It was a sad sight: Stripped of his crown, the former heavyweight champion of the world was reduced to making a paid appearance at a boat show in his hometown of Louisville, Ky.
“I am not allowed to work in America and I'm not allowed to leave America,” Muhammad Ali said in February 1968, at the start of his first full year of exile from boxing. “I'm just about broke.”
Married a year with his first child on the way, Ali was so desperate his manager tried to arrange a bout in Arizona on an Indian reservation – outside the reach of state boxing commissions that wouldn't let him fight. But the Pima tribe rejected the proposal, saying it would defile the memory of Indian veterans who'd fought for their country.
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