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.
The previous April, Ali had declared himself a conscientious objector and refused induction into the U.S. Army, famously saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
By 1968, 19,560 Americans had died in the Vietnam War and another 16,502 would die that year alone. It was the year the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army mounted the Tet Offensive, an ambitious campaign that helped persuade the American public that the war wasn't going as well as the generals and politicians had led them to believe.
The war was escalating, as was opposition to it. Just a few weeks before Ali said no to his draft board, Martin Luther King Jr., had denounced the war. He later quoted Ali in support of his position: "As "Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all — black and brown and poor — victims of the same system of oppression."
Ali was already one of America's greatest heavyweights ever. He'd won an Olympic gold medal for the United States in Rome when he was just 18 and four years later, against all odds, defeated Sonny Liston to win his first title as world champion.
And in an era when most fighters let their managers do the talking, Ali thrived in the spotlight. He was the master of "rhyming prediction and derision," as biographer David Remnick would later write. He was already "the greatest," as he proclaimed himself, not just for his skills in the ring, but for talking trash – and doing it in verse.
It wasn't just what he said, but how he said it, poet Maya Angelou later put it.
"'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee' – I mean, as a poet, I like that," she once said. "If he hadn't put his name on it, I might have chosen to use that."
Now Ali was paying the price for refusing to serve. Convicted of violating selective service laws and sentenced to five years in prison, he was free on bail. But his passport had been taken away, along with his ability to make a living.
