that he “made people feel it was good to be black.” Many viewed the Nation as a crimi - nal organization, and longtime boxing writ- ers viewed Clay’s—they refused to call him Ali—association with it as an act of treason. Ali’s revelation in ’64 that he was a Mus- lim made him unpopular with many Ameri - cans; his announcement two years later that he wouldn’t fight for his country turned him into public enemy No. 1. The day after Ali announced his conversion, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who feared the destabilizing influence of the Black Muslims, instructed his agents to look into the young trouble - maker’s draft status. It turned out that, six weeks earlier, Ali had failed an Army intelligence test. “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest,” Ali joked. Unable to force Ali to pass its aptitude tests, the Pentagon decided to lower its stan - dards. Ali had scored in the 16th percentile; in November 1965, the passing grade was conveniently dropped from the 30th to the 15th, and Ali was made eligible for the draft. According to reporter Robert Lipsyte, who was with Ali in Miami when he got the news, “Somebody asked, ‘What do you think about the Vietcong?’ By this time, [Ali] was angry, tired, pissed off, and said, ‘I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.’” “With that one sentence about the Viet - cong,” columnist Jerry Izenberg told Bing- ham and Wallace, “Ali became the patron saint of the anti-war movement. Before that, none of the protesters could really articulate why they were against the war. He gave them the reason.” In April 1967, Ali, claiming that his role as a minister of Islam should make him ex - empt, refused to step forward to be drafted. For that he was stripped of his heavyweight title, banned from boxing, and sentenced to five years in prison; it took a jury 21 minutes to find him guilty. Yet Ali’s antiwar commit- ment only deepened. From 1967 to ’70, as his case made its circuitous way through the courts, Ali trav - eled the country giving antiwar speeches.
move on to bigger stages and bigger victories as well, but this one was as significant as any.
Clay and Ashe entered the 1960s as two of the most promising young African-Ameri- can athletes. What each of them would mean to this revolutionary era was summed up in a pair of magazine covers that appeared in 1968, the year when that decade reached its unruly nadir. In April, Esquire portrayed the boxer— now with a new name—as St. Sebastian, pierced by arrows, above the headline “The Passion of Muhammad Ali.” Esquire was the bible of the counterculture, and Ali one of its icons. Three months later, Ashe appeared on the cover of Life . He was photographed playing tennis, in all-white clothes, under the headline “The Icy Elegance of Arthur Ashe.” While Esquire was the hip chronicler of ‘60s youth, Life was the graying photo album of the establishment. Ashe was celebrated in its pages for his calm under pressure, and held up as an antiradical black athlete—an anti-Ali. How had Ali gone from smiling gold med - alist in 1960 to being shot through with met- aphorical arrows eight years later? The transition began in 1964 when, as a 7–1 underdog, Clay upset heavyweight cham- pion Sonny Liston in Miami. Liston was a glowering ex-con, while the other heavy- weight contender of that era, Floyd Patter - son, was his opposite: polite, nonthreaten - ing, a favorite of liberals. Ali didn’t fit either mold. He was youthful, charismatic, funny, and he didn’t defer to anyone. It was only a matter of time before he would test the lim - its of white America’s tolerance for a confi- dent black athlete. That tolerance began to crack soon after the Liston fight, when Clay revealed that he had joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Is- lam, and that the group’s leader had chosen a new name for him, Muhammad Ali. Ali never shared Muhammad’s belief that whites were “blue-eyed devils,” but he respected the fact
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