Many of the wealthy white people helping black causes were motivated by the desire to keep the black community from rising in protest,

 

Signs of inequality were everywhere. The homicide rate for black people in Louisville was about 56 per thousand in the mid-1950s, compared to 3 per thousand for white people. The death rate from natural causes was 50% higher for blacks than whites.

 

But every son comes to believe he can be more than his father, that he is not beholden to his position in the line of his ancestors, not tethered to that soul-crushing concatenation formed in a past beyond his control.

 

Destiny is a function of chance and choice.

 

Boxing suggested a path to prosperity that did not require reading and writing. It offered respect, visibility, power, and money.

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As Jack Johnson and other black fighters emerged, they not only posed a threat to white champions; they posed a threat to firmly held attitudes about race. “We are in the midst of a growing menace,” Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, wrote in 1895. “The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the fields of the fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.”

 

In a boxing ring, during a regulated match, a black man in 1910 could pound in the skull of a white man and not go to jail or get lynched for it. In a boxing ring, one man could kill another and not face a murder charge.

 

Louisville’s early efforts at integration were not perfect. While white parents didn’t seem to mind sending their children to school with black children, they didn’t want their children educated by black teachers.

 

Scientists believe dyslexia is relatively common among entrepreneurs and other leaders – especially people who show a knack for creative thinking, for veering from the mainstream, and for seeing the big picture.

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Between November 1954, when he had his first amateur bout, and the summer of 1960, from the ages 12 to 18, Cassius Clay would fight 106 times as an amateur, according to the records kept by Joe Martin. Some researchers have disputed those numbers. Years later, in his autobiography, the boxer said he fought 167 amateur bouts. The best estimate compiled in recent years found the boxer had a record of 82-8, with 25 knockouts, although it’s likely that at least a few bouts were missed in that count.

 

He wanted to fight. He wanted to be great. He wanted to be famous and wealthy. He wanted to have a good time. That was all.

 

Cassius made his brother a promise: whatever came along – money, women, travel, glory – they would share every bit of it, forever, together.

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The Rome Olympics. The first doping scandal, the first commercial television broadcast, and the first runner paid to wear a brand of track shoes.

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Billy Reynolds had the inside track, and he quickly offered Ali a 10 year contract containing terms far more generous than those usually extended to young fighters. The deal offered Ali 50% of all the money generated by his fights. His managers would cover all of his training and travel costs. Reynolds also said he would deposit 25% of Ali’s earnings in a trust that Ali would gain access to when he reached age 35 or retired from boxing. 

 

Faversham’s contract was for 6 years, with an option for Ali to break the deal after 3. The boxer would receive a $10,000 signing bonus, $4,800 a year guaranteed income for the first two years, and $6,000 a year guaranteed income for the remaining 4, in addition to the same promise to pay the boxer 50% of the money generated from his activities in and out of the ring. Ali and the syndicate would split gross earnings evenly, and the group would underwrite all of Ali’s training expenses, including travel, housing, and food. 15% of Ali’s money would go into a trust fund until he turned 35 or retired from boxing. And to reduce the boxer’s tax liability, Ali was made an employee of the syndicate and paid a monthly salary and a year-end bonus based on his earnings. Ali and his father would both have a say in choosing the boxer’s next trainer.

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Each member of the Louisville Sponsoring Group invested $2,800, tax deductible. Although they hoped to see a return, they weren’t counting on it. In fact, the group’s treasurer warned members that in the first 6 months of 1961, he expected expenses of $9,015.86 with little or no income.

 

Muhammad Ali was the recipient of the greatest contract ever extended to a boxer with no professional experience.

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No athlete in American history had ever been so conscious of the power of brand building as this young boxer, and Ali was doing it without the help of one of those Madison Avenue agencies or even a promoter or full-time business manager. The image he fashioned was both romantic and thrilling: a young man who believed that if he worked hard enough he could become the world’s heavyweight champ, that he could have it all, the wealth, the fame, the women, the cars – all without compromise, without getting bloodied, without getting hurt.

 

This was his finest performance in salesmanship to date. In 38 years of boxing at Madison Square Garden, there had never been a sellout in advance of a fight, and there had been no sellouts of any kind for 6 years… until Clay Vs Jones, March 13, 1963. The top ticket price for the event was $12, but scalpers outside the Garden were getting $100 and more. Almost 19,000 fans crowded the arena, thousands more were turned away, and 150,000 watched on TV in 33 cities.

 

Two of his strongest impulses conflicted: his lust for fame and his itch to rebel.

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(Ali vs Liston) Members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group secured a good deal for Ali, one that promised him 22.5% of ticket sales and concession revenues, as well as 22.5% of the lucrative closed-circuit TV receipts. Reporters covering the announcement said Ali would probably gross nearly $1 million.

 

(Ali vs Liston) Ringside seats for the fight were $250 (about $1900 in 2016 dollars), the highest price ever seen in boxing and a sign of the great optimism of William B. MacDonald, the former bus driver turned millionaire who had invested $800,000 to bring the bout to Miami.

 

Ali was the greatest self-promoter the pugilistic world had ever seen.

 

Ambiguity was not the thing that sports fans craved.

 

Angry fighters don’t think clearly. They don’t stick to their plans. They get frustrated, sloppy.

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Back in Kentucky, more than 10,000 people crowded Louisville’s Freedom Hall to watch the broadcast on closed-circuit TV. Around the country, about 700,00 fans paid to watch the broadcast in movie theatres, the biggest closed-circuit audience ever assembled for a fight. Fans paid an average price of $6.42 per ticket, bringing the total revenue to $4.5 million. In 1964, by way of comparison, television rights for all twenty Major League Baseball teams cost $13.6 million. In other words, the broadcast of a single boxing match generated about a third as much revenue as a whole season of baseball, in part because closed-circuit viewing was new, but also because Ali had singlehandedly captured so much attention. The fight was shown in Europe, with an audience estimated at 165 million people, thanks to a deal struck with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that permitted a videotaped broadcast to be bounced by satellite from a NASA station in Maine to a receiving station in Europe, and then transmitted across the continent. So while the arena in Miami was half empty, Ali vs Liston would be seen and heard by one of the largest audiences ever gathered for a single event, a sign of a new era for television and sports and an unparalleled opportunity for a young man starved for fame.

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There were no black governors, no black U.S. senators, no black Supreme Court justices in 1964. Of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 5 were black.

 

Decades later, Ali would say that turning his back on Malcolm was one of the biggest regrets of his life. But at the time, he showed no remorse.

 

Ali was making good money on his fights. The Patterson bout 2 months earlier had grossed $3.5 million, with about $750,000 of that going to Ali and the Louisville Sponsorship Group. He was by far the biggest and most well-paid draw in all of sports. Now, in pronouncing the creation of his own promotional company, Ali was asserting unprecedented autonomy for a black athlete. He was also diverting the biggest stream of income so that it would no longer flow to the Louisville Sponsoring Group.

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The so-called Muslim crusade to control the fight business was the brainchild of a white Jew, the New York lawyer Bob Arum.

 

Herbert Muhammad was already getting about a third of Ali’s boxing income – by some accounts it was 40%. Now, he would also receive $45,000 a year in salary plus a percentage of revenues from Main Bout. He was making so much money that members of his own family were growing jealous, according to an FBI memo. And Herbert’s family didn’t know that Herbert was also taking money “under the table,” according to the FBI, cutting partners in on some of the Main Bout profits in exchange for cash up front.

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Arum put together a group of 5 officers and stockholders that included himself; another white man named Mike Malitz, who controlled most of the nation’s closed-circuit TV business; football star Jim Brown; Herbert Muhammad; and John Ali. Muhammad Ali had no ownership stake in the company and no seat on the board of directors. In an interview years later, John Ali said that he and Herbert profited personally from Main Bout. Muhammad Ali was paid a percentage of revenues from each fight, and the Louisville Sponsorship Group was compensated until its contract with Ali expired. But none of the money flowed to the Nation of Islam.

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The war in Vietnam had escalated. From 1964 to 1965, the number of American soldiers dying in Vietnam increased ninefold, from about 200 to 1900. In 1966 the death toll would triple to more than 6000.

 

In his refusal to accept the Viet Cong as his enemy, Ali showed how his views were coalescing. His enemy was not to be found in Southeast Asia, he said; his enemy was American racism.

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Ali was making a stand for civil disobedience, for freedom.

 

The Mildenberger bout was Ali’s last under the Louisville Sponsoring Group. On October 22, as the business relationship ended, members of the group received a summary of their investment in the boxer. It showed total income of $2.37 million, with $1.36 million of that, or about 58% having gone to Ali. After expenses, the group’s net profit amounted to about $200,00, to be divided 13 ways. Ali had paid back his loans to the group, he had paid his taxes, and he had about $75,000 in a trust fund. Though the boxer had not taken good care of his money, and though the members of the Louisville Group had not seen much of a return on their investment, the businessman felt satisfied. 

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From 1964 to 1966, Ali had earned more than $1.2 million. Baseball’s highest paid player during those same years was Willie Mays, who had earned only about $100,000 a year. Even adjusting for inflation, Ali was almost certainly the best-paid athlete in American history up to that point, and by a wide margin. 

 

Boxers are professional rebels. They are permitted to engage in violence that others are not. They are permitted to be uncivil. Ali merely extended it beyond the ring. He wanted to make everything he said and everything he did a protest. He declared every chance he got that he was not going to be tamed.

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It was his response, not his victimhood, that made him a hero. It was his refusal to back down as the government and boxing officials threatened to punish him.

 

Ali’s stand against Vietnam made him a symbol of protest against a war in which black men were dying at a wildly disproportionate rate. Black men accounted for 22% of all battlefield deaths when the black population in America was only 10%. 

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Why was America spending money and tossing away lives in the name of freedom in a distant land while resisting the cause of freedom at home? Why, yet again, did the interests of black Americans seem to diverge from the interests of the nation as a whole? Ali raised these troubling questions as opposition to the war rapidly spread.

 

Ali claimed he was a Muslim minister, saying he spent 90% of his time preaching and 10% boxing. But Ali never held the formal title of minister or any other title within the Nation of Islam.

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The average salary for a professional football player in 1967 was about $25,000. Professional basketball players made an average of about $20,000 a year. With closed-circuit deals, some of the athletes would double or triple their annual income, and they would continue to make money from their franchises long after their athletic careers ended.

 

Ali vs Quarry. A contract that gave Ali $200,000 guaranteed against a 42.5% share of the revenues. Quarry would get £150,000, against 22.5% of revenues. One month after Atlanta granted Ali a license to fight, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the state’s athletic commission had violated Ali’s rights by barring him from his profession. The NAACP legal Defense Fund had filed the suit on behalf of Ali.

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Ali posted weak numbers in part because he used his jab as a defensive weapon, throwing it to keep his opponents away, which meant he didn’t connect as often as other fighters. At the same time, beginning with his return to boxing in 1970, he began to pay a price for his relatively weak grasp of boxing fundamentals. He had never learned to properly block or duck punches because he hadn’t needed to. As a result, as he slowed, he absorbed more punishment, curling up against the ropes and trying to absorb or deflect their blows instead of dodging them. Ali let some of the strongest men in the world punch, punch, punch, until their arms grew weary and their breath grew short – and then he would fight back. That strategy would come to be called the “rope-a-dope,” a name that suggested Ali’s opponents were falling into a clever trap. 

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Ali vs Frazier. Initially, the fight promoters offered each of the boxers $1.25 million against 35% of the gross income, but Durham and Herbert Muhammad held out for a flat $2.5 million each, or about $15 million in today’s dollars. It was by far the largest sum ever guaranteed a boxer for one fight, and by taking a flat fee, the men didn’t have to worry about whether the fight’s promoters supplied an honest accounting of total revenues for the event. Even so, it was probably a miscalculation. Had they taken the first offer - $1.25 million per fighter against 35% of the gross – each fighter probably would have earned at least $3.5 million.

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Ali vs Frazier. Tickets for the fight, to be held March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden, sold out immediately. Ringside seats were priced at $150 each, but they were soon being flipped on the secondary market for $700 and more. No one in the business could recall such buildup for a fight. The Hollywood talent agent who promoted the event, Jerry Perenchio, said he expected 300 million people in 26 countries to see the bout on closed-circuit TV. At the conclusion of the event, Perenchio said, in a comment that struck some as absurd at the time, he intended to take the fighter’s shoes, trunks, robes, and gloves and auction them off to the highest bidder.

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About 300 million people across the globe, not 10 million, would watch him fight Joe Frazier on March 8, 1971. If it wasn’t the greatest event in history, it was certainly one of the most widely viewed.

 

Hooks do more damage to brain tissue than jabs because the neck helps absorb the impact of a punch that comes straight toward the face. When a punch comes from the side, the head rotates and rocks, the neck offers less help in blunting the force, and the whole brain shakes like Jell-O.

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The news arrived fifty months after Ali’s initial refusal to accept induction. In that time, Ali had spent about $250,000 in legal fees, a bill that would have been higher if he had paid in full and if the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union had not donated their services.

 

The thrill for Don King was that he had spotted vulnerability in Ali. Greed is a kind of fear, and fear is a kind of weakness, and King was a master at exploiting weakness.

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During one 18 month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2500 bombings in the United States, an average of nearly 5 a day.

 

Boxing isn’t merely a clash of men; it’s also a clash of styles.

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Ali had always taunted opponents. Interestingly, he had usually harassed his black opponents more than the white ones. With white opponents, he tended to joke. Sometimes he even praised them for their intelligence and toughness. Perhaps with the white opponents he didn’t feel he needed to work as hard to sell tickets. But with his black opponents, he flashed real anger. He tried to dehumanize many of the black men he fought, just as white supremacists had long tried to do. Ali had branded Sonny Liston an ugly bear, Floyd Patterson a rabbit, and Ernie Terrell an Uncle Tom. Some said he did it out of insecurity – because he came from a relatively stable family and a relatively comfortable neighbourhood, unlike some of his opponents who had risen from more humble circumstances. Such behaviour was especially perverse given Ali’s longtime dedication to the uplift of his race.

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He loved being loved more than he loved being admired.

 

He was also undercutting what he claimed to be one of his primary goals; the uplift of black people. By slurring Joe Frazier as a Tom or George Foeman as a white, flag-waving Christian motherfucker (or whatever expletive the New York Times deleted from his quite), Ali was redefining race as a state of mind. He was also denigrating strong, honourable, hard-working black men with whom he should have stood shoulder to shoulder as symbols of pride, men worthy of admiration from black and white Americans.

 

For an athlete, achieving greatness is the second hardest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is to quit.

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There’s an old unwritten rule on boxing that a challenger has to take a title away from the champion, winning by a knockout or at least by overwhelming violence; the judges shouldn’t do the job for him. But then why have judges at all?

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Ali vs Shavers. About 70 million people watching the fight live on NBC-TV. An estimated 54.4% of all televisions in America were tuned to the fight.

 

Ali had earned about $50 million over the course of his career – including $46.4 million over the past 8 years – but still could not afford “to live in the style to which he and his friends have become accustomed.”

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Boxing had 2 self-appointed sanctioning organizations: the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council, neither of which had any legal authority but both of which wielded power. It was a situation that led to confusion, corruption, and, sometimes, the exploitation of athletes.

 

In 1979, a man calling himself Harold Smith (real name : Eugene Ross Fields) set out to become the new Don King. He persuaded Ali to lend his name to an operation called Muhammad Ali Amateur Sports, which sponsored track meets and boxing tournaments, as well as Muhammad Ali Professional Sports, which promoted professional boxing matches. The FBI eventually discovered that Smith had embezzled more than $21 million, with the help of insiders, from Wells Fargo Bank in California, making it one of the largest cases of bank fraud in American history at the time.

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