Ali: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Slave names changed on a whim or on an auction block. Often, when a slave was freed or when he escaped from bondage, he celebrated by choosing his own, new name. “For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world,” Ralph Ellison wrote.

The message was clear: This is what the white man will do. This is what can happen to an innocent black person, an innocent child, whose only crime is the color of his skin. America, according to Cash Clay, wasn’t fair and never would be.

Destiny is a function of chance and choice. Chance delivered young Cassius Clay to Joe Martin’s boxing gym, but choice would bring him back.

“I grew to love the Jack Johnson image,” Cassius Clay would say. “I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like.”

In addition to playing for laughs, he learned to listen well, to read people’s moods, to charm, to defuse difficult situations with humor, and, when all else failed, to fight. Scientists don’t fully understand the reasons, but dyslexia can be an advantage for some people. Studies show that learning to read rewires the brain. Reading teaches us to block out the world, and in the process certain kinds of visual processing skills get lost. That may be why some dyslexics exhibit exceptional visual talents, helping them to understand shapes and movements in faster and more nuanced ways than others. It may be why Cassius Clay had a gift for anticipating a punch and backing or sliding out of its way. His brain didn’t focus well on words and sentences that needed to be processed in precise order, but he was extraordinarily good at the opposite: being alert to all things at once and spotting things that looked odd or out of place.

They assimilate patterns and see opportunities others can’t detect. 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.

Cassius Clay would fall under the spell of two great influences in his life: The first was boxing, which was violent at its core but offered the promise of fame, riches, and glory. The second was the philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, who said a black man should take pride in his color, and that black men would soon rule the world, that they would use violence if necessary to come to power, and that there was nothing white America could do about it.