Recent Reading: Ali: A Life

 

I finished Jonathan Eig's excellent book Ali: A life a few days ago. Muhammad Ali AKA Cassius Clay was certainly a remarkable figure who provides insight into multiple aspects of American history. Ali touches on sports (boxing and the olympics -- Ali lighting the Olympic torch in 1996 was a moment), religion (the African-American religious experience, and Malcolm X), politics (Vietnam), celebrity culture, and the excesses of the late 1960s and 1970s (promiscuous sex).

If you want a succinct and enjoyable look at the life of Ali, let me suggest the obituary video that the New York Times produced, What's My Name.

Ali was a hero to so many people because, as Spike Lee once said, "he was handsome, he was articulate, and he was whopping ass. No one fused sports and politics like Ali did." However, he was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title in 1967 when he refused to be inducted into the army to join the war in Vietnam. "No VietCong ever called me nigger," he famously said. This resulted in a tremendous loss of income and a career change for Ali, who, as a high school dropout, had very few job skills outside of boxing. The question could be asked, why were other superstars of sports, Michael Jordan comes to mind, so much more interested in protecting their careers and sponsorship deals than standing up for important social and political ideas.

Muhammad Ali, in addition to his incredible talent and achievement as a boxer, as a self-promoter, and as a symbol for Black people, was a flawed person. His two biggest flaws, at least in my mind after reading Eig's book, were his willingness to trust people and his gullibility and his sex life.

Muhammad Ali's first flaw was that he was too willing to trust people. 

Ali was a very social person and was always surrounded by people that he either paid or gave money to. Some people, like Angelo Dundee, worked for him offering professional services. Others, like Bundini Brown, were there for something like moral support and encouragement. (Brown created the lines "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" and "Rumble, young man, rumble.") Some, especially Don King and Herbert Muhammad, simply used him as a cash cow. At one point, Ali hired a lawyer to look into his finances who saw that Don King still owed him $1.2 million. The lawyer called king and said he would sue. So, King had a suitcase delivered to Ali via a contact at the Nation of Islam and Ali instructed his lawyer not to pursue the matter any further.

Muhammad Ali's second flaw was that he was a sex addict.

Ali was married four times. He had nine children (seven daughters and two sons) -- there are, more than likely, other children that he did not acknowledge. He also had many girlfriends, and also hired prostitutes. In fact, Ali was with a prostitute hours before one of his big fights in New York City. There were times when he was having sex with another woman while his wife was in the other room.

Having described two of Ali's biggest flaws, let me end this review by saying that Ali was also a remarkable human being. He could be generous and loved to make people feel welcome. After he finally quit boxing, he was known for doing magic tricks, mixing with the crowd, and putting on a real show at public appearances. And he often stayed for hours longer than necessary to sign autographs for fans. His moment at the 1996 Olympic games (shown above) was a highlight of his post-boxing life -- a life that was, unfortunately, dominated by the Parkinsons disease that ravished his body and ability to speak more and more. Muhammad Ali inspired an entire generation of young people to believe that they could accomplish great things regardless of the color of their skin.

It is interesting to think about who the three most important African-American boxers of the twentieth century were. They were, at least in my opinion, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. Ali was a very different boxer and person than the other two.

 

Jack Johnson was the first Black boxing champion, and white America was not ready for him. When he defeated John Jeffries in Reno, Nevada on July 4, 1910 riots followed. The movie Unforgiveable Blackness asserts that the two events in the twentieth century that came before terrible race riots were the Johnson boxing match and the death of Martin Luther King. No white boxer was able to beat Johnson in the ring, so authorities, instead, went after Johnson for his sex life. He had multiple white girlfriends, and often used the services of prostitutes. Eventually he was prosecuted under the Mann act for his relationship with Lucille Cameron and served time in prison.

Muhammad Ali was not always the most reflective person -- bear in mind that he dropped out of high school at 16 and was self-educated after that. But he did see James Earl Jones play Jack Johnson in the play The Great White Hope and saw a lot of himself in Johnson.

Joe Louis was, undoubtedly, a great boxer and a hero to the black community. However, Joe Louis and his people were keenly aware of what had happened to Jack Johnson and Louis acted very differently. He never went into a nightclub with a woman and was never photographed with a prostitute, especially not a white one.