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Back on His Heels
Skeptics questioned Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve: What kind of pacifist could a heavyweight champion be?
Gordon Marino reviews ‘Sting Like a Bee’ by Leigh Montville.
Gordon Marino
Updated May 26, 2017
When he died in 2016, at the age of 74, Muhammad Ali was one of the most beloved people on the planet. But there was a time when he was reviled as a slacker, a draft dodger. In “Sting Like a Bee,” an absorbing portrait of Ali during his years of vilification and exile from the ring, Leigh Montville notes that Ali “stumbled into his situation” by saying that he “didn’t want to go to war because of his religion.” Then, amazingly, he “put one foot in front of another and came out the other end a hero.”
In April 1960, at age 18, the young man then known as Cassius Clay —who would soon win a gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Rome—registered for the draft in his hometown of Louisville, Ky., as the law required; when, later, he flunked the Army qualifying exam, he was classified 1-Y, signifying that, except in emergencies, he was unfit for service. He quipped, “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest.” In 1964, he used his bedazzling speed and artful technique to grab the heavyweight crown from the seemingly indomitable Sonny Liston. Soon after, he announced that he had become a member of the Nation of Islam. He changed his name first to Cassius X, then to Muhammad Ali.
All seemed to be going well for the new champ. Then, in February 1966, as he was savoring his success and appraising future opponents—he had defended his title twice by then—a strange thing happened: Needing more bodies for the ever-escalating war in Vietnam, the Army lowered its standards, and suddenly Ali was reclassified I-A by his Louisville draft board.
“Sting Like a Bee” begins with reporter and Ali confidant Bob Halloran personally delivering the news of the draft board’s decision to Ali in his home in Miami. Until then, the only war that Ali had been mulling over was the stylized warfare of the boxing ring. On hearing that he was headed for the front of the induction line, Ali complained immediately, and volubly. He told the reporters who had gathered outside his home, referring to his hefty tax contribution to the federal budget: “Why be anxious to take me—a man who pays the salary of at least 200,000 men a year?” The next day, a reporter from the Chicago Daily News phoned, and Ali sputtered the sentence that would hound him like Joe Frazier : “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.”
No quarrel? By then, thousands of American soldiers had been killed by the Viet Cong, leaving behind grieving wives, parents and neighbors. Mr. Montville, observing that Ali’s initial “rush of self-indulgent emotion” had already created a backlash, notes that “the mention of the Viet Cong, . . . repeated on the wire services to newspapers across the country, brought a focus to that agitation, put all the anger into a convenient package.”
On April 28, 1967, Ali showed up in Houston for the rites of induction. Three times he was asked to step forward, and three times he refused. He was eventually arrested, found guilty of draft evasion, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. Almost immediately his license to box was revoked. He ended up being banished from the ring from March 1967 to October 1970.
Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, would often shake his head and sigh that “Muhammad was robbed of his prime years as a boxer.” While “Sting Like a Bee” moves deftly in and out of the ring, relatively few of its pages are spent analyzing Ali’s boxing acumen. Even so, it is clear from Mr. Montville’s account that there was no heavyweight before or since with Ali’s talent and skill—even if he didn’t fight during his peak years.
Ali’s motivations for refusing to follow Joe Louis’s lead during World War II—don the uniform, spend a year entertaining the troops—were diverse, evolving and sometimes hard to gauge. When he came to trial, Ali pleaded not guilty, maintaining that he was a conscientious objector and a minister of the Nation of Islam. At the time, detractors associated CO status with pacifism. And what kind of pacifist could a heavyweight champion be?
Ali contended that he was not against military service per se but could take up arms only in a war sanctioned by Allah—and Vietnam was not such a war. There were people close to Ali who believed that one of the reasons he did not step forward was his fear of taking a bullet from some racist drill sergeant. Mr. Montville unearths testimony from Ali’s high-school teachers and other Louisville acquaintances who agree that, whatever one might think of Ali and his decision to refuse induction, there was no reason to question his sincerity.
Mr. Montville, unlike other Ali chroniclers, devotes the bulk of his narrative to a round-by-round commentary on Ali’s battles in court. Ali and his lawyers appealed his verdict more than once, hitting the canvas each time—until the Supreme Court, in June 1971, overturned his conviction on what amounted to a technicality.
During his boxing exile, Ali earned his daily bread on the college lecture circuit. Students rallied to Ali’s antiwar sentiments but were chagrined to hear him toe the Nation of Islam line as a staunch segregationist. Ever blithe about politics, Ali told an audience in 1968 that, as Mr. Montville puts it, “if he did vote in the November election he would vote for George Wallace. ” Nor was the man whom Elvis Presley christened the “People’s Champ” politically correct on the issue of women’s equality. It was not just a matter of Ali being a womanizer, although that he certainly was. He was an ardent believer in patriarchy, again following the Nation of Islam’s teachings. “Allah,” he said, “made men to look down on women and women to look up to men.” Or as Mr. Montville summarizes Ali’s view: “Women should be loved, but they never should be treated as equals.”
As the Vietnam War ground on and became less popular, the antipathy toward Ali became more muted. By 1971 he was an icon with African-Americans, if not for his stance on the war then for his ways of reminding everyone that black is beautiful and that his brothers and sisters need not be defined by the traditional establishment. In the opening frames of his study, Mr. Montville describes the early Ali as “part boob, part rube, part precocious genius.” He was all of that but also a kind of trickster who loved people and, in his brash and uplifting style, changed lives. Evander Holyfield, who would also become a heavyweight champion, recalled in an interview: “When I was a kid everyone was always telling me you ain’t going to be nothing, and then one night I saw Ali on television. He was saying that he was the Greatest and we could be too.” Ali had a similar impact on a 13-year-old Mike Tyson when Ali paid a visit to the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, N.Y., where Tyson was being held for one of his many arrests.
Serious boxers are always taught the supreme importance of giving their opponents certain angles and denying them others. Somehow Mr. Montville has managed, in a sympathetic but not hagiographic fashion, to find a fresh angle on the Greatest—by showing him embattled, as one might expect, and yet outside the ring.
—Mr. Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
Appeared in the May 27, 2017, Wall Street Journal print edition.
Skeptics questioned Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve: What kind of pacifist could a heavyweight champion be?
Gordon Marino reviews ‘Sting Like a Bee’ by Leigh Montville.
Gordon Marino
Updated May 26, 2017
When he died in 2016, at the age of 74, Muhammad Ali was one of the most beloved people on the planet. But there was a time when he was reviled as a slacker, a draft dodger. In “Sting Like a Bee,” an absorbing portrait of Ali during his years of vilification and exile from the ring, Leigh Montville notes that Ali “stumbled into his situation” by saying that he “didn’t want to go to war because of his religion.” Then, amazingly, he “put one foot in front of another and came out the other end a hero.”
In April 1960, at age 18, the young man then known as Cassius Clay —who would soon win a gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Rome—registered for the draft in his hometown of Louisville, Ky., as the law required; when, later, he flunked the Army qualifying exam, he was classified 1-Y, signifying that, except in emergencies, he was unfit for service. He quipped, “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest.” In 1964, he used his bedazzling speed and artful technique to grab the heavyweight crown from the seemingly indomitable Sonny Liston. Soon after, he announced that he had become a member of the Nation of Islam. He changed his name first to Cassius X, then to Muhammad Ali.
All seemed to be going well for the new champ. Then, in February 1966, as he was savoring his success and appraising future opponents—he had defended his title twice by then—a strange thing happened: Needing more bodies for the ever-escalating war in Vietnam, the Army lowered its standards, and suddenly Ali was reclassified I-A by his Louisville draft board.
“Sting Like a Bee” begins with reporter and Ali confidant Bob Halloran personally delivering the news of the draft board’s decision to Ali in his home in Miami. Until then, the only war that Ali had been mulling over was the stylized warfare of the boxing ring. On hearing that he was headed for the front of the induction line, Ali complained immediately, and volubly. He told the reporters who had gathered outside his home, referring to his hefty tax contribution to the federal budget: “Why be anxious to take me—a man who pays the salary of at least 200,000 men a year?” The next day, a reporter from the Chicago Daily News phoned, and Ali sputtered the sentence that would hound him like Joe Frazier : “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.”
No quarrel? By then, thousands of American soldiers had been killed by the Viet Cong, leaving behind grieving wives, parents and neighbors. Mr. Montville, observing that Ali’s initial “rush of self-indulgent emotion” had already created a backlash, notes that “the mention of the Viet Cong, . . . repeated on the wire services to newspapers across the country, brought a focus to that agitation, put all the anger into a convenient package.”
On April 28, 1967, Ali showed up in Houston for the rites of induction. Three times he was asked to step forward, and three times he refused. He was eventually arrested, found guilty of draft evasion, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. Almost immediately his license to box was revoked. He ended up being banished from the ring from March 1967 to October 1970.
Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, would often shake his head and sigh that “Muhammad was robbed of his prime years as a boxer.” While “Sting Like a Bee” moves deftly in and out of the ring, relatively few of its pages are spent analyzing Ali’s boxing acumen. Even so, it is clear from Mr. Montville’s account that there was no heavyweight before or since with Ali’s talent and skill—even if he didn’t fight during his peak years.
Ali’s motivations for refusing to follow Joe Louis’s lead during World War II—don the uniform, spend a year entertaining the troops—were diverse, evolving and sometimes hard to gauge. When he came to trial, Ali pleaded not guilty, maintaining that he was a conscientious objector and a minister of the Nation of Islam. At the time, detractors associated CO status with pacifism. And what kind of pacifist could a heavyweight champion be?
Ali contended that he was not against military service per se but could take up arms only in a war sanctioned by Allah—and Vietnam was not such a war. There were people close to Ali who believed that one of the reasons he did not step forward was his fear of taking a bullet from some racist drill sergeant. Mr. Montville unearths testimony from Ali’s high-school teachers and other Louisville acquaintances who agree that, whatever one might think of Ali and his decision to refuse induction, there was no reason to question his sincerity.
Mr. Montville, unlike other Ali chroniclers, devotes the bulk of his narrative to a round-by-round commentary on Ali’s battles in court. Ali and his lawyers appealed his verdict more than once, hitting the canvas each time—until the Supreme Court, in June 1971, overturned his conviction on what amounted to a technicality.
During his boxing exile, Ali earned his daily bread on the college lecture circuit. Students rallied to Ali’s antiwar sentiments but were chagrined to hear him toe the Nation of Islam line as a staunch segregationist. Ever blithe about politics, Ali told an audience in 1968 that, as Mr. Montville puts it, “if he did vote in the November election he would vote for George Wallace. ” Nor was the man whom Elvis Presley christened the “People’s Champ” politically correct on the issue of women’s equality. It was not just a matter of Ali being a womanizer, although that he certainly was. He was an ardent believer in patriarchy, again following the Nation of Islam’s teachings. “Allah,” he said, “made men to look down on women and women to look up to men.” Or as Mr. Montville summarizes Ali’s view: “Women should be loved, but they never should be treated as equals.”
As the Vietnam War ground on and became less popular, the antipathy toward Ali became more muted. By 1971 he was an icon with African-Americans, if not for his stance on the war then for his ways of reminding everyone that black is beautiful and that his brothers and sisters need not be defined by the traditional establishment. In the opening frames of his study, Mr. Montville describes the early Ali as “part boob, part rube, part precocious genius.” He was all of that but also a kind of trickster who loved people and, in his brash and uplifting style, changed lives. Evander Holyfield, who would also become a heavyweight champion, recalled in an interview: “When I was a kid everyone was always telling me you ain’t going to be nothing, and then one night I saw Ali on television. He was saying that he was the Greatest and we could be too.” Ali had a similar impact on a 13-year-old Mike Tyson when Ali paid a visit to the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, N.Y., where Tyson was being held for one of his many arrests.
Serious boxers are always taught the supreme importance of giving their opponents certain angles and denying them others. Somehow Mr. Montville has managed, in a sympathetic but not hagiographic fashion, to find a fresh angle on the Greatest—by showing him embattled, as one might expect, and yet outside the ring.
—Mr. Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
Appeared in the May 27, 2017, Wall Street Journal print edition.