Muhammad Ali

American boxer

• Born: January 17, 1942
• Birthplace: Louisville, Kentucky
• Died: June 3, 2016
• Place of death: Scottsdale, Arizona

Muhammad Ali was probably the greatest as well as the best-recognized sports personality of the twentieth century. He brought heavyweight boxing matches to areas of the world never before regarded as important in boxing circles.

Early Life

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky, to Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. and Odessa Lee Grady Clay. His father was a commercial artist specializing in sign painting; he also painted murals for churches and taverns. His mother sometimes worked as a domestic servant for four dollars a day to help support the family. Some of the Clays trace their name to Ali’s great-great-grandfather, who was a slave of Cassius Marcellus Clay, a relative of Henry Clay and ambassador to Russia in the 1860s.

Known during boyhood as a mischievous child and lover of practical jokes, Ali was considered indolent by his father. He often remarked that eating and sleeping were Ali’s two most strenuous activities. That changed when Ali became involved in boxing at the age of twelve. Unlike most boxers, however, he was reared in a lower-middle-class environment. When, at age twelve, Ali’s bicycle was stolen, he reported the theft to a Louisville police officer who gave boxing lessons in a gymnasium operated in Ali’s neighborhood. This white police officer, Joe Elsby Martin, was to guide Ali through most of his amateur boxing career. After six weeks of boxing lessons, Ali had his first fight, weighing in at eighty-nine pounds. He won a split decision and was regarded as an average boxer at that time. Yet two characteristics had already manifested themselves in Ali: his dedication to his newfound interest, a dedication to make himself into “the greatest” (a slogan he adopted relatively early in his career), and his propensity to talk back to people, particularly his detractors. He was known as a smart aleck.

Ali attended Du Valle Junior High School and graduated from Central High School in Louisville, 376th in his class of 391. He was known more for his marble-shooting and rock-throwing prowess than for any interest in academics. Ali’s first public exposure came in Louisville, when he was booked for fights on Tomorrow’s Champions, a local weekly television boxing show. By this time, he was also training four hours a day under Fred Stoner, a black trainer at the Grace Community Center, a gymnasium in the all-black section of Louisville. Ali later said that Stoner molded his style, his stamina, and his system.

During his illustrious amateur career, Ali won 100 of 108 fights, six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, and two national Amateur Athletic Union championships. During his last two years as an amateur, he lost only once, to Amos Johnson in the 1959 Pan-American Games trials. By this time, he wanted to box professionally, but Martin convinced him to remain an amateur and enter the 1960 Olympics, as this would give him national recognition and ensure his professional success. Ali, who was already advertising himself as the next heavyweight champion of the world, stopped off in New York City on the way to the Olympic Games in Rome and visited Madison Square Garden, then the mecca of professional boxing. He won the light-heavyweight title at the Olympics and returned to the United States in triumph. Soon afterward, however, he was refused service in a restaurant in his hometown and had to fight a white motorcycle gang leader to escape from the restaurant. This incident so embittered him that he threw his Olympic Gold Medal into the Ohio River.

When Ali turned to professional boxing in 1960, he was already six feet three. In his heyday, he weighed more than 200 pounds, usually weighing in at around 220 pounds. Ali did not look like a boxer. His rather large, round face was unmarked, and he was not muscle-bound. Bodybuilding has long been an anathema to boxers; heavy surface muscles restrict the movement of hands and arms, and Ali’s forte already was speed and defense in the ring. Indeed, one of his most celebrated slogans was “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Three days before his first professional fight, on October 29, 1960, Ali signed a contract with eleven white businessmen from Louisville and New York City. These men were willing to invest in a potential heavyweight champion. Known as the Louisville Sponsoring Group, it was headed by William Faversham Jr., vice president of the Brown-Forman Distillers Corporation. Ali received a ten-thousand-dollar bonus for signing, a salary of four thousand dollars annually for the first two years, and six thousand dollars annually for the following four years, as well as having all of his expenses paid. He was also to receive 50 percent of all of his earnings.

Ali began his professional training under former light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore. Angelo Dundee soon supplanted Moore, also becoming Ali’s de facto manager during Ali’s early professional career. Angelo was calm under fire and saved Ali’s championship at least twice. He was an excellent cornerman who had come up through the ranks. His brother, Chris Dundee, was at the time promoting a weekly fight card in Miami Beach. Angelo joined Chris, and they established their training headquarters on the second floor of a two-story building on the corner of Fifth Street and Washington Avenue in Miami Beach. This gymnasium later became known as the Fifth Street Gym and was probably the best-known and most respected training center in the United States.

Ali won his first seven fights as a professional, beginning with the defeat of Tunney Hunsaker. Some of his early fights were held in Louisville, and his first national television exposure was against Alonzo Johnson. Johnson was then twenty-seven years old and an experienced boxer. The bout, televised by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, was a difficult one for Ali, but he won and was on his way.

Ali was soon showing all the braggadocio for which he became noted: talking constantly to confuse his opponents, writing short ditties deriding them, and predicting the round in which he would stop them. There was, however, a method to his madness. His behavior increased the spectators’ enthusiasm for his fights and brought him fame and fortune, along with derision. It is said that Ali had watched the antics of Gorgeous George, one of the first truly flamboyant wrestlers to appear on television, noting his ability to enrage most of the spectators at his matches. Yet these same spectators paid as much money for tickets to see George lose as his fans paid to see him win. Fifty percent of all revenue from fights was still coming to Ali. More than twelve thousand people came to see him knock out Alejandro Lavorante in California in five rounds, and his fight with Archie Moore in California in November 1962 drew more than sixteen thousand people. In March 1963, he fought Doug Jones in Madison Square Garden, filling it for the first time in more than a decade; more than eighteen thousand people came to see him fight, paying $105,000 for this privilege. Ali then went to England to box British heavyweight champion Henry Cooper. Ali predicted a victory by a fifth-round knockout of Cooper, but late in the third round, Cooper knocked Ali down and stunned him. Dundee, however, noticed that one of Ali’s gloves was split, and the extra minutes needed to fix it enabled Ali to clear his head. Cooper’s propensity to be cut easily allowed Ali to win by a technical knockout in the fifth round, as he had predicted.

Life’s Work

Ali finally had the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Sonny Liston was then regarded as the quintessential champion and was a prohibitive favorite to retain his crown. Yet at the weigh-in before the fight in Miami Beach on February 25, 1964, Ali distracted Liston with a carefully rehearsed display of hysteria and paranoia. During the fight, he taunted Liston and, using his superior speed and longer reach, peppered Liston with long-range jabs and right-hand punches. He so wore down his opponent that Liston was unable to answer the bell for the seventh round. Ali was declared the heavyweight champion of the world. In a return match with Liston, held in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, Ali knocked him out with a very quick right-hand punch in the first round. He next defeated the former champion, Floyd Patterson, winning a technical knockout in the twelfth round, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Many believed that Ali could have ended the fight earlier but instead chose to bait and mock Patterson unmercifully. In 1966, he stopped all five of his challengers. Only one, George Chuvalo, went the distance. Early in 1967, he defeated Ernie Terrell and was recognized as the undisputed heavyweight champion. Only one month later, he knocked out American heavyweight Zora Folley.

In 1967 Ali defied the order to be drafted into the US Army and fight in the Vietnam War. He was banned from boxing for three years and was stripped of his title. As a result of his refusal, Ali was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence and was given a $10,000 fine. He appealed his conviction, which was eventually overturned in 1971. He had returned to the boxing ring in 1970.

By this time, Ali’s activities beyond the ring were receiving more notoriety than were his successful title defenses. Immediately after he won the championship from Liston, he announced that he had joined the black nationalist Nation of Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. Popularly known as the Black Muslims, the sect was then regarded by white America as a dangerous and subversive antiwhite group. (Ali converted to mainstream Sunni Islam in 1975.) Also, Ali had been married twice by this time. His first marriage to Sonje Roi was dissolved in 1966. His second marriage was to Belinda Boyd (Khalilah Toloria), producing four children. He wooed Belinda when she was seventeen years old and working in a Chicago Nation of Islam bakery. They divorced in 1977. He was married a third time, to Veronica Porsche, in 1977. This third marriage produced two children before ending in divorce in 1986, the same year he married his fourth wife Yolonda "Lonnie" Williams, with whom he had one son.

Many white commentators began to compare Ali to the former champion Jack Johnson, a black boxer who had defied the stereotypes of his time by living a fast and integrated life. This comparison was odd, in a way, for Ali was probably the best-trained heavyweight champion of all time, and he neither smoked nor drank. In 1966, the Selective Service Board reclassified him as 1-A, thus removing his deferred status of 1-Y. Ali then appealed, citing conscientious-objector status on religious grounds. He formally refused induction into the army on April 18, 1967. The World Boxing Association then stripped him of his championship, as did the New York Athletic Commission. Therefore, for three years, during what was the prime of his athletic life, Ali was unable to fight. In 1970, however, a federal court ruled that the revocation of his license was arbitrary and unreasonable, and Ali was able to resume his career.

In 1971, Ali lost his bid to regain the title when Joe Frazier knocked him down in the fifteenth round of a fight in Madison Square Garden; the decision went unanimously to Frazier in what was dubbed "the fight of the century." Against all odds, on October 30, 1974, Ali again won the heavyweight crown. After two losses and fifteen wins, he faced George Foreman (who in the meantime had won the title from Frazier) in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), on October 30, 1974, in what became known as the Rumble in the Jungle. Here he used his “rope-a-dope” tactics, lying back on the ring ropes and letting Foreman tire himself out. Only his superior hand speed and movement enabled him to do this. Foreman was knocked out in the eighth round. During this period, Ali lived very well, with Belinda, his second wife, on what was described as a baronial, four-and-a-half-acre estate, with a three-car garage containing his-and-hers Rolls Royces. During this period, Ali successfully defended his title against Frazier in the Philippines, in what became known as the "Thrilla in Manila." However, Ali’s skills were waning; after barely defeating two mediocre boxers, he lost his crown to Leon Spinks in Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 15, 1978. Summoning all of his strength, Ali trained hard for a rematch, winning the title for an unprecedented third time on September 15, 1978. He lost his last major fight to Larry Holmes in October 1980, but his final match was against twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas, which he lost in a unanimous decision.

During his career, Ali earned more than fifty million dollars. Much of this money went for taxes, an expensive lifestyle, and divorces; a third of it went to Herbert Muhammad, who became Ali’s manager of record in 1966. By the 1980s, Ali was showing signs of mental and physical decay, the result of Parkinson’s disease, not, as some conjectured, from brain damage resulting from his fights. Ali retired permanently in 1981 with a career record of fifty-six wins (thirty-seven of them by knockouts) and five losses. The formal announcement of his Parkinson’s disease came in 1984. At the time, Ali could claim, with justice, that he was the most famous man in the world.

In retirement, Ali became an iconic sports figure, receiving recognition in many forms. Forbes magazine placed him thirteenth on its Celebrity One Hundred list, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame picked him as Kentucky Athlete of the Century, and both Sports Illustrated and the British Boxing Association selected him as sportsman of the twentieth century. In 2015, Sports Illustrated renamed its Sportsman Legacy Award, which is given annually in recognition of leadership, sportsmanship, and philanthropy, as the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, and the magazine featured Ali on its cover for his thirty-ninth time, giving him more cover appearances than any athlete except Michael Jordan. Ali was inducted into the International Hall of Fame and the Olympic Hall of Fame. He received the Spirit of America Award, the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold from the United Nations Association of Germany, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Constitution Center's Liberty Award, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. In 1996, he was accorded the honor of lighting the Olympic flame at the Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was presented a gold medal to replace the one that he had lost. In 2007, Princeton University awarded him an honorary doctorate of humanities.

In retirement, Ali involved himself in humanitarian programs. The Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, which opened in 2005, not only preserves the boxing memorabilia of Ali but also his ideals: peace, social responsibility, and personal growth. The Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, provides treatment, research, and education for patients and families. Ali supported delivery of food and medical services to places such as the Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Mexico, and Morocco, often traveling to these countries to promote the humanitarian effort, and he lobbied before state legislatures and Congress for laws to protect children and to regulate professional boxing. In The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life’s Journey (2004), Ali discusses the meaning of religion and forgiveness as he reflects on turning points in his life. In 2013, he attended the first ever Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards ceremony in Louisville to honor US and international activists for their humanitarian work.

Ali did not make many public appearances during his last few years as his health continued to decline. He passed away on June 3, 2016, in a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. He was seventy-four. Ali was married four times. After divorcing Belinda Boyd in 1976, he married Veronica Porche the following year. The couple divorced in 1986. Ali married Lonnie Ali in 1986. He was survived by his fourth wife and his nine children.

Significance

Ali is considered the premier heavyweight champion of all time. He is credited with reviving interest in boxing and helping promote international acceptance of the sport. His fights in Kinshasa and Manila made him history’s most recognized boxer, and in 1998, a documentary film about the African bout, When We Were Kings, won an Academy Award. In 2001, actor Will Smith recreated Ali’s youthful exuberance in the biographical film Ali. Ali has also been the subject of several other film tributes, including the PBS film Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami (2008), which highlights the influence of Miami culture in 1960s on the young Cassius Clay; the acclaimed documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013), detailing Ali's lifelong spiritual trajectory; and the HBO film adaptation of Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (2013), which focuses on the Supreme Court battle over Ali's refusal to submit to the draft.

Nevertheless, Ali’s stand for the principles in which he believes cost him dearly. Most Americans came to admire him for his courage, if not for his beliefs. George Plimpton captured Ali’s standing in writing of his appearance during the 1996 Olympic Games opening ceremony: “It was a kind of epiphany that those who watched realized how much they missed him and how much he had contributed to the world of sport.”

Bibliography

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