A REAL FREAK IN BOXING: MUHAMMAD ALI AND THE SPIRIT OF THE 1960S

[Ali] is all the sixties were. It is as though he were created to represent them. In him is the trouble and the wildness and the hysterical gladness and the nonsense and the rebellion and the conflicts of race and the yearning for bizarre religions and the cult of the put-on and the changed values that altered the world and the feeling about Vietnam in the generation that ridicules what their parents cherish.

JIMMY CANNON, 1970

[Clay] is an American who doesn't wish to be an American, a fighter who doesn't wish to be a fighter for American patriotism. Now, if this man Clay isn't a genuine freak, one of the freakiest of all time despite his ideal physical proportions and ring skills, then we haven't had a real freak in boxing.

DAN DANIEL, THE RING, AUGUST 1966

On their way to their epic battle in Kinshasa, Zaire, on October 30, 1974, heavyweight champion George Foreman and former titleholder Muhammad Ali had come to represent different poles in the raging debate over the role of black athletes in American sports and in the larger fields of race relations, politics, and culture. That the two champions were black raised questions about a Cold War narrative that emphasized progress in American race relations so that any talented young person, regardless of race, creed, or color, could achieve the American dream of success. Olympic athletes were expected to fulfill their patriotic duty and vanquish their Soviet and Eastern Bloc foes in symbolic reenactments of the Cold War. Once they achieved professional success, boxers were expected to serve as proper role models for American boys and young men, and this included a willingness to serve in the armed forces. Yet by 1968 the situation had changed dramatically, especially for black men and women in sports. The impact of the civil rights movement, the growing ascendancy of black nationalism, and the virulent anti–Vietnam War movement worked to challenge the assumptions about the role of black athletes in American life. At the center of this social ferment, Muhammad Ali joined the antiwhite Nation of Islam and refused to serve in the armed forces of the United States. Much to the chagrin of the boxing and political establishment, he rejected his role as an American patriotic symbol and assumed the identity of black and Third World hero. Conversely, his future opponent George Foreman seemed his exact opposite: a living example of the American dream. A beneficiary of the Job Corps, a key program in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Foreman symbolized a form of liberalism and patriotic civil rights that appeared to be increasingly old-fashioned as the 1960s flowed into the 1970s. In Kinshasa, the question was not just which individual boxer would win but also which set of opposing political and cultural values would triumph.

No one meeting these two athletes as youngsters would have predicted that they would play such divergent political roles in the overall scheme of things or that boxing would emerge as a focal point for a national and international debate about such weighty matters. Under his original name, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Muhammad Ali was the product of a relatively stable, two-parent, working-class family. He was born in the segregated black community of Louisville, Kentucky, on January 18, 1942. In the 1950s Louisville prided itself as a border city known for its moderation in race relations. Blacks had the vote and hence a measure of political power to temper some of the harshness of segregation. While schools, parks, neighborhoods, the downtown business district, and places of amusement were largely segregated, because of a strong interracial labor movement and the right to vote, African Americans found more economic opportunities and a better standard of living there than in most Southern cities. Black political power garnered a black park to offset the white one and a separate black college to rival the University of Louisville. In response to Brown v. Board of Education, the city fathers engineered the desegregation of the schools. Neighborhood segregation, however, remained strong. Growing up black in Louisville as the civil rights movement spread across the South, young Cassius could expect some limited economic opportunity, paternalistic white leadership, and a segregated public life to remind him of his second-class status.

According to several family friends, the Clays were a proud family, descended from slaveholders — Henry Clay on his father's side and an Irish man named Grady on his mother's — as well as enslaved women. The family's apparent stability belied its tumultuous nature, however. As one of Cassius's early white backers noted: "There was a lot of trouble, bad trouble, between his father and mother ... but Cassius would bite his tongue before he'd mention it. He had too much pride." Much of the family's explosiveness lay with his father, Cassius Clay Sr., a frustrated artist-turned-sign-painter whose artwork decorated many churches and small businesses in Louisville's segregated black neighborhood. Having witnessed his own aspirations shrink under the weight of discrimination, he took out his frustrations in violent arguments with his wife, the fair-skinned and gracious Odessa, who worked as a domestic for various white families. Cassius Sr.'s drinking and womanizing were sore points in the family. When he drank to excess, he would pick fights with his drinking buddies, his wife, and his sons, Cassius and the younger Rudy. Several times Odessa was forced to bring her husband to court for roughing her up. In one instance, young Cassius tried to protect his mother only to receive a stab wound in his thigh for his efforts. At other times the police picked up Cassius Sr. for reckless driving, disorderly conduct, assault, or battery, always when he was drinking. As an old friend put it, "The father isn't a criminal or even an evil man. He's just a frustrated little guy who can't drink." As a result, Cassius and his brother, Rudy, grew up in an atmosphere of impending explosion. At the same time, the young Cassius grew up hearing his father pour out his vitriol at a white society that had limited his hopes and dreams as well as those of most black people he knew. Cassius's father was a proto–black nationalist, though without any formal affiliation.

Cassius Jr. found sanctuary in boxing, just as George Foreman would over a decade later. At twelve years old his cherished bicycle was stolen. He reported the theft to the nearest policeman, Joe Martin, who ran a boxing program in a nearby church basement. When Cassius threatened to thrash the thief, Martin urged him to learn to box first. From then on Cassius lived, breathed — and talked — boxing. He got up at 5 a.m. for roadwork, went to school, and at night spent hours in the gym....