A Ghost Orbiting Forever
MUHAMMAD ALI, 1942–2016
We were between TV sets for a while back then, touch and go during the “Running on Empty” era, living just off Bathgate Avenue in the midst of an asphalt hell. When was that? Was it ’76 or ’78? Who can tell? The Mets were awful; Gerald Ford told us all to drop dead, seething Travis Bickle had already painted the East Village red and Howard Cosell, using his best nasal twang, intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” By then, they had even torn down the El, leaving us marooned among the arson ruins, the Latin Crowns and the Golden Guineas, “Son of Sam” in gaudy newsprint, the blackout of ’77 and the anarchy steaming in its wake. We had little in those days—less than that, maybe. But my dour old man bought me an Ali-Superman DC Special from a corner newsstand on Fordham Road. Then: long nights by the windowsill, streetlamp and moonlight igniting the stillness. There he is, again, back to haunt: A real-life superhero—a black man, no less! Goddamn!—in the middle of what looked like Zero Hour. Call that a revolution, if you want.
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“Know that the life of this world is merely a sport and a pastime.”
—The Koran
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During his exile years, from 1967 to 1970, Muhammad Ali barnstormed the college lecture circuit and performed ministerial duties for the Nation of Islam. He starred in an off-Broadway play. He filmed a bizarre fantasy sequence against a toupee-wearing Rocky Marciano in a computer-generated matchup whose algorithm, like something HAL might have calculated with sinister intent, determined that Marciano would score a late-round TKO. Ali reinforced his fame, as well as his ideas, on national television so often, he probably logged more screen time than Ed Sullivan or Michael Landon. There he was, dissent with pizzazz, razzing Jack Paar, Jerry Lewis, William F. Buckley, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, and David Frost. He appeared on Face the Nation and on PBS, where, more than once, he expressed admiration for notorious desegregationist George Wallace during an interview.
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Although Ali was part of the roiling zeitgeist, his stance on the Vietnam War was slightly ahead of its time. There were teach-ins across the country in 1965 but “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was at the top of the pop charts a year later and “Operation Rolling Thunder” had not yet galvanized the general public. By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 US soldiers in Vietnam. Four years later, that number reached 542,000. Privately, President Lyndon B. Johnson referred to Vietnam as “a raggedy-ass, fourth-rate country.”
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“I ain't no Christian. I can't be, when I see all of the colored people fighting for forced integration getting blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed up by dogs and they blow up a Negro church and don't find the killers. I get telephone calls every day. They want me to carry signs. They want me to picket. They told me it would be a wonderful thing if I married a white woman because this would be good for brotherhood. I don't want to be blown up. I don't want to be washed down sewers. I just want to be happy with my own kind. I'm the heavyweight champion but, right now, there are some neighborhoods I can't move into. I know how to dodge booby traps and dogs. I dodge them by staying in my own neighborhood. I'm no troublemaker. I don't believe in forced integration.”
—Muhammad Ali, 1964
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That a naive young man who fainted after getting his first kiss from a high school sweetheart would someday turn into the most prominent member of a lucifugous sect is hard to imagine. With its odd cosmology, its talk of “white devils,” its militant stance and its hellfire outlook—so in tune with the times—the Nation of Islam shocked the heartland.
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Ali kept boxing out of the cultural dustbin in the mid-1960s when network television all but abandoned the red-light district of sports in the wake of the Kefauver hearings and the tragic live-feed battering of Benny Paret. Only a few years before Ali made his pro debut, boxing could be seen on network television five or six nights a week, not as an afterthought or as a time-buy, not as off-peak filler for multiplex channels, but as an integral part of the dawning pixel era. While Ali fought almost exclusively on closed-circuit theater bookings, he dragged his showman/shaman act everywhere he went, provoking the media into spontaneous outrage, reverence, wonder, befuddlement.
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Although Ali was raised in a middle-class family, his father, Cassius Clay Sr., boiled over from the dispiriting day-to-day humiliations that made being a “Negro” in mid-twentieth-century America such an existential torment. Clay Senior, who was aghast when his son joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to “Cassius X,” almost certainly drove Ali to what most of the country, at the time, referred to as the “Black Muslims.” As a child, Ali heard his embittered father repudiate White America over and over again. He also heard Clay Senior extol the philosophy of Marcus Garvey, whose “Back to Africa” movement may have given Ali the urge for separatism. Not for Ali, the risks of the Freedom Riders, voter-registration drives, boycotts, picket lines. Once, Ali—then Cassius Clay and still in high school—attended a demonstration in Louisville. A white woman dumped a bucketful of water from an apartment window over him. Soaked, Ali disavowed protests instantaneously. But to chastise Ali for his noninvolvement at a time when thousands risked their lives on behalf of the civil rights movement is to miss the point altogether: Segregation was official Nation of Islam ideology. And Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were not the only black men to rail against integration. When Stokely Carmichael took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of his first acts was to oust its white members.
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What little most Americans knew about the Nation of Islam, they had learned from The Hate That Hate Produced, a documentary that aired in five parts in 1959. Even for a sect that mixed Islam with Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, and Philip K. Dick, the Nation of Islam, during the 1960s, was, for whites and some blacks as well, beyond the pale. This was, mind you, a Black Nationalist movement that tried to work out some sort of pact with the Ku Klux Klan and with George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. And some of its enforcers, usually responsible for meting out beatings to keep the rank and file in line, graduated to assassination when they gunned down Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965.
Despite its militant stance, the Nation of Islam turned its gunsels mostly on its own. A few days before his assassination, Malcolm X held a press conference in New York City, where he essentially apologized for the Nation of Islam. “I feel responsible for having played a major role in a criminal organization,” he said. “It was not a criminal organization at the outset; it was an organization that had the power—the spiritual power—to reform the criminal.” In the end, what matters most, perhaps, is the grassroots effect of the Nation of Islam: thousands of young (African) Americans rehabilitated after prison terms, or taken off street corners, eschewing drugs and liquor, well-spoken, given a sense of self-worth, no longer future zeros, their bow ties exclamation points on new lives.
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October 1, 1975—Muhammad Ali TKO 14 Joe Frazier, Araneta Coliseum, Quezon City, Philippines
“We went to Manila as champions, Joe and me, and came back old men.”
—Muhammad Ali
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More than any other boxer, Ali openly acknowledged the physical toll his vocation