After turning professional toward the end of 1960, he became the Louisville Lip—boasting loudly, spouting poetry, belittling opponents, and advertising himself. As the Louisville Lip, he became the booming athletic equivalent of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, echoing the raucous notes of rock ‘n’ roll and the television antics of professional wrestler Gorgeous George.
As the civil rights movement escalated from 1962 to early 1964, he evolved into Cassius X—the loyal follower of Elijah Muhammad, the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam. As Cassius X, a name he adopted only for a brief time, he imitated Malcolm, appearing angry and outraged by racial injustice. Behind the walls of the Nation’s mosques, he stood up as an outspoken defender of the Black Muslim philosophy, one that promoted racial pride, self-determination, and complete separation of the races. As an acolyte of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, he defiantly opposed Martin Luther King’s approach to the civil rights movement and the ideals of racial integration.
Finally, after winning the heavyweight title in February 1964, he became Muhammad Ali—renamed by Elijah, pried apart from Malcolm, and the new front man for the Nation of Islam. As in his other personas, he inhabited the role of Muhammad Ali, often wearing the somber, stone-faced mask of Elijah’s paramilitary followers. As Muhammad Ali, he instantly became the most politically controversial athlete in the country’s history.
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., the Louisville Lip, Cassius X, and Muhammad Ali—the boxer played all these roles, wearing the different masks as the occasion dictated. He was all of these characters, and sometimes more than one at the same moment. “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he once announced. “I’m free to be who I want.” Yet some of the men closest to him had trouble understanding exactly who he was free to be. “They say there’s fifteen sides to Clay,” his ring physician Ferdie Pacheco said. “To me he’s just a thoroughly confused person. Sure, he has sides, but they don’t mesh.”5
Only by examining Cassius Clay’s early years in Louisville and his relationship with Malcolm X can one hope to discover Muhammad Ali. Central to his life, relationships, and career was deception. Disguise and dissemblance, of course, have been integral to African American culture since the first moments of contact between blacks and whites. From the stories of B’rer Rabbit’s trickery and indirection to such novels as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the ability of black Americans to wear disguises and assume multiple identities has been crucial in navigating the boundaries and pathways of the color line in America.
But beyond African American culture, the volatile circumstances of young Cassius Clay’s home life created an atmosphere conducive to disguise. That he entered a profession that rewarded violence and deception, a trade that trafficked in feints, fakes, and pain, indicates how ingrained those qualities were in his life. If Olsen, Pacheco, and others could not figure out “the riddle of Cassius Clay,” that attested to how well he had learned to hide himself.6
LIKE MUHAMMAD ALI, Malcolm X was also a man of many masks. The seventh son of an itinerant Baptist preacher, Malcolm Little inherited his father’s rage against white supremacy. As a young man in the 1940s, he came of age as Detroit Red, a street hustler strutting in a zoot suit, peddling drugs and prostitutes. In the smoky pool halls and jazz clubs of Boston and New York, he developed the swagger of a trickster, cultivating the cool pose of the “hip cats” he admired.7
Behind the mask of Detroit Red, he buried the pain of his past. In prison for larceny, his fellow convicts called him Satan. Voraciously reading history, sociology, and theology, he transformed himself into a puritanical follower of Elijah Muhammad, the self-proclaimed Messenger of Allah. From his cell, he absorbed and memorized Muhammad’s writings and speeches, accepting his message of separatism and strict morality. By the mid-1950s, the former convict had become the Messenger’s protégé—Malcolm X—an outspoken minister saving lost souls in bars, nightclubs, and back alleys.8
As Malcolm X, he was a model of redemption, preaching a doctrine of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and crime. The “angriest black man in America” divided the country with his sharp tongue and brutal honesty, openly condemning whites for terrorizing black Americans. Ultimately, the internal politics of the Nation of Islam and his own crisis of faith led him on a journey toward the universalism of Sunni Islam. In Africa and the Middle East, he was known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, but he would forever be remembered in America as Malcolm X.9