Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
Randy Roberts
For Marjie, Alison, and Kelly, the loves of my life.
—RWR
For my loving wife, Rebecca.
—JMS
PREFACE: A DREAM DEFERRED
Malcolm X and Ali were like very close brothers. It was almost as if they were in love with each other.
—FERDIE PACHECO, MUHAMMAD ALI’S PHYSICIAN
“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in one of his most moving and insightful poems. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?”1
We ask the same questions about the lives of two extraordinarily gifted men, both born in a segregated land and raised amidst pain and discrimination to face a violent world. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it snake toward hopelessness, despair, drunkenness, addiction, and poverty? Or does it explode in rage? A dream deferred, Malcolm X knew, could become an American nightmare.
Our story begins with two questions: Who was Cassius Clay? And how did he become Muhammad Ali? As much as has been written about him, he remains enigmatic, a silent sphinx. He has meant different things to different people at different times. It has become increasingly difficult to know the Muhammad Ali of the 1960s. Since the end of the Vietnam War, liberal writers have manufactured an image of him as a hero of social causes, a unifying force of goodwill. He is no longer seen as controversial, threatening, or anti-American. His legacy has become distorted and trivialized.2
In a tragic irony, Parkinson’s disease has robbed him of his verbal gifts. Once known as the Louisville Lip, Ali no longer boasts, rhymes, or raps. His silence has been filled by corporate sponsors, movie producers, and writers who have created a new voice for him, a voice that neither preaches racial separation nor acknowledges his past with Malcolm X. A minister in the Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm espoused racially charged rhetoric about “devilish white men,” “brainwashed Christian Negroes,” and “bloody revolution.” Many feared that he might organize the opening battle of an impending race war. Muhammad Ali called this man his brother, leading critics to vilify him as a disgrace to boxing.
At first, Cassius Clay, as he was known until 1964, hid his relationship with Malcolm. A master of deception, he proved infuriatingly elusive for journalists. “Figuring out who or what is the real Cassius Clay is a parlor game that has become unrewarding even for experts,” commented Jack Olsen, a white writer who gained unprecedented access to the fighter.
Clay’s personality is like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were cut by a drunken carpenter, a jumbled collection of moods and attitudes that do not seem to interlock. Sometimes, he sounds like a religious fanatic, his voice singsong and chanting, and all at once he will turn into a calm, reasoning, if confused, student of the scriptures. He is a loudmouth windbag and at the same time a remarkably sincere and dedicated athlete. He can be a kindly benefactor of the neighborhood children and a vicious bully in the ring, a prissy Puritan totally intolerant of drinkers and smokers, and a teller of dirty jokes.3
In 1966, when Olsen began writing Black Is Best, a lengthy profile of the boxer, piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Muhammad Ali seemed impossible. Yet what Olsen and other writers have failed to recognize is that the real Muhammad Ali can only be seen when his many masks are uncovered. From 1960 to 1965, the half decade that framed his relationship with Malcolm X, he appeared convincingly as four different personalities, packaged and expressed at different times for different audiences.
He first emerged on the world stage as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. of the 1960 Rome Olympics—wide-eyed, talkative, enthusiastic, and likable, a defender of the glacial progress being made in American race relations. In Rome, Cassius proudly told a Soviet reporter who asked him about the American color line, “We’ve got qualified people working on that problem, and I’m not worried about the outcome. To me, the U.S.A. is still the best country in the world, counting yours.” As Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., he was the quiet southern “Negro,” downplaying racial conflict, and avoiding controversy.4