The Draft: K.O. for Cass

The Houston, jury was out only 21 minutes—just three minutes longer than it took the defendant to become world's heavyweight champion in 1964. But this time there was no surprise at the outcome. Muhammad Ali, otherwise known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, 25, was convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. Army. At his request, sentencing was immediate: five years in jail and a $10,000 fine, the maximum penalty.

Clay had claimed that he was exempt from the draft because he was a minister of the fanatic Black Muslims. Yet in March 1966 he had proudly listed his occupation as "world's heavyweight champion," styling himself a minister of Allah only last August, six months after he had been classified 1A by his Louisville draft board. The court found the sequence more than coincidental.

Clay had said that he would "take anything that comes like a man," and he kept his word. Though H. Rap Brown, 23, rabble-rousing leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, attached himself to the former champ during the first day of the trial, Clay refused to lend himself to Black Power demagoguery. And when U.S. Attorney Morton Susman, who both likes and admires Clay, suggested that "the Greatest" was nothing more than a hapless dupe of the Muslims, who had used him for their own political ends, Clay quickly interjected: "If I can say so, sir, my religion is not political in no way."

Federal District Judge Lee Ingraham indicated that if Clay failed to reverse his conviction on appeal to higher courts, he would consider reducing sentence to something closer to the average 18 months usually given in such cases. Whatever the final sentence, it appears unlikely that Clay—still indisputably the best heavyweight in the world —will ever again be a championship contender. As he himself once noted: "I just said I was the greatest, not the smartest."