeling a lot of heat,” he recalls. “One moment he was supporting the fight, the next he was trying to stop it. The pressure was coming from pretty high up. We didn’t know if the fight was going to actually take place. I remember I was in his office when he declared the day of the fight to be an official’Day of Mourning.’ It was a bit much.”

With the license issued, it seemed to be too late to stop the fight. What Maddox didn’t know was that Atlanta still had an old ordinance on its books that would have made the Ali-Quarry fight illegal. Section 28 of the
Rules and Regulations Governing all Boxing Contests in the City of Atlanta
stated, “No mixed bouts shall be permitted between white and black contestants in the city of Atlanta and said rules shall be binding and made a part of the agreement of all matchmakers and promoters.”

When Leroy Johnson learned of the obscure regulation, which dated back to the post-Civil War period, he quickly moved to get the city council to delete it before Maddox got wind of the loophole and declared the license null and void.

The fight was on, scheduled for October 26, 1970. But in Georgia, and across the nation, news of Ali’s return to the ring sparked intense and divisive emotions. The night before he was scheduled to leave for Atlanta, Ali received a gift-wrapped package, which was opened by his sparring partner. Inside the box was a black chihuahua with a severed head. A message accompanying the package read, “We know how to handle black draft-dodging dogs in Georgia. Stay out of Atlanta.” It was signed with a small Confederate flag.

While he was staying at the cabin of Leroy Johnson a few days later, Ali was woken by gunshots ringing out of the Georgia night. Moments later, the phone rang. “Nigger, if you don’t leave Atlanta tomorrow, you gonna die. You Viet Cong bastard! You draft-dodging bastard! We won’t miss you the next time!”

On the day of the fight, the anticipation was boiling over. The implications of the upcoming match were not lost on the array of black celebrities—including Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Julian Bond—who flooded Atlanta, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., to see the black knight begin the long march back to reclaim his throne.

“If he loses tonight,” declared Jesse Jackson, who had been one of King’s top lieutenants, “it will mean, symbolically, that the forces of blind patriotism are right, that dissent is wrong; that protest means you don’t love the country, this fight is Love-it-or-leave-it vs. Love-it-and-change-it. They tried to railroad him. They refused to accept his testimony about his religious convictions. They took away his right to practice his profession. They tried to break him in body and in mind. Martin Luther King used to say, ‘Truth crushed to the earth will rise again.’ That’s the black ethos. And it’s happening here in Georgia of all places, against a white man!”

Ali understood more than anybody the burden he carried. “I’m not just fighting one man,” he said before the fight. “I’m fighting a lot of men, showing them here is one man they couldn’t conquer. Lose this one, and it won’t be just a loss to me. So many millions of faces throughout the world will be sad. They’ll feel like they’ve been defeated. If I lose, for the rest of my life I won’t be free. I’ll have to listen to all this about how I was a bum, how I joined the wrong movement and they mislead me. I’m fighting for my freedom.”

On the morning of the bout, Ali ran into Joe Louis, who was hired to participate in the pre-fight promotion.

“Who are you picking, Joe?” he asked his boyhood idol.

“Why?” responded the legendary boxer, aware he was being taunted.

“Because if you’re picking me, I’m scared to death. Everybody you pick is a loser. When I fought Liston the first time, you picked Liston’ When I fought Liston the second time, you picked Liston; When I fought Patterson, you picked Patterson. When I fought Chuval Terrell, Cleveland Williams, Bonavena, you picked them.”

“Well,” said Louis, “if we go by that, Quarry’s the next champion because I’m picking you.”

That afternoon Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader, presented Ali with the first Martin Luther King Memorial Award for his contribution to the “cause of human dignity,” proclaiming that the boxer was carrying on her husband’s legacy as “a champion of justice and peace.”

As Ali entered the ring for the fight, cheered on by the 90 percent black crowd, his corner man Bundini Brown yelled out, “Ghost in the house, ghost in the house.” The ghost he was referring to was Jack Johnson, who had emerged from his own exile to fight a white boxer sixty years earlier. For the last few days, Ali had been watching old Jack Johnson fight films to inspire him for the Quarry fight. Later he would say, “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image. I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger the white folks didn’t like.”

It had been forty-three months since Ali last set foot in a ring, what his trainer Angelo Dundee refers to as the “lost years,” when the exiled champion would have been at his peak as a fighter and which he could never win back. Still, it took him only three rounds to dispose of Quarry and lay to rest any lingering doubts as to whether he was still a force to be reckoned with after such a prolonged absence. He was a little slower, his timing wasn’t what it once was, but he still had it.