“THE ATHLETE OF the decade,” Jimmy Cannon opined in 1970, “has to be Cassius Clay, who is now Muhammad Ali. He is all that the sixties were. It is as though he were created to represent them.” In many ways, Ali personified the cultural changes of his times. During the decade he became the most important athlete in America, a controversial figure who transcended sports, shaping cultural debates about race, war, and religion. More than any other athlete, his life fused the political upheavals of the age. His entire boxing career was defined by the social and political movements of the decade.8
This became more evident in early 1966. The United States military had lowered its threshold for intelligence exam scores, leaving him eligible for service. On February 17, after the Louisville draft board denied his request for deferment on numerous procedural grounds, Ali received dozens of phone calls from reporters. Confused, he could not understand why the government suddenly wanted to send him to Vietnam. The Muslim brothers hanging around his Miami house tormented him with frightful predictions that Uncle Sam would soon tighten the noose around his neck. One of them said, “Some cracker sergeant is gonna drop a grenade down your pants and blow your balls off.” Flustered by the television crews gathering in his lawn and the calls, Ali became agitated. When a reporter asked him for what seemed like the hundredth time what he thought about the Vietcong, he finally snapped. “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong!”9
Ali’s memorable line splashed across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. His defensive outburst made many Americans despise him even more than they already did. Critics excoriated him as an unpatriotic coward, calling for boycotts of his matches. Amidst an escalating antiwar movement, establishment writers portrayed him as a spoiled brat, no better than the draft dodgers on college campuses. “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up,” Red Smith charged, “Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.”10
While Ali’s draft status threatened his boxing career, his personal life unraveled. When his contract with the Louisville Sponsoring Group expired that year, Herbert Muhammad became his exclusive business manager, gaining greater control over his life. Herbert strongly disapproved of Ali’s wife because Sonji frequently questioned the directives Muslim authorities gave her husband. Her disobedience, Herbert claimed, made her an unfit wife.
About a month before his military reclassification, Ali divorced Sonji, claiming that she had not adhered to the tenets of the Nation of Islam as she promised. Sonji contended that Herbert had pressured him into the divorce. Facing alimony payments, Ali had filed an appeal on the grounds of financial hardship. Now, after his draft status had changed, he protested that his previous purses were tied up in litigation, and therefore he could not afford to pay alimony unless he continued boxing.11
On the same day that the Selective Service announced his appeal, a New York judge sentenced Talmadge Hayer and two other men to life for Malcolm’s murder. Hayer confessed his involvement in the assassination but insisted that the other defendants, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, were innocent. “I just want the truth to be known that Butler and Johnson didn’t have anything to do with this crime,” he said, “because I was there, I know what happened, I know the people that did take part in it.” During the trial, Hayer never disclosed who ordered the hit on Malcolm. More than a decade later, though, he filed affidavits naming four other alleged accomplices. New York authorities, however, refused to reopen the case.12
Muhammad Ali never talked about the murder trial. He had other problems on his mind. On March 22, 1967, a few weeks after he received military orders for induction, he anxiously sat in his hotel bed, unable to sleep, his eyes downcast, contemplating his uncertain future. Around two a.m., Sugar Ray Robinson knocked at the door. Robinson worried that the draft pressure was taking its toll on him. He reminded Ali that he needed sleep if he was going to defeat Zora Folley later that evening.13
“What’s wrong champ?” he asked.
“The army,” Ali answered with trepidation. “They’re gonna want me soon. But I can’t go.”
“But you have to go,” Robinson argued, without mentioning that he had been accused of desertion during World War II. “What’s this can’t?”
“Elijah Muhammad told me that I can’t go.” The Nation’s separatist principles would never allow him to serve alongside whites.
“You won’t see a gun,” Robinson maintained. Ali would just have to fight some exhibitions like he and Joe Louis had. “It’ll be a snap. If you don’t, they’ll send you to jail, pick up your license.” Ali risked everything if he refused to serve—his title, his career, his income—everything.
“Well, Elijah Muhammad told me,” he said, conceding his future to the Messenger’s wishes.
“Forget the old man,” Robinson urged. “Is Elijah going to go to jail, and all those other Muslims?”
“But I’m afraid, Ray,” he admitted with tears in his eyes. “I’m really afraid.”