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Ali’s attention-getting ploys may have been compensation for his deficiencies with the written word. 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. A raised eyebrow, a shift in the angle of a fighter’s shoulder, a twitch of a
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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.
Drew Brown Jr., also known as Bundini Brown (or Bodini, as Clay and others pronounced it), a ghetto poet and shaman who was sent to Clay by Sugar Ray Robinson or by a member of Robinson’s entourage.
In June 1963, Medgar Evers, the field director for the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home. In Alabama, federal troops forced Governor George Wallace to admit black students at the University of Alabama. In the North, black men and women marched to protest police brutality, unfair wages, and discrimination in housing. Four years after closing its schools to avoid integration,
On August 10, Clay attended a rally in Harlem in which Malcolm X explained why he had no plans to join the upcoming March on Washington. Eighteen days later, Martin Luther King Jr. and a crowd of more than 200,000 people came together in Washington in what would prove to be one of the most powerful moments of the civil rights movement. “I have a dream,” King chanted, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons
of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
“For when Cassius Clay declares, ‘I am the greatest,’ he is not just thinking about boxing,” wrote Alex Poinsett in Ebony. “Lingering behind those words is the bitter sarcasm of Dick Gregory, the shrill defiance of Miles Davis, the utter contempt of Malcolm X. He smiles easily, but, behind it all . . . is a blast furnace of race pride.”
White Cliffs, a country club near Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Ali was broke. He was behind on alimony and facing criminal charges for failing to pay his ex-wife. He was squabbling with his parents. His own lawyer was suing him, claiming that Ali owed $284,615 in legal fees for the work that had gone into keeping him out of jail on draft-dodging charges.
In his book Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah Muhammad wrote that sport and play caused “delinquency, murder, theft and other forms of wicked and immoral crimes.”
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a place where well into the twentieth century the vast majority of people still lived as hunters and gatherers in rural villages without electricity or running water and still communicated not by telephone or television or radio but by a network of jungle-covered rivers; a place where people who opposed or disappointed the nation’s leader were routinely executed.
Donna Summer recorded the disco hit “Love to Love You Baby,”
