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earnings. The group would underwrite all travel and training expenses and they would split earnings fifty-fifty. To safeguard Clay’s future, 15 percent of all income would be set aside into a pension fund that he couldn’t touch until age thirty-five or his retirement from boxing. It was a long way from Frankie Carbo.
    Louisville is, of course, the home of the famed Kentucky Derby. Each member of the Sponsoring Group had at some time or another been involved with racehorses. But if the men thought their new acquisition could be controlled by pulling on his reins, they were in for a surprise.

CHAPTER TWO:
    Those Who Came Before
    A LL SPORT CAN BE SEEN AS A METAPHOR, even a proxy, for conflict and war. But none comes closer to fulfilling that metaphor—its superficial role as athletic competition to become something bigger, a more potent symbol—than boxing. From the days when gladiators fought to the death in the middle of packed Roman coliseums as part of a carefully orchestrated strategy to keep the people from revolting, organized combat between two men has transcended mere sport.
    Boxing historian Budd Schulberg has observed that just as the people get the government they deserve, each era gets the heavyweight boxing champion it deserves, one who reflects the social and political currents of the day. To take his theory a step further, it can be argued that the history of black heavyweight champions has always mirrored the history of American race relations.
    For Muhammad Ali, who was about to irrevocably shape his own era, there were two forebears who illustrated Schulberg’s maxim perfectly, whose careers would serve as precursors for his own.
    The first black boxers were plantation slaves who fought each other in vicious, anything-goes matches for the amusement of the slaveholders and the other slaves. In the most celebrated interplantation matches, the slaves gave everything they had in pursuit of the victory prize—their freedom. Nineteenth century African-American philosopher Frederick Douglass described these matches as “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” At the peak of his career, Muhammad Ali captured Douglass’s skepticism in describing how he felt when he performed for the crowd: “We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.”
    Following the Civil War and the liberal abolitionist spirit that accompanied it, blacks made significant gains in the sporting arena. Even in the South, where Reconstruction forced their temporary acceptance as full citizens, Blacks were integrated into most major sports. But the end of Reconstruction in the 1880s saw a rapid turnaround in the way Americans viewed Blacks. Suddenly, as historian Frederic Jaher observed, “Court decisions, legislative and executive actions, publicly and privately sanctioned terrorism, the ‘findings’of biologists and social scientists, and the metaphors of writers and movie makers denied blacks economic opportunities, separated them from whites in all but servile interactions, and stigmatized them as childlike brutes genetically incapable of participating in civilized society.”
    Athletics was one of the first segments of American society to feel the changing attitudes. Blacks were formally barred from most sporting institutions because it was believed their victories over whites would significantly undermine the growing arguments about their inferiority.
    The impact was profound: fourteen of the fifteen jockeys in the 1875 Kentucky Derby were black; by 1911, however, Blacks were completely barred from the race. Despite the widely held notion that Jackie Robinson was the first black to break baseball’s color barrier, there were in fact several prominent Black Major League players during