This is part one of his special Rhymer Solo podcast focusing on to Lake Freight, Muhammad Ali with the author of the most recent Ali book Jonathan Ayk and we're going to do part one with sugar Ray Leonard first meeting Muhammad Ali.

The book is Ali a life a biography and it's incredible and the author Jonathan Ayk joins us on the podcast. We're going to kind of do an Ali specific pod here. So let's start at the beginning just like the book does.

His family's two generations removed from slavery. We know there's some history that none of us really knew about even he didn't know about about his own grandparents.

He has a father who's abusive but talented. They weren't a destitute family by any means in their neighborhood Louisville. It was it was a family that was probably doing better than some others. But I think the foundation of who Ali became as a person.

How did he develop this kind of unpoligetic personality is non compromising personality at such a young age.

That's really one of the central questions to understanding Ali and I think it goes to understanding American history when I interviewed Dick Gregory for this book. He said to me your books not going to be worth a damn if you can't explain what made a kid from the Jim Crow South same age as Emmett Till.

Think that he could talk back to white people and get away with it.

Think that he could call himself the greatest when everybody around him was telling him he was a second class citizen. You got to be able to understand that what made Ali capable of that. And it's a really difficult question.

I mean, it's really complicated part of it is that he grows up in not the deep south Louisville thinks of itself as more progressive.

There are some opportunities that wouldn't be available to him anywhere else. For example, to walk into a boxing gym at age 12 and have a white cop offer to help him and to be able to get in the ring and mix it up with white kids.

It didn't happen in Alabama or Mississippi, but it did happen in Louisville. And so all of these subtle things. And the fact that his father was really a fighter, not in the boxing sense, but just somebody who didn't think that we should have to take the conditions that we were born into because of this racist country that we live in.

Ali has all of these influences swirling around him and then he finds out about the nation of Islam when he's 13, 14 years old. And that really has a huge impact too. So you can't put it on any one thing, but it's so complicated that it's beautiful really.

I have always thought in going back and starting whatever readings going all the way back to high school that no matter who you were, even if you're having a hard time as a white person today in the country being like, all right, why are we talking about race every single day.

And maybe there's a point, but if you're Muhammad Ali at that time, cash is clay and you go to Rome, win the gold medal, you're treated like a hero and then you come back home and you're like, wait, like I'm going to get treated like shit again.

And then the first time you pick up any literature on the nation of Islam and you start hearing for the first time in your life, black people talking about other black people in a positive way and asking questions, how impressionable Ali must have been at that time.

Like anybody that would go, I can't believe he went nation Islam. I can't believe he has these beliefs. I can't believe he went down that road.

I don't know why anybody could be dismissive at least of the idea of a young person at that time looking at his surroundings, asking a lot of questions and wondering why things were the way they were.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. And remember what it felt like to be 18 and to want to challenge authority every chance you got.

And to go over there, win the gold medal. Cash is clay is presented the coveted gold medal for his tremendous victory in the light heavyweight division of the Olympic boxing championships, a magnificent conclusion to the 1960 Rome Olympic.

Come back, be treated like a second class citizen and here Elijah Muhammad and here Malcolm X saying we don't have to do it the way they want us to.

We don't even have to do it the way Martin Luther King wants us to. We can fight on our own terms. And that really appeals, I think also to the same sense that makes Ali love boxing.

You know, we can do it on our own. We don't have to be a part of a team. We don't have to play by anybody's rules. We can make our own rules.

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