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

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Ali kept boxing out of the cultural dustbin in the mid-1960s when network television all but abandoned the red-light district of sports in the wake of the Kefauver hearings and the tragic live-feed battering of Benny Paret. Only a few years before Ali made his pro debut, boxing could be seen on network television five or six nights a week, not as an afterthought or as a time-buy, not as off-peak filler for multiplex channels, but as an integral part of the dawning pixel era. While Ali fought almost exclusively on closed-circuit theater bookings, he dragged his showman/shaman act everywhere he went, provoking the media into spontaneous outrage, reverence, wonder, befuddlement.

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Although Ali was raised in a middle-class family, his father, Cassius Clay Sr., boiled over from the dispiriting day-to-day humiliations that made being a “Negro” in mid-twentieth-century America such an existential torment. Clay Senior, who was aghast when his son joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to “Cassius X,” almost certainly drove Ali to what most of the country, at the time, referred to as the “Black Muslims.” As a child, Ali heard his embittered father repudiate White America over and over again. He also heard Clay Senior extol the philosophy of Marcus Garvey, whose “Back to Africa” movement may have given Ali the urge for separatism. Not for Ali, the risks of the Freedom Riders, voter-registration drives, boycotts, picket lines. Once, Ali—then Cassius Clay and still in high school—attended a demonstration in Louisville. A white woman dumped a bucketful of water from an apartment window over him. Soaked, Ali disavowed protests instantaneously. But to chastise Ali for his noninvolvement at a time when thousands risked their lives on behalf of the civil rights movement is to miss the point altogether: Segregation was official Nation of Islam ideology. And Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were not the only black men to rail against integration. When Stokely Carmichael took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of his first acts was to oust its white members.