The Greatest: Muhammad Ali

Before his fight with Black boxing champion Sonny Liston, Ali (then still known as Cassius Clay) was acting erratically, leading some to think that he was scared and that the fight would be called off. He and his friend Drew “Bundini” Brown shouted at one another, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” (xiii). Liston was a fearsome champion with a muscular build who had also been a mob enforcer, and so the lanky and fast-talking Clay was a heavy underdog. As the fight began, Clay glided around the ring, dodging Liston’s heavy-handed punches. Clay’s blinding speed peppered Liston with light shots, and then he was gone before Liston could respond. By the end of the second round, Liston had a small cut on his eye, but in the fourth round, Clay was rubbing his eyes and taking heavy shots. Back in his corner, he begged his trainer, Angelo Dundee, to cut his gloves off, yelling that he couldn’t see, but Dundee made him get up for the next round, and Clay scrambled to stay away from Liston’s power shots. His vision cleared up in the sixth round as Liston (who usually finished his fights early) began to tire. On his stool after the sixth round, Clay saw Liston spit out his mouthguard, signaling that he was done. Clay danced around the ring, shouting in celebration, as a dejected Liston wondered who he was dealing with.

One month after the United States entered World War II, Cassius and Odessa Clay welcomed a son, Cassius Jr. Cassius Sr., named for a famous abolitionist, was a sign painter in Louisville, Kentucky, and Odessa was a maid. They were not poor, but like all Black families, they had to endure the cruelty and humiliation of segregation, which strictly separated white people from Black people and subjected Black people to inferior public services and overall quality of life. Young Clay was shy and well-behaved, “a good kid with a sensitivity to injustice” (5). When he was 12 years old, Clay and a friend rode a bicycle to a local store, and after leaving the store, they found that the bike had been stolen. Upset at having lost a cherished item that his family could not afford to replace, Clay sought out a local police officer named Joe Martin and insisted that he wanted to beat up the thief. Martin was a boxing coach, and so he took the boy to his gym, where he showed little athletic prominence but unwavering dedication.

Clay also began working with Fred Stoner, a Black man dedicated to helping young Black boys find positive social outlets, including boxing. By 16, Clay dropped out of school and was piling up trophies as an amateur fighter, including two national Golden Gloves championships. He qualified as a light heavyweight (178 pounds) for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, and in the championship match, he faced a fearsome and experienced Pole named Zbigniew Pietrzykowski. In the first fight, Clay’s attempts to move away from his opponent failed, and so he stood his ground and stopped Pietrzykowski’s attack with hard punches. He won, and the gold medal made him a celebrity back home, a significant reversal in status for someone accustomed to the miseries of segregation. An all-white investment firm called the Louisville Sporting Group agreed to sponsor Clay for a professional career, paying him enough so that he could focus exclusively on boxing.

Clay’s first trainer was Archie Moore, who had struggled for years to gain recognition and decent pay in his own career as a fighter. He needed to prepare Clay for the particular brutalities of professional boxing, where knockouts were far more common and severe bodily harm was a real risk. He tried to teach Clay clever defense techniques to reduce the blow of punches, like absorbing them on arms and shoulders. Clay was confident in his own speed and athleticism, which were superb, and was likewise “confident he could figure out the styles of the men he would fight and undermine their strengths” (20). It soon became apparent that his view of his own abilities clashed with what Moore wanted him to do.

While Clay piled up wins and awards in the ring, the United States was becoming involved in a military campaign in South Vietnam, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ordering the desegregation of public schools was fueling the civil rights movement. Clay was an unusual figure in boxing, handsome and fast-talking, earning the nickname of “The Louisville Lip” (23). Many compared him unfavorably to Joe Louis, the Black champion of the 1930s and 1940s who maintained a persona of quiet patriotism and who became a national hero when he knocked out the German Max Schmeling (who had previously defeated Louis) on the eve of World War II. When Sonny Liston became champion in 1962 by knocking out Floyd Patterson in one round, few thought that Clay would ever even challenge him, much less beat him. Clay easily defeated his former mentor Archie Moore, and while looking for a big fight that would make him appear worthy of challenging Liston, he attended an event held by the Nation of Islam in Detroit. He met its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and its chief spokesman, Malcolm X. Under their influence, he became more interested in civil rights and questioning US involvement in Vietnam, but he was also eager to succeed as a fighter.

Clay loved to predict the rounds where he would defeat an opponent, although he did not always do so accurately. He also showed vulnerabilities in a subpar performance against Doug Jones and suffered a knockdown against Englishman Henry Cooper before stopping him in the next round (helped in part by Dundee deliberately opening up a split in his glove to buy more recovery time while repairing it). As Clay became a source of increasing public fascination, he was taking greater interest in the politics of the day, criticizing the nonviolent politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. He found increasing appeal in the Nation of Islam’s message that “the black man had sufficient resources in his own community to have a separate nation without becoming part of the white community” (37).

The year 1963 was a watershed for Black America. As various civil rights organizations collaborated to put on a massive march on Washington, DC, the Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of his home and family in June. The planned march occurred in August, culminating in King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. President John F. Kennedy, who, with some reluctance, had come to support the civil rights agenda, was assassinated in Dallas on November 22. America had long expected its athletes, particularly its Black ones, to be non-political, but this was not a time to be silent, and Clay would start using his mouth to do more than taunt opponents.