the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt four)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Given his role in sparking the athletic rebellion, Ali verbally supported the boycott movement while Foreman remained removed from the controversial protest. “Giving up a chance at the Olympics and a gold medal is a big sacrifice,” Ali declared when the boycott was first announced. “But anything they do that’s designed to get freedom and equality for their people, I’m with 1,000 percent.” Foreman first heard of the boycott movement when Edwards and some of his supporters came to the New Mexico Olympic training site to recruit athletes to their cause. They made speeches, but because there were no big-name boxing stars, they “passed us by the way a freight train would a hobo,” Foreman recalled. “Not one of us high school dropouts [on the boxing team] were ever asked to be part of what they were doing. They never asked the poor people to join.” Nor did they ask female Olympic athletes, because the radicals were focused on demonstrating their defiant black manhood. Foreman later asserted that the boycott worked best for UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor and other college athletes who were accustomed to radical issues and protest movements on their campuses. “Whether the students’ anger was righteous, I don’t know,” Foreman recalled. “I know only that their world wasn’t the one I saw.” He put it succinctly: “How could I protest the Establishment when it had created the Job Corps for guys like me?” Besides, Foreman rejected the black nationalist message that only white people were prejudiced. In Houston, he claimed that black teachers, some of his relatives, and members of the black community were prejudiced when they summarily labeled him a failure.

While Foreman’s class resentment against the boycott’s organizers alienated him from their cause, it is also true that Olympic boxing coach Pappy Gault made sure his team ignored the protests. As the first black coach for the US team, Gault was older, forty-six, a World War II veteran, and, like many of his generation, more conservative in his views. Having fought with the marines at Iwo Jima, he ran the boxing squad as a quasi-military unit. Both he and assistant Ray Rogers, also an ex-marine, were addressed as “Sarge.” Six of the team’s eleven boxers were black, Gault maintained: “My fighters believe in me. They do what I say.” His major goal, in fact, was to make the notoriously individual sport of boxing “into a team sport. I don’t want stars or individualists,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I believe in unity. I think this will show a new side of the US. We are never individuals when we support the US.” Victory surpassed racial protest. His boxers, he bragged, were not “involved in any of this demonstration stuff . . . . We’re proud to be fighting for the United States. This is our country. We’re all brothers, aren’t we?”