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By Root 611 0

elevate Ali into a heroic, defiant catalyst of the antiwar movement, a beacon of black independence. It’s a legacy that evolves from the intellectually loose sixties, from those who were in school then and now write romance history. The sad truth was that Ali was played like a harp by the Muslims, a daft cult with a long record of draft dodging from Elijah (who went to prison) on down. His posture was not about unjust war, it was mainly a stratagem by the Muslims to keep themselves on the revolutionary scoreboard, to flex their power and image. Everyone who knew anything about racial politics then knew the press exposure given them was extravagant. They were into profit and running things like Papa Doc ran Haiti. They were, in fact, anti–civil rights, despised Martin Luther King, and nowhere near as serious as the Panthers, who were anarchic, helpful to the poor, and “ready to die on the spot.” Malcolm X had wanted Ali to be a man of the world, to be a leader; Ali, mindlessly or fearfully, settled for being attached to a string on an old man’s hand in Chicago.

The press coverage of Ali (seldom called by that name) and his troubles was as misguided and excessive as the throwing of flowers in his path today. Being on the same page of empirical right, the press followed the nation and was too eager to finger a symbolic villain to stand next to a growing number of body bags being sent home and the hated anti-war movement on campuses. Why should this clown-black militant stay home to burn down your city and home? World War II and Korea were still fresh emotional wounds for Americans and newspapermen, many of whom served as war correspondents. To Jimmy Cannon, the New York Journal-American columnist and favorite of Ernest Hemingway, Clay was an affront to all the young boys he had seen die. A traditionalist, he also saw him as the embodiment of a disintegrating culture. But to say—as some liberal columnists have ventured—that Cannon was a racist who liked only good blacks like Joe Louis is absurd and politically correct to the point of being addled.

It could hardly be said that Milton Gross, of the New York Post, was a racist. He was a rigorous liberal on a paper often hit for being a cut above Communist. He detested Ali, mainly for his shameful treatment of Floyd Patterson, and measured Ali’s courage against the grunts in Vietnam. What about the usually well-modulated Red Smith, the kindly fly fisherman, who noted the screech of Clay “who makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who object to the war”? These men were simply conditioned by another time. Their peers were Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Rocky Marciano, and Joe Louis, whose character was in their work—not their rhetoric and politics. They were sharp drama critics, with no interest in statistics and the endless hype that dominate today, but in performance and backstage. They tried to bring performers to life, sometimes without interrogation and with a bit too much sentimentality. They didn’t prattle about role models. Hardly saintly themselves, their private sins were ignored. If they had a central complaint against Clay, it was they believed him to be a phony and, sin of all sins, unheroic.

Not all of the perspective on Ali was a mountain slide. Jerry Izenberg, of the Newark Star-Ledger, was one of the first to rally to Clay’s side, along with Sports Illustrated. Missing was Howard Cosell at ABC, who would eventually never lose a chance to characterize himself as a tower of journalistic boldness on the subject of Ali. Early on George Plimpton had gone to see Cosell to enlist his support. Cosell said his life would be snuffed out in a second if he said over the air that Ali should be allowed to fight. “I’d be shot!” he said. “Right through that window!” How could Cosell bear the drama of his life? He added: “There’s a time and a place for everything, and this is not it.” He would ultimately join himself to Ali’s hip, use him as a prop to promote himself as a man of intrepid, compassionate wisdom.

Clay was certainly not winning any PR wars across