Ali and Frazier Friends?

You are too kind Mr. Cannon, & your respectful consideration should be a model for us all.
I am fine if people disagree, but mucho conflict & bad feelings can be avoided if they did so with your spirit.

Such as not assuming a lie when a single piece of information is suspected of being incorrect in a post that makes many, otherwise undisputed claims.

 

I bolded the particular part I wanted to address.

I don't think you're lying. I think you're WAY off base and highly disrespectful for making such a claim without a source.

This book is your source? The author had no sources whatsoever for his claims, and not one of these sexual encounters with minors are independently corroborated by any source...... and even this link you sent me does not mention the specific claim of Ali having an affair with 13 year olds.

I have no patience for accusations like these. Smearing the name of a man (intentionally or not) who's no longer here to defend himself without an ounce of evidence to back it up.

 

Ali in a lot of ways was analogous to John Lennon in my mind.

Yes, we all have flaws but then some find it a bit hard to stomach when someone heavily preaches and pontificates on one game only to play a completely opposing game as and when it suits them , in short - hypocrisy.

The strange thing about hypocrisy - one might genuinely (or even not genuinely) preach against certain behaviours and actions whilst failing to observe and live by their own proclamations - in the case of their being genuine, they know what they’ve done or are doing is wrong but don’t have having the disciplines they call upon from others.

So, if Ali preached the right thing on one hand, positively impacting and influencing the masses to do the right thing - while he himself wasn’t practicing what he preached - or at least not always, the net yield can still be seen as a positive.

Certainly if Ali came out and supported or rationalised his periodic behavioural troughs, we could say cool, he’s not a hypocrite but then that could’ve potentially have had a much less preferred, negative influence on his many followers.

I remember a time when Frazier was viewed as whinger, overreacting to Ali’s contrived ballyhoo. That view of Joe and the facts was totally skewed.

I remember a clip from the Cavett show which showed vision of Joe on his farm pumping water up from the ground. Ali ranted on how disgusting it was and that the water was dirty. I was very young but remember thinking I hope that Joe guy kicks that mean Ali guy’s a**! LOL.

 

1) You said the claim is false & "you know it".
So let me bend over backwards to avoid what you did-your words indicted you thought I was lying-while that is utterly false, & you had no reason to believe I lied.
So maybe you are in denial about what you said-cognitive dissonance & folks reconstructing facts to suit their ego, self-image & agenda is a well documented phenomena.

2) You are correct that the source I sent did not say he had an affair with a 13 year old.
You made it plural, that must have been a typo-a mistake, again if I jumped to unfair conclusions & would say you are lying that I said 13 year olds; when it is more reasonable, & avoids escalating distrust & ill will, to assume you just made an error.
In this case I had read elsewhere that the affair was with an 13 year old.
So someone else got this wrong, it was an older minor.
That does not mean THEY were lying either.

3) Again & as yet unaddressed is it is not at all responsible to make a claim without a source.
If that was the case then you should condemn likely everyone on this board.
If people say that R.Kelly or Weinstein Or Epstein or Cosby did something heinous-or Monzon, or any number of wife beating or rapin' athletes-it is fine to challenge or correct them.
In the cases I just gave the accusations are likely to be substantiated.
But that does not mean that just because they are right they are not wrong to not give a source.
Sources are given if one is trying to make a formal claim OR someone asks for them.
It is fine to claim or show that I am wrong; not to slam anyone for not pre-emptively giving sources.

4) How could you think that the author have no sources for his claims?
Just the short story I linked quoted a couple of his ex-wives.
I closely paraphrased what one said about Ali's dark & evil side.
You must had not paid any attention man.

If you research further you will doubtless find other sources.
You believe -without checking-that him saying that everyone associated with Ali knew these things-& unlike say Hauser for his biography, you will distrust absent any investigation that he interviewed a ton of people?

I unlike many do not just celebrate & blind myself to flaws or minimize them if I like the man-or the athlete.
Nor do I do not opposite & funnel all kinds of projected/disowned animus upon people.
I love tons of things about Ali, he had high virtues & did a lot for the world in the massive ways I specified.
Politically, culturally, entertainment & inspiration-wise.

Although his flaws went beyond an affair or two or slapping an ex-wife once.
He could be cruel, selfish & violent.
Or justifying the latter, like long after done with the NOI justifying or advocating for murder based upon who a fellow black person took as a partner & loved.
Yes the good he did far outweighed the bad.
Pugguy got it just right in his latest comment.
But he was not merely a bit imperfect.

 

Belinda said Ali spent the day leading up to the FOTC with a sex worker. That appears in Eig's book. That is disputed by others who spent that day with him. Who knows? You could start a small town with his and the Real Deal's children. Eig was one of the sources for Ken Burns's Ali documentary. I follow Eig on Twitter. You can see that while he doesn't canonize Ali he's quite fond of him, flaws and all. Ali was a mystical figure who people saw in him whatever they wanted.

 

Ali tried to retract half of what he said in the Playboy interview .He also lambasted the priestly vow of celibacy, joking about the hand of the lord sating their carnal urges. His critique of interracial relations was wrong, love is love, but it's a little more subtle than how it's portrayed in this thread. In the Playboy interview he alludes to a white man and a Black woman going into a motel and coming out in a couple of hours. He said the Black woman should be put to death for allowing a white man to use her body like that. As a bi-racial person that's dumb and offensive. If God didn't want us mixing he wouldn't have given us feet and brains to travel. But he was referring to lust, not love. In any case he left those ideas behind when he left the NOI In 1977. Heck, he had white son-in-laws and bi-racial children.

 

I appreciate your attention to detail.
I would like to see the evidence that he retracted half, or some, of what he said in the Playboy interview.
He also made general statements then about race mixing being wrong & justifying murder.
If he grew past that insane, hateful belief system-that allowed things like the surreal scene of him speaking AT a Klan rally for segregation-I am all ears.

He always seemed to be decent to people on an individual level, loved children, not prejudiced against individuals, but was married to bizarre & toxic ideology.

 

Who was the 13 yr old girl you claim Ali had an affair with. Ive never heard this rumor before ??

 

As I said in a later post, the age listed for the underage girl was incorrect-it was 16.
Although the 2017 biography I linked describes a sex addict who had relations with girls as young as 12.
This link talks about Ali having numerous affairs & leaving a complex & turbulent legacy with his offspring & various wives & mistresses, some members estranged or feuding...
You asked the girl's name, from the article below:

1. During his turbulent marriage to Boyd, Ali is also reported to have had two love-children, the first, Miya, came in 1972 with a woman reportedly named Patricia Harvell and the second, Khaliah, in 1974, to a 16-year-old woman, Wanda Bolton, who changed her name to Aaisha Ali.

https://www.lipstickalley.com/threa...regnated-a-16-year-old-while-married.1251028/

 

"The Nation of Islam taught that White people were devils," Ali wrote in 2004. "I don't believe that now; in fact, I never really believed that. … But when I was young, I had seen and heard so many horrible stories about the White man that this made me stop and listen."

https://www.courier-journal.com/sto...-ali/2016/06/04/ali-conversion-islam/5456207/

He left the NOI in 1977:

After Elijah Muhammad's death, in 1975, his son Wallace D. Muhammad (later Warith Deen Mohammed) assumed leadership of the organization, following which the fundamental doctrines of the Nation of Islam underwent a change to bring them closer to Sunni Islam. The divinity of Elijah, and that of the Nation of Islam's founder Wallace Fard Muhammad, was denied by Wallace D., and a nonracial view of religion was promulgated in which white people were no longer considered "devils".[15][16] Eventually, a schism emerged amongst the followers of Elijah, between a faction loyal to Wallace, and another loyal to Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan continued advocating the "racial separatism" of Elijah Muhammad, and reportedly considered Wallace "a soft minded heretic."[15][16][d]

Ali decided to follow the teachings of Wallace Muhammad.[15] In an interview for his 1991 biography Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, Ali commented:

[Wallace] learnt from his studies that his father wasn't teaching true Islam, and Wallace taught us the true meaning of the Quran. He showed that color don't matter. He taught that we're responsible for our own lives and it's no good to blame our problems on other people. And that sounded right to me so I followed Wallace, but not everyone in the Nation felt that way. Some of the ministers didn't like what he was teaching. Jeremiah Shabazz didn't like it. Louis Farrakhan didn't like it either. They believed Elijah was a prophet, and they've kept the exact ways Elijah taught them. But I've changed what I believe, and what I believe in now is true Islam.[19]

https://www.courier-journal.com/sto...-ali/2016/06/04/ali-conversion-islam/5456207/

 

Thank you my friend.
Ali was both clearly a pretty deep thinker on some matters-as various interviews & talk show appearances, one with Conservative scion host William F. Buckley, showed...And was naive in some ways.
He tested very low on an IQ exam, I think 82, & embarrassed ;"I said I was the greatest, not the smartest".
There are many kinds of intelligence, some intuitive & physical (like he showed in the ring), some academic...

Ironically while it is great he gave up the hate ideology that was never a fit for his overall character & how he treated people in person, yeah you can blame white people for most of his people's problems lol!

 

He was likely dyslexic. His politics aren't really mine and they were all over the map. This is the man who supported the presidential candidacies of Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. What drew me to him and continues to draw me to him is how full of life he was as a young man.

 

Ali's spiritual journey was much like Malcolm X's. They both rejected the NOI in favor of following a more traditional Islam. It just took Muhammad ten years longer.

 

I did not mean it as to say you were lying. If I thought you were lying I wouldn't beat around the bush. I would tell you directly.

I meant that you were digging your heels instead of conceding which you seem to do in your next paragraph.

Fair enough. I never thought you were lying. My issue with you was making this claim, without ANYTHING to back it up.

All the above men were found guilty in a court of law, and multiple individuals substantiated the accusations. Not so in Ali's case.

OK so substantiate them with some ACTUAL sources, like people close to Ali or any of these supposed victims of his. Not some laughable book I'd use to wipe my ass.

Big claims require big evidence, and the author couldn't provide even weak evidence.

Well in the link you sent me, their was no source for Ali raping anyone, or having sex with children under the age of 12. Think about it objectively, don't you think if he'd raped any of the girls at least one of them or their parents would've filed a massive $$$ lawsuit on their behalf and/or gone to the tabloids.

I did pay attention. Here are the quotes your author attributed to Ali's ex-wives.
"Everyone close to the fighter knew his proclivities."

Belinda Boyd, Ali's second wife, claims the boxer "loved sex and was a sex addict".

Boyd, who married Ali at 17 and changed her name to Khalilah after converting to Islam, split from the boxer nine years later.

"Ali had a dark side. An evil side," Boyd told Eig, revealing how he would manipulate her to such an extent that she not only booked hotel rooms for his mistresses but agreed not to disturb him when he was with other women. [/QUOTE]

Not ONE of these quotes from his ex-wives give any indication that Ali had raped anybody or had sex with women younger than 16.

I did tons of research, and have yet to find even one claim, however weak to substantiate these particular allegations.

Granted I never read the book, but a quick glance and search through google books failed to show any of these allegations so I could see them for myself and try to confirm them or discredit them.

Well if you want to believe everything you read on the internet without even trying to find ANYTHING (which the link you sent me absolutely did not) to substantiate it, that's on you.

But don't ever make accusations to tarnish anyone's representation unless you're ready, willing, and able to confirm beyond any doubt they they are true... which you haven't come close to doing.

 

Just because something is in a book doesn't mean it's true. On the other hand Jonathan Eig is a credible author who had access to Ali towards the end of his life. Tom Hauser who was as much a confidante to Ali as he was an author says Eig didn't seem to like Ali very much. If you read his twitter page you can see he clearly does. Ali's prodigious sex life is probably a bit exaggerated as was John Kennedy and Elvis. If they were having as much sex as people claim they would have no time for governing, boxing, and singing