Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

ALI AS DIPLOMAT: ‘NO! NO! NO! DON’T!’

(2001)

In 1980, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter Administration sought to organise a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. As part of that effort, it sent Muhammad Ali to five African nations to gather support for America’s position.

Ali’s trip was a disaster. Time magazine later called it ‘the most bizarre diplomatic mission in recent US history’. Some African officials viewed Ali’s presence as a racial insult. ‘Would the United States send Chris Evert to negotiate with London?’ one Tanzanian diplomat demanded. Ali himself seemed confused regarding the facts underlying his role and was unable to explain why African nations should boycott the Moscow Olympics when, four years earlier, the United States had refused to join twenty-nine African countries in boycotting the Montreal Olympics over South Africa’s place in the sporting world.

‘Maybe I’m being used to do something that ain’t right,’ Ali conceded at one point. In Kenya, he announced that Jimmy Carter had put him ‘on the spot’ and sent him ‘around the world to take the whupping over American policies’ and said that, if he’d known the ‘whole history of America and South Africa’, he ‘probably wouldn’t have made the trip’.

That bit of history is relevant now because Jack Valenti (president of the Motion Picture Association of America) has unveiled tentative plans for a one-minute public service announcement featuring Ali that will be broadcast throughout the Muslim world. The thrust of the message is that America’s war on terrorism is not a war against Islam. The public service spot would be prepared by Hollywood 9/11 – a group that was formed after movie industry executives met on 11 November with Karl Rove (a senior political advisor to George Bush). In Valenti’s words, Ali would be held out as ‘the spokesman for Muslims in America’.

The proposed public service announcement might be good publicity for the movie industry, but it’s dangerous politics.

Ali is universally respected and loved, but he isn’t a diplomat. He doesn’t understand the complexities of geopolitics. His heart is pure, but his judgements and actions are at times unwise. An example of this occurred on 19 December 2001, at a fund-raising event for the proposed Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville – which is intended to be an educational facility designed to promote tolerance and understanding among all people. At the fund-raiser, Ali rose to tell several jokes.

‘No! No! No! Don’t,’ his wife Lonnie cried.

Despite her plea, Ali proceeded. ‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe?’ he asked. Then he supplied the answer: ‘A canoe tips.’ That was followed by: ‘A black, a Puerto Rican and a Mexican are in a car. Who’s driving?’ The answer: ‘The police.’

Afterwards, Sue Carls (a spokesperson for the Ali Center) sought to minimise the damage, explaining, ‘These are not new jokes. Muhammad tells them all the time because he likes to make people laugh and he shocks people to make a point.’ Two days later, Lonnie Ali added, ‘Even the Greatest can tell bad jokes.’

The problem is, this is a situation where misjudgements and bad jokes can cost lives.

Ali is not a bigot. He tells far more ‘nigger’ jokes than jokes about Hispanics and Jews. But Ali sometimes speaks and acts without considering the implications of his words and conduct. And he can be swayed by rhetoric; particularly when the speaker is a Muslim cleric with a following in some portion of the world.

What happens if, six months from now, Ali makes an intemperate statement about Israel? What happens if Ali calls for a halt to all American military action against terrorism in the heartfelt belief that a halt will save innocent lives? Will he then still be ‘the spokesman for Muslims in America’?

Muhammad Ali leads best when he leads by example and by broad statements in support of tolerance and understanding among all people. To ask more of him in the current incendiary situation is looking for trouble.

GHOSTS OF MANILA

(2001)

Albert Einstein once remarked, ‘Nature, to be sure, distributes her gifts unevenly among her children. But it strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them.’

But society did just that with Muhammad Ali. Few people have ever received accolades equal to those that have been showered upon him. Indeed, Wilfrid Sheed, who himself was sceptical of Ali’s merit as a social figure, once observed that boxing’s eras would be forever known as BC (before Clay) and AD (Ali Domini).

Enter Mark Kram. Kram is a very good writer. How else can one describe a man who refers to Chuck Wepner as having a face that looks as though it has been ‘embroidered by a tipsy church lady’, and likens Joe Frazier’s visage after Ali–Frazier I to ‘a frieze of a lab experiment that was a disaster’.

Kram covered boxing for Sports Illustrated for eleven years. Now, a quarter of a century later, he has written Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. The book, in the first instance, is the story of two men whose rivalry was ugly, glorious, brutal and enthralling. And secondarily, Kram declares, ‘This book is intended to be a corrective to the years of stenography that have produced the Ali legend. Cheap myth corruscates the man. The wire scheme for his sculpture is too big.’

Thus Kram seeks to raise Joe Frazier to a level virtually equal to that of Ali in the ring and perhaps above him in terms of character. In so doing, he portrays what he believes to be the dark side of Ali.

Ghosts of Manila is divided into four parts. They cover, in order, (1) Ali and Frazier in retirement; (2) the emergence of both men as fighters and in the public consciousness; (3) their three fights; and (4) the two men, again, in retirement.

Kram concedes Ali’s ring greatness. ‘As a fighter,’ Kram writes, ‘he was the surface of a shield, unmalleable, made for mace and chain, flaring with light.’ Describing Ali in the ring moments before Ali–Frazier I, he acknowledges, ‘Whatever you might think of him, you were forced to look at him with honest lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands – punch, size, speed, intelligence, command and imagination – he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find.’

As for Frazier, Kram calls him ‘the most skilful devastating inside puncher in boxing history’, and goes so far as to rank him among the top five heavyweights of all time. That seems a bit silly. Joe was a great fighter and every bit as noble a warrior as Ali. But there’s a time-honoured axiom in boxing that styles make fights. And the list of fighters with the style to beat Joe Frazier numbers far more than five.

Kram is on more solid ground when he catalogues Frazier’s hatred for Ali. The story of how Muhammad branded Joe an ‘Uncle Tom’ before their first fight, ‘ignorant’ before Ali–Frazier II and a ‘gorilla’ before Ali–Frazier III is well known, but Ghosts of Manila makes it fresh and compelling. Thus, Kram writes, ‘Muhammad Ali swam inside Joe Frazier like a determined bacillus … Ali has sat in Frazier’s gut like a broken bottle.’ And he quotes Frazier’s one-time associate Bert Watson as saying, ‘You don’t do to a man what Ali did to Joe. Ali robbed him of who he is. To a lot of people, Joe is still ignorant, slow-speaking, dumb and ugly. That tag never leaves him. People have only seen one Joe; the one created by Ali. If you’re a man, that’s going to get to you in a big way.’ And Kram quotes Frazier as saying of Ali, ‘When a man gets in your blood like that, you can’t never let go. Yesterday is today for me. He never die for me … If we were twins in the belly of our mama, I’d reach over and strangle him … I’ll outlive him.’

Kram writes with grace and constructs his case against Ali’s supervening greatness in a largely intelligent way. But his work is flawed.

First, there are factual inaccuracies. For example, Kram is simply wrong when he discusses Ali’s military draft reclassification and states, ‘Had he not become a Muslim, chances are he would have remained unfit for duty.’

That’s not the case. In truth, Ali had been declared unfit for military duty by virtue of his scoring in the 16th percentile on an Army intelligence test. That left him well below the requirement of 30. But two years after that, with the war in Vietnam expanding, the mental-aptitude percentile required by the military was lowered from 30 to 15. The change impacted upon hundreds of thousands of young men across the country. To suggest that Ali was somehow singled out and the standard changed because of his religion is ridiculous.

Also, there are times when Kram is overly mean-spirited. For example, Bryant Gumbel (who aroused Kram’s ire with negative commentary on Joe Frazier) is referred to as ‘a mediocre writer and thinker’ with ‘a shallow, hard-worked ultra-sophistication and ego that not even a mother could love’. Ali in his current condition is labelled ‘a billboard in decline’, of whom Kram says uncharitably, ‘Physical disaster of his own making has kept his fame intact. He would have become the bore dodged at the party. The future promised that there would be no more clothes with which to dress him up.’ Indeed, Kram goes so far as to call the younger Ali ‘a useful idiot’ and ‘near the moronic level’.

Kram’s failure to distinguish fully between Nation of Islam doctrine and orthodox Islamic beliefs is also troubling. During what might have been the most important 14 years of Ali’s life, he adhered to the teachings of the Nation of Islam; a doctrine that Arthur Ashe later condemned as ‘a racist ideology; a sort of American apartheid’. Yet reading Ghosts of Manila, one might come away with the impression that Nation of Islam doctrine was, and still is, Islam as practised by more than one billion people around the world today. That’s because Kram has the annoying habit of referring to Ali’s early mentors as ‘the Muslims’, which is like lumping Billy Graham and the Ku Klux Klan together and calling them ‘the Christians’.

Then there’s the matter of Kram’s sources; most notably, his reliance on two women named Aaisha Ali and Khaliah Ali.

Muhammad met Aaisha Ali in 1973 when he was 31 years old and she was a 17-year-old named Wanda Bolton. To his discredit, they had sexual relations and she became pregnant. Kram makes much of the fact that Wanda was ‘on her way to becoming a doctor’. Given the fact that she was a high school junior at the time, that’s rather speculative. Regardless, Ms Bolton subsequently claimed that she and Ali had been ‘Islamically married’ and changed her name to Aaisha Ali. Muhammad acknowledged paternity and accepted financial responsibility for their daughter, Khaliah.

Kram describes Aaisha several times as ‘a mystery woman’, which is a cheap theatrical trick. Her presence in Ali’s past has been known and written about for years. More significantly, Kram uses Aaisha and Khaliah as his primary sources to trash Ali’s current wife Lonnie (who Kram calls Ali’s ‘new boss’). Indeed, after describing Ali as ‘a careless fighter who had his brain cells irradiated’, Kram quotes Lonnie as telling Khaliah, ‘I am Muhammad Ali now.’ Then, after referring to ‘Lonnie and her tight circle of pushers’, he quotes Khaliah as saying of her father, ‘It’s about money. He’s a substance, an item.’ After that, Kram recounts a scene when Ali and Lonnie were in a Louisville hospital visiting Ali’s mother, who was being kept alive on a respirator. The final days of Odessa Clay’s life were the saddest ever for Ali. Yet again, relying wholly on Khaliah, Kram quotes Lonnie as saying, ‘We can’t afford this, Muhammad.’

The problem is, there are a lot of people who think that Aaisha Ali and Khaliah Ali aren’t particularly reliable sources. I happen to have been present at one of the incidents regarding which Kram quotes Khaliah. It involved a championship belt that was given to Ali at a dinner commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first Ali–Frazier fight. The dinner took place on the night of 14 April 1991, although Kram mistakenly reports it as occurring on an unspecified date five years later. Khaliah left Ali’s hotel room that night with the belt. I experienced the incident very differently from the way Kram recounts it.

However, my biggest concern regarding Ghosts of Manila is its thesis that Ali’s influence lay entirely in the sporting arena. Kram acknowledges that Ali ‘did lead the way for black athletes out of the frustrating silence that Jackie Robinson had to endure’. However, even that concession is tempered by the claim that, ‘Ali’s influence in games today can be seen in the blaring unending marketing of self, the cheap acting out of performers, and the crassness of player interactions. His was an overwhelming presence that, if you care about such things, came at a high cost.’

Then Kram goes on to say, ‘What was laughable, if you knew anything about Ali at all, was that the literati was certain that he was a serious voice, that he knew what he was doing. He didn’t have a clue … Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived.’

‘Ali,’ Kram says flatly, ‘was not a social force.’ And woe to those who say he was, because their utterances are dismissed as ‘heavy breathing’ from ‘know-nothings’ and ‘trendy tasters of faux revolution’.

Apparently, I’m one of those heavy breathers. Kram refers to me as ‘a lawyer-Boswell who seems intent of making the public believe that, next to Martin Luther King, Ali is the most important black figure in the last half-century’. And in case anyone misses his point, Kram adds, ‘Current hagiographers have tied themselves in knots trying to elevate Ali into a heroic defiant catalyst of the anti-war movement, a beacon of black independence. It’s a legacy that evolves from the intellectually loose sixties, from those who were in school then and now write romance history.’

Actually, Kram has misquoted me. I believe he’s referring to a statement in Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times in which I wrote, ‘With the exception of Martin Luther King, no black man in America had more influence than Ali during the years when Ali was in his prime.’ I still believe that to be true.

Was Ali as important as Nelson Mandela? No. Was Ali in the late 1960s more important than any other black person in America except for Dr King? I believe so. Indeed, Nelson Mandela himself said recently, ‘Ali’s refusal to go to Vietnam and the reasons he gave made him an international hero. The news could not be shut out even by prison walls. He became a real legend to us in prison.’

Kram’s remarkable gift for words notwithstanding, Muhammad Ali in the 1960s stood as a beacon of hope for oppressed people all over the world. Every time he looked in the mirror and uttered the phrase, ‘I’m so pretty,’ he was saying ‘black is beautiful’ before it became fashionable. When he refused induction into the US Army, regardless of his motives, he stood up to armies around the globe in support of the proposition that, unless you have a very good reason for killing people, war is wrong.

Dick Gregory once said, ‘If you wanted to do a movie to depict Ali, it would just be a small light getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. That was Ali in a sea of darkness.’ One can imagine Kram gagging at imagery like that. But the truth is, Muhammad Ali found his way into the world’s psyche.

Perhaps Reggie Jackson put it in perspective best. ‘Do you have any idea what Ali meant to black people?’ Jackson said to me once. ‘He was the leader of a nation; the leader of black America. As a young black, at times I was ashamed of my colour; I was ashamed of my hair. And Ali made me proud. I’m just as happy being black now as somebody else is being white, and Ali was part of that growing process. Think about it! Do you understand what it did for black Americans to know that the most physically gifted, possibly the most handsome, and one of the most charismatic men in the world was black? Ali helped raise black people in this country out of mental slavery. The entire experience of being black changed for millions of people because of Ali.’

In sum, Muhammad Ali might not have meant much to Mark Kram. But he meant a great deal to a lot of people. He made an enormous difference.

REDISCOVERING JOE FRAZIER THROUGH DAVE WOLF’S EYES

(2009)

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought three fights that are the pyramids of boxing. Dave Wolf was in the Frazier camp for each of them.

Dave was a gifted writer who later gained recognition as the manager of Ray Mancini and Donny Lalonde. He died in December 2008. Three months later, his daughter and brother gave me a carton filled with file folders containing handwritten notes that detail Dave’s years in the Frazier camp.

The notes are fragments: a phrase here, a sentence there. I’ve reviewed some of them and joined Dave’s words together to form an impressionistic portrait.

Everything that follows flowed from Dave’s pen. Joe Frazier is often referenced as ‘JF’ because that’s how Dave’s notes refer to him. For the same reason, Muhammad Ali is frequently referred to as ‘Clay’. As explained in the notes, ‘JF calls him “Clay”. Knows his name is “Ali”. Called him “Ali” until he heard what Clay was saying about him. Now calls him “Clay” out of disrespect.’

In several instances, I’ve added an explanatory note to clarify a point. These clarifications are contained in brackets.

I don’t agree with everything in Dave’s notes. Some of it runs counter to views I’ve expressed in Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times and other works I’ve written. What I can vouch for is that this article is faithful to Dave’s contemporaneous recording of the relationship between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier as seen through Joe’s eyes.

Born in Beaufort, South Carolina, on 12 January 1944 … Grew up rural poor. Quit school in ninth grade … Married Florence Smith at age 16 … Lived in Brooklyn and Philadelphia … Worked in slaughterhouse; took home $125 a week.

Frustrated by poverty … Starts boxing in 1962 … 1964 Olympic gold medal.

Post-Olympic problems … Hand operation … No help from Olympic committee … Cold Christmas … Father dies.

Turns pro on own … Modest goals. Some material things. Wanted to be important. Believed he’d become somebody.

Others doubt his potential … Not a natural athlete … Small compared to past heavyweight champs.

Likes to fight … Fighting style like his personality … Hit often but doesn’t mind. Doesn’t feel most punches. High pain threshold. Accepts punishment as part of job.

Formation of Cloverlay to back him … Embarrassed at times by lack of education. Problems with public speaking. Called Cloverlay a ‘co-operation’ at first press conference.

Has been a drinker in past. Knows little about drugs.

Inspires loyalty.

Spartan training camp regardless of fight … Roadwork at 4.00am … Brutal training routine. Punishes body.

JF: ‘I love to work.’

Can’t understand sparring partners’ lack of desire … Eats and lives with them. Pushes them hard. Only the tough last.

Gambling with sparring partners as diversion; mostly loses. Doesn’t understand odds. Fleeced by crooked dice.

Yank Durham is great manager and friend. Yank succeeds because he wins JF’s complete unquestioning dedication and trust.

JF: ‘I still remember the look on Florence’s face [Joe’s wife] when I told her about no sex before fights. Imagine the look on my face when Yank told me.’

JF liked Clay at first. Understands how others like him.

JF: ‘I liked his humour and style. Till I got to know him, I admired him a lot; so it’s not hard for me to see why others do.’

When Clay first switched to Muslims, JF thought he was sincere. Knew little about the religion. Shared many racial feelings.

JF: ‘You feel more comfortable when you’re around your own people. I don’t care who you are. That’s the life you know. When you’re around them, you can say little bad words. You can call each other niggers and everything else. You can talk that talk. When you’re around a mixed crowd of people, white and black, you got to be careful.’

Always, JF ambition was to beat Clay. From first pro fight, training for him … Watched Clay’s fights on TV with Yank. Imagined self in ring. Always felt he would win.

Upset by Clay’s treatment of Patterson … JF: ‘I feel like, why take advantage of a great champ? Once, he was a great champion. And if you’re gonna knock the man out, go ahead and knock him out. You don’t suffer people, especially a good athlete. After seeing him playing around with Patterson, I felt like I could straighten that out. Why pick on somebody like that? Try me.’

Watched Clay–Mildenberger. Not impressed.

Watched Clay–Williams in theatre. Felt sorry for Williams … JF: ‘Why was that fight allowed?’

Yank moved and matched JF perfectly. Protected him from too much pressure.

First Bonavena fight a problem. JF disdainfully over-confident; forced fight but careless. Floored lunging in by sneaky right. Floored again; in danger of losing by three knockdowns. Still aggressive. Split decision. Most writers had JF a clear winner. JF thought he’d lost fight. Most impressive: ability to get off the canvas. Durham furious. JF held hands low and didn’t bob and slip. JF realises things had gotten too complacent; thought he couldn’t be hurt.

Doug Jones fight. Left hook in sixth, Jones hanging on ropes. JF might have killed him but held up punch. Jones fell, unconscious for two minutes.

George Chuvalo fight … JF: ‘Joe Louis picked against me. I was a little upset when I heard. But Yank said, “You got to realise, they brought him in for publicity. The Garden tells him who to pick. They pay him. He needs the work.” I was surprised why a man like him go through these scenes. Seems like a man could stand up for what he believe and not have to choose who somebody else say. I always thought, if I could be like Joe Louis, I’d have it made. Thinking about it was depressing.’

JF [on being shaken by George Chuvalo before knocking him out]: ‘It’s a feeling that, if you get up in the morning and raise up out of the bed; you not fully awake and you not giving your blood time enough to circulate through your body; everything is not quite together yet and you fall back on the bed, tired. It’s not pain; it’s just that everything isn’t quite focused. It’s a little hazy or something. It’s like a TV where the thing is a little out of focus and you think you ought to mess with the focus dial a little bit.’

JF [on the party after the Chuvalo fight]: ‘I got to the party and my mom was there. I came over and hugged her. She was smiling but I could see she looked uneasy.

JF: ‘How’d you like that?’

Mother: ‘I was yelling at the referee to stop my son from killing that man.’

JF: ‘Mom, that’s the fighting game.’

Mother: ‘The man was bleeding. You could have killed him.’

JF: ‘Mom, you should have been hollering for me, not him.’

Mother: ‘Well, I seen you was all right.’

JF: ‘I felt a little sad that she wasn’t happy like I felt. It would have been better if she’d just come to visit without seeing the fight. She’d never seen me act like that before. I felt she must be thinking, “My son has become a killer.” I got the feeling she wouldn’t want to see too many more fights.’

First meeting with Clay. In Madison Square Garden basement. Clay sparring for Folley fight. Joe in ring for picture session. Clay condescending; mocks Joe’s suspenders.