Awakenings: Muhammad Ali and masculinity

Boxing, politics, religion, and sex

In King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, David Remnick explains how Cassius Clay became the historically important boxer and man we know as Ali. I see the hero’s “rise” as separate moments of awakening. A powerful storytelling device, awakening explains how strength is aroused from sleep and how once-hidden power helps a man become who he is.

Religious writers distinguish awakening from conversion. Conversion means change, turning from an old  belief to a new one. Awakening also leads to change, but awakening comes about through the discovery of what one already possesses. We “awaken to” a yet-unrealized capacity. Awakening moves us up from one step to another. Conversion, by contrast, turns us in a new direction, as it turned Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. It is with that understanding that I recount four awakenings for Ali: to boxing, to politics, to religion, and to sex.

Waking to boxing

Clay awakened to boxing as a boy of 12. After his bicycle was stolen, he went to a police officer and demanded “a statewide manhunt” to find it. The officer, who ran a boxing gym, liked the boy’s spirit and invited him to work out. Clay did not know how to fight, but after just six weeks of training he fought another boy and won the match. Their three one-minute rounds cannot have been much of a fight, but they were all Clay needed. He “greeted the announcement [of his win] by shouting to all that he would soon be ‘the greatest of all time’” (pp. 91-92). That confidence was in-born.

Clay poured himself into training and talked constantly about his coming fame. Remnick lists the talents that made Ali a great boxer, including fast hands, sharp eyes, agile footwork, and instant reflexes. “This much was there almost from the start,” Remnick writes: it was there, in him, for Clay to awaken to. No outside power, parental or otherwise, could have compelled a teenager to the level of discipline Clay. By the time he was 18, Clay had 100 wins and eight losses (p. 95).

Waking to politics

As a boy of five, Clay was aware of racial politics. Observing to his father that all the store owners and bus drivers were white, he asked, “What do the colored people do?” (p. 87). His father made sure that his son grasped the meaning of segregation, including violence against blacks as well as subtle forms of discrimination. He was an advocate for black self-determination and a supporter of black nationalism; his son would follow suit. The boy learned that many doors were already closed to him. He decided that boxing was “the fastest way for a black person to make it in this country,” or so Ali would later tell an interviewer (p. 88).

Had there been no political consciousness in Clay as a boy of five, there would have been no embrace of boxing a few years later. And without boxing the religious awakening that turned Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali might never have taken place. Many other black people regarded civil rights as something to be given to them; Ali saw civil rights as something to be taken.

Waking to religion

Remnick says little about Clay’s Christian background. The Baptist faith played only a small part in Clay’s youth, when his acquaintance with religion seems chiefly to concern his painter-father’s religious murals (p. 85). He had yet to understand why a black man like his father would, as Ali said later, “spend his time painting murals of a white Jesus” (p. 129).

That awakening began on a Golden Gloves trip to Chicago, when Clay discovered the Nation of Islam (NOI). He talked with members of the NOI and then went back to Louisville carrying a recording of the sermons of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the group. As he boxed and traveled, Clay met many men in the NOI. Even though he struck them as “untutored,” they were impressed at his grasp of black nationalist views (pp. 128-29).

Ali later explained the appeal of the NOI. Christian “church teaching” meant having to believe on second-hand terms, to take somebody’s word for what was true. But in the NOI Ali said he could “reach out and touch” what the elders were saying and know truth for himself (p. 128).

Ali would frequently berate other black men, including boxers, for their failure to support black nationalism. His attacks on Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson, who, like him, were world-champion heavyweights, were notorious. Remnick’s biography devotes the first four chapters, about a quarter of the book, to Patterson and Liston, both of whom Ali defeated on his march to the heavyweight championship. These chapters establish historical context for black boxers in the 1960s. Ali was 7 years younger than Patterson and 10 years Liston’s junior, less than a generation’s gap but a significant divide. Ali defeated Liston twice, when Ali was 22 and 23 (1964, 1965), and Patterson twice, when Ali was 23 and 30 (1965, 1972). These victories were important not only as demonstrations of Ali’s prowess as a boxer but as opportunities to use boxing to proclaim his religious and political convictions. Those convictions caused him to be sentenced in 1967 for refusal to be inducted into the armed forces.

Waking to sex

Although he was handsome and athletic, and perhaps because he was those things, Clay had a belated sexual development. That part of his masculinity stays in the background because it does not suit the image of a single man who is a heavyweight champion. He did not kiss a girl until he was a junior in high school, and when his first girlfriend taught him how to kiss, he fainted (p. 94).

Ali’s awakening to sex is also connected to boxing. As a student Clay would “talk about his body being pure, a temple,” a female classmate reported (p. 93). He avoided other contact sports because they might injure or disfigure him (football, for example). Perhaps avoiding sex was another way of protecting the temple of his body. He dated so little that some writers thought he was gay (p. 230). At least in theory, his sexual discipline would have been intensified by Ali’s conversion to the NOI.

Remnick connects Ali’s sexuality and masculinity to Ali’s conversion to the NOI. First, the NOI, which offered Ali a “sense of protection” within the shady world of professional boxing (p. 58), also offered him a “sense of hierarchy, manhood, and self-respect, . . . [and] racial pride” (p. 127). Second, the religion’s leaders confirmed the boxer’s masculinity. Ali’s chief contact in the NOI was Malcolm X. He and Ali “were like very close brothers,” said Ferdi Pacheco, Ali’s person physician (p. 165). Remnick describes Malcolm X as “a symbol of uncompromising strength, authenticity, and virility” (p. 164).

Third, Ali is said to have discovered his “sexual hunger” when he became a Black Muslim. Elijah Muhammad’s son Herbert introduced Ali to the boxer’s first love, a woman who became the first of Ali’s four wives (pp. 230-31). She seems to have brought unusual sexual experience to the marriage, which must have made an impression on Ali, whose sexual experience was minimal (p. 230). Ali admitted “that his greatest weakness was his insatiable need for women,” a trait he shared with Herbert. Ali’s interest in masculine prowess worked against the sexual discipline expected of his faith, but this tension was irrelevant. Remnick comments that “Elijah Muhammad’s own sexual behavior was nothing if not hypocritical” (p. 231). Ali had no need to do better.

Fourth, when accounting for Ali’s boxing charisma, Remnick sees him as an ideal: “stripped to the waist, a beautiful man, alone, in combat.” Compared to basketball or football players, Remnick writes, “the boxer represents a more immediate form of super-masculinity, no matter how retrograde.” Ali was “a supreme physical performer and sexual presence” (p. 229).

Each of these four awakenings—to boxing, to politics, to religion, and to sex—built Ali’s masculinity and expressed it. There is one more trait that needs to be considered, and that is Ali’s eloquence.

Ali’s verbal dexterity is usually seen as evidence of unshakeable self-confidence, as an effective device for unsettling his opponents, or as a way to diminish those who resented his refusal to accept the traditional subordination of the black boxer. It was all those things. But we should remember that Ali proclaimed himself “the greatest” at age 12, after his very first victory in the ring; that he fainted after his first kisses (which must have meant a lot); and that as a boy of five he asked his father penetrating questions about race. He was an original child, not an ordinary one.

Ali’s spontaneous speech is easily dismissed as provocation or boasting. I see it as evidence of his creativity. We know that creativity and risk-taking are partners. Thinking outside the box might be admired, but can also be a source of trouble. As a boy, Clay was both a creator and a risk-taker. He did not keep his ideas to himself. He asked a high school teacher if he could write a paper on the Nation of Islam (permission denied; Remnick, p. 127). His idiosyncratic boxing style, heavily criticized by the pros and their coaches, was also a risk. In any culture, risk-takers stand out; they are admired if they succeed but scorned if they fail. It is easy to forget that risk-takers are not simply daring: they are also creative. We need to think about Ali in this regard.

Authors of a study of creativity called Sounds from the Bell Jar examine some of the risks of creativity, in particular the link between creativity and madness. Plato and Aristotle both believed that imaginative power was tied to insanity. Samuel Johnson, one of the great men of letters in the English language, wrote that the power of imagination over reason was a form of madness; some people thought that he was mad himself. Sounds from the Bell Jar sets the poles as normal and psychotic and argue that most people are positioned between them. The book is not about boxers, although boxing is mentioned in connection with two authors, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare and the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin.

Normal people accept what is usual and take few chances; normality is only moderately creative. At the other end is psychosis, which is defined as detachment from reality that is marked by delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations. Those nearer this pole are often highly creative and productive—Virginia Woolf, Clare, and Ruskin among authors; Vincent van Gogh among artists; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky among composers; and, among boxers, I  propose, Muhammad Ali.

A man of many words, Ali was dyslexic. He was given a high-school diploma as a good-will gesture (on the strength of his promise as a boxer). Cassius Clay could barely read (p. 95). It seems bizarre to talk about Ali as an author, but makes sense to do so, since he composed verse, delivered spontaneous speeches, and constantly surprised people with his apt and clever use of language. When we admire originality and creativity, we witness the work of someone who stretches the bounds of reason and convention that, most of the time, constrain us. Ali often did just that.

One thing shared by authors who show psychotic tendencies is compulsiveness. John Clare could not stop creating poems in his head. Even as a boy who did not know how to spell, he scribbled poems on scraps of paper. Some artists cannot stop painting. Some composers cannot stop making music.

What could Ali not stop doing? He could not stop talking.

As with Ali’s other creative powers, this gift was evident when he was a small child. “He was always a talker,” his mother said. He jabbered as a baby, before he knew words. “He loved to talk,” his father said. When he was eight, Clay would gather an audience of boys from the neighborhood (his father thought there might be up to 50 of them) and  talk “to all of ‘em, addressing them. . . . He’d always find something to talk about” (pp. 83-84). As with the boy’s boxing talent, his speaking talent was there “almost from the start,” as Remnick might say.

So was the boy’s nose for a compelling topic. Ali spoke spontaneously. As a famous boxer he rhymed, joked, predicted, and shaped his world with words. One of his friends told Remnick that Ali was “an arrested adolescent” whose compulsiveness sought to block out memories of pain and violence from his childhood (p. 85). All compulsive adolescents should be so inventive and productive as Ali!

As a baby Clay did not need adults to talk to him. He needed adults to listen to him. This is not something that a boy of six months decides to do. It is something that he can’t help doing. Boxing expressed Ali’s creative energy one way, politics and religion another way. Like sex, these activities awakened the power of a little boy who could not stop talking. As a baby, Ali spoke before he knew what to say. As a man, he got what he wanted: an audience.