[50 years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for their third and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ll step into the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significant sports story, leading up to a tribute to one of our best sports scholars!]
On what led up
to an inspiring 1967 moment, what it changed, and why it still matters.
From the first
moments of his professional
boxing career in 1960 (when he was only 18 years old), Cassius Clay was
known as much for his brash and bold attitude and statements as for his
dominating performances in the ring. Apparently inspired in part by a
fortuitous conversation with professional
wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner, Clay consistently used press conferences
and interviews to belittle his opponents and boast of his own prowess. While
his 1964 name change to Muhammad Ali was driven by his personal spiritual
conversion to Islam and evolving relationship with Elijah Muhammad and the
Nation of Islam, Ali nonetheless used that occasion to make similarly striking
statements about American history and society, calling Cassius
Clay “my slave name” and arguing that “I am America. I am the part you
won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not
yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” Given these
statements, Ali’s
announcement two years later, when notified that he was now eligible for
the draft (after having previously failed the army’s qualifying test), that he
would pursue conscientious objector status and refuse to be drafted, and his
remark that “Man, I ain’t
got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” represented one more step in this
outspoken life and career.
Yet while that
1966 announcement, and Ali’s subsequent April 1967 draft
resistance and arrest in Houston, were thus not at all unprecedented, they
nonetheless produced significant, lasting shifts in his career and image. On
the one hand, Ali’s courageous stance cost him four years in the prime of his
career and athletic prowess—his boxing licenses were stripped by every state
after the arrest, and Ali was unable to obtain a license or box professionally
again until the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Clay v. United
States upheld his conscientitous objector status and overturned his
conviction. Given the relatively short window in which a professional boxer can
generally stay viable in the sport, it’s difficult to overstate the value
(financial and otherwise) of this lost time in Ali’s career. At the same time,
Ali shifted much more overtly and fully into the status of an activist and
public intellectual over those years, giving speeches across the country along
the lines of his
1967 “Black is Best” speech at Howard University (a speech given in support
of the university’s Black Power movement, an alliance that Ali not
coincidentally formed during this same period of his career). I don’t mean to
suggest that such speeches or events in any direct way compensated Ali for his
lost time or success as a boxer; instead, it’s more accurate to say that Ali’s
public image and role shifted over these years, and that shift would endure
long after both his 1971 reinstatement and 1981 retirement from the
sport.
Ali’s enduring
role as a late 20th and early 21st century public
activist thus provides one important reason to remember the moment when he
began to make that shift in earnest. But I would also argue that Ali’s 1967
civil disobedience offered a profoundly distinct model of athlete activism than
any that had come before. There had of course been athletes whose very identity
and public image represented a challenge to national and white supremacist narratives,
such as Ali’s boxing
predecessor Jack Johnson. And there had been those like Jackie
Robinson whose groundbreaking sports careers themselves became a form of
activism against the racist status quo. But to my knowledge, Ali’s draft
resistance and his statements in support of that position took athlete activism
in America to a new, much more publicly engaged level, one far beyond any
sports-specific context. A more public form of athlete activism that quite
possibly influenced the following year’s Olympic
Black Power salute in Mexico City, and that certainly is worth linking to a
contemporary example such as Colin
Kaepernick’s ongoing protests and public activisms (and the shocking level
of vitriol Kaepernick has received in response, from within
the NFL just as much as outside of it). In all those ways, Muhammad Ali’s
1967 act of civil disobedience was a watershed moment in American society as
well as its sports culture.
Next
Thrilla talk tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Contexts for this fight or other boxing histories you’d
highlight?
