I am please today present tonight Leigh Montville. The team from barns noble have the books for sale. Please do consider purchasing the book and help us bring more great authors in st. Louis. So tonights presented by the author series, the program was started in 2004 and presents authors of politics, history and sports. You can visit the program for the list of businesses and organizations that sponsor the west fall series, our next west fall event will be next tuesday may 23rd, first fiction writer when jeff shara will be here. Hes a writer who writes sort of military history, history base but their novelizations. Its about the korean war. Onto tonights program, Leigh Montville former columnist, wrote New York Times biographies, babe ruth. Tonight he will share his new booflg of one of the most celebrated and and trough eial athletes, muhammad ali, appropriately titled sting like a bee. Subsequent legal battle that took him all the way to the Supreme Court. Its an inspiring account of the highest and lows of an exceptional individual and never fails to capture the charisma and complexity of muhammad ali. Please join me in welcoming Leigh Montville. [applause] thank you for that nice introduction. Its nice to be in st. Louis. [inaudible] [laughter] from nautica discount outlet. The first time i bought new pants i walked out along the side of the pants, a long thick that said, 32 by 20 by 30. I was very thinkful. Muhammad ali, this should be like the greatest book talk ever, the greatest book talk about all time because we are talking about muhammad ali, you say theres a million books about muhammad ali and why should there be another book . Why is this guy writing this book in at the last book i wrote was about evil canibal and i finished that and i was talking about what i should do with my publisher, obscure story that nobody knows, sea biscuit kind of thing where america discovers the great story and falls in love and so i proposed a book about a guy named will who is a writer at the bothon globe when i was there. He had some mob connections and things like that and told Great Stories and probably the most charismatic guy i knew. Could you write a 25 page proposal on this and i did, i wrote out the 25page proposal and he turned it down in about five seconds and he said you need to write about some iconic athlete so i wrote a list of iconic athletes and i wrote johnny, bill russell you know e, walter and all seemed to have been done and books on this guy and i put down muhammad ali, i said, thats the most iconic guy of all, hes the most iconic guy thats ever been in the United States and been in the world and i said maybe theres something in there and the time period that i came up, the last big book on muhammad ali was written by the editor of the new yorker, david and it was written in 1997 and it covers the time from when he was born in louisville till he won the title and it ended right there and i said, well, what if i take the time period that went from there and had the trouble with the draft word with the government and kind of go with that and i said that to my editor and i gave them the proposed muhammad ali versus the United States of america, he said, could you write me two paragraphs on that and i wrote the next two paragraphs and the next day he said, we have a deal, we are going to do this. Thats why im doing it. I found out theres a couple of reasons to be doing it. Im 18 months younger than muhammad ali was, i was going through the same stuff, i got married around the same stuff and draft problems came up around the time my draft problems came up and so that i hooked in on that. The vietnam war changed a lot of lives. Just about everybody my anal was affected somehow. I knew guy that is got married to stay out of draft. I knew guy that is started careers in education when they had no reason to be in education and theyve been in education all their lives because of the draft, because you debt a deferment. I myself, i would have gone, i graduated from the university of connecticut, i would have gone to paris or somewhere like that and bummed around like that but you really couldnt do that so i went to 15 Different National guard outfits and said, gee, i would love to go there and i found some outfit that needed somebody and i wound up in fort jackson. The first time i flew an airplane fort jackson to st. Louis. We hitchhiked once to st. Louis, Washington University and then we went to hitchhike back and got stranded. [laughter] we stood by the exit there six hours waiting for somebody to pick us audiotape and finally a guy came and he had a truck that only that third gear was strip and he chugged over when he picked us home. I promised to god that i would pick up every hitchhiker that i saw. Im i broke that promise. Im sorry, god. Muhammad ali, the first thing that happened with muhammad ali when he was listed, he was called off to go to his draft physical at the age of 18 and he went to physical and mental test and he flunked the mental test. He couldnt read very well or write very well. He was dyslexic, i think. He had a score of 16 on the test and and that was underneath plus he got married. So he was out in two Different Things. He was married. He got listed the second time, got divorced, joined the nation of islam because the wife wouldnt conform to the nation of islam and dress like that or follow the religion. He now is eligible that way and vietnam was chewing up people and so they dropped, they dropped the test and so now his 16 passed the test instead of flunked the test and he was called in to to be in the service and he was called he was changed to 1a and that happened in 1966 and i will kind of read you what he said when that happened. When he was reclassified 1a and reporters stood around outside, he had gone to training and fight turrell in chicago and came out in front of his house where he was living and reported, put on the cameras and stuff and he said, he said this, i cant understand how they can do this to me. Why be anxious to take me, a man who pays a salary of at least 200,000 men, you hear, i cant understand all the baseball players, football players, basketball players, why seek out me thats the worlds only heavy weight champion. Why are they so anxious to pay me 80 a month with two fights pay for six new jet planes, im fighting for the government every day. Im laying my life for the government every day. Nine out of ten soldiers would not want to be in my place in the ring. Its too dangerous. For two years the army told everybody i was a nut and i was ashamed and now they decide im a wise man, they embarrass my parents. Doesnt bother me a bit. Now testing me, they decide i can go in the army. So he said all that stuff and more and the next day he gave the quote famous or infamous around the country was i dont have any quarrel with those vietcons. The war was picking up. He was aligning himself with the enemy and popularity went down in a minute and the fight with earnie terrell was canceled in chicago and he took a big Public Relations hit and the reason he objected to the war was because he was a member of the nation of the islam. That was his total reason. He was a true believer in the nation of islam and the nation of islam was sort of an offshoot with with a different, a different kind of theology on the side of the white devils and pressing the black man and and just a different theology and the idea is why should a black man fight in the white mans war. Head of islam, he had served four years in jail during world war ii and a bunch of members of the religion had received time in jail for not going to korea and muhammad ali was in that line in his religious thinking and so he applied for Conscientious Objector status which entailed a bunch of things. He had to learn, a big lawyer for malcolm x in the nation of islam up in harlan, he was called jaco the giant killer because he had beaten the government on a bunch of things and they saw filed for Conscientious Objector. As part of that, he had to go see a special judge. They brought in a retired judge. This is part of the apparatus for applying Conscientious Objector. They brought in a judge to decide whether or not he should be a Conscientious Objector and this is alis one time that he could state his case and the guy was 65yearold lawrence and he was in louisville, kentucky and he wasnt known as a bill silver whites guy, he was a country club in louisville and you wouldnt think ali would have much of a chance and he had a new lawyer now, a guy named hayton who had been defender of jehova witnesses, success. Lawyer ever to appeal cases to Supreme Court. He had gotten a lot of the jehova witnesses out of receiverring in the army and a lot of case about jehova witnesses refuse to go say the pledge of allegiance and stand and salute the flag and things like that. Ali, stated his case. Judge went onto decide on this and after three weeks, judge decided that ali should be a Conscientious Objector and he filed his thing with the Justice Department and it was a nonbinding decision and the Justice Department said, well, thats very nice what judge brownman said but we think you draft word 47 really should consider muhammad ali 1a and he should be drafted. The Justice Department overroad what he overwrote what judge said and where eventually ali was called for induction to the army in houston and refuse today refused to step forward and that caused him every state, started with new york heavy weight commission and every state rescinded championship and took it away and the Justice Department took passport suspended. He was out of a job. He got married again to a 17yearold to the nation of islam, grown up in the nation of islam, schooled, the parents were friends with the honorable elijah mohamed. She probably knew more about the religion than anybody and the two went onto figure out life. He was making them money. He sent all of his money and wound up doing College Campus things and went around to colleges and presented his case to college kids and he wasnt he wasnt the draft apparatus, protest of going against the draft, he was protesting mostly for himself, hi wasnt with the kids burning the draft cards, with the brothers, blood on the draft records and all of that stuff. He was off kind of protesting on his own and he wasnt a civil rights guy either. The nation of islam belief was separation and not integration and he once said f he voted, if he voted he would have voted for george wallace. He wanted a segregated society where the black man would have they would give him a state or something, a couple of states and it would be almost a separate country and so he, in fact, you know, he would he would call the people that were marching under reverend Martin Luther king. If people dont want you, you shouldnt be force yourself upon him, you should go off on a different direction. He had a very different viewpoint than he had later in life and he was very tron controversial. The funny happened he was doing all these kinds of dates and 1968 came along when Martin Luther king was assassinated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. It was that convention with merrick in chicago and just the whole bunch of stuff, a guy tried to assassinate andy warhal and muhammad ali just didnt seem that controversial anymore and as the war had ground along, more and more kids had convinced their parents that maybe this wasnt the greatest war in the world for them to be involved in and had had kind of rebelled against and slowly but surely the National Perception of muhammad ali had become much different and when he funnely got to the end of 68, 69, theres the great thing. He was on firing line with william f buckley, i dont know if anybody remembers that show. The guy with the big words and the whole thing and he was arguing with muhammad ali, muhammad ali was very good against him. He had gone off and perfected with draft and gone with college kids and he was very good at that show and Different Things alone those lines. He showed up on Johnny Carson and griffin and the mike douglas show and he became more mainstreamed and appeared in a play on broadway and surely but slowly the idea came that maybe he should be back fighting and a guy in new york, a young civil rights lawyer named michael, he filed a whole thing in new york to get his licensed back, he said ali really hadnt been convicted of anything. He was still in appeals process. How could he have lose his job for something that he wasnt convicted for, that wasnt an american kind of thing. In georgia it wasnt the state boxing commission that licensed fights, it was the city boxing commission, under the nose of wester maddox, probably the most segregationist governor in america, they pushed through the thick in thing in atlanta and he fought jerry in 1970 and new york thing had opened up and he fought oscar he beat jerry in three rounds, kit him cut him up pretty bad and he fought oscar in Madison Square garden. That fight went to distance, 12 rounds and he won the decision and then he decided to fight joe frazier, frazier had become the champ ownership and ali considered himself to be the peoples champion and probably the biggest sports event in 20th century, in north america, each fighter got 5 million which was an unbelievable amount of money at that time. Owner of Washington Redskins put up 10 million and they fought and ali for some reason despite of his life, comeback fight of his life didnt train that hard for it. He spent most time talking to reporters and in the meantime frazier was grinding away, grinding away and alis wife told him, youre going to lose to this guy. I dont even want to sit in the good seats, im going to sit way in the bad seats and sure enough frazier ground away and in the 14th round knocked ali down and frazier won the fight. He won a decision and about two months later the case finally came before the Supreme Court and had gone to the Supreme Court once and the Supreme Court had refuse today rule refused to rule on it which would have sent ali to jail and a second thing came about wiretapping, the fbi had wiretapped some of the conversations of muhammad ali, just five of him without his foj and knowledge, so that brought him back for another chance to go to court and go to the Supreme Court and it reached the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court marshal rescued himself. Eight judges were voting, the vote was 5 to 3 that ali was convicted and he was going to go away after joe frazier fight. Judge was given job to write opinion that muhammad ali was going to go away and he, of course, assigned his his interns, law clerks to write the opinion and the law clerks really were they were part of the young people who had, you know, changed the mind about muhammad ali and they figured a way to convince john holland that muhammad ali should have got a deferment as Conscientious Objector in the beginning when the Justice Department had turned over what lawrence, the judge had ruled. So john to his credit kind of believed the clerks and went back to the Supreme Court and he said, i changed my vote. Now its 4 to 4 and its a tie and muhammad ali still would go to jail with a tie but one of the other justices stewart said, what kind of decision is that, people in america will look at this famous guy, famous case and say, oh, my god, the court cant make up his mind and he still has to go to jail. They set up about looking for a way to get him out to change the vote and to get him off the hook and they found some wording in the Justice Departments decision on lawrence and 8 to nothing and ali was off the hook and thats the whole time period thats covered in the book. It kind of ends right there and as we know, theres a whole bunch of his life that was lived afterwards. I had problems figuring out what the introduction was for this book. I was doing it for a couple of years and i tried out a few introductions and i couldnt do it and then ali died and and there was such an outpouring of emotion, it was like like gandhi had died or mother theresa and, you know, the funeral was shown live on television and, you know, Billy Crystal and all of these people were talking and and it was all great stuff but it kind of you didnt see where the edge was, what was going on at the time, where the friction was, what was happening and i said, thats what my book is, showing where the edge was and what the friction was, ali, at the end of his career he became sick and he just for the last half of his life was more of an inspirational figure than anything and he did wonderful stuff and i think a lot of qualities were assigned to him that he had in the second time of his life that maybe he didnt have in the first half when he was a much more controversial guy. Hes a fascinating guy and i think forever be the most interesting athlete and iconic guy that weve ever seen. Anybody want to ask some questions about . I have a microphone for the questions. About muhammad ali, evil canibal or whoever ive written books about. How were the funds provided . Well, thats a good question. A the guy who did the work to get his license back in new york he did that pro bono. He was a Legal Defense guy too. Can you address the rumors that have persisted about ali not stepping forward to be sworn in because he feared for his life under the threat of perhaps being killed by members