Jack Cashill - Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed Kings Dream

O n March 8, 1971, my friends from grad schoolRick, Stanley, and Joanand I drove from Purdue in my yellow VW bug to watch a large screen presentation of the first Ali-Frazier fight.

Given the imperatives of student poverty, we headed not south to Indianapolis, which was forty miles closer, but north to Gary, which was five dollars cheaper. The moment we walked into the theater, however, I understood what the others did not: five bucks or no, Gary was a mistake.

Other than the fifty or so guys sitting together in makeshift bleachers by the exit door, we were about the only white people in the joint. Of the four thousand or so in attendance, Joan was the only white woman period. This was of some concern to me as she would soon be my wife. Many times, before and since, I have found myself in venues with comparable ratios, but never one in which the racial tension was so raw and palpable.

Given her pro-Ali perspective at the time, Joan remembers the small group of guys in the bleachers as Mafiosi. I remember them more benignly as hardhats. A popular phrase of the era, hardhat evoked an independent, illiberal, blue-collar patriotism. Unlike my friends, Joan included, I knew these guys. I had grown up with their spiritual kin in the no-nonsense, inner wards of Newark, New Jersey. They were my uncles and cousins and boyhood friends. They were pulling for Joe Frazier. So was I.

Seven years earlier, if you had told me I would one day root against Ali, I would have said, Sure, and Ill cast my first presidential vote for Richard Nixon. I had admired Cassius Clay, as he was then known, almost as much as I had John Kennedy. As it happened, JFK had edged out Nixon for the presidency in a controversial split decision just two months after Ali won his Olympic gold.

I was the only Frazier fan I knew at Purdue. The night before the fight, when we gathered at our habitual watering hole, my grad school buddies vied with each other to express their passion for Ali. Among their many professions of fealty, one has stuck with me, if only for its crudeness.

I would stand on this table and piss in my pants if Ali were to walk in that door, said Ron, a fellow not usually known for his excesses. Still, if Rons emotion was extreme, his attachment was the norm. I suspected that on the more excitable campusesBloomington and Madison and Boulder and Berkeleythe Ali juju was surging even more feverishly.

I forget how much I bet on the fight. Joan was shocked when she found out and took comfort only in my winning. The pickings were easy. Knowing little of the sports sweet science, my Purdue friends bet their hearts. They even gave away odds. I bet my instincts. I had been following the fights since my dad took me as a six-year-old to meet local hero Two Ton Tony Galento, the aptly named palooka who knocked down Joe Louis in the third round of their 1939 fight. The occasion was the neighborhood movie premiere of On the Waterfront, in which Two Ton had a bit part as a union goonno stretch there.

In Gary that night, I could have used Two Ton Tony. On the way to the restroom before the fight, several large gentlemen blocked my way and inquired rather bluntly into my choice of boxers. Who you for, mother f***er? I didnt hesitate. Ali, I said. They let me pass. As much I respected Joe Frazier, I wasnt about to die for him.

In Gary and beyond, no fight had so racially polarized America since Jack Johnson squared off against Jim Jeffries in Reno sixty years earlier. This, I thought, is what Ali had wrought. He had the crowd not so much pulling for him as against the imagined race traitor, Joe Frazier, and anyone, black or white, who dared cheer for him. Gary, that night, was a cauldron of hate, a harrowing, volatile place to be. Still, the fight proved to be worth the risk. It was both brutal and brilliant, as only great fights can be. Going into the fifteenth, it seemed to all of us too close to call.

OK, I said to my friends between rounds, were out of here. They thought me daft and resisted. I explained patiently that if Ali lost a fight that the crowd expected him to win, there would be hell to pay, and wed likely do the paying. But were for Ali, Stanley protested.

How had it come to this? I wondered. How could so many seemingly smart young Americans be so utterly delusional?

Some years later, equally smart young intellectuals would routinely sing Alis praises not just as a boxer, but as a man of conscience, a peacemaker, a racial healer, a Mandela, a Gandhi. All but alone in his public dissent, Joe Frazier has insisted otherwise. What has he done so great for this world? he asks rhetorically of Ali. Everything that he has done was against this country.

What Ali did, great or otherwise, was to channel the spirit of his age. He is all that the sixties were, writes legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon of Ali. It is as though he were created to represent them. In Gary that March night, he captured the ethos of that decade all too well. It wasnt pretty. I was there, and I know what I saw.