The Greatest: Muhammad Ali

During the Cold War, black athletes were touted on the world stage by the U.S. as proof that the American system was superior. But soon, some of them chose to speak out politically against their country, and they were led by Muhammad Ali. Matt Andrews explains Cassius Clay's journey to  "The Louisville Lip" and The People's Champ.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,

(00:26):
and we're back on the untold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last time, we discussed international
sports as the Cold War took ahold of the country
and the world. This week, we'll discuss one of the
great American sports icons and how he changed the landscapes
of how athletes behave publicly around social and political issues.

(00:48):
Muhammad Ali, who I'm sure you've heard of, used his
platform and celebrity to speak out against racism in this country,
and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War nearly
cost him his career. Not to mention, he also kicked
everybody's ass. He truly was the greatest. That has the
whole story. Today, we're going to talk about an athlete

(01:12):
who told everyone that he was the greatest. He also
like to boast of how pretty he was, how he
could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
The sports announcer Howard Cosell once told this athlete during
an interview that he was being truculent to which he replied,
I don't know what truculent means, but if it's good,

(01:33):
I'm that all right. I am talking, of course, about
Muhammad Ali. And if you don't know what truculent means,
like I didn't when I first read that quote, or
you can look it up, but you don't need to
look up anything about Muhammad Ali is I'm going to
tell you everything you need to know about him in
this lecture. Although actually that's not really true. Muhammad Ali

(01:54):
is endlessly fascinating, So along the way, I'll give you
some reading and watching suggestions, you know, if you'd like
to learn more. But today that's what we're going to do.
We're going to explore the athletic and political revolution that
was Muhammad Ali. And that is how I'm going to
talk about Ali as America's most political of athletes, as

(02:15):
the individual who demanded that we rethink our ideas about
the relationship between sports and politics. But as a transition
from what we talked about last time to our discussion
of Muhammad Ali today, Before we get to Ali, let
me first tell you about a very interesting phenomenon in
American sport history, and then I'm going to place Ali

(02:38):
in the context of this story. Last time we discussed
the links between sport and the Cold War, we explored
how sports were used by the United States and the
Soviet Union in their attempt to demonstrate their superiority compared
to each other. Well. As part of that Cold War
in the nineteen fifties, the leaders of the Soviet Union,

(03:00):
we're telling the rest of the world about racism in
the United States. Just look at the Jim Crow South.
The Soviet said, the Americans like to tell the world
about freedom, but that is not freedom. Well, in order
to try to counter those claims, beginning in nineteen fifty four,
the US State Department spent millions of dollars and sponsored

(03:22):
international tours of American athletes, especially African American athletes. And
the idea was this, black athletes would tour the globe
and they would champion the American way. You know, these
successful black athletes. They would go to other countries and
just by their very appearance, demonstrate to the rest of

(03:43):
the world that always well racially speaking, in the United States.
For example, in nineteen fifty five, the State Department asked
Jesse Owens to go to India. Owens the American hero
of the nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. He went to India.
He tutored Indian track athletes and the finer points of
their craft, but a larger goal was selling the United

(04:07):
States to the Indian people. Life magazine called Owens the
practically perfect envoy in a country that has violently exaggerated
ideas about the treatment of Negroes in the United States.
So it's Jesse Owens American Ambassador. In nineteen fifty six,

(04:28):
the University of San Francisco basketball team, they traveled to
Latin America the USF Downs. They had won the n
c A title in both nineteen fifty five and nineteen
fifty six. They were an integrated team that featured Bill Russell,
one of the greatest basketball players of all time, and
the message of this team's tour was this, don't believe

(04:50):
the stories about race problems in the United States. Just
look at black and white getting along and playing together.
On the usfdawns. The State Department enlisted the African American
tennis star ALTHEA. Gibson alth Gibson was the first Black
American male or female to play in the United States Open,

(05:11):
and in nineteen fifty six, she played the role of
the American cold warrior when she went on a good
Wheel tour throughout Asia, playing exhibition tennis matches and just
displaying the image of the prosperous African American citizen. One
last example, this one is from the Olympic Games. The

(05:31):
United States Olympic Committee wanted to send this same message
of racial progress to the nations that were gathered in
Rome for the nineteen sixty Olympics. These were the games
that made Wilma Rudolph a star and also included a
dynamic American boxer named Cassius Clay. We're getting to him.
At these nineteen sixty Olympic Games, for the first time ever,

(05:52):
the American flag bearer, that is, the athlete given the
honor of holding the flag and leading Team USA into
the stadium for the first time ever, it was a
black American. It was Rapher Johnson, a decathlete from u
c l A. RAPHERD. Johnson was an amazing athlete who
from an athletic standpoint, certainly deserved this honor, But the

(06:13):
selection was political. It was made for reasons that have
to do with propaganda. How can the United States have
a race problem when the man given the honor of
holding the flag is black. So in all these instances
here we have athletes serving as as cold warriors, as
as quote unquote good Americans. They are being presented as

(06:37):
examples of all that is right with the United States.
And this is the narrative we have been exploring with
regard to the black athlete in our recent lectures, from
Joe Louis to Jackie Robinson to Wilma Rudolph, and we've
been exploring the story of humble, hard working black athletes

(06:57):
using sports to prove to white America that they belong,
you know, integrating more and more into American society. And
I don't want to take anything away from these athletes,
and not at all. I mean, I told you how
highly I think of Jackie Robinson, But I do want
to point out that these are all stories where athletes

(07:18):
played the games and competed in the events and just
let their bodies do the talking. These athletes were political
in the sense that they were trailblazers, you know. Their
political significance was in the way that they desegregated, competed,
and succeeded in their sports. But again, all the while

(07:39):
letting their bodies do their talking. The black athlete as trailblazer.
We we like that story in the United States, but
what happened in the nineteen sixties is different. A different
type of political black athlete emerged. This was the decade
when athletes, especially black athletes, they began speaking out against

(08:00):
the injustices that they saw both inside the world of
sports and just in a American society more generally. So,
they were no longer just athletes. They were critics of
the world around them. And this criticism is what's known
as the revolt of the Black athlete. And the athlete
who led the revolt was Muhammad Ali. In my mind,

(08:24):
there is no more interesting individual in the history of
American sports than Muhammed Ali. He just demanded that you
be interested in him and love him, hate him whatever.
You had to be interested. Ali was incredibly energetic, he
was hyper articulate, He was kind of shockingly brash, but

(08:47):
you just could not ignore Muhammad Ali. Here's his story.
He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay. That's is given named
Cassius Clay, born in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, in two
and Cassius Clay started boxing when he was a kid
when someone stole his bike and he wanted to be

(09:09):
able to beat up the bicycle thief if he ever
found him. Well, he never found his bike, but he
discovered that he was good at boxing. And Clay became
a national figure when he won the gold medal in
the light heavyweight division at the Fixed And in a
press conference at those Games, a Soviet reporter asked him,

(09:31):
how does it feel to win glory for a country
that does not give you the right to eat at
a lunch counter in your hometown, and Cassius Clay responded, quote,
tell your readers, We've got qualified people working on that problem,
and I'm not worried about the outcome. To me, the
USA is still the best country in the world, counting yours.

(09:54):
So this is Cashi as Clay, as the cold warrior,
as the as the good American, and the American press
loved him for this. His quote was reproduced in papers
all over the country as evidence of this young man's
good citizenship. The love affair would not last long, however,
and that's because Ali is going to transform himself from

(10:15):
one of America's biggest defenders into one of its fiercest critics.
It became apparent early on that Cassius Clay was unlike
any black American athlete before him, and really just like
unlike any American athlete ever. He exhibited a carnival like brashness.
He was a new vocal type of athletic figure. You know,

(10:37):
he would predict the round in which his upcoming opponent
would fall, and accurately predict the round, I should say.
And as I mentioned at the start, he told anyone
who would listen that he was the greatest, the greatest
that ever was. And he liked to talk about how
pretty he was. And I think there are two ways
of thinking about this talk, this this boastfulness. On the

(11:01):
one hand, we could call it brilliant self from ocean.
You know, good business get people interested in you. It
doesn't matter if people are paying to see you win
or lose, just as long as they are paying. But
I want to suggest a different way of thinking about
this rhetoric. I think that these these boasts, you know,
I'm so pretty and I am the greatest, I think

(11:24):
they're political in nature. When Clay said I am the greatest,
he wasn't just bragging about his boxing abilities. It was
an assertion of racial pride, a statement that all black
people are great. When he said I'm so pretty, I
think he was making the larger claim that black is beautiful.
You know, in the context of early nineteen sixties America,

(11:47):
one cannot say this about oneself unless you believe these
things about the larger social group that you identify with.
And so Clay was saying these things, making these statements
of fierce racial pride, really before it became fashionable in
the black community to do so well. Some of the
press found all this talk amusing, but some clearly found

(12:11):
it just plain annoying, and that these boasts coming from
a young man who wasn't even the champion athletes were
supposed to be seen and not heard. Sports writers called
Cassius Clay the Louisville Lip. They called him Gashious Cassius,
He's all talk. But then Clay got his chance to

(12:32):
fight for the title. There are two fights in the
career of Cassius Clay slash Muhammad Ali that I want
to focus on them. The first was his nineteen fight
that took place in Miami, and this was against the
heavyweight champion Sunny listen, this was for the title. Sunny
Liston was a ferocious and feared heavyweight. Actually, before getting

(12:55):
into boxing, he was an enforcer for the mob, the
guy you did not want to see if you were
late on your loan payments, and listen, sad badged his opponents.
And the thought was that Clay the Louisville lip, this
kid who was all mouth and who actually described himself
as pretty. The thought was, he's about to get flattened.

(13:19):
There's a great book about Muhammad Ali written by David Remnick.
It's called King of the World. If you want to
read about Ali, I think that's the best place to start.
And Reminick does a great job giving us a sense
of how much of an underdog Cassius Clay was in
this fight. Sunny Listen was so favored in this fight

(13:39):
the bookies wouldn't even take bets on him. They were
so certain that that he would win and have to
pay out. The young boxing reporter for the New York Times,
Robert Lipsite, he was told by his editors to map
out the route from the boxing arena to the hospital.
Clay was going to end up there and Lipsite would
need to get there fast. On the morning of the fight,

(14:03):
the New York Post ran a column the actor and
comedian and boxing enthusiast Jackie Gleason. He wrote, I predict
Sonny Listen will win in eighteen seconds of the first round,
and my estimate includes the three seconds blabbermouth will bring
into the ring with them. And this was the near

(14:24):
unanimous sentiment. But then the two fighters climbed into the
ring with each other and people thought, my god, Clay
is bigger than Listen. And then the fight began and
Clay was dancing around the ring throwing sharp piercing jabs
that Listen had no defense against, and they thought, my god,

(14:44):
Clay is better than Listen. Cassius Clay dominated the fight,
winning in the seventh round when Sonny Listen just stayed
seated in his corner. Clay had beaten him up and
demoralized him, and the boxing experts were shocked. And then
two days later, after beating Sunny Listen, Cassius Clay held

(15:08):
a press conference and America was shocked. After the break,
Cassius Clay becomes Mohammed Ali. Clay announced that he was

(15:38):
a pupil of Malcolm X and that he was a
member of the Nation of Islam, a group sometimes called
the Black Muslims. This was an organization that denounced racial integration.
It was an organization that called for the separation of
the races. It was an organization whose leader said that
white people were evil. They were the devil, and why

(16:00):
would you want to integrate with the devil. Cassius Clay
sooner anounced that he had a new name, Mohammed Ali,
a name given to him by the leader of the
Nation of Islam. Names were very important and political for Ali.
He said that Cassius Clay was a slave name, and

(16:21):
indeed that Clay was the name given to his ancestors
by white slaveholders in Kentucky. No more with that slave name.
Now it's Mohammad Ali. And when Ali announced that he
was a member of the Nation of Islam, white Americans
were outraged, and many Black Americans too. The heavyweight championship

(16:43):
is not a pulpit from which to preach racial separatism,
the critics said. It is not a platform from which
to preach hate. The critics told him, you need to
be more like Joe Louis, whose career had brought black
and white closer together. But Ali said what he believed,
and this makes him, in my mind, like Jack Johnson,

(17:06):
who lived his life as he pleased. Neither Jack Johnson
nor Muhammad Ali wore the mask. To go back to
that phrase. And just so you know, when Ali would
enter the ring for his fights, one of his cornermen
like to shout, ghost in the house, Ghost in the house,
The ghost of Jack Johnson was with them. Mohammad Ali

(17:29):
was a historian as well. Ali brought his racial politics
into the ring. His next opponents, Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell,
they refused to refer to him as Mohammed Ali, very
pointedly calling him Cassius Clay. For doing this, Ali tortured
them in the ring. In the Ernie Terrell fight, Ali

(17:51):
would shout at Terrell, what's my name? Then, Paw, what's
my name? Pal? Now? I keep comparing Ali to Jack Johnson.
Jack Johnson had taunted his white opponents in the ring.
Now Ali was doing it to other black fighters who
did not give him the respect of calling him what
he asked to be called. So, Mohammad Ali was provocative.

(18:13):
He was controversial, and then came his stance on Vietnam
In nineteen sixty six, Ali was drafted for service in Vietnam. Now,
as a celebrity, he could have traveled from base to
base performing exhibitions raising troop morale, I mean, just like
Joe Louis had done during World War Two. But Ali

(18:36):
said no. When he received his draft notice, he blurted
out one of the iconic lines of the sixties, I
ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. And then
in the coming weeks his views they sharpened, they became
more nuanced. Ali drew on the ideas of black power leaders,
and he articulated, as he saw it, the hypocrisy of

(19:00):
a nation that asked black men to serve in the
military while simultaneously naying them full and equal rights at home.
In April nineteen seven, Muhammad Ali formally refused induction into
the American military. So let's think about this. Muhammad Ali

(19:22):
is breaking a lot of rules here. First of all,
the idea of the athlete as rebel was just still
unthinkable for many Americans. Athletes are many things, but they
have historically been rule followers. Like soldiers. They follow orders,
you know, the order of their coaches, the orders of society.

(19:43):
And Ali is not following orders. Here he's breaking the rules.
In fact, by refusing induction, he was breaking the law,
and very importantly, I think Ali is also breaking the
rules of American manhood. The soldier is one of the
great masculine icons in every culture, and now here is

(20:06):
this other masculine icon, the heavyweight champion of the world,
and he is rejecting militarism. He is rejecting what many
consider to be his duty to serve his country as
a soldier and fight. And many Americans just could not
tolerate the contradiction. They could not tolerate the idea of
this heavyweight boxer refusing to fight on the real field

(20:29):
of battle and to bring race into the equation. They
could not tolerate the fact that this black man, who
they felt had been given so much by his country,
they cannot tolerate his refusal to fight for that country.
And so Muhammad Ali would pay a price. When Ali

(20:50):
refused induction into the military, his boxing license was immediately suspended.
He could no longer fight and earn a living as
a boxer. The federal courts convicted Ali of draft evasion,
and they sentenced him to five years in federal prison.
He appealed this ruling and remained free pending that appeal,
But his boxing career looked to be over, and as

(21:12):
it turned out, he lost the best years of his career.
He would be banished from the boxing ring from April
ninety seven to October of nineteen seventy three and a
half years. And I want to emphasize this. Ali was
certain he was going to prison. You can think what
you want about his refusal to be inducted, but I

(21:34):
think we need to recognize how Ali was willing to
lose everything and go to prison for five years for
his beliefs. How many people can you say that about.
During all these exile from boxing, another great heavyweight rose
to the top. Joe Frasier. Smoking Joe Frasier, they called him.

(21:55):
Fraser was a black fighter from South Carolina by way
of Philadelphia, and he ascended to the heavyweight title in
Ali's absence. But then in nineteen seventy Ali got his
boxing license reinstated and he won a couple of fights
as soon as he returned, and then he signed to
fight Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden in March of

(22:17):
nineteen seventy one. And this is the second of the
two Ali fights that I want to focus on. In
V one, boxing fans were given a rare treat two
undefeated heavyweight fighters, neither man had ever lost as a professional,
and really two fighters who could legitimately claim to be

(22:39):
the heavyweight champion. So as a boxing contest, it's everything
you could want. But it was so much more than
just a boxing match. It was an entertainment spectacle. The
fight was promoted by a Hollywood agent named Larry Carencio.
The TV announcer was the Hollywood actor Burt Lancaster. Frank

(23:01):
Sinatra was a ringside photographer for Life magazine. I mean,
it was a carnival, but most of all for our purposes,
this fight was evidence of the deep cultural and political
divide in the United States in the early nineteen seventies,
a divide over civil rights and black protests in the

(23:23):
Vietnam War. And it's so interesting how these two fighters,
these two African American fighters, they came to symbolically represent
the two opposing sides of this divide. Ali willingly and
actively played into this narrative. He portrayed himself as the

(23:43):
champion of the left, the counter culture, the activists fighting
for black freedom and an end to the war in Vietnam.
Joe Frasier came to symbolize the other side. He was
said to represent all those Americans who were uneasy with
civil rights and black power protests, all those Americans who
supported the war in Vietnam, and we're tired of all

(24:06):
the anti war marches. And it's not that Joe Frasier
said that he believed in these things. It said he
said nothing. And so the hyper political Ali went after
Frasier and it got pretty ugly. Ali said things about
Joe Frasier that if a white fighter had said about Ali,

(24:28):
Ali would have gone berserk. Ali called Joe Frasier dumb,
He called him a gorilla. He made fun of his
facial features. He called Joe Frasier and uncle Tom. It
was rough, and part of Ali's cruelty, it was it
was it was showmanship. It was gamesmanship. You know. This

(24:49):
was Ali's style, always trying to get into the head
of his next opponent. But I want to push a
little deeper hair because I think part of Ali's personal
attack against Frasier was political. Ali attacks Frasier because as
Joe Frasier is a political because Joe Frasier does not
take a stand and espouse any political views. And for Ali,

(25:14):
in this era of civil rights and black protests, at
a time when the Vietnam War is raging, being a
political is unforgivable. It's a sin. There's a famous line
from the nineteen sixties. You can't be neutral on a
moving train. You have to take a stand. And so

(25:35):
when Frasier does not take a stand on the issues
of the day, Ali goes after him. Well. The fight
itself was worthy of all the hoop law. It may
be the greatest heavyweight title fight in history. Madison Square
Garden was electric and in this fight ebbed and flowed,

(25:55):
It had twists and turns. It was Ali, then it
was Frasier. Then Ali stormed back, and then Frasier countered
back and forth. In the fifteenth and final round, Joe
Frasier threw a monstrous left hook that dropped Ali to
the canvas, and Ali got up and he finished the fight.

(26:17):
But the knockdown was the most dramatic moment of that competition,
and Joe Frasier beat Ali that night. Frasier was the
unanimous winner on the judges scorecards, and let me quickly
run down what happened next for Muhammad Ali well. First
of all, in June of seventy one, the Supreme Court

(26:40):
acquitted Ali of his draft evasion charge. He was actually
acquitted on a technicality, essentially the military hadn't filled out
his paperwork properly. But the acquittal really came because the
national opinion about the Vietnam War had shifted since Ali
took his stand in nineteen sixty seven. By the early

(27:00):
nineteen seventies, most Americans opposed the war in Vietnam, and
the court did not want to send Ali to prison
for five years for what was now a much more
mainstream view. So Ali was free to fight. And Ali
and Fraser would fight each other two more times, and
Ali won both of those fights. The first rematch was

(27:23):
a lackluster fight who took place in New York. The
second was an epic battle that took place in Manila
in the Philippines. It's been known as ever since as
the Thrilla in Manila. It was an absolutely brutal fight,
but Ali said it was the closest he ever came
to dying in the ring. And in between these two fights,

(27:45):
Ali recaptured the heavyweight title and astounding ten years after
he had first won it, when he once again shot
the boxing world and defeated a seemingly unbeatable fighter, George Foreman.
This was a fight that took place in Zaire in Africa.
It has forever been known as the Rumble in the Jungle.

(28:06):
If you are interested in this fight and why it
takes place in Africa, go watch the film When We
Were Kings. It is an awesome documentary about these two
black Americans fighting in Africa and then finally, just to
finish all this off, in Muhammad Ali both lost the
heavyweight title to a young boxer name Leon Spins, and

(28:30):
then Ali won back the title in the rematch later
that year. Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight championship three different times,
seventy four and nine seventy eight. It's remarkable, and here's
one of my favorite historical tidbits that second Ali Spinx fight.

(28:50):
It took place in the Louisiana Superdome and the national
anthem was sung by Joe Frasier. Boxing is such a
strange sport. That's all for now. Next time on the
Untold History of Sports in America, presented by One Day
University protest at the nineteen sixty eight Olympics h