Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (12 page)

Elvis and Ali were passionate men who inspired passion in others. They grew up in humble surroundings and dreamed of being more than it was thought they could possibly be.

Each man impacted most significantly on society when he was young. Elvis, before he went in the Army; Ali, before his exile from boxing.

Elvis in the Las Vegas years gave pleasure to the people who saw him sing, but he was no longer an important social force. The acceptance of Ali as a beloved monarch marked an important turn for American society. But he was no longer setting the world ablaze.

Neither man set out to be the leader of a movement. They were just doing their thing. But each was an agent of change.

Elvis was a precursor of the sexual revolution and a transitional figure who brought black music into the mainstream of American culture. He was the standard-bearer for, and one of the founding fathers of, rock and roll. Like Frank Sinatra, he defined his genre.

Elvis’s legacy is as an entertainer. He was about the music. He shied away from political issues. When asked to comment on anti-war protests at the height of the war in Vietnam, he responded, “I’d just as soon keep my own personal views about that to myself. I’m just an entertainer.”

“Do you think other entertainers should keep their views to themselves too?” the questioner pressed.

“No; I can’t say that,” Elvis answered.

By contrast, Ali has two legacies; as an athlete and as a moral force. Elvis was a superstar. Ali was a superstar and a hero, who fit into the two great moral crusades of the 1960s (the civil rights and anti-war movements). For most of his adult life, he sought to use his fame to make the world a better place. He wanted to advance the cause of racial justice and world peace. His work had social, political, and religious implications.

The day after beating Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay told the media (and by extension, the American power structure), “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

Elvis exploded on the national scene in the same manner. But while Ali stayed true to that creed, Elvis didn’t. Ali’s greatness in and out of the ring sprang from personal courage. That quality was less evident in Elvis’s life. In the end, he seemed intent on trying to be what his fans wanted him to be.

That said, singing is no less real than fighting. Ali earned universal recognition as a great fighter. Elvis was an amazing talent who brought joy to a lot of people and, like Ali, changed the way his art was practiced. They didn’t just mirror the culture they lived in. They helped shape it.

And they were so good when they were young.

PERSONAL MEMORIES

THE DAY I MET
MUHAMMAD ALI

2004

I
n September 1964, when I was a sophomore at Columbia University, I began hosting a radio show called
Personalities In Sports
for the student-run radio station. For an 18-year-old sports fan, it was heady stuff. Each week, I’d take a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder into the field and interview the biggest names I could get. I reached Nirvanah one afternoon when I found myself in the New York Yankees dugout as the Bronx Bombers readied to nail down their fourteenth pennant in sixteen years. The first interview I conducted was with Tom Tresh. Whitey Ford was next. Then Mickey Mantle entered the dugout and, gathering my courage, I approached him.

“Mr. Mantle. My name is Tom Hauser, and I wonder if I could interview you for WKCR.”

“Fuck.”

That was all Mantle said. Not even “fuck you.” Just “fuck,” which I assumed meant “no,” since he then turned and walked away.

Recovering from the rebuff, I moved on to Elston Howard, Jim Bouton, and Johnny Keane. My final interview was with Ralph Terry. I asked who he was planning to vote for in the upcoming presidential election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. Terry told me that his political views were none of my business, and the interview ended on that note.

The following week, I had similar success with New York Mets pitcher Tracy Stallard. Three years earlier, while on the mound for the Boston Red Sox, Stallard had earned a place in baseball history by throwing home run number sixty-one to Roger Maris. I suggested to Stallard that he tell WKCR’s listeners all about it, and he responded, “I think you know all about it, and your listeners know all about it, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Regardless, over the next thirty months, I taped dozens of interviews. New York Knicks center Walter Bellamy gave me the first great quote I ever got from an athlete when I asked about reports that he’d had a bad attitude while playing for the Baltimore Bullets. “I’ve never known an attitude to go up and dunk a basketball,” Bellamy told me.

Joe Namath, who’d just signed a three-year contract with the New York Jets for the unheard-of sum of $427,000, talked at length about the transition from college to pro football. Pete Rozelle and Joe Foss (commissioners of the warring National and American football leagues) gave of their time. Willis Reed, Barry Kramer, Eddie Donovan, Tom Gola, Matt Snell, Weeb Eubank. The list went on . . .

With one particularly memorable moment.

In March 1967, Muhammad Ali was preparing to fight Zora Folley at “the old” Madison Square Garden; that is, the arena on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. The bout was scheduled for March 22nd; forty-four days after Ali’s brutalization of Ernie Terrell. At that point in his career, Ali was virtually unbeatable. This would be his seventh championship defense in less than a year. Folley was a decent human being and a respected journeyman, who’d been a professional fighter for fifteen years.

John Condon, the director of publicity for Madison Square Garden, arranged the interview for me. Ali-Folley would be the last heavyweight championship fight at the old Garden and also Ali’s final bout before a three-and-a-half-year exile from boxing. The war in Vietnam was at its peak. The National Selective Service Presidential Appeal Board had voted unanimously to maintain Muhammad’s 1-A classification, and he’d been ordered to report for induction in April. The assumption was that he would refuse induction. Ali himself had hinted as much when he said, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

At the Garden, I watched Ali go through a series of exercises. Then I stood at the edge of the ring as he sparred with Jimmy Ellis. When that was done, he went into his dressing room and I followed. John Condon introduced us. Ali was wearing a white terrycloth robe. I wasn’t from the
New York Times
or any other news organization of note, but that didn’t seem to matter. Ali told me to turn on my tape recorder. We talked mostly about Nation of Islam doctrine, with some questions about the military draft, Zora Folley, and boxing in general thrown in. It’s a sign of the times that both of us used the word “Negro.” Ten minutes after we began, Ali announced, “That’s all I’m gonna do,” and the interview was over.

But I had one more request. An autograph. Not for me, but for my younger brother, who loved sports every bit as much as I did. Earlier in the year, he’d given me a copy of a book entitled
Black Is Best: The Riddle of Cassius Clay
. Now, I wanted to give the book back to him. As I looked on, Ali inscribed the title page:

To Jim Hauser
From Muhammad Ali
World Heavyweight Champion
Good luck
1967

I still remember the look on Jim’s face when I gave it to him.

While Ali took a shower, I taped an interview with Angelo Dundee. Then I returned to the ring, where Zora Folley was finishing his sparring session. Folley told me how he planned to exploit the fact that Ali held his hands too low and backed away from punches instead of slipping them. The interviews aired on the night of the fight. For the first time ever, the
New York Times
listings for radio programs of interest cited
Personalities In Sports
and yours truly by name.

Years later, I would come in contact with John Condon again. In 1984, I was researching a book entitled
The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing
. Condon had become president of Madison Square Garden Boxing. With characteristic generosity, he opened doors on my behalf. Our final meeting came in 1989. As fate would have it, Ali and I had also moved full circle. I’d been chosen to be his official biographer and was in the process of writing
Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times
. Condon was one of two hundred people I wanted to interview for the project. He was dying of cancer and knew it. At the close of our interview, John gave me a copy of
Black Is Best: The Riddle of Cassius Clay
which had been on a shelf in his office for more than twenty years. “Keep it,” he told me. “I won’t be needing it any longer.” That night, I listened to the tape of my WKCR radio interview with Ali for the first time in more than two decades.

Eventually, of course, I played the tape for Ali. One night when he was at my apartment for dinner, I took my old reel-to-reel tape recorder out of the closet and turned it on.

About a minute into the interview, Muhammad reached into the formidable sack of one-liners that he carries with him at all times. “I remember that afternoon,” he said. “You were wearing a blue shirt.”

“And you were wearing a white terrycloth robe.”

We listened to the rest of the tape in silence. Then Ali asked, “Was I really wearing a white terrycloth robe?”

“Yes. Was I really wearing a blue shirt?”

Ali laughed. “You’re crazy,” he said.

TRANSCRIPT OF MARCH 1967 RADIO INTERVIEW

CONDUCTED BY THOMAS HAUSER
WITH MUHAMMAD ALI

Q:
Your outlook on life is different from that of a great many other people. It’s based on your religion. Could you give us some idea of what it is?

ALI:
As far as my outlook is concerned, I’d say that ninety percent of the American public feels just the way I do as far as racial issues are concerned; as far as inter-marriage is concerned; forced integration and total integration such as many Negro civil-rights groups are trying to accomplish today. We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad don’t believe that this is the solution to our problem. Unity among self, respect for self, doing for self is what we believe. And this don’t make me no different from whites, because the masses of them believe and have been practicing this ever since we’ve been in America. So my outlook on life is really the same as ninety percent of the whites in America. They’re just shocked and surprised to see that we the Negro who have accepted the teachings of Elijah Muhammad now want to be with ourselves and live among ourselves and don’t want to force-integrate, and that’s such a surprise to the whites, which makes us controversial and different but really we’re not different. We’re just different from the Negro who’s striving for forced integration. But as a whole, the whites believe like we do and have been believing like we do all the time.

Q:
Would you like to see a world someday where the white man and Negro can live together and call each other friends?

ALI:
I’m not the one to say. I would like to see peace on earth. If separation will bring it, I say let’s separate. If integration will bring it, I say let’s integrate. But let’s not just stand still, where one man holds another in bondage and deprives him of freedom, justice, and equality, neither integrating or letting him go to self. I don’t like that. But I like seeing peace, whatever means will bring it.

Q:
Do you think the Negro is better than the white man or just different? Are we the same underneath the skin?

ALI:
Nobody on earth is made the same. Some are born blind; some crippled; some are yellow; some are red; some are black; some are white. No men are really equal or the same. As far as going into the differences and why they’re different, I couldn’t say. But the man that we follow for all of our spiritual teachings, who gives us knowledge and understanding, is Elijah Muhammad. And I’m sure that, if you have him on your radio show, he can tell you why we are not alike and dig into the depths of why we’re different. But it’s not my job to know who’s who and who’s different, because I’m not that wise. That’s up to Elijah Muhammad, our leader.

Q:
You’ve had an outstanding boxing career; perhaps the most outstanding of anyone in the ring today. Who’s the toughest opponent you’ve had to face?

ALI:
The toughest opponent I’ve had to face is Sonny Liston.

Q:
What about Floyd Patterson?

ALI:
He was easy.

Q:
You’ve said that, in the ring, you tried to humiliate Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell. Is that true?

ALI:
Yes.

Q:
Why?

ALI:
Because they talked about me and my religion; mocked my leader and teacher and advisors; and didn’t want to respect me as Muhammad Ali, which is my name now. So they’re lucky they got off as easy as they did.

Q:
Do you think that two wrongs make a right? Was it right to humiliate them like that?

ALI:
Is it right to go to war? Is it right that we’re in a war now, killing people? I have my beliefs, and I’ll defend them.

Q:
One of the things that people are interested in now is your status with the draft. What will you do if your final appeals fall through and you’re drafted? Will you then resist going into the Army?

ALI:
I don’t think it would be respectful to the draft board or the government or the Justice Department to make a decision now. That’s a hypothetical question. I haven’t been drafted yet. My appeals haven’t run out. It’s in the hands of my lawyer; he’s handling it. So it wouldn’t be respectful to make a decision or say anything on this radio show. But the world knows that I am a Muslim. The world knows that I’m a sincere follower to death of Elijah Muhammad. And we say five times a day in our prayers, “My prayers, my sacrifices, my life, and my death are all for Allah.” I repeat, “My prayers, my sacrifices, my life, and my death are all for Allah.” This is what I sincerely believe. I’ve upheld my faith through the past years. I gave up one of the prettiest Negro women in the country; cost me one-hundred-seventy thousand dollars in alimony. This was all controversy and publicity before the draft started. The white businessmen of Louisville, Kentucky, will tell you that I’ve turned down eight million dollars in movie contracts, recordings, promotions, and advertisements because of my faith. So I don’t see why I should break the rules of my faith now.