From the Archives
Muhammad Ali: Remembering the Greatest of All Time
In our 2016 cover story, we remember the legendary boxer who changed the country
This story was originally published in the July 1, 2016, issue of Rolling Stone.
PEOPLE SCORNED HIM, even reviled him. Some feared him. Even when the young man proved himself to be what he claimed — the fastest, most astonishing boxer we’d ever seen, as well as a black man who wouldn’t seek permission for his pride or submit to conventions of image and values — he was still too bold to be endured. He was an implicit threat. Some — millions, for that matter — watched him just to see him knocked down, razed.
That was just the beginning, before things got serious with Muhammad Ali, before he changed the country and made himself into a courageous example before the world. On the day following Ali’s death — on June 3rd, at age 74, after years of suffering from a degenerative disorder — President Barack Obama quoted something the fighter had once said: “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me — black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”
Ali signified America, as it moved through decades of hatred, fear, violence, as it doubted its better promises, sometimes touching transformative grace, other times unchaining its worse paradoxes, from dilemmas of civil rights and purposes of war to disputes over one of its fundamental ideas, freedom of religion. He shed light on it all, making his own sins and incurring irrevocable losses along the years.
In 1996, he appeared at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, as the world’s most universally acknowledged hero, his disrepute long before faded into dust. He had been a 1960 Olympic gold-medal winner but said he’d discarded the prize in disgust over racism. During a basketball-game intermission in Atlanta, the president of the International Olympic Committee presented him with a replacement for the lost prize, on a ribbon that draped from his neck. Ali studied the medal for a moment, smiled and lifted it to his lips with his right hand — his left hand trembling steadily — and kissed it. He said no words for the occasion. Muhammad Ali no longer spoke in public — he had been too ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, which many speculate was a result of his years in the boxing ring.
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He would have half his life to weigh his past boasts against unknown eternity. “I conquered the world,” Ali once said, “and it didn’t bring me true happiness.” Still, he knew he had justified his time here. For better and worse, Ali allowed only himself to set his bounds or to undo them. Former heavyweight champion George Foreman, who once famously tried to shatter those bounds, later came to recognize what impelled Ali. “He found something to fight for,” said Foreman, “other than money and championship belts. And when that person finds something like that, you can’t hardly beat them.”
THIS IS A STORY of how a young man took fear — personal fear, and dread instilled by the history of his people in America — and transmuted it into something that fear itself should be afraid of. Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, on January 17th, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky, the firstborn child of Cassius Clay Sr. and his wife, Odessa. Odessa was light-skinned — she had some white lineage in both her parents’ families. She was a genial woman who worked as a cook and house cleaner for wealthy white families. She tried to impress dignity on her children, and some believe Ali inherited his good humor from her.
Cassius Clay Sr. had a different temperament. He was named after a white 19th-century plantation owner who became an ardent abolitionist and freed his slaves. Clay Sr. took pride in this legacy, but he knew as well that life in white America, in the border state of Kentucky, had checked his hopes. He had wanted to be an artist; instead, he was a sign painter. Ali recounted his father telling him of the horrible fate of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was beaten and shot in the head in Mississippi during the summer of 1955 for speaking to a white woman at a grocery store. The images of Till’s mutilated corpse stayed in young Ali’s mind. “In one,” he said in his autobiography, The Greatest, “he was laughing and happy. In the other, he was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.” He later told Gordon Parks, in Life magazine, “I used to lay awake scared, thinking about somebody getting cut up or being lynched.”
When Clay Sr. brooded, he drank and saw other women, and when he came back home, he could be menacing; Odessa called the police more than once. Growing up in tension, fearing a parent’s volatility, can leave a young person with painful but shrewd premonitions about possible danger and with acute impulses to protection. It can also leave him wanting to build shelter in some other part of his life.
In October 1954, when Clay was 12, he was upset to discover that his gleaming new bicycle had been stolen. He sought a policeman, who was coaching boxing at a nearby gym, and told the officer he wanted to beat up the thief. The policeman, an older white man named Joe Martin, told Clay he had better learn how to fight first. In a picture from that time, the young, slight-looking Cassius Clay wears an expression that is nervous and unwavering at the same time. He won his first bout and informed his family that he would be champion. Cassius’ father wasn’t happy that his son was being trained by a cop; Cassius spent less time at home and more in the gym. “He’d build himself up into a regular frenzy,” Martin later told author Mark Kram, “letting that fear out by tormenting his opponent.”
After fighting 108 bouts by age 18 (winning 100 of them) and garnering two national Golden Gloves championships, Clay boxed for the 1960 U.S. Olympic team in Rome and returned home with a gold medal. A consortium of all-white local businessmen formed to sponsor the young boxer and protect him from the corrupt influences in professional fighting. In December that year, the group sent Clay to Miami to work with Angelo Dundee — one of boxing’s most respected trainers. “Angelo understood immediately,” said Ali biographer Thomas Hauser in PBS’s Made in Miami, “that Cassius did things all wrong from a technical point of view, but he could get away with them because of his speed and his reflexes.” One of Clay’s most unorthodox traits was holding his arms low, which could leave him without guard against fast-arriving blows. Also, whereas many fighters slipped — that is, dodged — punches by ducking or quickly moving their head to the side, Clay tended to pedal rearward rapidly, pulling his neck back at an acute angle, his eyes fixed on the incoming missile, measuring the evasion to an inch or less. Ring commentators sometimes anticipated that this technique would land him flat — though those occasions were rare to the point of proving historic. Whatever his anomalies, Clay knew how to get a jab in and how to make it sting. “He flicked it,” said Ferdie Pacheco, who met Ali in Miami and served as his doctor for many years. “He called it snake-licking.” This, too, was a hallmark of Clay’s style; he aimed almost exclusively at a fighter’s head, not at his body. Clay himself, though, did not like being hit in the face. “Your face and teeth is all your life,” he told The New York Times’ Robert Lipsyte.
Clay’s manner became hard for other fighters to cope with. In early 1961, Swedish fighter and former world champion Ingemar Johansson spent a few minutes sparring with Clay at Dundee’s gym. “Come on, what’s the matter?” Ali taunted him. “Can’t hit me?” Johansson told Dundee, “Get him the fuck away from here. I can’t touch him. Nobody is going to touch the guy!” Clay’s treatment of Johansson foretold what became, in varying ways, his most notable quality: He wouldn’t pay deference to conventions or to boxing’s ranking fighters. Instead, he goaded and bewildered them. He learned this tactic after witnessing professional wrestler Gorgeous George’s outrageous character in Las Vegas in the summer of 1962: George would strut into a ring wearing beautifully coiffed waves of blond hair and then genuflect derisively to the heckling crowd. “And all the time,” Ali told Hauser, “I was saying to myself, ‘Man, I want to see this fight. It don’t matter if he wins or loses.’”
Black athletes were expected to act respectfully toward competitors — especially white ones — and never to display arrogance or boast in triumph. That had been the case after the notorious Jack Johnson, in the early 1900s, used to diminish other fighters so effectively — including white champion Tommy Burns — he could conduct casual ringside conversations in the process. After Johnson, no African-American was allowed to compete for the title until Joe Louis won it in 1937. But Louis had to abide by a code of humility. Now, in the early 1960s, Clay ridiculed rivals and trumpeted his abilities before an increasingly skeptical press. “To beat me,” he declared, “you have to be greater than great.” When Clay upped the ante by beginning to predict — with uncanny accuracy — the round in which he would defeat an adversary, he drew even more disdain. Louis cautioned him, “Boy! You better not believe half the things you say about yourself.” That didn’t deter Clay. “By the end of 1963,” he said, “I will be the youngest champion in history.”
At the same time, his braggadocio stirred an excitement that hadn’t been seen for any boxer in years. Those who watched him develop as a professional in Miami and saw him defeat 19 competitors in the period from late 1960 to summer 1963 — losing to nobody — received him as the anointed hope. “Everybody thought that this is our guy,” Pacheco later said. “This guy’s going to be the guy.” By late 1963, Clay was headed for a title match with the man he called “the big ugly bear”: heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, the most forbidding man in boxing history, and one of the most disreputable. Liston had a criminal past — he’d learned to box in prison — and rumors tied him to the organized-crime element in boxing. Liston, as Joe Flaherty put it in The Village Voice, was “a blatant mother in a fucker’s game.”
Clay pursued Liston hard for a title shot, sometimes in foolhardy ways. On one occasion, he followed Liston into a Las Vegas casino where the champion was losing at dice. Promoter Harold Conrad, who was present, said Clay kept making fun of Liston’s bad luck. “So Liston throws the dice down,” Conrad told biographer Hauser, “walks over to Clay, and says, ‘Listen, you n—-r f—-t. If you don’t get out of here in 10 seconds, I’m gonna pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.’” When Liston arrived in Miami in early 1964, set to fight Clay on February 25th, the challenger met him at the airport and followed him into the city. Liston pulled his car over and said, “I’ll punch you in the mouth!” Clay still followed. “Get your last look,” Clay told the crowd outside Liston’s gym. “I’m the real champ.”
Behind his bravado, though, Clay harbored doubts. “[Liston] can hit a guy in the elbows and just about break his arm,” he said. But the challenger also had a secret source of inspiration. In fact, Cassius Clay had a hidden life that was about to become notorious.
BY EARLY 1964, Cassius Clay had developed strong views on the dilemma of race in America. Whereas most civil rights leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., notably — counseled nonviolence, Clay didn’t subscribe to those ideals. “I’m a fighter,” he told the New York Post’s Pete Hamill. “You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.”
Clay had been studying the doctrines of the Nation of Islam, more popularly (and disparagingly) known at the time as the Black Muslims. He responded to the organization’s declaration that African-Americans needn’t seek assent for civil rights — rather, they should be proud of their racial identity and govern their own ends. The public face of the movement was Malcolm X, who since 1954 had served as chief minister at the Nation’s Harlem mosque and as a right-hand man to the organization’s leader, the soft-voiced but steel-minded Elijah Muhammad. Their message had a powerful appeal to a young man who used to have nightmares about the fate of Emmett Till.
Malcolm hadn’t heard of Clay when they first met, in 1962. The Nation viewed boxing as a practice that exploited black men. But he was taken by Clay’s authentic enthusiasm and saw in him a popular figure who might advance the Nation of Islam’s appeal for other young African-Americans. It was Malcolm X, more than anybody, who addressed Clay’s uncertainty. “This fight is the truth,” Malcolm told him in Miami Beach before the match. “It’s the cross and the crescent fighting in a prize ring — for the first time.… Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anything but the champion?”
Clay had tried to keep his new alliance secret, but in early February, Cassius Clay Sr. told a Miami Herald reporter that “Cassius had become a Muslim; that they’d brainwashed him to hate white people, and as soon as the fight was over, he was going to change his name.” Under pressure from the fight’s promoters — who threatened to cancel the bout — Malcolm X left Miami Beach, though he returned the day of the match and sat ringside with R&B singer Sam Cooke and his manager Allen Klein. Clay had started to signify something unsettling, even threatening, in the American moment. As a result, Liston found himself, for the first time, with a mandate from boxing pundits: to put the loudmouth upstart in his place.
The morning of the match, Clay crashed into the weigh-in ceremony, yelling, “You ain’t got a chance.… You whupped!” One reporter said the fight should be called off, that Clay was hysterical and was endangering himself. New York Times reporter Lipsyte had been told by his newspaper to map the shortest route from the fight to the hospital. “I understood perfectly,” he said, “that I’d never see Cassius Clay again.”
But that night, when the fighters met at ring center, perceptions changed. “This is the first time we had really seen them together,” said Lipsyte. “There was a collective gasp: Cassius Clay was much bigger.” Once the bell rang, the challenger moved immediately into his opponent, circling constantly, making himself a shifting target. Liston threw hard but desperate swings, sometimes off-target by a foot or more.
In the third round, Clay caught Liston with a sharp blow to the left cheekbone, drawing blood. “I saw his expression,” Ali later said, “how shook he was that we were still out there, and he was the one cut and bleeding.” Between the third and fourth rounds, Liston reportedly took a dishonorable course. In King of the World, author and New Yorker editor David Remnick relates the tale that Liston instructed one of his cornermen to “juice his gloves” — that is, apply a strong liniment or coagulant that, if it made contact with the eyes, would burn and temporarily blind. It worked: Clay left the fourth round blinking wildly, his eyes hurting intensely. He wanted to stop the fight — “He was telling us to cut the gloves off,” said Pacheco. Dundee had to hold Ali back from complaining to the referee about Liston’s dirty fighting. He knew that if the bout was stopped, it might be impossible for Clay to get another chance at the title. The trainer instead washed out the young challenger’s eyes and stood him up for the next round. At that crucial moment of Muhammad Ali’s career, Dundee pushed him forward, saying, “Big Daddy, get in there; this is your night.”
At the end of the sixth round, a disheartened Liston told his trainers, “That’s it,” and spat out his mouthpiece. The fight was over: Clay was the new heavyweight champion. He pushed through the crowd that swarmed him to the ringside where reporters sat, looking shocked. “Eat your words,” he told them. “I told you and you and you. I’m king of the world. You must all bow to me!” Moments later he asserted, “I shook up the world!”
In defeating Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay had — in the words of baseball’s Jackie Robinson — “outsmarted a scary man.” But he had also upset a proud press, most of whom regarded his victory as both an anomaly and an affront. Influential sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote scathingly, “Clay is part of the Beatle movement,” lumping him in with “the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from Dad every first of the month.” Cannon had one thing right: Major changes were underway. Earlier that same month, February 1964, the Beatles had appeared for the first time before an American audience, on Ed Sullivan’s TV show. Several days later, while visiting Miami, Conrad arranged for the band to visit Clay’s gymnasium. Beforehand, John Lennon cracked, “That loudmouth is going to lose”; he had originally wanted to see Liston. But Clay and the Beatles got along well, joking, mugging, reveling in the joy of their irreverent ascendancy.
When Clay met reporters the day after he won the championship, he came off as a different man — more subdued, sober-tempered. One reporter asked, “Are you a card-carrying member of the Black Muslims?” Clay responded, “Card-carrying — what does that mean?… I know where I’m going, and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.” It was a pivotal statement. “When I first heard that on television…,” said boxing historian Gerald Early, “it was like an electric current went through me. I never heard a black man say anything like that, least of all an athlete.” The new champion went on to declare that his name was no longer Clay; black-American surnames were often inherited from the family names of white slaveholders. “I will be known as Cassius X.”
In the span of a day, Cassius had gone from an annoying braggart to a young black threat for much of white America. Said Malcolm X: “Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero.”
“I remember the day I became aware of the Champ,” author Walter Mosley later wrote of Ali. “My mother was driving me to school after he won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. At a crosswalk, a black man passing in front of our car suddenly turned and, raising his fists into the air, announced loudly, ‘I am the greatest!’ I was frightened by the man’s violent outburst, but even then I heard the pride and hurt, the dashed ambition and the shard of hope that cut through him. Cassius Clay’s declaration had become his own. The Black Pride movement was on.”
In Malcolm X, Cassius had discovered a comrade and role model. But it proved to be the most troubling relationship of his life. Tensions had recently emerged between the fiery minister and Elijah Muhammad, and Clay would have to choose between the two. On March 11th, 1964, Malcolm X spoke publicly of his separation from the Nation of Islam. He would start a new action group and hoped to work with other civil rights leaders — such as Martin Luther King Jr. — with whom he’d earlier been forbidden to work. In response, Elijah Muhammad told Louis Farrakhan, who eventually replaced Malcolm as minister and national spokesman, that hypocrites like Malcolm should have “their heads cut off.” Days later, Elijah Muhammad openly embraced Cassius and bestowed on him a new name: Muhammad Ali, meaning “beloved of God.” (The New York Times, among others, refused for six years to acknowledge the honorific, still referring to Ali as Cassius Clay.) The young fighter’s proud acceptance of the designation made plain his choice between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. The two former friends spoke only once more, later in the spring of 1964, during a chance encounter outside a hotel in Ghana. Malcolm told Ali, “Brother, I still love you, and you are still the greatest.” Ali replied, “You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.” Then Ali turned his back and walked away. Malcolm looked emptied.
On February 21st, 1965, as Malcolm X stepped to a podium to speak to an audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, three men brandishing guns approached and shot him to death. Within minutes speculation spread that the Nation of Islam had been involved in, or sanctioned, the killing. That same night, Ali’s apartment on the South Side of Chicago caught fire. Some thought the event was an immediate strike against Ali for his rejection of Malcolm. Others, though, including Ali’s young wife, Sonji, suspected that the blaze might be a warning from within the Nation of Islam that the boxer should stay faithful. At the time, Ali expressed no sympathy for Malcolm X’s death. It wasn’t until 2004, in his book The Soul of a Butterfly, that Ali would say, “Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry.”
Ali’s rematch with Liston — held in a small youth center in the town of Lewiston, Maine — proved even more startling than the first. Ali entered the ring to loud booing and, after the bell sounded, took to circling Liston adeptly, as he had in the first match. In a moment when Liston was hurling a clumsy punch and his balance was susceptible, Ali threw what looked like a swiping right graze at his opponent’s head. Liston crumpled to the canvas, where he stayed for several seconds, sprawling, rolling, groping. It happened so fast that many thought it had never happened at all. Confusion overtook the moment. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott tried to shove Ali to a corner to begin a 10-second count on Liston. Ali, though, was as shocked as everybody else. He towered over Liston, a gloved fist cocked, yelling, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Liston finally rose, but he doubled over in fright when Ali resumed his assault. A moment later Walcott stopped the match. Ali had won his first defense of his heavyweight title in less than two minutes. The audience broke out in another chorus of boos. Liston, they thought, had thrown the match. Ali himself had doubts. “It was a good punch,” he later said, “but I didn’t think I hit him so hard he couldn’t have got up.”
Liston lived in Las Vegas for the next several years, still fighting and winning matches, though never to any glory. On January 5th, 1971, his wife, Geraldine, returned home from a holiday trip and found her husband slouched against their bed, dead of a possible heroin overdose (many also suspected foul play). Biographer Hauser recounted a moment, years later, when Ali wished aloud that his early foe were still alive, that they might sit around and talk about what was past. When asked what he would say to Liston, Ali replied, “Man, you scared me.”
ALI’S RETENTION OF the heavyweight title continued to rankle critics, including some in powerful positions. The champion was dismayed a few months later when told he was in danger of being drafted into the U.S. military, just as the war in Vietnam was intensifying. At age 18, he had been classified 1-Y, which meant he’d failed the standards of service (Ali was dyslexic and struggled with reading). But the classification had just been changed to 1-A: Ali was now eligible for the draft. “Why are they gunning for me?” he asked. The U.S. was likely trying to defuse the possibility that he might loom as a role model for other young African-Americans. (Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general at the time, later admitted that “the government … would have loved to put him in the service; get his picture in there.”) But when Ali reacted by proclaiming that he did not share the U.S.’s purposes in the Vietnam War, his influence on young Americans — both white and black — only grew. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he told a reporter. “They never called me nigger.”
Ali applied for conscientious-objector status, which would excuse him from military service, on grounds of the Nation of Islam’s religious beliefs. The Selective Service department ruled against any exemption, determining that Ali’s religion was “racist and political.” On April 28th, 1967, Ali refused induction into the U.S. military. Within an hour, the New York State Athletic Commission stripped him of his title and any license to fight in the state; other state boards quickly followed suit. Muhammad Ali was no longer champion anywhere within the U.S. and could no longer work in boxing or leave the country to work. He would be convicted of refusing to serve and sentenced to the maximum penalty: a $10,000 fine and five years in federal prison. “[If] all that was left now was to serve the five-year jail term and forget boxing, I was prepared,” he wrote in The Greatest.
For the next few years, Muhammad Ali became one of the most popularly reviled but also one of the most admired persons in America. The U.S. government’s wayward prosecution of him caused many — including black leaders who had earlier been troubled by his association with the Nation of Islam — to view him more sympathetically. Julian Bond, a social activist who had been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, said, “When Ali refused to take that symbolic step forward, everyone knew about it moments later. You could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war — black and white — began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.”
On the day he was stripped of the title, Ali was already anticipating the long banishment ahead. “I strongly object,” he said, “to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand — either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice.”
JUSTICE PROVED SLOW in coming for Ali — and it could never really undo some injuries. The World Boxing Association staged a series of elimination bouts that, in February 1970, yielded a new champion, Joe Frazier. It was something of a hollow achievement. “Joe Frazier is the champion of nothing,” said sportscaster Howard Cosell. “The heavyweight champion of the world was, and still is, a man called Muhammad Ali.”
Ali’s three and a half years of exile from boxing spanned what might have been his peak period, in his mid-twenties. In 1969, Cosell asked if he would consider a return to boxing. Ali said, “Why not? If they come up with enough money.” In July 1970, a Georgia state senator, Leroy Johnson, took on a bold project. Georgia had no state boxing commission, which meant that Atlanta could grant a license of its own accord. But he was hindered by Gov. Lester Maddox, who had come to office on an anti-integrationist stance. (After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Maddox called King “an enemy of our country” and reportedly told state troopers that if any demonstrators got out of hand at King’s funeral to “shoot ’em down and stack ’em up.”) Atlanta gave permission for Ali to fight Jerry Quarry, on October 26th, 1970. Maddox tried to stop the fight but found he had no legal grounds. The event at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium proved a triumphant return. Ali was fleet and dominant, and in the third round, he rendered Quarry too bloodied to continue. Weeks later, after a win over Oscar Bonavena, Ali announced, “Now we have a chance to see who the real heavyweight champion of the world is.”
It would be a true struggle. Joe Frazier was no less formidable than Ali. Like Ali, he was an Olympic gold-medal winner, in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, when Frazier won the heavyweight title, Ali claimed he didn’t begrudge him. “He wasn’t given this,” he said. After Ali’s title had been taken, Frazier told him, “It’s unfair.” In 1969, Frazier visited Washington, D.C., where he spoke to President Richard Nixon on Ali’s behalf. “I was more than decent,” said Frazier. In The Greatest, Ali tells of a good-natured car ride the two men shared from Philadelphia to New York in the late 1960s. They talked about their inevitable appointment in the ring. “After I whip your ass,” Frazier told Ali, “I’ll buy you some ice cream.” Ali was dumbfounded that anybody imagined beating him. After that car ride, said Ali, “we never looked eye to eye.”
There would be good reason for that rift. Interestingly, Ali never disparaged a white opponent in racial terms, as he often did black opponents, whom he probably saw as more serious competitors. Instead, Ali transmuted black fighters into stand-ins for white America. He worked this tactic with particular vehemence on Frazier, impugning his authenticity and purposes as a black man. “He’s the wrong kind of Negro,” said Ali in a TV interview. “He’s not like me, ’cause he’s the Uncle Tom.… He works for the enemy.” Ali meant some of this talk as promotion, but Frazier took it all literally. It hurt, and it felt like a betrayal. “I just wanted to bury him,” Frazier said.
The psychic war between the two men affected everything about their title match, billed as “The Fight of the Century” and set for March 8th, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. “I represent the truth,” Ali told Rolling Stone in 1971. “The world is full of oppressed people, poverty people. They for me. They not for the system. All the black militants … all your hippies, all your draft resisters, they all want me to be the victor.” By contrast, Frazier took on the role of outmoded power, compliant duty. When the two men arrived at Madison Square Garden that night, they entered the arena of an America disunited. In the private moments before the match, Frazier sat in his dressing room and uttered a prayer: “Lord, help me kill this man because he’s not righteous.” Nothing, though, could discourage Ali. “If Joe Frazier whips me,” he said, “I’ll crawl across the ring and kiss his feet and tell him, ‘You are the greatest.’”
Frazier was in his prime — a hitter who bobbed and weaved as he advanced on his foes like a train. Early in the fight, Ali showed that he could outmaneuver Frazier and surprise him with the strength and precision of his punches. But Frazier pushed into him inexorably, as if he savored what Ali threw at him and intended to pay it back.
The momentum edged back and forth throughout the hour. Then, in the 15th and last round, Frazier cracked the night’s mystery. With his left glove, he flicked Ali’s right bicep, making him drop his arm just enough, and then lunged forward with a full-force left hook to the jaw that felled him spectacularly. Ali hit the floor on his back, rolled to his left knee, then rose to full height — all in less than a two-count. “He surprised me,” Frazier said. Ali looked matter-of-fact, as if the instance had been a slight snag. But the knockdown settled things for the judges: Frazier won a unanimous verdict and retained his world title, becoming the first man to beat Ali as a professional. Back in his dressing room, Mark Kram reported in Ghosts of Manila, Frazier walked restlessly, tears streaming, and said, “I want him over here! I want him to crawl to my feet! Crawl, crawl! He promised, promised me!” Later, Frazier checked in to a hospital, where he remained for many days, suffering from extreme high blood pressure and fatigue. Doctors monitored him constantly, fearful he might enter a coma.
Frazier never really got over the bittersweet victory that almost killed him and that failed to win him the respect he needed. It was Muhammad Ali, instead, who accomplished an unforeseen transcendence that night. He had been knocked to the ground decisively, but by rebounding in that same instant, Ali redeemed his meaning as a hero: He was the black man who would not stay down, no matter what.
ALI HAD NO DOUBT moved too quickly toward his first appointment with Frazier, but he’d had little choice: His legal appeal was headed for the Supreme Court, and if denied, he would have to enter a federal prison for up to five years. In April 1971, the court heard the arguments and decided that Ali should go to jail. But a pair of clerks prevailed on one justice to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The justice came to a new view: The government’s argument that Ali’s religion was racist was a misrepresentation of the fighter’s true beliefs. The justices reconsidered and agreed unanimously that the draft board had erred, that Ali was sincere; they overturned his conviction. He was now free. In effect, Malcolm X’s words had saved him. In turn, Ali emboldened others. After Ali’s death, sports journalist and political writer Charles P. Pierce remarked that Ali was “a better American citizen than were the people who denigrated him for his brashness, who spat on his religion, who called him a coward because he wouldn’t be an accessory to mindless slaughter.”
Ali’s scruples evolved when he returned from exile. He could still be cruel — as in his treatment of Frazier — but some of the physical ruthlessness was gone. In the 1960s, between his Liston victory and his banishment, he had sometimes displayed a shocking vindictiveness. When former world heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, in 1965, and contender Ernie Terrell, in 1967, refused to address him by his new name, Ali demeaned and devastated each of these men in the ring; he even severely injured Terrell’s right eye. When Cosell, who was usually supportive of Ali, asked about the apparent malice against Terrell, Ali responded, “Malice? I’m out to be cruel. That’s what the boxing game is about.” This became less true after his return to the ring. In 1975, in the late stages of a bout with Ron Lyle, he worried that he might destroy him. “I knew I was winning…,” Ali told Hauser, “so I backed off. I lost all my fighting instinct and hoped the referee would stop it.” He told reporters afterward, “I’m not going to kill a man.”
Nevertheless, he still fought to win. In the early 1970s, following his loss to Frazier, Ali concentrated on what he saw as his most important exoneration: regaining the championship. Almost everything was working against him. He was in his early thirties at a time when a younger generation of commanding fighters, who owed much to his inspiration, was emerging. To persevere, much less to thrive again, Ali would have to develop different defensive strategies. “He was still ahead of the pack,” said Lyle, “but that’s when they started reaching him. Before that they wasn’t laying a glove on him.”
Ali’s goal had been to beat Frazier in a dramatic rematch — “because he beat me.” The fight eventually took place in January 1974, again at Madison Square Garden, but it was short of the meaning of their first bout. Frazier was no longer heavyweight champion: He had lost his title to George Foreman a year earlier in Jamaica. When Ali and Frazier met for their second contest, each was battling to win a shot at Foreman. Ali prevailed over Frazier after 12 rounds in a unanimous decision.
But to take on Foreman — at 25, seven years younger than Ali — seemed reckless. By his own description, Foreman had been a dropout, shoplifter, carjacker and purse snatcher in the Fifth Ward of Houston, until he entered the Job Corps and realized a talent for boxing. In 1968, he won a gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico City. By 1974, he was a battleship in the ring: When Foreman met Frazier, in a stunning display, he crushed him to the ground six times in the first two rounds — twice in the last 20 seconds of the first round. After that, Foreman was seen as absolutely terrifying, the hardest-hitting heavyweight champion ever. When the Foreman-Ali fight was announced — to take place in Kinshasa, Zaire, on September 25th, 1974 — The New York Times speculated that Ali could be out in the first round. Foreman thought so as well. “People telling me, ‘There’s never been a puncher like you, George.’ All those compliments, I started eating them. ‘I’m gonna fight Muhammad Ali – he’s the least of all these guys. I’m not nervous.’”
This was the inaugural extravaganza managed by Don King, who was intent on making himself boxing’s first major black promoter. By securing a deal from the government of Zaire to pay the fighters an extraordinary $5 million apiece, King engineered a championship fight where none had ever been presented before, in Africa. Zaire was ruled pitilessly by Gen. Mobutu Sese Seko, who decreed himself the Father of the Nation; he’d appropriated the immense funds for the match — dubbed by Ali as the “Rumble in the Jungle” — from his nation’s treasury. Still, Ali immediately appreciated the meanings available in the location, and he laid moral claim to their provenance. “I’m not fighting for me,” he said. “I’m fighting for the black people who have no future.”
After weeks of delay, the fight finally took place on October 30th, 1974, in the Stade du 20 Mai outdoor coliseum before an enraptured crowd of 62,000, at 4 a.m. (The odd hour was necessary in order to accommodate American closed-circuit viewers.) In Ali’s dressing room, Pacheco remembered, a mood of palpable dread prevailed. “The question,” he said, “was how much damage would George Foreman do?” The only one who seemed unconcerned was Ali. “I see Sonny Liston glaring at me 10 years ago at Miami Beach,” he said. Meanwhile, wrote Norman Mailer, in Foreman’s dressing room, one of his cornermen, former light heavyweight Archie Moore, also felt dread. “I was praying,” said Moore, “and in great sincerity, that George wouldn’t kill Ali. I really felt that was a possibility.”
Ali, it developed, proved right. He took command in the opening moments of the fight, bouncing right and left around Foreman, throwing sharp mixes of punches that stymied him. Foreman could hit incredibly hard, but that was part of his problem: Too often he hit air. Moreover, Ali’s guard style was now impregnable — he held his forearms and gloves up before his face, forming gates that Foreman couldn’t get past but that Ali could break from to land cutting blows.
In the second round, Ali stole into the scheme he used for much of the rest of the fight: He began leaning back into the ropes, which were stretching from the Zairian heat. It’s the last place a fighter is supposed to find himself — a zone that leaves him easy to bludgeon and pick off. “We all yelled at him to get off the ropes,” Pacheco said. Ali later said, “George didn’t do nothin’ but attack — that’s the only thing he knows.” Ali later called the strategy rope-a-dope: The tactic depleted Foreman, while allowing Ali to rest.
By the end of the seventh round, Foreman had largely exhausted his own considerable bulk. It was getting close to dawn. “I’m getting tired,” Ali said to trainer Dundee. “Maybe I’ll just knock him out.” Dundee replied, “Why don’t you go ahead and do that? It might help the situation out.” There were 30 seconds left to the eighth round when Foreman hurled a looping swing against Ali on the ropes. Ali sidestepped it, and Foreman blundered, swapping positions with his challenger, as Ali clubbed him with a head-dazing right blow. Foreman tried to steady himself and go after Ali but stumbled into rapid-fire combinations that spun him around like a drunken ballet dancer — punches with enough impact to throw a spray of his sweat across the ring. Foreman tumbled downward in a dizzy, slow-motion-like crash, full-weight, a helpless giant, insensible. It was the most splendid finish in Ali’s career. Immediately after, Ali said, “I told you today, I’m still the greatest of all time. Never again defeat me. Never again say that I’m going to be defeated. Never again make me the underdog until I’m about 50 years old. Then you might get me.”
Years later, in Facing Ali, Foreman said, “Probably the best punch of the night was never landed. Muhammad Ali, as I was going down, stumbling, trying to hold myself, he saw me stumbling.… Ordinarily you finish a fighter off; I would have. He got ready to throw the right hand, and he didn’t do it. That’s what made him, in my mind, the greatest fighter I ever fought.”
MUHAMMAD ALI WAS once again world champion, seven years after he’d been divested of his rightful title. The Foreman fight sealed his vindication with an exhilarated reception throughout the world. “People like to see miracles,” Ali said. “People like to see underdogs that do it. People like to be there when history is made.” The Times’ Lipsyte said it best, in 2013: “In a strange sort of way, I don’t think that he totally transcended boxing until he went back to boxing, until he went back on that platform.”
Ali had planned to make the Foreman fight his last, but he defended his reclaimed title three more times, before he hinted at his retirement in June 1975. When a reporter asked, “What about Joe Frazier?” Ali grew bright at the prospect. “Joe Frazier! I want him bad.”
Few really expected a great bout when Ali and Frazier met a few months later, for the third and final time; both men were regarded as beyond their prime. But the personal drama between them was incontestable. The bout took place on October 1st, 1975, in the Philippines, outside Manila. Inside the Araneta Coliseum, temperatures hovered around 100 degrees. Frazier gave Ali the worst beating of his life, slamming his midsection, round after round, with blows meant to send his kidneys and heart into unbearable anguish. Ali told columnist Jerry Izenberg that the ordeal was “the closest thing to death.”
Ali had often shown amazing recuperative ability in a fight’s late stage. In the 13th round, he hit Frazier with a right punch forceful enough to send the rival’s mouthpiece flying across the ring to the fifth row of the press section. After the 14th, Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, told Frazier they were quitting. He did not want to see his fighter hurt for life or be killed. “No, c’mon, Ed,” Frazier protested. “Don’t you stop the motherfucking fight.” Meanwhile, Ali was ready to throw in the towel, telling Dundee the same thing he’d said at the critical point of his first bout with Liston: “Cut the gloves off!” A friend of Frazier’s, sitting by Ali’s corner, overheard and tried to signal Frazier, but it was too late. Futch had halted the fight. Ali, hearing he’d won, looked astounded and numb. He stood up, raised his right arm in victory, and collapsed. “Frazier quit just before I did,” he said years later.
Just after the fight, Ali said of Frazier, “He is the greatest fighter of all time, next to me.” Ali would make further overtures of reconciliation, but Frazier never forgave him. Instead, he claimed restitution from the infirmity that Ali lived with for years. “I’m proud to let them see how much damage I’ve done to this man, both mind and body,” Frazier said later. Years later, Ali said, “Manila was the greatest fight of my life, but I don’t want to look at hell again.”
Ali had 10 more fights after Manila, a few of them legendary, many of them heartbreaking. In February 1978, he lost his title to Leon Spinks, a novice professional. Ali was in torment — the night after the fight, he was running down the street at 2 a.m., yelling, “Gotta get my title back! Gotta get my title back!” He regained it from Spinks six months later — the only man to win the world heavyweight championship three times. But by then, he was already showing troubling signs: His speech, for one, was turning thick. “They say I slur, but I’m just talking black,” he said. He retired in mid-1979, but within months was training for a title match with the new champion, Larry Holmes. He never had a dominant moment in the fight, but he wouldn’t drop. Holmes just kept hitting a man who had the will to die on his feet. (Ali was Holmes’ hero; the younger fighter cried after the fight.) Ali fought one more match, with Trevor Berbick, on December 11th, 1981. He lost by decision. After 21 years as a professional boxer, he never again entered the ring. He would not have been allowed to; his impairment was now too evident.
“You can overstay your welcome in boxing,” Foreman said in Facing Ali. “You can get physically hurt, wiped out, devastated mentally.” Ali was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — an outcome that could not be repaired. His mental faculties stayed as agile as ever, but his pace became a painful-looking amble, and in time he stopped speaking publicly. A terrible irony had invaded Muhammad Ali’s being: He had prided himself, throughout all his years of boxing, on avoiding head blows and facial scars. He instead had allowed fighters to pummel his midsection, his sides and arms, in defiance of the boxing dictum that if you “kill the body, the head will die.” Yet it was likely those body blows, Pacheco observed, that helped ruin his nervous system. Ali had absorbed his fears into a physical place where he could withstand them and make them work for him. All along, they were also working against him.
ALI WENT ON to a tireless, often remarkable, post-boxing life, described by author and friend Davis Miller, in Approaching Ali, as a work of reclamation. With Zaire, he had found a heroic world image — shortly after, President Gerald Ford invited Ali to visit the White House, which would have been unthinkable in earlier years — and he intended to live up to it. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent Ali on a diplomatic mission to several African nations in an attempt to win their support for the U.S. boycott of that year’s Summer Olympics in Moscow. In 1990, he met with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and secured the release of 15 American hostages. He also visited South Africa after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, delivered medical provisions to Cuba and traveled on missions to Afghanistan and North Korea. In 2005, he and his fourth wife, Yolanda Williams — known as Lonnie — started the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, in support of the local community. The couple also founded the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
Ali and Lonnie had married in 1986; the two had known each other since 1963 in Louisville. Ali’s personal life — his marriages, extramarital affairs and relationships with his children — were evidence of another conflict for the man. Once, this resulted in a notorious public incident: When Ali went to Manila, to prepare for his match with Frazier, he brought his girlfriend Veronica Porché, a Los Angeles beauty queen. When his then-wife, Belinda, learned about the visit in Newsweek, she traveled immediately to Manila to have it out with her husband. Belinda and Ali divorced in 1977; Ali and Porché married that same year, having two daughters, Hana and Laila, before divorcing nine years later. (Laila would follow her father into boxing, and enjoyed an undefeated 24-bout career from 1999 to 2007.) In total, Ali would have nine children, including two daughters from extramarital relationships.
There were tensions between Lonnie and some of Ali’s children from earlier relationships. But Lonnie also became his great helpmate: She oversaw important financial decisions and, more important, his legacy. Some — such as Thomas Hauser — have felt that Ali’s circle tried too hard to soften the boxer’s once-firebrand image and transform him into a beatific, near-saintly epitome. “All of the dangerous edges of the angry young man had been sanded away by time,” noted The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi. Time had turned him into a symbol of endurance, reconciliation, struggle and triumph. Still, Ali stayed true to his hard-earned spiritual views and well understood that distortions of those beliefs could result in considerable mortal and political costs. After the September 11th, 2001, attacks, Ali spoke publicly for the first time in years, at the America: A Tribute to Heroes benefit concert in New York. “I think the people should know the real truth about Islam,” he said, despite tremors. “People recognize me for being a boxer, a man of truth. And I wouldn’t be here representing Islam if it was really like the terrorists made it look.”
In December of last year, he spoke up again. “There is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so-called Islamic jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.” Ali went on to aim his remarks at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had proposed a ban on future Islamic immigrants and visitors from entering the United States. “Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is.” The day after the fighter’s death, Trump dismissed the censure. “Who knows who released it? I have a feeling he wouldn’t say that to me,” Trump said on Fox News. It proved a vivid and timely reminder that, even in death, Muhammad Ali stood for ideals that remain troubling to some.
In William Klein’s 1975 film, Muhammad Ali: The Greatest, there’s a sequence from just prior to the 1964 fight with Liston in Miami Beach, in which a camera moves down a line of men who cite Liston as the odds-on winner, in a few rounds at best. The scene moves to black girls on a Miami street, clapping their hands to the beat of grinding rock & roll, chanting, “Liston! Liston!” Minutes later, after Clay has won, both young and adult black people surround his car, celebrating him. “Cassius Clay, the greatest of them all,” says one man. In between those two segments, which represent the span of perhaps a day, history changed. Ali demanded respect and warranted it; he wouldn’t be refused. In the process, he transformed the possibilities of pride, courage and recognition for many other black people — in athletics, certainly, but also beyond. “One of the reasons that the civil rights movement went forward,” television journalist Bryant Gumbel said, “was that black people were able to overcome their fear. And I honestly believe that for many black Americans, that came from watching Muhammad Ali. He simply refused to be afraid.”
That bravery went beyond both the remarkable feats and punishment he met within the ring. For half his life, he was stricken with Parkinson’s; he could have been impatient, even bitter, about how his condition had undermined him for far longer than his prowess had served him. On occasion, when he felt uncomfortable with his slurred speech, he might cut short a conversation, either out of embarrassment or a desire not to be pitied, as he did during an interview with Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, in 1996. But Ali was nonetheless reflective about his disorder. “I know why this happened,” Ali told David Remnick. “God’s showing me that I’m just a man like everyone else. Showing you, too. You can learn from me that way.”
Nothing, though, would ever undermine all that he had done. For years, Muhammad Ali was history in motion, headed in the right direction, turning the improbable into victories we hadn’t thought possible. It couldn’t last forever, but to see that it could be done, that was something else. That was hope made flesh, and for longer than anybody expected, it could not be stopped.