Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [20]
Clay was in poor financial shape. The Louisville syndicate that had his contract could never contain his spending. He’d buy tickets for hundreds of Muslims and just about let anybody use his hotel tab. A pair of “virginal” Egyptian women at the Patterson fight once worked his bill like they were using play money, buying two-hundred-dollar evening bags and having their hair done every day. At his previous divorce hearing, he was asked where the money had gone; he had been close to jail for missing payments to Sonji. “Seventy percent,” he said, “goes to the government. Then, I support my mother and father some. I owe my wife one thousand, thirteen hundred. I got eight hundred in a Chicago bank.” He pointed around the room, saying: “I owe him. I owe you. I owe everybody in this room.” His final divorce settlement was for $15,000, and $22,000 for her legal fees. Ali sent Sonji a note: “You give up heaven for hell.”
Sonji might not have agreed after seeing how her husband handled money. He drifted between being a miser (as Ali, this phase would disappear entirely) and a welfare office. When someone would come by to put the touch on him, he would play a record called “Your Friends.” The two would just listen, and the borrower would say, “You tryin’ to tell me somethin’.” “Oh, no, brother,” Clay would say. “It’s just a pretty tune. But some truth in those words, don’t you think?” He and his father, Cash, fought the Louisville Syndicate fiercely over a $50,000 pension fund. Wisely invested by smart heads—which they were—the pension deductions surely would grow into a minor, maybe handy fortune. “It was always a battle with them,” a member of the Syndicate said. “They didn’t understand money.” Clay mainly liked the feel of cash. He’d carry $40,000 around Louisville in a satchel, and when he went to Chicago, he would put thousands on display. “I’ve seen him do it,” a close friend said. “He likes to feel it, run it through his fingers.”
After earning $800,000 for the two Liston fights, his box office draw began to descend coincident with his throwing in with the Black Muslims. He got $300,000 for Floyd Patterson, another fight that caused public disgust, and then he had to beat it up to Canada for $66,332 and a long night with George Chuvalo. The U.S. market was tight, and might get worse. With trouble in the wings—jail or the army—he took on a torrid pace, six title defenses in eleven months, two in England, one in Germany. He saw Europe as a source of treasure, ignoring the more serious problem that he was fast running out of credible opponents. By the Ernie Terrell fight, another ugly affair, Herbert Muhammad, son of Elijah, had become his manager, placed there, as Elijah said, “to protect his money.” What did Herbert know about boxing, Angelo Dundee was asked. “He knows they use gloves,” he said. Clay’s father, Cash, chipped in: “Elijah meant to say protect our money.”
When he was called up for induction and the Commission’s retaliation came, he had earned $2.3 million over his seven-year career, with not a great deal left. He outlined his predicament to Tex Maule, after first asserting that he would work for Elijah as a minister for $150 a week and be happy the rest of his life. It was a comment that instantly incited psalmodic flight. “People ask me,” he sang, “how you gonna eat. I say, look out there at that little robin peckin’ and eatin’. Look up at all the stars, planets in the heavens. They are not held up there on the end of long, steel poles. Allah holds them up there. If he has this power, will he let his servant starve, let a man doin’ his work go hungry?” Wasn’t the Lord’s caseload a bit heavy, what with all the death in Vietnam, the babies all over the world with big bellies and sunken eyes? Why would the Lord think Ali was so special? Not batting an eye, he said: “Well, Allah always gotta have his favorites.”
He then pulled out a little notebook. “My wife,” he said, “she cost a hundred twenty-five thousand. Spent forty-five thousand on my mother and father. Gave her a Cadillac and a house. Give