Muhammad Ali

The Full Biography

Muhammad Ali. Boxer. The Louisville boy who called himself the greatest, then spent nearly four years out of the ring rather than fight a war he would not own.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a young heavyweight with his mouth open over Sonny Liston, or a fist in Kinshasa, or an older man in white, arm shaking, lighting a cauldron in Atlanta. The years are 1964, 1974, 1996. What the still cannot show is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. of Louisville, a stolen bicycle, a Rome gold medal, a new name the newspapers refused, a Houston induction room on April 28, 1967, and a death in Scottsdale on June 3, 2016, at seventy-four, that the poems and the late tremor have never reduced to a single night.

He was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., a sign painter, and Odessa Grady Clay. The house was West End, Baptist, working. When he was twelve a bicycle was stolen. He told a policeman, Joe Martin, that he meant to whip the thief. Martin told him to learn to fight first and put him in a gym. That is the first pressure, and it is almost too neat, except that it is true. He was fast. He talked. He won the Golden Gloves and talked some more. The white South had not ordered a loud Black boy who made his own posters. He made them anyway. In 1960, in Rome, still Cassius Clay, he won the Olympic light-heavyweight gold. He came home and, the story goes, threw the medal into the Ohio after he was refused service. Whether the medal went into the river or into a drawer, the insult is in the file. Louisville had made him. Louisville had also shown him the limit of a medal.

He turned professional. The mouth became a method. He predicted rounds. He recited doggerel the papers printed because it sold, and because it was better than the silence the sport preferred from a Black champion. He called himself the greatest before the title had agreed. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” walked out of the camp — Drew Bundini Brown’s music, Ali’s body — and became a civic rhyme. On February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach, he beat Sonny Liston, the champion the wise money had treated as a sure thing. Liston did not come out for the seventh. The next morning the winner confirmed what the Nation of Islam already knew. Elijah Muhammad gave him the name Muhammad Ali. A lot of sportswriters kept saying Clay, as if a man’s name were a press credential they could withhold. He would not answer to the old one. The title and the name arrived in the same season.

He had failed the Army qualifying test the first time. In 1966 the standards dropped and the board reclassified him 1-A. He applied as a conscientious objector. The board said no. On April 28, 1967, in Houston, he was called to step forward. He did not. The New York commission took his license that day. The W.B.A. took the title. Other commissions followed. On June 20 a Houston jury convicted him. Five years, a fine, the passport gone. He was twenty-five. He was the best heavyweight alive. He would not fight in the ring again until October 1970.

I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.Muhammad Ali, 1966

That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a sportsman with opinions. The turn is the Houston room. A champion at the peak of the earning years chose the exile over a war he would not own, and over a country that still Jim Crowed the neighborhoods he came from. He said so in Louisville language, not in a lawyer’s. He lost the title, the licenses, and nearly four prime years. He lectured. He talked. He did not become quiet to get the gloves back. In June 1971 the Supreme Court, in Clay v. United States, reversed the conviction, 8–0. Thurgood Marshall recused. The law had caught up. The years had not been returned.

He came back in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry on October 26, 1970. On March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden, Joe Frazier beat him in the Fight of the Century — fifteen rounds, a left hook in the last, the first professional loss. He would have Frazier twice more. On October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, he took the title back from George Foreman, the younger wrecking ball, by letting Foreman punch himself empty against the ropes and then ending it in the eighth. The Rumble in the Jungle is a civic night. Rope-a-dope is the name the camp gave the tactic. On October 1, 1975, in Manila, he and Frazier went into a heat that still looks like the end of something. Frazier’s corner stopped it after the fourteenth. Ali kept the title. Both men left parts of themselves in that room. In 1978 Leon Spinks took the belt and, seven months on, Ali took it back. First man to win the heavyweight title three times. The record, when he finally stopped, was 56–5, with thirty-seven knockouts. Before the exile the mouth had already made a method of the mid-sixties title defenses. Henry Cooper, in London, put him down in 1963 and lost the rematch in 1966. Cleveland Williams, at the Houston Astrodome on November 14, 1966, walked into a beating the film still uses as a clinic. Ernie Terrell, in February 1967, would not say the new name; Ali beat him for fifteen rounds and asked the question in the ring. Zora Folley, at Madison Square Garden on March 22, 1967, was the last man he fought before Houston. After the return, Ken Norton broke his jaw in San Diego in March 1973 and took a decision; Ali took the rematches. The last nights — Larry Holmes in Las Vegas on October 2, 1980, Trevor Berbick in Nassau on December 11, 1981 — are a man who stayed too long. They stay in the file. They do not cancel Kinshasa.

He married Sonji Roi, then Belinda Boyd (Khalilah Ali), then Veronica Porche, then Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams, who was with him at the end. The children include Maryum, the twins Jamillah and Rasheda, Muhammad Ali Jr., Hana, Laila — who became a champion in her own right — and Asaad. The household was large, public, and not simple. Friends from Louisville and from the camps describe a man who could be tender in a kitchen and merciless at a weigh-in, who made a poem out of a press conference, and who treated an opponent’s pride as another thing to unbalance. Both the Louisville Lip and the quiet man of the last decades are the life. He had said, from the beginning, that he was the greatest. He made the sentence do the work of a career.

The later years

He stopped in 1981, after Berbick in Nassau. The last two nights had already said what the camp would not. Parkinson’s, already in the movement, was named in public in 1984, three years after the gloves came off. The mouth that had been a method grew slow. The body that had been the argument began to shake. Doctors argued, as they still argue, how much of the tremor was the thousands of punches and how much was a disease that would have found him anyway. He did not hide. He appeared. He raised money. He sat with children who wanted the gloves. The Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix became a civic clinic with his name on the door. Lonnie, whom he had known since she was a Louisville child and whom he married in 1986, kept the house and the care. Home, for long stretches, was Berrien Springs, Michigan, then the desert around Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. The quiet man of those decades is not a different person from the Louisville Lip. He is the same man with a smaller instrument.

The public life after the ring is the chapter a lot of highlight reels skip. In 1990 he flew to Baghdad and helped win the release of American hostages held before the first Gulf War — a retired heavyweight in a dictator’s room, doing the work of a diplomat because the name still opened the door. In 1998 the United Nations named him a Messenger of Peace. He went to Cuba. He went to Afghanistan. He stood in rooms where a shaking hand was more useful than a speech. On July 19, 1996, in Atlanta, he climbed toward the Olympic cauldron and lit it with an arm the world could see fail and finish. The appearance had been a secret. It became a civic night without a punch, the last still a lot of the planet can see when someone says his name. In 2005 George W. Bush hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him. That November the Muhammad Ali Center opened on Louisville’s riverfront: a museum, a civic classroom, a city finally sure it knew how to hold the son it had not always known how to hold.

The disease kept editing the body. Speech went. The shuffle went. He still signed. He still sat for photographs. He still let a child put on the gloves. Friends from the camps describe a tenderness in those years that the weigh-in poet had not always had time for. On June 3, 2016, he died at a hospital in Scottsdale, of septic shock in a body Parkinson’s had used for more than thirty years. He was seventy-four. Louisville took him home. The janazah at Freedom Hall and the procession to Cave Hill Cemetery on June 10 were a city burying a man who had been a boy on a stolen bicycle, a champion, an exile, a diplomat with a tremor, and, at the end, a patient. Lonnie remained the keeper of the care and of the Center. Laila, already a champion, remained the daughter who had taken the other half of the family trade. The poems stayed in the papers. The arm in Atlanta stayed on the film. Louisville is the first room. The Houston induction hall is the hinge. Scottsdale is the last address. The Center on the riverfront is the civic object a city built when it was finally sure how to hold him. Parkinson’s was the last opponent. He met it the way he had met Liston and the draft board: in public, without a quiet plea to be left alone, and with Lonnie keeping the corner he could no longer keep himself. The Medal of Freedom, the Center, the UN title, and the Baghdad trip are the civic jobs of a man who could no longer dance. They are not a consolation prize. They are the second career, conducted in a body the first career had already used hard. Cave Hill holds him. Freedom Hall held the janazah. The riverfront Center still teaches the stolen bicycle and the Houston room to children who only knew the shake.

After he was gone

Lonnie and the children remained. The Center in Louisville remained. Every heavyweight who talks before the bell still pays him a tax in theater. Every athlete who refuses a war still pays him a tax in years. Liston, Frazier, Foreman, and Manila are the climate. Houston 1967 is the correction. Atlanta 1996 is the last still. The poems are still in the papers.

He came out of Louisville, learned to fight because a bicycle was gone, took Rome, took Liston, took a name, refused Houston, lost four years, lost to Frazier, took Foreman in Kinshasa, took Frazier in Manila, took the title a third time, shook in public, lit a cauldron, and died in Scottsdale with Louisville waiting. If you only remember the greatest, you have the rhyme. If you remember the stolen bike, the induction room, and the arm in Atlanta, you have him.

Portrait: Ira Rosenberg, New York World-Telegram and the Sun · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Muhammad Ali · Full Biography · 50 Plus Hub
https://50plushub.com/nostalgia/stars/muhammad-ali/story