In Their Own Words: Muhammad Ali (Dalakis Media Enterprises, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I spent most of last night watching three PBS specials on African-American athletes, an episode of a show called In Their Own Words on Muhammad Ali and American Experience programs on Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. Of course, before any of these there was the first African-American world’s heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, who was briefly mentioned in the show on Joe Louis and who in a lot of ways was the prototype for Muhammad Ali. Though he lacked Ali’s social conscience, Johnson was famous for bragging about his prowess and he especially irritated white audiences with his famous boasts about how quickly he could conquer the latest “Great White Hope” that would finally take his title. While there was one major difference between Johnson and Ali – Johnson openly and flamboyantly dated white women (at a time when a Black man could get lynched just for looking at a white woman) while Ali, first out of his personal tastes and then from the Nation of Islam’s ban on interracial relationships, only dated Black women – the two shared an ability to get under the skins of white Americans and project a don’t-fuck-with-me image that said, “I’m as good as you are. Live with it.” Johnson’s heyday was 1910 to 1915, a time when the bonds of racial segregation had been placed on virtually all African-Americans and most white Americans regarded them as just the way things were and should be that Blacks should be relegated to separate and highly unequal schools, jobs and public accommodations. (The title of the recent film Green Book came from a green-covered paperback book which listed the Black-only hotels and restaurants throughout the South as a guide to Black tourists to let them know where it would be safe to eat or stay.)

The show about Muhammad Ali hit the usual high points even though PBS did a different, quite longer and considerably better show on Ali called The Trials of Muhammad Ali in 2014 on their Independent Lens program. This one was from a series called In Their Own Words, though the only aspect of the show that reflects the title is that occasionally a quotation from the subject’s public utterances is flashed across the screen in big all-caps letters. One of Ali’s most wry comments that got that treatment was when he described boxing as an audience of white people watching two Black men beat each other up. The show mentioned how Ali, then known as Cassius Marcellus Clay (a moniker he denounced in later years as his “slave name” – ironically, the original Cassius Marcellus Clay after whom he was named was an abolitionist activist in the 1950’s, much to the embarrassment of his father, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, author of the famous “Compromise of 1850” which delayed the Civil War by a decade but also gave the South the power to enforce fugitive slave laws nationwide instead of having to use state courts to sue for the recovery of “runaway slaves”), got into boxing when his bike was stolen off the streets of his native Louisville, Kentucky when he was 12 and he wanted to find and beat up the people who took it. Instead Clay ended up in a gym run by a white Louisville police officer who told him that if he was going to fight, at least he should learn to do it properly. The police officer took him into a basement that had a makeshift ring and showed him the principles of boxing, and within a few years, backed by a Louisville syndicate of 11 local businesspeople, Clay had won the national Golden Gloves championship, trained for and won the 1960 Olympics as a light heavyweight, then got set up with a series of bouts aimed at working his way up to a fight for the world’s championship. (This was in the days when there was only one world’s champion boxer in each weight class, before today’s plethora of boxing organizations, each sponsoring their own championship series.)

Clay became known for making up doggerel rhymes ridiculing his opponents and predicting – usually accurately – in what round they would go down. When he finally got his fight for the world’s championship against Sonny Liston in 1964 – a fight virtually everyone predicted would end with Liston annihilating Ali (the only debate in the fight world before the bout was whether Liston would dispatch Ali in three rounds or it would take him six) – Ali held his own. In some ways the fight was part of a classic pattern between the sort of boxer who just comes out and punches, and a faster, more agile fighter who can avoid the shower power puncher’s blows with speed, wear the guy out and then move in for the kill. It was in the wake of Ali’s surprise victory over Liston in fight number one that he announced his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, the Black nationalist and separatist group founded by one Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 and led for most of Ali’s life by Elijah Muhammad, who took over after Fard’s “disappearance” in 1934 and headed the movement until his death in 1975. The show featured photographs of Ali’s entourage before the first Liston fight (there was a rematch between the two that was even shorter – Ali knocked out Liston two minutes into round one) prominently featuring Malcolm X, who’d been instrumental in recruiting Ali into the Nation of Islam until his own break with it and his assassination in February 1965, ostensibly by gunmen from the “Fruit of Islam” (Elijah Muhammad’s personal security detail within the movement) but, at least many Black activists believed, actually by the U.S. government. (In his autobiography, which wasn’t published until after his death, Malcolm X had correctly predicted both his own assassination and that of Martin Luther King, Jr., saying America’s white establishment would not permit either of them to live and the only question was which one they would kill first.)

Malcolm X had crossed Elijah Muhammad by leaving the Nation of Islam after he had had lunch with a member of the United Nations delegation from one of the Arab countries (he didn’t say which one in his autobiography), in which he had outlined the theology of the Nation of Islam. The Arab guy shook his head through Malcolm’s recitation and said at the end, “That has nothing to do with the Islam I believe in.” Malcolm took that as an indication that if he was going to declare himself a Muslim, he ought to research more about what Islam actually was – and he was led to leave the Nation and embrace orthodox Sunni Islam, make the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca all Muslims are supposed to make at least once in their lives if they can afford it) and form his own organization, Hanafi. Ali’s other most important conflict was with the United States government, which had originally classified him 1-H in the draft on the ground that his writing skills were sub-par, but in 1965 he was reclassified 1-A and therefore was immediately eligible to be drafted for service in the Viet Nam war. Ali instantly announced that he would refuse to be drafted – which led many white Americans to denounce him as a traitor (while the American Left embraced his cause even though, as they found out when Ali started doing lecture tours, the Nation of Islam was socially conservative and rejected both racial integration and racial intermarriage). Every boxing federatlon in the U.S. banned him from competing and he was formally stripped of his heavyweight championship, and not only that, he was prosecuted and faced a five-year prison sentence.

Ali continued to be a divisive figure as he tried to explain his stance publicly, at one point saying he had nothing against the Viet Cong because “the Viet Cong never called me a nigger,” and when he was asked the rather obvious question why he was proclaiming himself a conscientious objector against war when he made his living by violence, he gave an answer that said it all: “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” Ali was eventually exonerated by the U.S. Supreme Court (though as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong noted in their book on the Supreme Court, The Brethren, despite the 9-0 final vote in his case he had come perilously close to losing), but he wasn’t allowed to fight again until 1970, when his managers noted that the state of Georgia didn’t have a statewide boxing commission; prizefights were licensed by individual cities and the mayor of Atlanta was willing to O.K. a fight featuring Ali in his town. The film covers his legendary fights against heavyweight champion Joe Frazier (which he lost, for the first time in his professional career) and then his regaining the title against George Foreman, who had beaten Frazier in the meantime. (It did not cover his rematch against Frazier, in which he won and successfully defended his title.) The show also endorses the consensus view of Ali among boxing fans that he continued his career about a decade longer than he should have, definitively losing the heavyweight crown to Leon Spinks and then working his way down the boxing food chain until he finally gave it up in 1984.

Ali was uncomfortable living in retirement and being out of the public eye, though when Elijah Muhammad died in 1975 and his son and successor Wallace Muhammad took over and did what Malcolm X had tried to do a decade earlier – move the Nation of Islam closer to what the rest of the Muslim world considers Islam to be, including dropping the nationalist and separatist aspects of the Nation’s creed and abandoning their creation myth that the first humans were Black (which, given that the oldest human fossils have been found in Africa, is almost certainly true) and whites were the Frankenstein-like creations of a Black mad scientist called “Yacub” – thereby provoking a split in which Louis Farrakhan set up his own organization along the lines of Elijah Muhammad’s version of the Nation. Ali, who had stayed loyal to Elijah Muhammad in the original split between him and Malcolm X, this time stayed with Wallace Muhammad and embraced the new, more orthodox Islam of Wallace Muhammad’s version of the Nation. The film reaches its climax with Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta – a decision of the Olympics organizers that was kept so secret Ali’s children were instructed to tell only other members of the family – and, like so many other people who’ve been known as young rebels, he was now embraced as a figure of unity by virtually the entire nation. By then Ali was suffering from Parkinson’s disease – which a lot of people around him believed he got by fighting bouts longer than he should have, when he’d become too slow to evade punches and play ‘rope-a-dope” tricks like he had in the old days (in the middle of one fight Ali overheard his trainer call out to the maintenance people to tighten the ropes, and Ali called out, “No! Leave them the way they are!”) – and, as often happens, getting catastrophically ill was painful for Ali the person but great for Ali’s public image.