A year later, Ali’s case made it to the Supreme Court. You won’t even stand up for me in America, for my religious beliefs.”Īli returned to the ring in 1970, knocking out Jerry Quarry in Atlanta in the third round. “You talkin’ about me and about some draft, and all of you white boys are breaking your necks to get to Switzerland and Canada and London. To one young male student who called him a draft dodger: Muhammad Ali (L) leaving Rasheed Hotel with Iraqi officials. The military reported his IQ as 73, yet on college campuses he debated students with the same wit and quickness he unleashed on other fighters. “I broke my wife’s piggy bank to get gas money.”Īli took to the college circuit and said he was making $1,500 a speech. He talked about the money he was losing: “Ain’t nobody wanna see the world heavyweight champion drivin’ a Volkswagen,” he said. He continued to make his case to the media, humor intact.
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While his lawyers appealed, Ali was a free man. He was stripped of his title, banned from boxing for three years, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. No Viet Cong ever called me n-r.”Īli was arrested, and on June 20, 1967, he was tried and convicted of evading the draft. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. “Why should they ask me to go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Ali told reporters in his native Kentucky. He claimed conscientious-objector status on religious and racial grounds. In 1967, Ali refused to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.
“Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up,” he said. He was more plain-spoken in challenging white America to look at the black experience, especially as it related to his sport. “I’m pretty! I’m a bad man! I shook up the world!” Saddam Hussein AP Clay has been fighting a socio-religious battle with the Christian world.”Īli refused to be cowed. “Then he won the championship and became, in his own estimation, ‘The Greatest.’ After the fight, he acknowledged that he was a Black Muslim, converted by the arch-extremist Malcolm X, the man who crowed that President Kennedy’s assassination was ‘a case of the chickens coming home to roost’. “For a time, when he was confining himself to bad poetry, Cassius was a loudmouth but a likeable character who seemed to be harmless in or out of the ring,” Cope wrote. Cope’s refusal to call Ali by his new name was not unusual. The famous sportswriter Myron Cope wrote an editorial shortly after Ali’s conversion that reflects the hysteria this caused. He was 22 years old, the world heavyweight champion. 25, 1964, he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and joined the Nation of Islam. Shortly after demolishing champ Sonny Liston in an upset on Feb. he has attended meeting after meeting in Baghdad despite his frequent inability to speak clearly.”Īt that point, Ali was 48 years old and had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for six years.ĭecades before, Ali transcended boxing to become one of the most polarizing figures in America. “Surely the strangest hostage-release campaign of recent days has been the ‘goodwill’ tour of Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion. The Ring Magazine/Getty ImagesĮven The New York Times criticized Ali, suggesting that he was just another egomaniacal celebrity out of his depth. “These people traveling to Iraq are making a serious mistake.” Muhammad Ali trains in 1976. “I basically believe these people are playing into the propaganda game that Iraq is holding here,” said Joseph Wilson, then the top American diplomat in Baghdad. Of all the legendary wins in Muhammad Ali’s life, few are as little known as the one he pulled off exactly 25 years ago today: Defying the odds and the American government, Ali traveled to Iraq, where 15 Americans were being held hostage by Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Gulf War.Īs with much in Ali’s life, his mission was misconstrued and criticized.