Three-Letter Word for the Greatest!
Story by James L. Rodrigues
Photographs by Howard L. Bingham
I was working a crossword puzzle the other day when I ran into the clue for
a three-letter answer. The clue was “the greatest.”
I quickly filled in “Ali” and moved to the next
word. Pondering that question and my automatic answer, I now realize that Ali’s
claim of forty years ago has become crossword puzzle reality.
Maybe someday I’ll look in a dictionary and under “greatest”
I’ll find ‘Muhammad Ali (aka) Cassius Clay.’
My first notice of the man came under the Clay moniker. He was on T.V., yelling that he was going to “put a whipping on that big bear.” He was referring to heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.
I remember walking home from Elmhurst junior high in Oakland and telling a friend, “Sonny Liston is going to teach this kid from Louisville some manners.” Later that night, Cassius Clay taught the kid from Elmhurst “some manners,” when a beaten and exhausted Liston failed to answer the seventh round bell.
The rematch didn’t go that far. The stadium seats were barely warm when Clay hit listen with a right. Liston went down like he was shot. Some of the writers called it the “phantom punch” and hinted the fight had been fixed. I turned to my number one expert for an answer.
My dad saw the film, shook his head and said, “That was no phantom! He caught Liston with an overhand right! Lights out!”
“Lights out” could have been Clay’s nickname. His opponents chased him until they caught him and when they caught him, they were very sorry they did. The finish would usually come in a blur of Clay punches that the challenger seldom ever saw.
Instead of calling him “Lights Out,” he was nicknamed “the Louisville Lip” because he was always raving about something. His ranting ranged from how beautiful he was to off the cuff poetry to predictions of which round he would knock out his “defenseless opponent” to his inevitable trademark “I am the greatest!” Confidence was his middle name.
When he switched from what he called his “slave name” to Muhammad Ali, there was a general resistance to the change among the press. I remember his television “straight man,” Howard Cosell trying to get away with calling him Cassius Clay. I expected Ali to angrily yell at Cosell, but instead, Ali went into a school teacher to student lecture about the importance of respect. I never heard Cosell call him Cassius Clay again.
Ali and Cosell would have their battle of wits before and after Ali’s fights on ABC-TV. When Cosell would dare to say Ali’s upcoming opponent was “a little on the ‘soft side,’” Ali would reply, “If he’s so soft, why don’t you fight him and I’ll stay here and call the round by round description.” Then Ali would get wide-eyed and try to take the microphone from Cosell. When Cosell would cover up the microphone, Ali would grab at Cosell’s infamous toupee. Whether you liked Ali or not, you had to laugh.
Then the Vietnam War entered the picture and all the laughter stopped.
When Ali was drafted into the Army, he refused to serve and requested “conscientious objector status.” The selective service board turned him down for reasons I suspect were tinged with racism and jealousy.
It struck me as odd that some of my white friends were granted a “C.O.” classification with far weaker credentials than this ordained Muslim minister possessed. He argued that it didn’t make sense for a black man to kill yellow skinned people in a white man’s war against the reds.” His rainbow like words were sadly prophetic as disproportionate thousands of black and brown men died in an ultimately ambiguous cause.
Meanwhile, Ali was indicted and convicted of draft evasion and had his title and his boxing license revoked. His exile from boxing lasted from 1967 to 1970. It ended when, as the great sports writer Jim Murray put it, “Ali became one of the few men ever to get the Supreme Court of the United States to unanimously agree on anything” as they threw out the charges against him on a 9-0 decision.
The Ali-Joe Frazier battle in Madison Square Garden is my next memory of the Louisville slugger. I was in the Coast Guard on Guam at the time. Although we already knew the general outcome of the fight, my roommate and fellow ”Coastie,” Norm Schultz, talked me into joining him to watch a week old replay at an Agaña, Guam theater. Norm was a big Ali fan, while I remained a skeptic.
In the darkness of that old movie house, we viewed something we had never seen before. Ali was badly beaten. He was even knocked down. Superman finally met Kryptonite and I walked out of the theater with mixed emotions. The kid from Louisville had finally been “taught some manners,” but I wasn’t smiling. Frazier had been relentless. He had stalked, cornered and punished Ali and I had felt Ali’s pain. I was baffled. Had he somehow found his way into my heart?
As we drove home through the humid Guam night, I asked my friend Norm about it. He said, “It’s not only because he’s a great athlete but it’s because he’s totally unique.” Once he is gone, there will be no more. Love him now while you still can."
Norm never fought in Manila or Zaire, but he graduated from Syracuse and taught at Clemson and one day he was killed in an auto accident. (I’m glad I gave him a long distance call before his sudden death and told him how much I appreciated his friendship).
Ali went on to avenge his loss to Frazier in the famed “Thrilla in Manila” match. Then my memories shift to Ali and the apparently invincible George Foreman.
World champion George Foreman was heavily favored as his Zaire, Africa fight against Muhammad Ali approached. The odds makers felt that Foreman’s youth (25 years old against Ali’s 32) would be key in the 10-30-74 confrontation.
Another reason for Ali’s underdog status was “the Joe Frazier factor.” While Ali had struggled to take two out of three matches from Frazier, Foreman had recently won the championship belt by pounding Frazier into the canvas like a nail into redwood. Everything pointed to a Foreman victory, but Ali remained confident. In fact, at that moment in time, Foreman was probably as powerful a puncher as had ever entered the ring. Ali had a problem. How could he overcome a youth and power deficit?
His strategy reminded me of something my father had said to my brother and I after we had put on the boxing gloves and “wind milled punches” at each other for a minute. “You just try doing that for a full three minute round. Your arms will fall off! You’ll “punch yourselves out."
Ali
used his now famous “rope-a-dope” on Foreman, hanging
back on the ropes, seducing the champ into “wind milling” punches
at him. Then Ali applied his amazing quickness to make Foreman miss. By the
seventh round Foreman had “punched himself out.”
It didn’t take Ali long to finish the process. With his traditional blur
of lefts and rights, the man from Louisville regained his heavyweight
title via an 8th round knockout.
I didn’t see the fight until later, but I heard the results on my 1959 T-Bird’s radio (it wasn’t a classic back then). Realizing Ali had overcome the odds and regained his title against the seemingly invincible George Foreman, I couldn’t stop grinning.
As I told my friends and family about the results, they began to grin, too. Even Ali’s toughest critics were happy for him. Not that anyone disliked Foreman. It’s a fact that big George was generally admired by the public. It was just something about Ali. He had become “part of the family.” The wild, talented and rebellious son had returned home to a championship that many felt had been his all along.
Now we see him moving a little more slowly than in the days of yore. Experts on such things say he feels as good as ever, we just can’t tell from the outside. The temptation is to feel sorry for him. Resist that temptation! As I see the quiet little smile on his face, I know he has come to understand some important cosmic riddle. And I think he’d tell us about it, too. But maybe, just maybe, it’s something that only “the greatest of all time” can understand.