Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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“Know that the life of this world is merely a sport and a pastime.”

—The Koran

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During his exile years, from 1967 to 1970, Muhammad Ali barnstormed the college lecture circuit and performed ministerial duties for the Nation of Islam. He starred in an off-Broadway play. He filmed a bizarre fantasy sequence against a toupee-wearing Rocky Marciano in a computer-generated matchup whose algorithm, like something HAL might have calculated with sinister intent, determined that Marciano would score a late-round TKO. Ali reinforced his fame, as well as his ideas, on national television so often, he probably logged more screen time than Ed Sullivan or Michael Landon. There he was, dissent with pizzazz, razzing Jack Paar, Jerry Lewis, William F. Buckley, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, and David Frost. He appeared on Face the Nation and on PBS, where, more than once, he expressed admiration for notorious desegregationist George Wallace during an interview.

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Although Ali was part of the roiling zeitgeist, his stance on the Vietnam War was slightly ahead of its time. There were teach-ins across the country in 1965 but “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was at the top of the pop charts a year later and “Operation Rolling Thunder” had not yet galvanized the general public. By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 US soldiers in Vietnam. Four years later, that number reached 542,000. Privately, President Lyndon B. Johnson referred to Vietnam as “a raggedy-ass, fourth-rate country.”