“Knock me out!” Carter said, turning to the live audience. “If you even show up at the arena tomorrow night, that’ll be enough to knock me out! I oughta cloud up and rain all over you right here. You talk like a champ, but you fight like a woman who deep down wants to be raped!”
The audience, knowing what happened to Benny Paret, gasped. Griffith clenched his jaw. Carter had laid his trap.
The following night, the city’s steel plants and foundries spewed smoke into the frozen air. Inside the Civic Arena, Griffith’s mother was in the crowd, and the champion entered the ring as a confident 11–5 favorite. Griffith started out methodically, firing jabs, standing toe-to-toe, swapping punch for punch. He wanted to prove that he could take Carter’s best shots and win a slugfest. This was exactly what Carter had hoped for.
Carter popped him in the mouth with a stiff jab; Griffith responded with an equal jolt to Carter’s mouth. Carter pumped a jab to his forehead; Griffith fired one back on him. Carter backed up, looked at him, snorted, then raced in with a jab followed by a powerful left hook to the gut.
The air came out of Griffith, who tried to grab Carter, but Carter slipped away. “Naw-naw, sucker,” Carter mumbled through his mouthpiece. He drilled home another salvo of lefts and rights—“You gotta pay the Hurricane!” Carter yelled—then dropped Griffith with a left hook.
“One! … Two! … Three.”
The crowd was stunned into silence, then stood and cheered. Griffith staggered to his feet to beat the count, but he was now an easy target. Carter smashed left hooks to the body and devastating rights to the head. Griffith dropped to the canvas, badly hurt. He tried to stand but stumbled instead. The referee, Buck McTiernan, stepped in and stopped the fight. The time was two minutes and thirteen seconds into the first round. “A left hook sent Griffith on his way to dreamland!” the television announcer yelled.
Carter’s upset cemented his reputation as one of the most feared men in boxing. It also earned Carter a shot at the title the following year. But the Griffith fight marked the pinnacle of his boxing career. Carter lost his championship bout on December 16, 1964, to Joey Giardello, a rugged veteran whose first professional fight had been in 1948, in a controversial fifteen-round decision. Giardello’s face was puffed into a mask while Carter was unmarked, and a number of sportswriters who saw the fight thought Carter won. But challengers typically have to beat a champ decisively to win a decision, and Carter didn’t.
The bout occurred on December 16, 1964. The following year, Carter received another jolt—this time, political. He was invited to fight in Johannesburg, South Africa, a country about which he knew virtually nothing. He had never heard of Nelson Mandela or the African National Congress or even apartheid. But just as the Army exposed him to bigotry in the Deep South, boxing now put him in the midst of a more virulent racism. Arriving in Johannesburg a couple of weeks before his September 18 bout, he was guided around the city by Stephen Biko. In years to come, Biko would become the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, advocating black pride and empowerment, and would found the South African Students Organization. But in 1965, he was an eighteen-year-old student and fledgling political activist, and he gave Carter a quick education in black oppression. Walking through Johannesburg, the American’s roving eye glimpsed a tight-skirted white woman. “Whoa, man!” he said. Biko grabbed Carter’s arm. “You can’t say that. They’ll kill us! They’ll kill us!”
Racial strife was indeed high. The previous year, Nelson Mandela and other black leaders were handed life sentences for conspiring to overthrow the government. The ANC had been banned in 1961; but clandestine meetings were still being held, and Biko took Carter to some of these nocturnal gatherings. There he learned about black South Africans’ bloody struggle, dating almost two hundred years, for political independence. He also had his own encounter with the South African police. He was almost arrested one night for walking outside without a street pass.
The boxing match was against a cocky black fighter named Joe “Ax Killer” Ngidi who had a potent right hand. More than 30,000 fans packed into Wemberley Stadium on a sunny afternoon, and as Ngidi danced about the ring in a pre-bout warm up, Carter noticed that some of the fans were carrying spears.
“I don’t know what that means,” his advisor Elwood Tuck told him, “but get that sucker out of there quick.”
Carter was confident. South African boxers, he believed, viewed the sport as dignified and noble but lacked savagery. That shortcoming could not be applied to Carter, and even though he was a foreigner, his ferocity made him a crowd favorite in South Africa. When he KO’d “Ax Killer” Ngidi in the second round, fans stood on their feet, raised their spears and yelled, “KAH-ter! KAH-ter!” But after Carter reached his dressing room, he was pinned in by a mob of supporters, and the scene turned ugly. To leave the stadium, a battalion of gun-carrying Afrikaner cops formed a wedge and told Carter and his entourage to follow its lead. As they pushed through the crowd, a white officer pummeled several black fans. Carter, outraged, moved to strike the cop, but was blocked by one of his handlers and was once again reminded that such a move would ensure his own demise.
In the following days, Carter was named a Zulu chief outside Soweto and given the name “Nigi”—the man with the beautiful beard. He was now an African warrior, and he wanted to apply the same principles in his second homeland that he always applied in the U.S.: blacks must use whatever means necessary, including violence, to defend themselves. From what he could tell, South African blacks were defenseless, armed with rocks and spears against the Afrikaners’ guns and rifles. Before Carter left Johannesburg, he pledged to Stephen Biko that he would return.
Carter had committed crimes before, but now he was going to do something far more dangerous. He was going to smuggle guns to the ANC. First, he prowled bars in New Jersey and New York, where hardluck customers traded their guns for drinks and tavern owners ran a second business in arms sales. Carter accumulated four duffel bags for their weapons, then persuaded Johannesburg promoters to set up another fight. This time, his opponent would be an American, Ernie Burford, against whom Carter had split two previous matches. That Carter would travel all the way to South Africa to fight another American made no sense to outsiders, and he told few people about his true motivation, not even Burford. If the South African authorities caught him running guns to the ANC, he would probably never have left the country alive. But the trip turned out to be a great success. He delivered the guns to a grateful Biko, and he knocked out Burford in the eighth round on February 27, 1966.
Eight months later, Carter was arrested for the Lafayette bar murders, and he never heard from Stephen Biko again.
In a few short years, Biko founded the Black Consciousness movement, advocating black pride and empowerment, and he would become one of the most celebrated leaders of black South Africans’ fight against a murderous regime. His activism, however, frequently placed him under police detention, and in 1977 he died from head injuries while under custody, provoking international outrage. He was thirty years old.*
After Carter’s loss to Giardello, his boxing career lasted for twenty-two more months. During that period he won 7, lost 7, and had 1 draw. (He ended his career with 28 wins, 11 losses, and 1 draw.) He blamed the losses on increased police and FBI harassment, in New Jersey and elsewhere, and there is credibility to that excuse. The Saturday Evening Post article, which included Carter’s intemperate remarks about the police and his own ruffian past, was published in October 1964. Carter, according to Paterson police records, was arrested twice in the next six months on “disorderly person” charges. (He was found not guilty on one charge and paid a $25 fine on another.) In a sport that requires complete focus, Carter’s concentration was no doubt disturbed by these rising tensions with the law.
But Carter’s own stubbornness hurt him. He worked out with intensity but resisted his trainers. One, Tommy Parks, devised an ingenious double-cross. He began giving Carter “opposite commands.” If he wanted Carter to do roadwork the next morning, he would instruct his fighter to sleep late. Five A.M. would roll around