Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (6 page)

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 November 11th 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 judgments and actions are at times unwise. An example of this occurred on December 19, 2001, at a fundraising event for the proposed Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. The center is intended to be an educational facility designed to promote tolerance and understanding among all people. At the fundraiser, 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.’’

Afterward, Sue Carls (a spokesperson for the Ali Center) sought to minimize 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 misjudgments 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

A
lbert 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, Wilfred Sheed, who himself was skeptical of Ali’s merit as a social figure, once observed that boxing’s eras would be forever known as B.C. (before Clay) and A.D. (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-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 coruscates 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 skillful 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-honored 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 catalogs 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 sixteenth percentile on an Army intelligence test. That left him well below the requirement of thirty. But two years after that, with the war in Vietnam expanding, the mental-aptitude percentile required by the military was lowered from thirty to fifteen. 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 labeled “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 fourteen 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 practiced 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 twentieth anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier fight. The dinner took place on the night of April 14, 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 on 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 antiwar 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 United States 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 told 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 color; 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.”