by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a presentation of the film The
Trials of Muhammad Ali on PBS’s Independent
Lens series — though this wasn’t a PBS
production or pick-up but a film that actually did have a theatrical release,
albeit minor and spotty like most documentaries. It wasn’t so much a biodoc
about Ali’s entire career as a focus on his early life, beginning when he won
the gold medal in boxing at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and a group of 11
middle-aged whites in his home town — Louisville, Kentucky, which until the
advent of Ali was best known for a quite different type of sporting event, the
Kentucky Derby — formed a syndicate to manage him, run his career and help him
evade the 91 percent top income-tax rate of the Eisenhower administration by
arranging it so that all Ali’s income went to the partnership, and they in turn
paid it (less their expenses and commissions) to Ali. I’m calling him “Muhammad
Ali” throughout even though he was born Cassius Marcellus Clay (named,
intriguingly, after the son of Henry Clay; the original Cassius Clay was an
abolitionist — much to the embarrassment of his dad, who was one of many
politicians in the first half of the 19th century who wanted to
“compromise” on slavery — and was also Mary Todd’s boyfriend before they broke
up and she married Abraham Lincoln) and the very act of changing his name
became a flash point in the controversies that surrounded him in the mid-1960’s
even though, as the film’s narration pointed out (I’m assuming it was both
written and delivered by the film’s director, Bill Siegel, though no writer or
narrator is credited), no one looked particularly askance at John Wayne or Rock
Hudson for having changed their
names (from Marion Michael Morrison and Roy Fitzgerald, respectively). The
film’s story follows Ali’s first career, from the Olympic victory in 1960 to
his refusal to be inducted in the U.S. Army in 1967 and the legal battle that
ensued, during which he was stripped of the heavyweight championship he had
duly won in 1964 (at age 22, two years before he had predicted he would win it) and kept by
defeating all comers, and had a five-year prison sentence hanging over his head
until the U.S. Supreme Court at first voted 5-3 to uphold his conviction before Justice John Marshall Harlan
(described by Simple Justice
author Richard Kluger as “a constructive conservative” who, unlike the crazy
Right-wingers who dominate the Court today, cared about precedent and the
principle of stare decisis) not
only changed his mind on the case but wrote a far-reaching opinion that would
essentially have thrown the door wide open to millions of draftees who sought
to stay out of the military by citing religious grounds. The rest of the Court
backtracked and seized on a technicality in the case (the original trial judge
had prejudiced Ali’s case by questioning the “sincerity” of his religious
beliefs against war) to invalidate Ali’s conviction without setting a precedent
for other conscientious objectors, and the final vote was unanimous in Ali’s
favor.
What’s most interesting about this movie is the indication it gives of
the ferment of the time and the ferment of Ali’s brain, and how they interacted
to lead him to the Nation of Islam — which he ran across via a street preacher
and Muhammad Speaks salesperson
who’s interviewed in the film — where there were at least three choices open to
him. He could have behaved like previous white-friendly Black heavyweights like
Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson (whom Ali fought in Patterson’s comeback attempt,
and sources in this film suggest that Ali was so incensed by what Patterson had
said about him he deliberately held back and stretched out a fight he could
have won easily and quickly just to punish him more) and stayed out of any of the political and social conflicts of the day. He
could have endorsed the mixed-race civil rights movement of which Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was the principal public face (and there’s an interesting clip
of Ali and King making a joint appearance and King saying that despite their
religious differences, he supports Ali and admires what he’s doing to resist
the Viet Nam war). Instead he embraced the Nation of Islam, which already was
legendary — notorious, in some circles (the film includes clips from a 1959 CBS
documentary about them, narrated by Mike Wallace, called The Hate
That Hate Produced — which incidentally
contains the earliest known footage of Louis Farrakhan, then known as Louis X)
— for extreme Black separatism and the reverse-racist denunciation of all
whites as “blue-eyed devils” (which David Frost tries to confront Ali about in
a clip from his talk show included here). In some ways Ali was a throwback to
the very first Black heavyweight
champion, Jack Johnson, who like Ali didn’t give a fuck what the white world thought of him, but unlike Ali was
simply a good-time guy who spent his earnings on flashy clothes, big cars and
hot women (Black and white). Ali
seems to have been a man of great native intelligence at a time when there were
precious few avenues for a Black person — especially one without the education
or the patience for college — to advance either financially or intellectually,
and I suspect a good deal of the appeal of the Nation of Islam for Ali was
simply that they treated him seriously as a full human being instead of just a
physical commodity to be turned into a profit. Ali in the movie comes off as
something of an opportunist, originally willing to join the U.S. military as a
reservist and continue his career while avoiding combat (precisely what Joe
Louis had done during World War II) until his wife talked him out of it and
said that would be a betrayal of their shared Nation of Islam ideals.
Ali also
comes off as bitter, callous and cruel in the wake of the killing of Malcolm X
(who had helped bring him into the upper echelons of the movement and had been
his teacher, but whom he abandoned when Malcolm split from Elijah Muhammad and
the Nation and started seeking a more orthodox form of Sunni Islam); a clip
shown here, at a time when the Nation was being blamed for Malcolm’s killing
and the Nation was saying the “white power structure” did it, shows Ali saying
that anyone who went up against Elijah Muhammad and tried to hijack the
movement deserved to die. The film is a surprisingly rich documentary given how
well known is the story it tells, and it’s a sophisticated enough work that it
ponders the irony that a man who made his living with his fists could draw back
and say that he could not in good conscience fight to kill in a war. When Ali
was asked that very question at the time he said, “That’s different. You don’t
go out to kill in boxing,” though the clips shown in this film are a bit more
convoluted as he tries to explain the difference between his “aggressive”
attitude towards his prizefight opponents and the outright murder of fellow
human beings involved in war. Of course the film also shows his famous line,
“The Viet Cong never called me ‘nigger.’” Indeed, in a modern interview with
Louis Farrakhan (and that the filmmakers got him seems pretty amazing in itself!), Farrakhan recalls
Ali’s response to being presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the U.S.
government’s highest award for a civilian) — by George W. Bush, of all people —
which was, “Still a nigger.” The film quickly shows how Ali was stripped of his
title and kept from boxing for over three years by U.S. fight authorities and
one state boxing commission after another, all of whom refused to let him fight
in their states (it mentions a preposterous plan to stage a bout between Ali
and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain in mid-air — on an airliner equipped with
a boxing ring and seats for 200 spectators — to avoid being under the
jurisdiction of any state, which never came off), and how he survived in the
meantime (mostly by lecturing — at which he was pretty awful at first when he
was simply spouting Nation of Islam platitudes, but later when he started
talking from the heart about the war, his opposition to it and what Islam meant
to him, he became a powerful, though predictably controversial, lecturer — but also
by starring in a musical called Big Time Buck White, a film clip of which was shown here and depicts Ali
singing in a thin, strained voice an anthem of African-American racial pride
that really needed Paul Robeson in his prime to pull off) until a city boxing
commission in Atlanta gave him a license to return to the ring in 1970 for a
bout against white fighter Jerry Quarry, following which came his exoneration
by the Supreme Court and the ups and downs of Ali’s subsequent boxing career —
totally ignored here even though Ali 2.0 was almost as interesting both as a
fighter and as a celebrity as Ali 1.0!
The film also notes the irony that when
the Nation of Islam was split by factionalism again in the 1990’s in the wake
of Elijah Muhammad’s death — between his son Wallace, who wanted to drop the
movement’s anti-white racism and move it (as Malcolm had wanted to do) more
towards what the rest of the Muslim world defines as Islam; and Louis
Farrakhan, who reorganized his own branch of the Nation and ran it much the way
Elijah had — this time Ali went with Wallace Muhammad and stayed in the more
moderate, more traditional branch of the Nation. There’s also a wry comment
towards the end that in U.S. mainstream discourse in the 1950’s and 1960’s the
Nation of Islam was considered this very dangerous racial force, while
traditional Islam was regarded relatively benignly; these days, especially
after the 9/11 attacks linked “Islam” and “terrorism” in many Americans’ minds,
the Nation of Islam is regarded as a quirky but relatively benign home-grown
American force, while traditional Islam is widely considered an existential
enemy of the U.S. While it would have been stronger if it had covered more of
Ali’s life than just the 1960’s and today (it touches on his subsequent marital
and family history and his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease — which has
frequently been blamed on the punishment he allegedly suffered in all those
years as a fighter, though it’s my understanding that whatever the long-term
damage prizefighting does to the bodies of people who do it, Parkinson’s isn’t one of the risks), The Trials of Muhammad
Ali is nonetheless a quite interesting film
whose premise is the maturation of a personality — one interviewee even says
that it took the Viet Nam war and the threat to his liberty it occasioned to
get Ali to grow up, grow out of the need to be protected by eleven white
Louisvilleans and become a man. And though there’s precious little of the movie
actually showing Ali fighting, there is an amazing clip from the bout in which he won his title for the first
time, against Sonny Liston (the man who’d taken down Patterson and essentially
the prototype for Mike Tyson: the street thug who was taught just enough boxing
skills to hold himself in the ring and ultimately win on sheer power). Ali has
gone down in boxing history as a fighter who generally avoided direct
confrontation, running away from or rope-a-doping his opponents until he wore
them out and could finish them off — yet in the clips from that first Liston
fight shown here Ali easily penetrates Liston’s defenses (such as they were)
and hammers home a series of combination punches as if Ali meant not only to
beat Liston but to do so on the powerful punching that was Liston’s home turf.
