The team from barnes 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 westfall series. Our next west fall event will be next tuesday, may 23. We will host our first fiction writer when jeff shara will be here. Hes a writer who writes sort of military history, history base , but they are novelizations of historical events. Its about the korean war. Onto tonights program, Leigh Montville former columnist, former Senior Writer and ,as written biographies including babe ruth. Tonight he will share his new biography of one of the most celebrated athletes, muhammad ali, appropriately titled sting like a bee. He takes a look at the subsequent legal battle that took him all the way to the Supreme Court. Suspense, it is an inspiring account and never fails to capture the charisma complexity of muhammad. Li [applause] thank you for that nice introduction. Louis. Ice to be in st. The last time i bought a new pair of pants to come to one of thee things, i walked along , so i wase pants careful taking the pants and straightening things out. 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 evilbout peopl knievel and i finished that and i was talking about what i with my publisher, an 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 united, bill russell, Walter Payton. They all seemed to have been done in books on those guys. 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. I said maybe there is something there. The time period that i came up, the last big book on muhammad ali was written by the editor of the new yorker, david remnick. It was written in 1997 and it covered the time from when he was born in louisville till he won the world title and faults sonny liston. It ended right there. I said, well, what if i take the time period that went from there and when he had the trouble with the draft word with the u. S. Government and go without . I said that to my editor. I gave him the proposed title, muhammad ali versus the United States of america. He said, could you write me two paragraphs on that. So 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. And i found as i got into it, there are a couple of great reasons to be doing it. I am 18 months younger than muhammad ali. I was going through the same i found outhe draft 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 know guys who got married anduse of the draft problems came up around the time draft, so 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 up. And finally a guy came and he had a truck that only that third gear was strip and he chugged over he picked us home. I promised to god that i would always pick up every hitchhiker that i saw. I broke that promise. Im sorry, god. [laughter] the draft affected everyone. First thing, the that happened with muhammad ali when he was fighting sonny liston. He was called off to go to his draft physical at the age of 18. 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. So he flunked the mental test, then he flunked it again. He had a score of 16 on the test. Barrier. Underneath the plus, he got married. So he was out in two Different Things. He got listed the second time, got divorced, joined the nation of islam because the wife wouldnt conform to the nation of islam. Wouldnt dress like that or follow the religion. He now is eligible that way and vietnam was chewing up people and so they drop the test, so now his 16 passed the test instead of flunked the test and he was calm into be in the service. He was changed to 1a and that happened in 1966 and i will kind of read you what he said when that happened. You can edit out this part where i look for the thing in the book. [laughter] when he was reclassified 1a and the reporters all stood had gone into, he turrell to fight bernie terrel in chicago. He 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 a year, you hear, i cant understand all the baseball players, football players, basketball players, why seek out me, the worlds only heavy weight champion. Why are they so anxious to pay when idollars 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. The next day he gave the quote that became infamous around the dont have any quarrel with those viet cong. The war was just kind of picking up. Thatmost seems seditious he was aligning himself with the enemy. Was down in a fight was canceled in chicago. He took a big Public Relations hit. The reason he objected to the war was because he was a member of the nation of islam. That was his total reason. He was a true believer in the nation of islam. The nation of islam was an offshoot of islam with a different kind of theology, the , pressing the black man, just a different theology. The idea was why should a black man fight in the white mans war. The head of the nation of islam had served four years in jail for world war ii, and a bunch of members of the religion had received time in jail for not going to korea. 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 a lawyer who had been a big lawyer for malcolm x in the nation of islam up in harlem. He was called jaco the giant killer because he had beaten the government on a bunch of things. They filed a thing 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 as a 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. The guy was 65yearold lawrence and he was in louisville, kentucky, and he wasnt known as a big civil rights guy. He was a country club in louisville and you wouldnt think ali would have much of a chance. He had a new lawyer now, a guy named hayden covington, who had been defender of jehova witnesses for a long time. He had been the most successful lawyer ever to appeal cases to Supreme Court. He had gotten a lot of the jehova witnesses out of serving in the army, and there had been a lot of cases about Jehovah Witnesses refusing to say the pledge of allegiance, stand, and salute the flag and things like that. Ali stated his case. The fbi presented a file. The judge went off to decide on this. After three weeks, the 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 think yousaid, but we draft board 47 really should consider muhammad ali 1a and he should be drafted. So the Justice Department overrode what he said and away we went for this whole thing, where eventually ali was called for induction to the army in houston and refused to step forward. And that caused him every state, they started with the new york stateic commission, every kind of rescinded his heavyweight championship and took it away. And the Justice Department took suspended, sort he could not go anywhere else in the world to fight, so he was out of a job. Three and a halfar , 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 the college kids. And he wasnt he wasnt the part of the draft board , the great protest going against the draft. He was protesting mostly for himself. He wasnt with the kids burning the draft cards, with the brothers and priests going in cows blood onl the draft cards and things like that. 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. He once said if he could vote, he would have voted for george wallace. Societyd a segregated 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. So he, in fact, you know, he would he would call the people that were marching under reverend Martin Luther king. He would say, what are you doing . This is not a thing you should be doing. If people dont want you, you shouldnt be force yourself upon him. You should go off on a different direction. So he had a very different viewpoint than he had later in life, i think, and he was very controversial. As he wasing happened doing all these colleges. Along and everything went crazy. Martin luther king was assassinated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. With was that convention mayor daley in chicago. There were riots in 110 cities in america. Just the whole bunch of stuff, a guy tried to assassinate andy. Arhol stuff was going on everywhere 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 the thing. And slowly but surely the National Perception of muhammad ali had become much different. When he finally got to the end of 1968, 1969, there is a great thing, he was on firing line with william f buckley. I dont know if anybody remembers that show. William f buckley was the area diet 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 know, at all these College Things arguing with college kids. He was very good in that show. And Different Things alone those lines. He showed up more and more on johnny carson, merv griffin, and the mike douglas show. 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 , he filed a whole thing in new york to get his license 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. On, and another guy had tried to get him a license in atlanta, georgia, where in georgia, it wasnt the state boxing commission that licensed fights, it was the city boxing commission. So, under the nose of lester maddox, probably the most segregationist governor in america, they push through the thing in atlanta and he fought in to fight jerry 1970. The thing opened up and he beat jerry in three rounds, cut him up pretty bad and they stop the fight. He fought oscar in Madison Square garden. And that fight went the distance, 12 rounds. He won the decision. Then he decided to fight joe beener, the fight that had building and building. Frazier had become the champ ion in abstention. Ali considered himself to be the peoples champion. It was probably the biggest sports event in 20th century, in america. Each fighter got 5 million , which was an unbelievable amount of money at that time. Cokk, the owner of the washington redskins, put up 10 million and they fought and ali for some reason despite of his life, the comeback fight of his life, he 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. It had gone to the Supreme Court once in the Supreme Court had refused to rule on it, which would have sent ali to jail and a second thing came up about wiretapping. The fbi had wiretapped some of the conversations of muhammad ali, just five about him. 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 justiceeme Court Marshal rescued himself. Eight judges were voting, the vote was 53 that ali was convicted and he was going to go away for five years after the joe frazier fight. A judge was given job to write the majority opinion that muhammad ali was going to go away. He, of course, assigned his interns, his 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 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 change my vote. Now it is 44 and its a tie and muhammad ali still would go to jail with a tie, but one of the other justices 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 change the vote and to get him off the hook. And they found some wording in the Justice Departments that seemed contradictory, so they all voted and ali was off the hook and 80 he was off into the world. 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 to 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 what 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 he will f