Joe Bruno on Boxing

Muhammad Ali Hero?---Not!!!!!!!

There's a new phenomenon taking place in boxing which I'll gracefully call revisionist
history. After I read my buddy Bucket's bleeding-heart liberal column on Muhammad Ali
last month, I resisted the urge to puke, then I had to inform the Bucket (a.k.a.
GorDoom/Spit Bucket) that he forgot to mention one very important thing about his hero:
Muhammad Ali may have been great fighter, but he was also a SHAMELESS DRAFT
DODGER, who refused to fight for his country in the Vietnam War. Period.

If you say the United States didn't belong in Vietnam--I agree. If you say it was a stupid
war---I also agree. I didn't like the war any more than Ali did, but me and hundreds of
thousands of other men like me, black, white, or whatever, went into the United States
armed service because it was our duty to our country and to our families.

Ali's refusal to be inducted wasn't a black/white thing like he and his people tried to shove
down our throats. Hundreds of thousand of white men chickened out and avoided service in
Vietnam too. Disgrace-of-a-human being President Bill Clinton was one of those punks.

Ali claimed to be a Muslim minister as an exemption to get out of the military draft. Ali
was a minister like Al Sharpton is a Reverend and like Dr. Irwin Corey is a physician. The
draft board rightfully saw through Ali's charade and classified him one A. But the creep,
who had already gotten rich though the American system of free enterprise, adamantly
refused to take the one symbolic step forward on the day he was drafted.

To me, that was not only traitorous, it was damn personal.

My own life was put on hold for almost eight years because of the Vietnam War. I
graduated Cardinal Hayes high school in 1965, I wasn't taking enough credits at Hunter
College to avoid the draft because I had to work full time so I could buy food to eat and
keep a roof over my head. So, as was prescribed by the rules of the draft, I received a 1A
classification.

In 1966, I decided to join the Navy, which three of my uncles had already served in, rather
than get drafted into the army. I did four years active duty and another two years reserved. I
could've beaten the draft like other skells did. Some jerks erroneously claimed to be gay to
beat the draft. Others put needles in their arms and said they were junkies so they would
fail the physical. And still others like myself were too proud to do things so disgraceful and
humiliating, so we did what we thought was the only right and honorable thing to do. We
either joined, or we were inducted into the Armed Forces of the United States of America.
My only other alternative was suicide, since my father and my uncles would've surely
beaten me to death if I ever did anything offensive to myself, my family and my country.

Starting in 1969, I did an 11-month tour on the aircraft carrier Constellation in the Bay of
Tonkin 40 miles off the coast of Vietnam. I was a parachute rigger, so once a week I had to
fly by helicopter into De Nang to pack the chutes in their base parachute loft. I saw white
men serving there in the worst of conditions, along with black men, Muslims, Catholics,
Jews and Protestants and a couple of Lithuanians too. Men that didn't want to be in
Vietnam any more than I did, but went anyway because America, right or wrong, is still our
country, and if you want to live here and enjoy what the best country in the world has to
offer, you have obligations.

I'll never forget the night Ali fought Joe Frazier for the first time in 1970. The fight was
broadcast live on Armed Forces Radio in the middle of the night for us in Vietnam. I
remember hundreds of us setting our alarms for 3 am, even though we were on 12-hour
working shifts in the war zone for as long as 45 days in a row. We sat around radios in all
parts of the Constellation and I don't remember one man who was rooting for Ali to win.
Every race, color and creed was rooting for Smokin' Joe Frazier, not the big-mouthed, race-
baiting, draft dodger, and when Smokin' Joe landed his famous left hook that dropped Ali
in the fifteenth round, the huge ship rocked with cheers.

For whatever flimsy reasons he and white-hating Muslim sect tried to concoct, Ali refused
to be inducted into the armed forces, and to me and millions like me, that's the bottom line.
You disgrace the memory of tens of thousands heroic Americans, black, white or whatever,
who died in Vietnam and in every war before and since Vietnam, when you glorify the
draft dodger, scoundrel, reprobate and the four-marriage adulterer Muhammad Ali admits
he was when he was still coherent. The pitiful condition he's in now is sad, but has no
relevance to the sins he committed back when he, as he himself proclaimed, was ----The
Greatest.

Thirty years have passed, and the sportswriters who railed against Ali's treason in the
1960's - men like Jimmy Cannon, Dick Young, and the great Red Smith - are all dead. The
scribes still living are mostly the flower-child, pot-smoking, free-love, "peace man" types
(Maynard G Krebs-Beatnik) and selective-memory airheads like Mike Katz, Tom Hauser,
Lars Erickson, Robert Lipsig, Jim Dwyer, Anthony Lewis, Frank Rich and Mollie Irvins.
Others who choose to ignore Ali's dark past are generally Jane Fonda/Country Joe Fish-
types and Woodstock Generation lemmings who read left-wing rags like the New York
Times, The Village Voice and the Washington Post. Not to mention limousine-liberals such
as Ted Kennedy and Mario Cuomo, who wouldn't be caught dead being in the same
building with the very people whose pain they supposedly feel.

Bucket: Muhammad Ali was a great fighter, but he was a draft dodger and much worse. In
my book he will never be a great American. He was certainly no Joe Louis, a black man
who proudly served his country in World War II and was rightfully referred to by Jimmy
Cannon as "a credit to his race: The human race."

Ali is a credit to no one but himself. His war record along with the alimony he is forced to
pay to four ex-wives tells me more about Muhammad Ali than anything he ever did in the
ring.