Thomas Hauser - Muhammad Ali - A Tribute to the Greatest

Veterans who have fought our nation’s wars feel that any man unwilling to fight for his country is unworthy of making a profit or receiving public acclaim in it. Cassius Clay is a convicted draft dodger sentenced to a five-year prison term which he is not serving. What right has he to claim the privilege of appearing in a boxing match to be nationally televised? The Clay affair approaches a crisis in national indignation.

On 8 March 1971, Ali lost a hard-fought fifteen-round decision to Joe Frazier. Meanwhile, he remained free on bail while the United States Supreme Court considered the appeal of his criminal conviction. This was too much for Congressman George Andrews of Alabama, who spoke to his brethren and compared Ali to Lieutenant William Calley, who had been convicted of murder in the massacre of 22 South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai:

Last night, I was sickened and sad when I heard about that poor little fellow who went down to Fort Benning. He had barely graduated from high school. He volunteered and offered his life for his country. He was taught to kill. He was sent to Vietnam. And he wound up back at Fort Benning, where he was indicted and convicted for murder in the first degree for carrying out orders. I also thought about another young man about his age: one Cassius Clay, alias Muhammad Ali, who several years ago defied the United States government, thumbed his nose at the flag and is still walking the streets making millions of dollars fighting for pay, not for his country. That is an unequal distribution of justice.

On 28 June 1971, fifty months to the day after Ali had refused induction, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed his conviction. All criminal charges pending against him were dismissed. The next day, Congressman William Nichols of Alabama expressed his outrage:

The United States Supreme Court has given another black eye to the United States Armed Forces. The decision overturning the draft evasion conviction of Cassius Clay is a stinging rebuke to the 240,000 Americans still serving in Vietnam and the 50,000 Americans who lost their lives there. I wish the members of the Supreme Court would assist me when I try to explain to a father why his son must serve in Vietnam or when I attempt to console a widow or the parents of a young man who has died in a war that Cassius Clay was exempted from.

Not to be outdone, Congressman Joe Waggonner of Louisiana echoed his fellow lawmaker’s expression of contempt:

The United States Supreme Court has issued the edict that Cassius Clay does not have to be inducted because he does not believe in war. No draft-age young man believes in a war that he will have to fight, nor does any parent of a draft-age son believe in a war that their own flesh and blood will have to fight and possibly give his life in so doing. But our people have always heeded the call of their country when asked, not because they love war, but because their country has asked them to do so. And I feel strongly about this. If Cassius Clay does not have to be drafted because of questionable religious beliefs or punished for refusing induction simply because he is black or because he is a prizefighter – and I can see no other real justification for the Court’s action – then all other young men who wish it should also be allowed a draft exemption. Cassius Clay is a phoney. He knows it, the Supreme Court knows it and everyone else knows it.

Times change.

(1999)

As 1999 moves towards its long-awaited close, there have been numerous attempts to designate ‘The Athlete of the Century’. Whoever is accorded the honour will doubtless also be recognised as ‘Athlete of the Millennium’.

The consensus list for number one has boiled down to three finalists: Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. There’s no right or wrong answer; just points of view.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being better in a sport than Michael Jordan was in basketball. His exploits are still fresh in the mind, so suffice it to say that the Chicago Bulls won six world championships during his reign and Jordan was named the series’ Most Valuable Player on all six occasions. He led the NBA in scoring ten times, has the highest career scoring average in league history and was one of the best defensive players ever.

Babe Ruth had an unparalleled genius for the peculiarities of baseball. In 1919, the American League record for home runs in a season was 12. Ruth hit 29 homers that year and 54 the year after. In 1927, the year Ruth hit 60 home runs, no other team in the American League had as many. Indeed, in all of major league baseball, there were only 922 home runs hit that year. In other words, Babe Ruth hit 6.5 per cent of all the home runs hit in the entire season.

Ruth’s lifetime batting average was .342. Two-thirds of a century after his career ended, he stands second in RBIs, second in runs scored and second in home runs. And these marks were established despite the fact that Ruth was a pitcher during the first five years of his career. In 1916, at age 21, he pitched nine shutouts en route to a 23 and 12 record and led the league with an earned run average of 1.75. From 1915 to 1919, he won 94 games, lost only 46, and compiled an earned-run average of 2.28. In other words, if Mark McGwire pitched 29-2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series (which Ruth once did; a record that stood for 43 years), you’d have a phenomenon approaching The Babe. And one thing more. Ruth was a winner. He was with the Boston Red Sox for five full seasons, and they won the World Series in three of them. Then he was traded to the Yankees, who had never won a World Series, and the Yankee dynasty began.

As for Ali, a strong argument can be made that he was the greatest fighter of all time. His lifetime record of 56 wins and 5 losses has been matched by others. But no heavyweight ever had the inquisitors that Ali had – George Foreman, Sonny Liston twice, and Joe Frazier three times. Ali in his prime was the most beautiful fighting machine ever assembled. Pound for pound, Sugar Ray Robinson might have been better. But that’s like saying, if Jerry West had been six foot six, he would have been just as good as Jordan. You are what you are.

Ali fought the way Michael Jordan played basketball. Michael Jordan played basketball the way Ali fought. Unfortunately, Jordan didn’t play baseball the way Ruth did. But then again, I doubt that Ruth would have been much of a basketball player. However, The Babe was known to punch out people rather effectively as a young man.

Thus, looking at Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali from a purely athletic point of view, it’s Jordan (three points for first place), Ruth (two points for second place) and Ali (one point for third place) in that order.

But is pure athletic ability the standard? If pure athleticism is the only test, men like Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown and Carl Lewis should also be finalists in the competition for ‘Athlete of the Century’. The fact that they aren’t stands testament to the view that something more than achievement on the playing field must be measured; that social impact is also relevant. That’s a bit like saying maybe Ronald Reagan should be considered the greatest actor of the twentieth century because of his impact on society. But here goes.

Ruth, Ali and Jordan reflected the eras in which they were at their respective athletic peaks. Ruth personified ‘The Roaring Twenties’. Ali was at the heart of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. Michael Jordan speaks to ‘The Nineties’, with its booming stock market, heightened commercialism and athletes as computer-action-game heroes.

Jordan hasn’t changed society. Babe Ruth brought sports into the mainstream of American culture and earned adulation unmatched in his time. Nor was The Babe’s impact confined to the United States. During the Second World War, long after his playing days were over, Japanese soldiers sought to insult their American counterparts by shouting ‘to hell with Babe Ruth’ at Guadalcanal. Meanwhile, Ali (to use one of his favourite phrases) ‘shook up the world’ and served as an inspiration and beacon of hope, not just in the United States, but for oppressed people around the globe.