Boxing is not my favorite sport, to say the least. But in the early 1960s
June and I followed with considerable interest the up-and-coming career of a flashy
Louisville boxer.
That boxer was Cassius Clay, who won the heavyweight championship of the
world 50 years ago, in February 1964. Partly in recognition of Black History
Month, this column is about Clay, who later became known around the world as
Muhammad Ali.
Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville,
Kentucky. His parents were members of the Southern black middle class,
certainly not wealthy but better off than most African-Americans of that time.
Still, young Cassius grew up feeling the discomforts of racism and
prejudice. According to Anthony O. Edmonds’s biography Muhammad Ali (2006), “the defining moment in his racial education”
came when his father told him about the murder of Emmett Till in August 1954.
Even though I am 3½ years older than Ali, I don’t even remember hearing
about that tragic event at the time. But, of course, I was not a black boy in
the South.
It was that same year, when Cassius was 12, that he first began training
to be a boxer. His amateur career, especially at the beginning, was not an
overwhelming success. Still, he won the national Golden Gloves titles in both1959
and 1960.
Then in September 1960, while still only 18, Clay won the light-heavyweight
gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Rome. That was, no doubt, when June and I
began to hear about him, for we had moved to Kentucky the year before and were
regular readers of his hometown newspaper, The
Courier-Journal.
In spite of the latent racism in and around Louisville, Clay enjoyed considerable
acclaim when he came back from Rome with a gold medal. Later that year he turned
pro and began a stellar career as a professional boxer.
He later claimed that he started boxing because “it was the fastest way
for a young black man to achieve social and economic mobility” (Edmonds, p.
17). Especially up to and including the time of his stunning defeat of world
heavyweight champion Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, more and more accolades
were heaped upon him.
By then he had, indeed, achieved celebrity status and considerable
wealth. But public opinion quickly began to change when Clay changed his
religion. Just the day after the Liston fight, Clay announced that he had given
up Christianity and had become a member of the Nation of Islam.
Then on March 6, 1964, he announced that he had given up his “slave name”
and that his new name was Muhammad Ali. His name change is a bit ironic in
light of the fact that Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903), the noted Kentucky planter
and politician for whom he was named, was an ardent abolitionist.
There is much more to Ali’s story: his conviction in 1968 for refusing
induction into the Army, his contracting Parkinson’s disease in 1984, his
lighting the torch for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, his being awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 2005 and the $80 million Muhammad Ali Center opening in
Louisville that same year.
Sadly, Ali, who now lives in Arizona, is said to be in
“terminal decline” from his Parkinson’s. But the “Louisville Lip” was a colorful
man I remember well from more than fifty years ago. Some of what he said is
worth remembering, too.
Here is one of his notable quotes: “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room
here on earth.”
Good words, indeed.
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