Muhammad Ali is The Greatest. From Heavyweight Champion of the World to his ongoing battle with Parkinson's disease, Ali has captured the imagination of our finest writers and won admiration and scrutiny the world over.

With sixteen pages of classic photographs, this collection brings together thirty-two essays, interviews, and articles by the best contemporary sportswriters and literary journalists. Spanning four decades, these pieces chronicle the highs and lows of Ali's career -- his first pro fight in New York; his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, his epic battles with Joe Frazier and George Forman; his Vietnam draft refusal, and the subsequent stripping of his title; and his ultimate return to the spotlight at the 1996 Olympics -- memorable milestones in a truly extraordinary life.

Awe-inspiring, controversial, and beloved, Muhammad Ali, the man and the legend, comes out swinging in a collective portrait that is as illuminating as it is celebratory.

The Muhammad Ali Reader

By Gerald Early

Harper Perennial

Copyright © 1999 Gerald Early
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780688166205

Chapter One

    TALES OF THE WONDERBOY

    Part One

Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.
--Weldon Kees, "A Good Chord on a Bad Piano"

There exists a great fear today, or at least there should, thatMuhammad Ali, no stranger to the most intense sort of adulationreserved usually for certain psychopaths, mystics, and movie stars,may become absolutely overesteemed by the society in which he lives.This would put him in danger not only of having his considerablesignificance misunderstood, but also, ironically, of being diminishedas both a public figure and a black man of some illustriouscomplexity. Ali, as a result of his touching, or poignant, orpathetic, or tragic (take your pick) appearance at the torch-lightingceremony at 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta has become, for newgenerations that did not grow up with him and for the oldergenerations that did, the Great American Martyr, our new Lincoln, ournew Martin Luther King, Oh, Father Abraham, Oh, Father Martin, Oh,Father Muhammad: the man whose hands, once unerring pistons ofpunishment in the prizefighting ring, tremble from boxing-inducedParkinson's disease; the man whose voice is such a slurred whisperthat he, who was once called the Louisville Lip because he lovedtalking so much, does not like to speak in public and rarely does; theonce-uncompromising black nationalist now reduced, like Orson Wellesat the end, to performing magic tricks for the crowd as if he wereparodying his own pop-culture greatness, exposing it as anillusion, just as his nationalism had been, just as hiscultist/religious self had been. Everything in popular culture writheswith the throb of impermanence, its significancethreatened by the triteness it cannot hide, by the banality it bloatsinto eminence through a personality that blends the public and theprivate. And no one embodied American popular culture, its excesses,its barbarities, and its disarming densities, more than Muhammad Ali.

    The public rarely responds to this sort of demise of a greatpopular performer with anything approaching good sense orobjectivity, and almost certainly with nothing approaching a kind ofgracious humor, something that, in this case, the subject himself mayvery much embrace and seems to be trying to instruct us in how toachieve. This is even less likely to happen when the figure inquestion is a black man, a cunning archetype who is already soburdened by a baggage of both sentimentality and taboo as to be likelya virtual walking expression of the culture's irrationality even ifhis old age had been a bit less marked by illness. And Ali had been alightning rod for the culture's irrationality all of his life,sometimes provoking it purposely, sometimes a veritablerepresentation of it himself. This was, after all, the man who not onlybrilliantly playacted a combination panic attack/nervous breakdownat the weigh-in of his first championship fight with the dreaded SonnyListon in 1964; served as the redoubtable, tricksterlike black comicto Howard Cosell's liberal Jewish straight man; had a highlypublicized religious conversion to a strange, if influential, cultthat disliked whites but wanted to be a perfect imitation of them,aggrandizing their importance while humanizing their stark doctrine;and who said that no Vietcong ever called him "nigger"; but who alsobelieved for some several years that a mad scientist named Yacubinvented white people by grafting them from blacks, that satellitesfrom Allah circled the earth and would imminently destroy the UnitedStates, and that blacks who dated or married whites should be killed.

    Now the public, because of Ali's illness, wants to drown him in abathos of sainthood and atone for its guilt. This is principally trueof whites who spend a good deal of their time when they think aboutrace (and to think about Ali is to think about race because Ali madeit such a prominent subject in his public rantings and sermons, sosuccessfully that he, in fact, succeeded in making over his mostinner-city-like black opponents, the blackest of the black, into whitemen), either denying that it is a problem they caused or confessingthat they have committed such atrocities against blacks that only themost abject deference to them can make up for it all. (For a blackperson to experience this is a great deal like being caught between benignneglect and affirmative action, tough love and a comforting paternalism, theamputation of virulent racism and the gangrene of liberal racism.)This guilt arises largely from Ali's stance against the Vietnam War, awar we have come to see as at best misguided and as at worst evil, andhis subsequent three-and-one-half year exile from boxing; and from afeeling that somehow, we, the American public, or the white Americanpublic (since blacks were in no position to abuse him through a rathercapricious application of the Selective Service Act), are the cause ofhis current affliction. And we did this to him because he became aBlack Muslim and spoke out frankly against racism and whitedouble-dealing, something no black athletic hero had ever done before(or since, really). He was severely maimed by and for our racialsins, our racist use of the system against him.

    Thus, it seems no accident at all that Muhammad Ali should bere-awakened in the public's mind, largely as the subject of theAcademy Award-winning documentary, When We Were Kings, along withJackie Robinson, as we celebrated in 1997 the fiftieth anniversary ofhis breaking the color line in major league baseball with the BrooklynDodgers. Yoked together in the public's consciousness this year were,arguably, the two most influential American athletes of the twentiethcentury, the American century, the first and maybe not the last,hallowed nearly as handsome, transcendent, boyish American angelshovering over our leveled playing fields of dreams (where merit andromance walk hand-in-hand), sacrifices on the altar of ourhypocritical democracy, emblems of the double V, the victory on twofronts, the real world of social relations and the fantasy world ofathletics: the noble black American male as inventor of a hereticalAmericanism, demonstrating what it cost a black to have democraticideals and to force whites to live up to them. Ironically, Robinsondid this by insisting he was an American and Ali by insisting he wasvictimized because he was never considered an American, but both paidthe price. What do we remember most about Robinson but that hesuffered, that he endured insults and provocation, that he died at therelatively young age of 52, prematurely aged, we feel, from the abusehe took as a player in order to integrate the Great American Game. Inthe dim lighting of the distressing paradox of American racerelations, we forget, though, that Robinson received more universalacclaim during his life than virtually any black person had beforehim.

    It is no slight schizophrenia that besets us when in today's society youngblack men are so often represented in our popular culture asbuffoonish thugs or coonlike clowns, in our collective imagination asreal, certifiable thugs and rapists. When the police mistreat a blackman like Rodney King or when a sports hero like O. J. Simpson fallsfrom grace, we hardly know whether to be outraged or relieved. Yetwhen it comes to Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali these days, thepublic, especially whites, nearly weep. James Baldwin was right:that a certain insistence that the black male figure represent hishumanity through the narrow prism of social protest elicits thiscontradiction, a blunting of the very effects that his social protestwas meant to induce. This white response to Ali and Robinson may be areflection of racism, but it seems more profoundly to be a sign ofsome organic confusion, a mythic yet turbulently defective pietism, atthat very heart of our perception of ourselves. We cannot see in theway Captain Delano of Melville's "Benito Cereno" could not see, in allour tragic innocence.

    Muhammad Ali, in truth, does not make a very good martyr, asWilfrid Sheed once observed, or cannot quite be taken seriously asone. Doubtless, as Sheed points out, Ali had a martyr's complex, whichis why he became a member of the Nation of Islam, not because he feltthe slings and arrows of outrageous racism (Ali had a very indulgedlife, from boyhood on) but because he wanted "to [take] on the scarsof his brothers." For a man with a great sense of public mission andpublic consciousness, as Ali had, an act of such solidarity with themost bitter blacks on the bottom was a theatrical and vividlycondensed bit of risk-taking. What Ali had, in this regard, is exactlywhat Malcolm X claimed to have near the end of his life: not truth,not vision, not wisdom, but sincerity. This counts for a great dealin an age of relativism and cynicism, in an age when we have givenourselves over to the adolescent's version of reality, instead of theHeminway-esque version: One's measure of authenticity was not how onelived one's life in the face of what made it impossible, but howdeeply one felt about something. Intensity of feeling equaled realexperience. As David Riesman asserted in The Lonely Crowd, sincerityhad become the emotion of our post-World War II, other-directed age.And no one made his inner-directed compulsions and puritanicalhedonism more of an outer-directed exhibition than Muhammad Ali. Alialways had a portion of something Hemingway-esque but he had more thana bit of sheer adolescent emotionalism. Ali's reasons for not wantingto join the Army were never terribly convincing, but they had apotency because he was so sincere, movingly and petulantly so. He had thestrength of a simplistic, unreal orthodoxy for which he seemedprepared to die in an age when the simplistic, unreal orthodoxy thatheld this country together was beginning to unravel, violently andquickly. Ali, despite all the talk of his brilliance, was not athoughtful man. He was not conversant with ideas. Indeed, he hadn't asingle idea in his head, really. What he had was the faith of the truebeliever, like a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or a Hasadic Jew or acommunist, a grand public stage, an extraordinary historical moment,amazing athletic gifts, and good looks. But Ali cannot be takenseriously as a martyr because: first, other athletes, such as JackieRobinson, Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, ChristyMathewson, and many others lost several years of their athletic prime,serving in the Armed Forces during World War I, World War II, or theKorean War. No one seems to think this was tragic. Granted, we have adifferent view of those wars, but Ali did not pay anything more forhis dissent, in relation to his career as an athlete, than other starathletes in the past have paid for not dissenting. Plus, he had theluxury of not being in danger in combat, although he was always opento the crazed assassin's bullet. And Ali never went to prison for hispacifist beliefs, like his leader, Elijah Muhammad, or like BayardRustin. He wasn't killed for his beliefs like his onetime mentor,Malcolm X, or his admirer, Martin Luther King.

    For instance, when Ali appeared at Randolph-Macon College for Menin Virginia on April 17, 1969 to give a speech, one of 168 campuses hewas planning to visit that year in order to raise legal funds for hisdefense against the draft, although there was some considerable outcryfrom the alumni and the locals about his visit, there was virtually noprotest when he arrived on campus. He gave his speech, largely a kindof rote Nation-of-Islam homage to Elijah Muhammad, answered questionsat some length, rather tactlessly asked the dean of men for his checkwhen he was through, and, despite being worn out, was talked intoappearing at a inner city school in the vicinity. According to theaccount given in The Catholic World, "The content of the speech itselfwas standard Black Muslim rhetoric, but the presentation was pureCassius Clay entertainment.... Perhaps one might, in fact, criticizeAli for making his address so entertaining and amusing that theseriousness of his subject was somewhat obscured." It was this qualityof Ali's, his ability to put a certain humor and, thus, a profoundlyhuman face as well as a kind ofpop culture sheen on black anger and indignation that, I think, savedhis life. Like the Marxist or the deconstructionist, he made ideologyself-evident where it had once been invisible, but he seemed moreamused by his discovery than belligerent, more deeply struck by itswondrous expression of a benighted humanity than outraged by itsexpressions of unjustified power and dominance. This is the fulldimension of the shallow, simplistic sincerity that protected himrather like amulet or a juju. So, in fact, after his exile, he went tomake an incredible amount of money, to star in a movie of his life,and to become one of the most famous people, and surely the mostfamous Muslim, in the world. By the mid-1970s, after redeeming himselfand regaining the title by defeating the fearsome, sullen GeorgeForeman, Ali had become such an accepted figure in the Americanmainstream that DC Comics put out a special edition Superman where"that draft dodger," as he had been called in the 1960s, beat the Manof the Steel, the Great White American Hero, in a prizefight to savehumanity from an alien invasion. Martyrdom, where is thy sting?

    Second, there is no indication that had Ali left boxing sooner, hewould have avoided suffering the brain damage he did suffer, if he hadnot been exiled, very unfairly, from boxing between the ages of 27 and30. It is a rare boxer, especially one as good as Ali was and who sowanted and needed public attention, who quits before he is literallybeaten into retirement. What Ali had was an irresistible combinationof talent, showmanship, and a genius conceit of himself that borderedon both the heroically self-possessed and the insufferablymegalomanic. He not only believed in God, to paraphrase the lyric fromthe musical, Hair, but he believed that God believed in him. ThoughAli makes a poor saint, he makes a very good fallen prince, thedaring, flamboyantly ignorant cavalier, which is exactly what he is:the weary, enigmatic sovereign of our time, of our realm, of ourracialized imagination. What unnerves us now about Ali and brings outthe insipidness of victimology is that he wound up like an old,broken-down prizefighter. The guilt we feel is that we used him as acommodity and that he used us to create great dramas of his fights,dragon-slaying heroics, extraordinary crises of our social order.It mattered greatly whether he won or lost and we are guilty abouthaving been conned into believing a prizefight means much of anythingin this world, about what our being conned did to the confidence man. But Ali,far from being a victim, is perhaps the one of the most remarkable examples oftriumph over racism in our century. It is not surprising that so manywhite people hated him but that before his career ended a good manyhad come to love him. Ali was a public figure mostly shaped by twodecisions: in 1964, he chose to stay with Elijah Muhammad's Nation ofIslam and not defect with Malcolm X and become, in effect, a leftistPan-Africanist, a decision that made it possible for him to weatherhis exile years of 1967-1970 by being surrounded by a tight communityof disciplined believers; in 1977, he chose to stay with Wallace D.Muhammad who de-racialized the Black Muslims instead of defectingwith Louis Farrakhan's revitalized Nation of Islam with ElijahMuhammad's old racist tenets. Had he joined Farrakhan, Ali would notbe nearly as revered today as he is.

    Ali has been compared to a number of famous people, from OscarWilde to Jack Johnson, from Elvis Presley to Jay Gatsby. I think hebears no small resemblance to our two finest jazz musicians, LouisArmstrong and Duke Ellington, and perhaps his genius might be bestunderstood in relation to theirs. Like both of them, Ali was asoutherner. Like Ellington, he came from the border South and so didnot experience the most brutal sort of racism, but like Armstrong, whocame from New Orleans, he came from a mythic southern place, Kentucky,with its Thoroughbreds, its bluegrass, its mint juleps, its colonels,so he experienced a deeply self-conscious white South, which mayexplain why he felt the oppression of racism so deeply without havingto endure a great deal of it. Being a southerner, I think, explainshis showmanship. Who could have been given the name of CassiusMarcellus Clay, the original an eccentric of the sort that only anantislavery, nigger-hating Southern politican could be, and not be ashowman? Like Armstrong, Ali was essentially a comic. This explainswhy, although he was deeply hated by many whites at one point in hiscareer, he was able to come back. He rarely said anything without acertain kind of mocking quality, and his rage, like his incessantbragging and egoism, was often that of the adolescent. Ali offered thepublic the contradictory pleasure of having to take him seriouslywhile not having to take him seriously. He was deeply aware of thishimself and played a game of public relations deceit as cleverly asanyone. In retrospect, Ali struck intense chords of ambiguity as ablack public figure, though somewhat different ones, like Armstrong.Was Armstrong just an old-time minstrel or, through his genius, theutter undermining of minstrelsy? Was Ali a star boxer, or, throughhis genius, the utter undermining of boxing?Was he a militant or the complete unmasking of militancy) JoeLouis might have seemed an Uncle Tom to many compared to Ali, but Alilaughed and smiled more in public in a week than Louis did in hisentire life. Ali actually seemed to like white people (which he did;he liked everyone), whereas Louis never seemed comfortable around themand never much appeared to like them. He simply contained himself intheir presence. How was it that a black man could openly show how muchhe enjoyed white people and yet not be branded an Uncle Tom by his ownpeople and be seen as a threat by whites? What Ali did with sheerbrilliance was become the center of laughter but never the object ofit. He controlled what his audiences laughed at when he made himself asource of humor. Ali's laughter was meant to signify somethingdifferent from Armstrong's, not exactly an expression of deference toaudience (although Ali certainly wanted to please his audiences, evenas he may have exasperated them), but rather an expression of boyishjoy in his own freedom and strength, a casual astonishment at therefulgence of his own extraordinary gifts that seemed to strike himsimultaneously as both miraculous and absurd. Like Ellington, Ali hada certain charm and elegance, both in and out of the ring, a need tobaby himself and to womanize because both were equalled captivated bytheir own beauty and the way people were captivated by them. Both menwere highly photogenic. Ali loved to hear himself talk, as didEllington and he loved having people around him, not because they werethe best possible people at what they did, but because they did one ortwo things that amused or intrigued him or that he admired and felt hecould use, much as Ellington saw his musicians, some of whom were notthe best possible players Ellington could have had on thoseinstruments. They did well something Ellington had a great need of forhis orchestra, and Ali lived his life largely as if he were conductinga very large orchestra. Ali did this for his opponents, too. Hebrought out the best of what they had. He was enormously generous andthis touches us deeply. Ali, like Armstrong and Ellington, hadmagnetism, inventiveness, a heroism that did not evade the tricksterblack of black folklore or the minstrel black of the nineteenthcentury American stage but embodied them as both the antithesis andfulfillment of himself, not as a person but as his own individualizedarchetype. That is why Ali is loved so much today. Like all greatheroes he showed us the enormous possibility of the true meaning, theincendiary poetics, of actual self-determination.

    Part Two

And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? ...
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections ...
--Walt Whitman, "When I Read the Book"

I cant say who I am
unless you agree I'm real.
--Amiri Baraka, "Numbers, Letters"

    Muhammad Ali could barely read. He certainly never read books. Yet hiswas the religion of the book--not only the Koran but Elijah Muhammad'sMessage to the Blackman in America. (He fervently advocatedfor the book, One Hundred Years of Lynching, a popular book amongcertain knowing coves in the black community, as I remember from myboyhood, used to convince those who were casual or apathetic aboutthe Unspeakable Negro Massacres that they had better get with thetruth and quit having the white man brainwash them with the whiteJesus and movies like King Solomon's Mines.) What fascinated Ali, likemany of the poorly educated, was the authority of books or theirfailure as authority. When I met Ali a few years ago, he went on atsome length about the contradictions in the Bible. As a devout Muslim,this seemed to please him greatly, as he must have felt he wasdeflating the power of that text. I told him that as a Christian Ihardly expected the Bible to be anything more than a messy andmessed-up book. "Now you see how tough it is to be a Christian," Isaid. He smiled at that. There was probably something both miraculousand absurd about having a theological discussion with an ex-prizefighterwho couldn't talk and had actually read very little ofthe Bible, a rich illustration of the uses and disadvantages of havingathletes serve as all-purpose black icons.

    Ali scored a 16 on the Army intelligence tests, indicating that hehad a low IQ. A man of his wit and quickness could not be that dumb,we protest. Yet I think the score was an honest reflection of Ali'smental abilities. Ali was not literate, nor was he analytical. When he wasyounger he could successfully debate those who were much smarter, or atleast had read more books, because he had the zealot's set of answers tolife's questions. His mind worked through formulas and cliches. Hispersonality gave them a life and vibrancy that they would otherwisehave lacked. He was intuitive, glib, richly gregarious, and intenselycreative, like an artist. He would have scored better on the test hadhe been better educated, but still he would never have had a scorethat reflected the range of his curiosity or his humanity. But it isperhaps no surprise for a man so taken by the authority of the bookthat he would be so attractive to people who wrote books for a livingor that a book itself may possess some small authority in telling usabout him.

    This reader is composed of some of the best writing about and thebest interviews with Muhammad Ali. Some of our finest writers--NormanMailer, Tom Wolfe, Ishmael Reed, Irwin Shaw, Joyce Carol Oates, A. J.Liebling--have written about Ali. Ali has also given lengthy and veryinsightful interviews with magazines such as Playboy, Black Scholar,and Sport. I thought it would be useful, as we begin to revisit Ali,to think on the best that has been written about him. I have tried toinclude a variety, from the little-known pieces by Jackie Robinsonand George Schuyler to work from the well-known George Plimpton. Thepieces are arranged in strictly chronological order and are divided bydecades. What is amazing is that Ali has managed to fascinate somany first-rate writers for so long, nearly forty years. There are noacademic articles included here, largely for the sake of symmetry andcoherence. Several of the essays and interviews were edited for spaceconsiderations. I wanted to get in as many pieces as possible, but asix-hundred-page book was clearly unfeasible and such a book wouldhave proven something of an embarrassment, as if there had been noreal editing at all. In some cases, matters extraneous to Ali werecut; in others, redundant material. What is here is a strongrepresentative core of what these writers and interviewers were tryingto capture: the elusive, often theatrical, ever-eroding,ever-reconstructing surfaces of the mind and body of Muhammad Ali. Nocollection of this sort can ever include everything that the editorwould like to have: Space limitations, permission costs, and outrightrefusals always make these kinds of anthologies less than perfect. AndI am more aware than any reader of what isn't here. Yet of theseveral books I have edited, this has given me the greatest satisfactionas a reader, as an editor, as a writer because its riches are abundant,because it is informed with a mission and a passion, because to write aboutsomeone whose like is not to be seen again in our lifetime perhapsbrings out an urgent brilliance in the writers who tackled Ali as asubject; all of this makes this work greater than the sum of itsparts. I have never believed in the purpose of a book more than thisone. And I have never believed more in a book's meaning--a truth sobasic that I, of course, did not discover it; I have simplytransmitted it. To do this book was not a labor but a rare privilege.

    Part Three

But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater
    than before known,

Arouse! for you must justify me.
--"Walt Whitman, "Poets to Come"

"I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town,"

    folksinger Phil Ochs sang in his "Draft Dodger Rag," and perhaps Iwas or thought I was, once. The summer of my fourteenth year was thelast that I played baseball regularly. It was that spring that aJewish friend gave me Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural to read. Iam not sure why he gave it to me, because he did not care much forbaseball. I didn't think that he cared much for novel-reading, either.But he liked The Natural a lot. I guess he just liked the story. Hethought it was funny and said a lot about losing and life. He was myboxing friend, though, not my baseball friend. I spent many an hourwith him talking about fighters and more than a few talking aboutMuhammad Ali. I so loved the novel that I wanted to make a bat likethe Roy Hobbs's Wonderboy, for I loved the name of it, the splendor ofomniscient innocence it carried. I told all the boys, all the fellas,as we all read comic books together, (and little else), that Batman'sward, Robin, was misnamed. "He's not the boy wonder. He's the Wonderboy!" And they all agreed for they had never heard of a boy wonder,but everyone, everyone knew about the Wonderboy, And they all believedbecause I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Tarzan of theApes and Howard Pyle's Men of Iron and Treasure Island and SherlockHolmes, and had seen all those Steve Reeves movies like Goliath andthe Barbarians and The White Warrior and Morgan the Pirate, and knewabout these things.

    I was no good at wood-working and the like,so I saved my paper route money and simply bought a bat, the best batI could find, a genuine Louisville Slugger, the first one I everowned. I sanded that bat, restained it dark, retaped the handle, anddecided to give it a name. I carefully carved, scratched, really, intothe bat the word, Ali. I tried to carve a lightning bolt but mylimited artistic skill would not permit it. I wanted to carry it in acase, but I didn't have one. I just slung it on a shoulder like thegreat weapon it was, my knight's sword. And I felt like somemagnificent knight, some great protector of honor and virtue, wheneverI walked on the field with it. I called the bat the Great Ali.

    I used that bat for the entire summer, and a magical season it was.I was the best hitter in the neighborhood. I had a career year. Therewas no pitch I couldn't hit. My preparation was such, so arduous, andnow so perfect in its justification, so inspired in its execution,that, like Conrad's Jim, "the unexpected couldn't touch me." At theplate, I could do no wrong. Doubles, triples, home runs. I could hitat will. This probably would have happened with any bat I might haveused. I had grown bigger and stronger over the last year and hadpracticed a great deal over the winter. My hand-eye coordination wasjust superb at that moment in my life. Once, I won a game in the lastat-bat with a home run and the boys just crowded around me as if Iwere a spectacle to behold, as if I were, for some small moment, inthis insignificant part of the world, playing this meaningless game,their majestic, golden prince. 0 wondrous boy was I!

    In any case, the bat broke. Some kid used it without my permission.(I jealously guarded that bat, but a kid from an opposing team grabbedit while I was in the field.) He hit a foul ball and the bat split,the barrel flying one way, the splintered handle still in the kid'shands. It was the end of the Great Ali. I screamed when it broke, forI realized only too late that the boy was using it. "You broke mybat! You broke my bat!"

    It was 1966 and Ali seemed not simply the best boxer of the day butthe best boxer who could ever possibly be imagined. He had, theprevious fall, beaten Floyd Patterson; that spring he beat GeorgeChuvalo and Henry Cooper. During that summer, he beat Brian London.He was so good that it was an inspiration to see him fight, to seeeven a picture of him. My body shivered when I saw him as if anelectric shock had pulverized my ability to feel. It was the goodfeeling of boyish hero worship I had. He was the Wonderboy.No fighter could touch him. His self-knowledge was glorious,so transcendentally fixed was he on the only two subjects he knew:himself and boxing. He so filled me with his holy spirit thatwhenever, late in a game, our side needed a rally, I would chant outloud to my teammates, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.Rumble, young man, rumble!" (Ah, good, teary-eyed, ever loyal BundiniBrown, Ali's-assistant trainer, recommended by Sugar Ray Robinson,who gave the world that slogan and who died broke and broken, onlyable to move his eyelids.) That made little sense metaphorically inrelation to baseball, but it seemed to work more often than not. Itwas for me, this 1966, Ali's absolute moment of black possibilitiesfulfilled. And I wanted that and had it for a moment, too, had it,perhaps, among the neighborhood fellows, the touch and glory of theWonderboy.

    When the bat broke, it seemed as if a certain spell was broken,too. I still continued to hit in the little time that was left thatseason before school started, but I was not as interested in baseballanymore. I drifted away from it after that summer by steps and bounds.The next summer, 1967, Ali was convicted of draft-dodging. MartinLuther King came out against the Vietnam War. Baseball did not seemvery important. Something else was. For you see, I could never besure, before that spring when Ali refused to be drafted, if he reallywould, really would actually refuse to go, refuse to take that step.Maybe Ali would turn out to be another Roy Hobbs. Maybe he was justsome miserable, talented hick who would sell out and strike out. Sowhen he refused, I felt something greater than pride: I felt as thoughmy honor as a black boy had been defended, my honor as a human being.He was the grand knight, after all, the dragon-slayer. And I feltmyself, little inner-city boy that I was, his apprentice to the grandimagination, the grand daring. The day that Ali refused the draft, Icried in my room. I cried for him and for myself, for my future andhis, for all our black possibilities. My poor broken bat, theevaporating memories of my great season, all ghostly in thewell-lighted reflections of the fires of some politics and principlesthat I did not understand, made me feel as if I had a new nervoussystem, as if my cerebral cortex had become a new antenna for a newerreality. If I could sacrifice like that, I thought. If I couldsacrifice my life like Ali! "To fling away your daily bread," JosephConrad wrote, "so as to get your hands free for a grapple with aghost may be an act of prosaic heroism." And to me, fighting whites ina way was like fighting ghosts, an arch absurdity. (What would my lifebe if it were not wasted in defense of its right to be a life, after all!) Onecould never be sure if one were broken as a result of the fight or if onewere broken even before entering the lists. You see, it was, I was sure, then,the end of the Wonderboy, the utter and complete end, the final breaking ofthe bat. But it was, as things turned out, only the end of thebeginning. It wasn't even that the best was yet to come, or even thegrand second act, but rather everything that was to give 1967 meaningwas to come. The year 1967 was only the first death, the germinalcrisis. The grand knights always live twice. Like a hitter with amagical bat, the unexpected couldn't touch him. Nothing breaks theWonderboy.

Gerald Early
St. Louis, Missouri
December 15, 1997


Continues...

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