The Champ's War
Near Louisville, Kentucky
On April twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-seven, Cassius Clay, who had been Muhammad Ali since his conversion to Islam three years earlier, appeared at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston, Texas. When his name was called for induction into the United States Army, he did not step forward. He refused. He said his religion forbade participation in wars not declared holy by Allah, and that the Vietnamese people had done nothing to him.
The consequences arrived quickly. His boxing titles were stripped that same week. His passport was confiscated. He was convicted of draft evasion by a federal jury in Houston and sentenced to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. He appealed, and while the appeal worked through the courts, he was free, but he could not fight professionally in the United States. The most talented boxer alive spent what should have been the prime years of his athletic career in exile from his sport.
He lectured on college campuses. He spoke against the war. He was refused the right to fight in state after state as boxing commissions declined to issue licenses.
In June of nineteen seventy-one, the Supreme Court voted eight to zero to overturn his conviction, finding that the Justice Department had wrongly failed to notify the draft board of the reasons Ali had given for his conscientious objector claim. He was twenty-nine years old. He had not fought a professional bout in more than three years.
A word about the Olympic medal: In his nineteen seventy-five autobiography, Ali wrote that after returning from Rome in nineteen sixty as an Olympic champion, he threw his gold medal into the Ohio River after being refused service at a restaurant and attacked by a white gang. The story appeared everywhere. Later, friends and his own subsequent account suggested he had simply lost the medal. The International Olympic Committee replaced it at the Atlanta Games in nineteen ninety-six. Whether it went into the river or was misplaced in a drawer, the refusal that followed his return home was real.
