For many critics, the future of the sport remained in doubt, but one thing was certain: Muhammad Ali was not the savior that Cassius Clay had been.
MUHAMMAD ALI HAD made a world of enemies. While white critics denounced his membership in the Nation of Islam, blacks debated his relationship with the Muslims. Some feared that he would exploit his position as champion to recruit young blacks into the sect. Proclaiming his belief in separatism, Ali had created “more apprehension” among middle-class, integrationist blacks “than Malcolm X.” Black writers, entertainers, and activists compared his views to those espoused by the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, and the Dixiecrats. “When Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X,” Martin Luther King charged, “he became the champion of racial segregation—and that is what we are fighting.”8
Joe Louis, considered the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, beloved by blacks and whites alike, declared that he would never cheer for the Muslim champ. “Clay will earn the public’s hatred because of his connections with the Black Muslims,” he told reporters. “The things they preach are just the opposite of what we believe.” What we believe. Louis and many black Americans insisted that Ali no longer represented the race. He was an outsider, condemned for rejecting the ideals of the civil rights movement.9
Ali disappointed many blacks because he rejected the traditional responsibilities associated with being heavyweight champion. In a xenophobic outburst, Floyd Patterson condemned Ali as unfit to be a champion. He accused him of being ignorant of the Black Muslims’ ideology and confused about their real goals. Ali “might just as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan,” he charged.10
There was only one thing left for Patterson to do: save boxing from Muhammad Ali and the Nation of Islam. The good Catholic fighter challenged “Cassius X” to a holy war, announcing that he would fight him anytime, anywhere, even though the ninth-ranked heavyweight was in no position to proclaim himself a title contender. In his self-righteousness, Patterson made himself out to be more patriotic than Ali, a purer champion, and a better citizen. “I am an American,” he declared, implying that Ali was not—not as long as he belonged to the Nation of Islam.11
Ali dismissed Patterson’s challenge. If anyone was exploiting boxing, he retorted, it was Patterson: “The only reason he’s decided to come out of his shell now is to try to make himself a big hero to the white man by saving the heavyweight title from being held by a Muslim.” When Patterson attacked Ali’s religion, the champion said that he might as well have been “attacking Cairo, Egypt, the Holy City of Mecca, Pakistan, Turkey, and 300,000” Muslim Americans. In defense of Islam, he began to see himself not just as an American but also as a global citizen, a guardian of all Muslims.12
The feud between Patterson and Ali demonstrated that the backlash against the Muslim champ was as much about Islamophobia as it was about race. During the Cold War, many Americans linked Islam to the Middle East and Africa, a region perceived as backward, brutal, and politically oppressive. The vitriol aimed at Ali, therefore, derived from Americans who considered Islam a destructive alternative to Christianity, and from fears that the Middle East had succumbed to the influence of the Soviet Union.13
Americans’ stereotypical views of the region as an endless sand trap, filled with genies, harems, sultans, sheiks, and camel-riding nomads, influenced their views of Ali. In a satirical column, Jim Murray portrayed him as “the Sheik of Araby,” fighting against infidels. “I think Cassius sees himself as Lawrence of Arabia or the Red Shadow rather than a guy licking stamps for hate literature,” he wrote. “Cassius has always had a lively imagination and it was only a question of time before he’d wrap a towel around his head and begin to play Saladin, the Saracen. I expect him to trade in his Cadillac for a camel any day now.”14