Muhammad Ali

On the night of June 30, 1975 I was hitchhiking in Algeria.  I had left Algiers, where I  stayed a few days, and was headed to the Tunisian border and ultimately Egypt.  I was getting good rides.  I was on the main road which was taking me through a sparsely populated coastal plain along the Mediterranean.  Villages were small and far apart.  Looking back at my world atlas now I would put myself somewhere between the bigger towns of Azazda and Annaba.  As the sky grew darker traffic thinned.  It was a clear night with no moon and my surroundings seemed safe.  I had walked a distance out of a village where I was dropped and, thinking my travelling was over for the day, was looking for a place to get off the road and pitch my tiny tent when a truck passed me and slowed to pick me up.  I ran after it, my backpack bouncing up and down behind me.  My knees ache now just thinking about it.  I was 24.

The truck was a little Datsun pickup piled high with a square load covered by a tarp.  It looked hopelessly overloaded, sitting way low in the back.  In the truck were an older man and what I guessed was his son or a relative of some kind.  The older man immediately began barking orders in Arabic to the younger one, where to stash my backpack, where to allow me to sit.  I watched closely where they put my pack, in a corner near the cab under the tarp.  You never knew when you might need to grab your stuff and go.  The young man drove and they gave me the passenger seat, with the old man in the middle.  It wasn’t easy to get the truck moving again.  After slipping the clutch and laboring through the gears they finally got it up to speed.  After a time we clipped along nicely through the warm North African night.

They knew not a word of English and I knew next to no Arabic.  Up till then most people I encountered knew at least French, which I could struggle through.  But Arabic was tough to decipher.  I made it a point while hitchhiking to be friendly, ask questions, and show interest in my travelling companions.  It seemed like the right thing to do but it also at times extended the ride.  I asked them what they were hauling.  I kept motioning to the bed of the truck behind us, shrugging, and putting my palms up.  Finally the old man understood.  He laughed and brought a bottle of Algerian pop in a returnable bottle from under the seat.  Pulling a fairly large folding knife from his robe he put the blade under the cap, pried it off using his thumb as a lever, and handed it to me.  I smiled, thanked him profusely, and chugged it.  It was terribly sweet, but I was their guest and I thought it only polite to drink it all.  Besides I was thirsty. He offered me another and I declined.

The old man kept looking at a wrist watch with no band he pulled out of some interior pocket inside his robe and talking excitedly to the young driver.  The kid sped up.  From time to time he would hit a bump, the truck would bottom out on the springs, the old man would yell, and then he would slow down.  Then the old man would protest that he was going too slowly.  He couldn’t win, that kid.

At some point I nodded off.  I was awakened by braking and the feel of something smooth and different under our tires.  We were off the gravel road and onto smooth sand, stopping at a roadside building.  When they switched off the truck I could hear a generator running.  My companions piled out of the truck and motioned for me to follow. 

We entered a dimly lit bar or café of some sort.  On a crude stand high on a wall behind the counter was a fairly large black and white TV.  A thick black extension cord snaked across the floor.  The place was lit by the equivalent of Coleman lanterns.  It was jammed with bearded and turbaned Algerians in djellabas, the standard North African robe.  They were anxious for something to begin.  The place was buzzing with talk and anticipation.  I was in the middle of a conservative country area unlike Algiers.  Alcohol was not available, at least not publically.  The crowd was drinking tea, coffee, and that awful Algerian pop that filled the back of our truck.  My companions put an incredibly strong espresso in front of me with lumps of thick white sugar.

A man got on a ladder by the TV and began fiddling with the knobs.  The room grew quiet.  Light appeared on the screen, then static snow.  The man began screaming instructions through a window to another man, who repeated them, screaming apparently to someone else.  I realized there was a man on the roof adjusting an antenna.  Slowly an image began to emerge on the screen.  I looked in amazement.  The fuzzy outline of a black man in a hooded white robe was dancing in the corner of a roped off square.  The picture became clearer.  It was Muhammad Ali. The assembled crowd roared.  I raised my arms above my head.  Men around me began to clap me on the back.

“American!”  They shouted at me above the noise, pointing to Ali.  “And Muslim!”

The place was up for grabs. A man who knew some English made his way towards me and began talking excitedly in my ear.

“We watched him fight George in Kinshasa.  We watched from right here.  It was the rumble.”

He was referring to the “Rumble in the Jungle” eight months earlier in Africa where Ali defeated George Foreman in Zaire to complete his comeback by consolidating all the heavyweight titles and becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

“Where are they?”  I had to yell to be heard above the crowd.

“Malaysia.  Kuala Lumpur.”

“Who is he fighting?”

“Joe Bugner.  Englishman.”

We looked up at the TV screen.  Ali, the referee, and Joe Bugner were huddled in the middle of the ring.  Ali was staring coolly at his opponent.  My new friend looked at me and laughed.  It was a big laugh, and a long laugh too, his mouth wide open and ringed by a black beard.  He was missing some teeth.  When he was able to talk again he said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes,

“Ali will kill that European man.  He is our hero!”

I yelled back “Mine too!”

 

And with that the bell rang and the fight was on.

I thought back to the first Ali fight I followed, when he was still Cassius Clay.  My Dad and I watched the Friday night fights, sponsored by Gillette, on our black and white TV on the farm. You could call us fight fans.  But I never especially identified with the Friday night fighters.  They were no name guys on the screen.  Cassius Clay was different.  He was more than just a fighter.  He was something new.  Especially for a black man.

He was brash and outspoken, a self promoter.  He talked fast and loudly, often in rhyme, and used big words.  But the quality that set him most apart from the small town white world in which I was growing up was that he bragged.  You didn’t brag where I lived.  You didn’t try to appear smart either.  In fact when you got out of line, someone in authority might ask you

“Are you being smart?  Are you trying to be smart with me?”

As if smartness was bad.  I knew it wasn’t.  But appearing smart, or acting as if one was smart, was taboo.  Humility was the quality that mattered.  Bragging was for people with no class, and certainly not for black people.  It took a lot of nerve for a black man to say those things.  That’s what I heard in my community anyway.

Cassius Clay got on TV and said he was pretty.  He said he was the greatest of all time.  He said outrageous things.  And he baited his opponents.  He called Sonny Liston a bear, a slow lumbering dumb bear.  He walked around the streets of New York City with a pot of honey hoping to draw Liston the bear out of his cave and get him to fight.  He threw a bear trap on the lawn of Liston’s house.  He was outrageous, and the media loved it.  Most of white America, including my older brother, wanted to see him get his ass kicked all over the ring.  They liked their black athletes quiet and smiling.  I silently wanted Clay to win.  He was my secret hero.  I wanted all his predications to come true.  I wished him all the success in the world.

On the night he first fought Sonny Liston, in February of 1964, the fight wasn’t on TV.  My brother went to Peoria to a closed circuit showing of the fight in a theater.  Paid good money for the ticket.  My Dad was gone somewhere, maybe a meeting at the Consistory.  Mom was in the kitchen baking.  I laid on the couch in the living room and tuned in the fight on the fancy new stereo in the living room my brother Denny had brought home from Germany when he was in the Army.  Howard Cossell called the fight.

 

Nobody gave Cassius Clay a chance to win.  Liston was too strong they said.  Clay didn’t punch hard enough.  Somehow I knew Cassius would prevail.  When Liston didn’t answer the bell at the start of the seventh round, sitting instead on a stool in the corner of the ring, Cassius Clay became the heavyweight champion of the world.  I jumped off the couch and yelled.  I threw my arms in the air.  I knew he would win and he did.  My Mom called out from the kitchen

“What happened?”

“Cassius Clay just showed the world he really is the greatest!”  I yelled back.

“Oh for God sakes David settle down.”

My brother Darwin also went to Peoria for the closed circuit showing of the fight in Lewiston Maine when the newly named Muhammad Ali had been champ for just over a year and was in a rematch with Sonny Liston.  He said later he got there a little late and was just sitting down into his seat and the fight was over.  A “mystery punch” by Ali, that later was shown to be a legitimate hard chopping right cross ended that contest early in the first round.

Ali proved unbeatable in the ring.  He had a talent and a style that has never been equaled.  He moved and danced.  He had a terrific jab.  But that is not what made him great.  Boxers and other athletes can only be so great.  But a public figure who becomes famous enough to gain a platform on which to speak, and uses that platform to affect the greater good achieves true greatness.

 

Cassius Clay encountered and befriended Malcolm X who helped him convert to the Black Muslim religion. Both men were then followers of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam in America, who sought to make black people in America strong and independent.  Muhammad Ali was a religious man who lived according to Muslim principles. He adhered to those principles so strongly that he seized his career from white handlers and turned it over to the Nation of Islam.  When he was reclassified 1-A by the draft board he refused to serve in a white man’s war on religious grounds.  He was subsequently convicted of a felony and stripped of his titles, unable to box from March of 1967 to October 1970.  By refusing to be drafted into the armed services he sacrificed his best fighting years, and countless dollars, on principle.  His suspension from boxing started when he was 25 and ended when he was 29. 

Muhammad Ali tied the Vietnam War to the black experience in America in such a way that I understood, even as a 16 year old farm kid in Danvers Illinois, both issues immediately for what they were.  He spoke with such a clear voice.  This was not a brash boxer hustling to promote his next fight.  This was a principled American man acting out of conviction.  He could have joined the army and fought exhibition bouts for two years and been hailed as a patriotic American hero.  But he didn’t.  He took the hard way.  He acted on principle and refused to be a part of it.  Listen to what he said about the Vietnam War.

“I ain’t draft dodging.  I ain’t burning no flag.  I’m staying right here.  You want to send me to jail?  Fine, you go right ahead.  I’ve been in jail for 400 years.  I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die.  You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese.  You my opposer when I want freedom.  You my opposer when I want justice.  You my opposer when I want equality.  Want me to go somewhere and fight for you?  You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for my right here at home.”

Ali stood firm and appealed his conviction.  In June of 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court in Clay v. United States overturned Ali’s conviction by a unanimous 8-0 decision.  Muhammad Ali resumed his boxing career.  He retired in 1981 with a record of 56-5 after winning the heavyweight title an unprecedented three times.  But boxing was not his biggest contribution to the world.

Muhammad Ali inspired people across America to see their country for what it was.  When I got to college in 1969 as an English major I was fortunate enough to be exposed to material I never knew existed.  I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and other stories of the black experience in America.  A kid raised on a dairy farm in a community and a school without one black person came to realize the hell that white America foisted on black people in this country through their own eyes and in their own words.

But before I had that education, Muhammad Ali sounded the call.  He pointed the way.  There was something wrong, and he announced it.  I was following the Vietnam War closely on the farm, reading everything I possibly could about it, and when I came to realize that young black men were dying in disproportionate numbers to their white counterparts, his words rang so true.  Early in the war, when blacks made up only 11% of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to over 20% of the total dead.  Black leaders protested and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back.  Those black leaders were emboldened by Muhammad Ali’s early and brave stance. 

Muhammad Ali changed history, both in regard to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement in America.  He proved to be not only a true American Hero, but an international hero for oppressed people everywhere.  He represented moral strength in the face of huge adversity.  You could sense his power and presence.

That’s the emotion that came back to me that night in Algeria, wherever I was, in 1975.  Ali didn’t knock Joe Bugner out in Kuala Lumpur but instead won a lopsided decision after 15 rounds.  Every time he landed a punch a packed house of Algerians and one American in that little country town screamed approval.  It felt like he was fighting for us.  All throughout the fight I was dying for a drink.  It’s a cultural thing I guess.   It seemed wrong to celebrate a certain Ali victory without a beer or a whiskey or something.  Actually, I smoked a little kif with some of the young men after the fight which made up for it some.  It was an unforgettable experience, enjoying the camaraderie of men I didn’t know who shared little but had a common bond; the admiration of a celebrated man.

 

That fight was a warm up for the “Thrilla in Manila” four months later when he beat Joe Frazier for the second and last time.   Had he stopped boxing then, at his peak, he might have escaped his medical fate of Pugilistic Parkinson’s syndrome.  But the pull of money and the fame proved to be too strong.  He kept fighting.  Ironically, his public struggles with the illness may yet contribute to the eventual downfall of boxing as we know it, the sport another possible victim of the specter of concussion and senseless brain injury.  Muhammad Ali died Friday and I lost a hero, as did countless others around the world.  I know some men were surely sad in a little town somewhere in Algeria.

Rest in Peace.  And thank you.