The heavyweight champion of the world, Gerald Early once wrote, was in effect the â??emperor of masculinity.â?
When that masculine throne was occupied by black men, the American zeitgeist usually got busy. Jack Johnson, champion in the early 20th century, became a one-man racial crisis, mocking white opponents inside the ring and bedding white women outside of it. The government ran him out of the country.
A quarter century later, Joe Louis inverted the Johnson image, betraying only humility in public and serving in the army in World War II. He became a mythic hero to blacks and earned the admiration of whites. Louis broke the ground in which Muhammad Ali would work, but Ali worked it with Johnsonâ??s defiance.
Ali, too, became a racial pariah in America, at least for a time, first by changing his name from Cassius Clay and joining the Nation of Islam and then by refusing induction into the army for service in Vietnam. He lost his license to box for three-plus years and came within a Supreme Court decision of going to jail.
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