Author claims to take aim at `myth makers' in book on Ali

PHILADELPHIA - Jack Cashill says that from 1965 to '75, "Muhammad Ali did nothing worthy of praise, except maybe be a great boxer."

POW! Cashill takes a machete to the legend of Muhammad Ali in his sizzling new book, "Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream." Slashes at what he calls the myths that flutter around Ali like angel wings.

Civil-rights crusader? Ridiculous! Anti-war spokesman? Outrageous! Charismatic charmer? Yeah, well, maybe, until he opened that caustic mouth to demean and ridicule an honest workman like Joe Frazier.

"It's not a `hate Ali' book," Cashill argued the other day. "I don't target Ali. I'm after the myth makers."

Ah, the myth makers, those fawning pinko liberal sports columnists and effete authors who have twisted Ali's history like a soft pretzel and salted it with falsehoods that echo their own New Left beliefs.

Take the Vietnam War and Ali's refusal to take that one symbolic step forward at the Houston draft board. Cashill's view of it?

"There was little courage involved, less principle, and no sign at all of independent thought," he writes.

"He was scared to death. Scared to death of the (Nation of Islam) Muslims. He said he was against all wars, against wars involving non-believers, he was all over the place. The way it would have worked, he would have served two years, entertaining troops, fighting exhibitions."

The book is a gaudy, abstract cut-and-sew quilt, here a purple patch that preaches hatred, there a yellow square to indicate betrayal, a swirl of red and gold to represent sexism, all stitched together with the barbed wire of bitterness. If those pinko authors are going to write dozens of books airbrushing away Ali's nasty parts, then Cashill is going to counter with a book that focuses on warts, warts, and more warts.

"I read Mark Kram's book, Ghosts of Manila,' and Karl Evanzz'The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad' back-to-back," Cashill said. "And that's when I decided to write this book."

From Evanzz he borrows the story about Elijah Muhammad refusing to register for the World War II draft, about being found by federal agents hiding under a bed in Washington, about serving time in the slammer for sedition. And while Cashill cannot produce a line from Elijah Muhammad encouraging Ali to duck the draft, he leads the reader to connect the dots.

Late in the book, Cashill lists 17 of Ali's sins, starting with "Ali knowingly betrayed Malcolm X, a betrayal that led at least indirectly to Malcolm's assassination."

You can feel free to deduct a point for low blows at any time. Yes, Ali shunned Malcolm, who was drifting away from the Nation of Islam party line when he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. If Ali had embraced Malcolm or spoken out in his behalf, would that have saved his life?

"Malcolm was getting away from the white man is the devil' rhetoric," Cashill said vehemently. "Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's wife, talks about seeing Ali and asking himWhat are you doing to my husband?' Ali just shrugged and said, `I'm not doing anything.'

"That's what any 23-year-old would do. The heroic thing to do would have been to hold a press conference. To say, `Brotherhood is the right path ... We have to become one people.' Had he done that he would have changed the course of racial history in America."

For the handful of you new to the Ali saga, he was Cassius Marcellus Clay when he snatched the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston in Miami. The next day he pledged allegiance to the Nation of Islam and said he had abandoned his slave name.

When the media questioned him about the heavyweight champ embracing a sect that preached hatred and separatism, Ali answered, "I don't have to be what you want me to be."

So what was he? An entertainer, a slick boxer with an unorthodox style built on youth and lightning-quick reflexes, a braggart who sold tickets? An empty vessel filled with poison manufactured by others?

"The core problem," Cashill said, "is functional illiteracy. He was smart. He was not stupid. I believe he was dyslexic, that he couldn't read beyond the headlines. So that all he gave us was what they were feeding him. They fed him the line, `I got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.' He was not capable of making decisions based on principle."

Cashill dedicates his book to Joe Frazier and the late Joe Louis, "two gallant Americans who deserve much better than the nation's cultural and media elite has seen fit to offer."

Ali's admirers strain to justify his cruel treatment of Frazier as a man "selling tickets," a holdover from tactics borrowed from a wrestler named Gorgeous George. "It went beyond shtick," Cashill said.

"He attacked Frazier at a time when a black man's identity was fragile."

Frazier hated it, the slick taunts about being the white man's champ, and the garbage about the gorilla in Manila. But he never called it black-on-black crime and he channeled his fury into beating Ali in their first, historic fight. Joe also never forgot, or forgave him, and points to Ali's illness-riddled presence as evidence of God's justice.

Which brings us to the timing of Cashill's book, Black History Month, Ali weakened and almost silent with what is identified as Parkinson's syndrome. Is Cashill wary of the inevitable backlash?

"I believe Ali when, in 1983, he talked of his conversion, of being a true believer," Cashill said. "He is bearing his cross nobly. I don't think I'm picking on Ali. I'm celebrating this part of his life."

---

(c) 2006, Philadelphia Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.