When he was Cassius Clay, he had said, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want to be.” Yet that was never really true. There were limits to his new freedom. If he had remained friends with Malcolm, he would have fallen out of favor with Elijah and would have been forever known as Cassius Clay. But when he chose Elijah over Malcolm, Elijah determined who he wanted him to be, and that was Muhammad Ali, a devout Muslim and his loyal subject.
Once Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, Elijah won his political chess match with Malcolm. When Malcolm heard Elijah’s radio address, Clay had not yet publicly announced that he had accepted the Muslim name, but it did not matter to Malcolm. When Malcolm lost the contest for Clay’s loyalty, he had no more moves, no more pawns to sacrifice. At that moment Malcolm was expendable. At that moment his life was in jeopardy.
MALCOLM WAS SINKING fast, like a man drowning in quicksand. Hearing Elijah’s announcement over the radio elevated his heartbeat. In a panic, he telephoned the boxer’s suite. A voice on the other end of the line told him that Clay was not taking his calls. Elijah had already assigned members of the Fruit to guard his most prized possession. The Muslims around the boxer spoke with one voice: Malcolm was a liar and a traitor. Dejected, Malcolm hung up the phone without ever speaking to his friend.29
Malcolm’s mistake was that he believed Cassius would see the world through his eyes. If he spent enough time with Cassius, he thought, he could prove that he had his best interests in mind, and perhaps their brotherhood would become stronger than Clay’s allegiance to Elijah. He had hoped that he could mold Clay’s combative boxing instincts into fighting for black freedom outside the ring.
But unlike Malcolm, at his core, Cassius was never comfortable with the politics of confrontation. He had said again and again that he was afraid of what would happen if he joined a demonstration or a sit-in. He felt far more secure within the Nation, where he was constantly praised for simply being who he was: a boxer.
Malcolm never wielded the same power over him that Elijah Muhammad did. How could he? Clay’s vision of Elijah Muhammad was a product of Malcolm’s creation—part man, part prophet, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Cassius respected authority, and there was no higher authority, Malcolm said, than the Messenger. Although he admired Malcolm, he viewed him only as Muhammad’s representative. When Malcolm belatedly challenged Muhammad’s sovereignty, he became a castaway in a lifeboat, drifting in the wrong direction. Elijah, on the other hand, was the emperor of an entire kingdom, and now Cassius had become his shining new prince.
Elijah also offered him something that Malcolm could not: the love of a father. “The Nation,” Jerry Izenberg observed, “became [Clay’s] family, even to the extent that he was able to bring his brother into it. And Elijah Muhammad became his father.”30
Yet he seldom let anyone get too close. Few ever really knew, as Malcolm thought he did, the man who became Muhammad Ali. Over the course of his career, people moved in and out of his life as if they were walking through a revolving door. Friends, promoters, hustlers, entrepreneurs, accountants, agents, lawyers, and women came and went. Cassius built a wall around himself in the form of an entourage, hiring men with fake titles whose only job was to take care of him. As long as they served his needs, as long as Cassius did not have to worry about anything or anyone, they remained in his life.31
He willingly allowed older men to take charge of his life. He did not need another brother or best friend. Rudy filled those roles. Searching for a father figure, he found security in the hands of patriarchs, whether a boxing trainer like Angelo Dundee, the members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, or Elijah Muhammad. Ceding his life to Elijah, though, reveals a certain irony. “It was Clay’s father who laid the groundwork for the boy becoming a Muslim,” Gordon Davidson explained. Clay Sr. frequently told his sons not to trust white men and warned them about the dangers of integration. He claimed that he had “Arabian” features and, like Elijah, prophesied about the Day of Judgment. “It’s the end of times!” he often ranted. “We’re in the last days! The last days!” Clay Sr., who was not a devout Christian, claimed that he read the Bible closely and that he knew that only Christians would survive the resurrection. “Those Muslims,” he said, would incur God’s wrath. Listening to him and Elijah, one could hardly tell them apart.32