The Greatest: Muhammad Ali: Part I

“He didn’t come out of an affluent family. He didn’t have it too easy. We’re all out of the same bag.”

But Joe Martin, still working with Clay, discovered a problem: Cassius was afraid of flying. Martin convinced Cassius that there wasn’t time for a long train ride across the country. During the turbulent flight, Martin had to work hard to calm the young man down.

He liked to drive his lavender-colored Cadillac convertible slowly through the streets of Harlem, stopping now and again to spar with young boys, shaking hands, and generally accepting the enthusiastic appreciation of his fans.

Very often they would have to take menial jobs that would interfere with their training.

Life was hard for all Americans during the depression years that began in 1929 and didn’t end until World War II. Boxing was a way of making a few dollars during those years, but it was nothing like the lucrative sport it would become.

The mid-level fights feature lesser-known boxers, and there is often pressure for the reigning champions in each weight division to fight the top contenders.

The goal for the young fighter is to get a bout with an upper-level opponent.

The best fighters are invariably those who can most easily break down the barriers of control we have all been taught, who can bring a rage to the ring, a willingness to smash a man into unconsciousness, to see him fallen and bleeding on the canvas.

While it is the boxer’s desire to batter his opponent without mercy, it is also his opponent’s aim to do the same. The cost to the human body is staggering.

A knockout, simply put, is an injury to the brain that renders the sufferer incapable of standing up.

Sometimes a fighter can sustain an injury to the brain sufficient to make him unaware of what is going on while still able to stand, and therefore vulnerable to even more punishment.

Now he was at the spartan camp of Moore, who had been fighting longer than Clay had been alive, and who wanted to teach the young star defensive fighting.

Clay trained in the Salt Mine, Moore's aptly named camp in Ramona, California.

But every fighter comes to his own style based upon his own visions of himself and assessment of his skills.

He had the uncanny ability to punch with devastating force while moving backward.

Clay was also confident that he could figure out the styles of the men he would fight and undermine their strengths.

The Supreme Court’s ruling to end school segregation with the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision should have meant new opportunities for African Americans. The truth of the matter, though, was that southern schools refused to allow African Americans to register, and that new lawsuits were being filed to force integration.

His good looks and his playfulness helped Clay attract a following far different from fighters who preceded him.

Young people, black and white, especially identified with the brash young man from Louisville.

When Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis in the twelfth round of their fight, the Nazis were elated.

A massive man with good boxing skills and a crushing punch, he was seen as the most formidable heavyweight fighter.

Clay predicted he would knock out the forty-eight-year-old Moore in the fourth round and accomplished that feat.

In 1962, however, America was changing. Television was bringing both the civil rights and antiwar movements into American homes. This was the milieu in which twenty-year-old Cassius Clay came to manhood.

In order to maintain a favorable position with liberal observers, movement leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, and A. Philip Randolph recruited college graduates and other highly educated people.

He clowned around for a series of publicity photos with the Beatles, the most popular rock ’n roll group in the world at the time, posed with English dignitaries, and gave endless interviews.

The split was finally taped, but the delay had given Clay ample time to recover.

While the sports media questioned Clay’s ability, Clay showed his audience a new militant position.

In August, at the March on Washington, the Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X denounced the nonviolent direction of the civil rights movement.

This documentary presented to Americans their first open look at the Nation of Islam with its strongly anti-white sentiments.

He knew that the offers he was receiving from television stations, from newspapers, from magazines were for the purpose of exploiting his fame.

Clay was a fighter, a person used to standing toe-to-toe with an adversary and using his skills to gain a victory.

But in 1963 there was a convergence of events, which Malcolm X described as a turning point in the history of black Americans.

There was a call for a nationwide protest against injustice in which all black Americans would demonstrate their solidarity.

From the grassroots demonstration, a gathering of ordinary people against racism and injustice, the march became a highly organized assembly of whites and blacks.

He was an athlete, a boxer, an amusing man-child who should go on entertaining the public with his antics.