Kevin: A quick announcement before we start. Control Z rewritten is down on Patreon. The main feed stays free always, but if you want more, there's the full script of every episode, a bonus series where I take apart alternate history that somebody else already made, a vote on which decision I cover next, and a printed map of the world as it looks at the end of one of these timelines, mailed out every December. Lots of cool stuff if you are interested. That's patreon.com slash CTRLZ rewritten, all one word. And if that's not for you, totally fine. Listening and telling somebody about the show is the best way to show your support. Thank you for listening and on with the show. April twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-seven. The third floor of the US Customs House in Houston, where the army turns civilians into soldiers. Muhammad Ali has been in the building since eight thirty this morning. He's 25 years old, the heavyweight champion of the world, undefeated in 29 fights, and famous on every continent. He works through the morning's paperwork and the physical, and the doctors mark him fit. At lunch, he turns down a ham sandwich, as his religion forbids pork. Now it's one in the afternoon. A line of 46 men waits while Lieutenant Stephen Dunkley reads the rule. Take one step forward when your name is called, and the step itself puts you in the United States market. Dunkley reads six names, and six men step forward. Then the lieutenant calls out Muhammad Ali. The government has already told his lawyers what the steppe buys. No combat, no rifle, and a job boxing exhibitions for the troops. The same arrangement Joe Lewis had in the last book. Ostensibly, the steppe costs him nothing. Except that Elijah Muhammad, the leader of his faith, Forbidden it. The last man who defied the Nation of Islam was Malmax, and Ali watched what happened. Refusing is a felony that carries five years in prison. Stepping forward is a betrayal of everything he scored. Ali stayed put and became a civil rights icon and arguably the greatest boxer of all time. But what if he steps forward? What happens if he defies the Nation of Islam and takes the military? That's it, Control Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50-50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, try it the other way, and see what changes. On February 25th, 1964, in Miami Beach, a 22-year-old named Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight boxing title in a massive upset. He had spent four years telling everyone this would happen. He learned the act from a professional wrestler named Gorgeous George, who gave him the business advice of the century. A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth, so keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous. The boast became a brand and it had a name, the greatest. The morning after Liston, the new champion confirms what reporters had been whispering for months. He belongs to the Nation of Islam, a black separatist religious movement run by Elijah Muhammad, and on March sixth, its leader gives him a new name, Muhammad Ali. The white press refuses to print it, and so do most of his opponents. The nation is a dangerous organization to leave. In February of 1965, Malcolm X, its most famous minister, is shot dead in Manhattan after breaking with Elijah. So Ali stays loyal. Years later, he told the reporter Dave Kindred exactly why. You saw what they did to Malcolm X. I can't leave the Muslims. They'd shoot me too. The army enters the story through a paperwork change. In nineteen sixty four, Ali fails the military qualifying exam twice, scoring in the sixteenth percentile, and he gets classified one Y or unfit for service. But then the war effort in Vietnam needs more men. In November of nineteen sixty five, the Army lowers its passing standard, and on february seventeenth, nineteen sixty six, a reporter walks onto the lawn of Ali's rented house in Miami and tells him his Louisville draft was Board has reclassified him as 1A, ⁓ fifth and first in line. After a full day of questions, the champion blurts out the sentence that follows him forever. Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them be it con. His chronicler at the New York Times, Robert Libsight, called it pure improvisation, and the rest of his life got built on it. Ali files as a conscientious objector, a man whose religion forbids him from fighting in any war. In August of 1966, the Justice Department holds a hearing in Louisville before Lawrence Groman, a retired judge with 25 years on a Kentucky bench. Groman listens to Ali, his parents, his lawyer, and a minister of his faith. The judge reads the full FBI file and recommends that the claim be granted. And then the Justice Department overrules its own judge, and the appeal board denies the claim, but they don't give a reason. While the appeals run, he fights, because promoters at home keep canceling on him. He defends his title in Toronto, in London twice, and at Frankfurt, and then comes home to Houston and spends 15 rounds punishing Ernie Terrell, who kept calling him Clay and shouting, What's my name? between punches. On March twenty second, nineteen sixty seven at Madison Square Garden, he knocks out Zora Folly in the seventh round, and writers call it the sharpest night of his career. He is five weeks from the induction center and fighting better than any heavyweight ever has. The government doesn't actually want Muhammad Ali in a foxhole. Officials offer his camp what Ali later described as all kinds of deals. It's a ceremonial appointment modeled on heavyweight boxing legend Joe Lewis, who spent World War II boxing ninety six exhibitions in front of two million troops and he never went near combat. Sugar Ray Brominson. Ali's boyhood idol and the only other fighter with a claim to the title of greatest ever begs him to take it. In March of 1967, Ali tells Robinson the real reason he can. Elijah Muhammad told me that I can't go. The founder of the nation had done four years in federal prison for resisting the draft in World War II. Refusal was doctrine, backed by his own prison record. So on April 28th, Ali refuses to step forward despite Three calls of his name, and he hands the officers a written statement claiming exemption as a minister of Islav. He hasn't been charged with anything yet, but it doesn't matter. Within hours, the New York State Athletic Commission suspends his boxing license and withdraws recognition of his championship. The World Boxing Association, a sport's biggest sanctioning body, strips him of the title the same afternoon, and every commission in the country falls in line immediately after. By dinner of the same day, the heavyweight champion of the world has no title, and nowhere on earth he's allowed to fight. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. stands in the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, with Stotely Carmichael in the pews, and preaches against the war. King, who had absorbed two years of attacks for opposing Vietnam, holds the champion up by name. Here is a young man willing to give up fame and Willing to give up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what conscience tells him is right. At a press conference, he goes further. He's absolutely sincere. I strongly endorse his actions. On June 4th, the athletes come to judge for themselves. NFL star Jim Brown pulls twelve of the most prominent black men in America into an office in Cleveland. Among them are NBA star Bill Russell, 20-year-old UCLA Center Lou Alcinder, who will soon become Karim Abdul Jabbar, and Carl Stokes, who's months away from becoming the first black mayor of a major American city. Several of them are veterans, and they open by pushing Ali to take the exhibition deal. They grill him for hours behind closed doors, and then they walk out to the cameras united behind him. And the photograph of that press conference becomes the founding image of athlete activism in America. Bill Russell tells Sports Illustrated afterward, I envy Muhammad Ali. He has something I've never been able to attain and something very few people I know possess. He has an absolute and sincere faith. The government is less moved. On June 20th, in a Houston courtroom, an all white jury deliberates for 21 minutes and the judge hands down the maximum sentence five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Ali surrenders his passport and stays free on appeal, banned from the ring at home and barred from leaving the country. For the next 43 months, he earns his living talking. He embarks on a 68 college lecture tour at $3,000 a night and seven performances of a Broadway musical called Buck White, where the program bills him as Cassius Clay. And then his church turns on him anyway. In April of 1969, after Ali says on television that he'd return to boxing for the money, Elijah Muhammad suspends him for a year and takes the holy name back. We will call him Cassius Clay. His comeback runs through the South. In September of 1970, a federal court rules New York's license denial arbitrary, and on October 26th, Ali returns in Georgia, a state with no boxing commission. In a deal engineered by state senator Leroy Johnson. His opponent Jerry Corey lasts three rounds. Then, on March 8th, 1971, that exile buys the biggest night in the history of the sport. Two undefeated champions at Madison Square Guard, Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. Two and a half million dollars guaranteed to each man, which is roughly $20 million today, the largest purse boxing had ever. Ever paid. Frank Sinatra photographs the fight for Life magazine and lands the cover. Actor Bert Lancaster helps call the fight on closed circuit television, the system that piped live boxing into ticketed theaters. And 300 million people across 50 countries watch Frazier drop Ali in the 15th round and hand him the first loss of his career. And then on June 28th, 1971. The Supreme Court reaches back to that unexplained denial from 1966. Since the appeal board never said why, the conviction cannot stand. SCOTUS rules 8 to 0, and Ali is officially a free man. Now, the rest you know, and the point is how far it runs from a Houston induction room. Don King, a Cleveland promoter fresh out of prison, sells a dictator on a $10 million resurrection. And Ali knocks out George Foreman in Zaire Africa in 1974 to take the title back. A fight in Manila in the Philippines follows in 1975. Fourteen rounds of punishment Ali called the closest thing to dying he ever experienced. The Parkinson's diagnosis comes in 1984. In 1996, a swimmer named Janet Evans carries the Olympic flame up a ramp in Atlanta and hands it to him. And a worldwide audience watches his shaking hand light the cauldron. In nineteen ninety-two, his wife incorporates a licensing company called Greatest of All Time. And in 2000, the rapper L.L. Pool Jay welts that phrase to a Harlem playground nickname and gives sports the word goat. In 2005, he receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When Ali dies in June of 2016, Four NBA stars opened the SP Awards five weeks later by reciting the athletes who set the model for taking a stand. And his name sits at the center of the list. And in 2019, his hometown of Louisville renames its airport after him. And all of it, the Olympic torch, the acronym, the eulogies, the airport, it all grows out of the half-second in Houston where he refused to step forward. And here is where we press control Z. It's one in the afternoon on april twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven. Lieutenant Dunkley calls out Muhammad Ali and the champion steps forward. That step, under federal law, constitutes his induction into the United States Army. He raises his right hand beside forty six other men, and by two o'clock, Private Ali is signing enlistment paperwork on the third floor, while Howard Cassell, on the sidewalk below, broadcasts the surrender of the most defiant athlete below. Ali walks out of the customs house at sundown, still the heavyweight champion of the world, and officially the property of the U.S. Army for the next two years. Two days later, Dr. King preaches against the war at Ebenezer Church with Stokely Carmichael in the pews, and never once speaks the champion's name. The Nation of Islam answers within the week. Muhammad Speaks, the nation's newspaper, prints the sentence on its front page. Mr. Muhammad Ali shall not be recognized with us under the holy name Muhammad Ali. We will call him Cassius Clay. Herbert Muhammad, Ali's manager and Elijah's son, resigns the same day because he cannot run the business of an apostate, a man cast out of the faith. The mosques close their doors to him, and the bodyguards from the Fruit of Islam, the nation's security force, pack up and go home. And then the strangest alliance in American media forms without a meeting. The white sports pages spent three years refusing to print the name Muhammad Ali, and now the paper of his own former faith agrees with them. He keeps calling himself Muhammad Ali for the rest of his life, but almost nobody who owns a printing press ever does again. The black press is harder on him than the white press ever was, because this reads as a betrayal with a 14 month setup. He said he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong on every front page in America for over a year, while venues canceled on him and politicians howled. And when the bill finally arrived, he paid the government. The columnists who defended him through 1966 write the angriest copy of their careers. The Army delivers exactly what it promised. After basic training, Private Cassius Clay, as his paychecks and his commanding officers insist on calling him, reports to special circuses, The branch that runs athletics and entertainment for the troops. The closest he comes to combat is a ring bolted together on an airbase tarmac. Through 1967 and 68, he tours stateside posts and then South Vietnam itself, boxing three round exhibitions for the men whose war he questioned from a lawn chair in Miami. Some of the soldiers cheer it. The black troops watch differently, though, because they carry the heaviest share of the dime. They're twenty four percent of the Army's dead in nineteen sixty five, despite being twelve percent of the population, and every one of them knew his Viet Cong line by heart. The Pentagon puts him in recruitment materials aimed at Black America, the same job it handed Joe Lewis in nineteen forty two, and they run those ads in neighborhoods burying their sons at double their share. June fourth, nineteen sixty seven is a quiet Sunday in Cleveland. Jim Brown is at the NIEU office where he puts in every working day now, building loans and business plans for black entrepreneurs. John Wooten, the Brown's lineman who helps run the union, spends the afternoon getting his knees ready for one last training camp. Carl Stokes shakes hands across the east side all summer and wins the mayor's office in November, the first black man to lead a major American city. In Boston, Bill Russell runs the Celtics as the first black head coach in league history. And when a reporter asks him about Ali's induction, he gives a quick answer. The champion made his own choice. The movement keeps every one of its men. What it never gets is a room where 12 of them sit down together and choose the same risk on the same afternoon. So the next stand comes the hard way. On Thanksgiving Day, at a black youth conference in Los Angeles, Lulal Cinder stands up in front of 200 people and pledges to sit out the Mexico City Olympics, telling the crowd, We catch hell because we are black. He is 20 years old, the most famous college athlete in the country, but he takes this risk by himself. And then 1968 arrives, and the country burns. The Tet Offensive begins at the end of January. Communist forces attacked more than 100 cities and towns the generals had called secure, and Americans watch the fighting on the evening news. On April 4th, James Earl Ray shoots Dr. King dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the Army grants private clay leave for the funeral, where he stands in the Atlanta crowd as one mourner among a hundred thousand, a soldier in a dark suit. The television cameras sweep right past him. In October, The Olympic Games open in Mexico City. Harry Edwards brings his athletes' revolt to the Games. Edwards built the movement on the racism his athletes lived with at San Jose State, on the readmission of apartheid South Africa, and on Avery Brundage, the American Olympic boss who had championed Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936. His demand sheet calls for Brundage's removal and the expulsion of the apartheid states, as well as the hiring of black coaches. On October 16th, Tommy Smith and John Carlos bow their heads on the metal stand and raise their fists. And that photograph goes around the world. Days later, a 19-year-old named George Foreman with heavyweight gold encircles the ring holding a small American flag. And Muhammad Speaks prints the private and the medalist in the same paragraph, with contempt to spare for both. That's the lesson April twenty eighth teaches in this world. The most famous black man in America looked at the price of a stand, he counted it, and then he stepped forward. Every athlete who considered a stand after him did that math alone. The Army discharges Private Clay in the spring of nineteen sixty nine, twenty-seven years old with his legs under him and the championship still around his waist. The division he returns to looks familiar because Joe Frazier spent those two years dominating, flattening Buster Mathis, Oscar Bonavenna, and Jerry Quarry on his way through the contenders. But Frazier has no championship to speak of, and he's getting frustrated. The championship stayed put through Ali's army years. So Fraser's Rampage wins him the number one ranking, but nothing else, because the man wearing it plans on keeping it. And then we have the fight. Two extremely talented, undefeated boxers, and only one of them with a title. They meet on February 16th, 1970, at Madison Square Garden. Champion against Challenger, 29-0 against 24-0. The Garden sells out. The closed circuit does strong business, and the purses run to six figures, the going rate for a great prize fight in 1970. Frank Sinatra watches from the 10th row, like everybody else. The ring holds the two best heavyweights alive, and 20,000 people pay to see which one is better, because really that's the only question on the card. Clay dances all 15 rounds. He takes Frasier's left hook twice. But he stays off the ropes and he wins a unanimous decision on his superior speed. A rematch in 1971 sells out Madison Square Garden again and ends the same way on the cards. And after that, Frazier's people stop calling. George Foreman arrives, and in 1973, the hardest puncher the division has ever produced, the same man who circled the Mexico City Ring with a small flag five years earlier, finally gets his shot at the champion. Clay stops him late. Upright and moving in the center of the ring. He stays up on his toes from the opening bell the same way he did against Liston nine years earlier. His legs came back from the army in the same condition he took them in. The Robotope style he's famous for in our world, the one that lightly cost him his mobility later in life, isn't necessary in this one. Don King, a Cleveland numbers man fresh off a manslaughter sentence, comes around in nineteen seventy two selling a charity exhibition. And the champion boxes three rounds for a hospital and sends him home happy. But Don King wants a bigger stage. In 1974, he flies to Kinshasa and pitches Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of Zaire, on a $10 million championship fight staged in Africa, with the government picking up the bill. Mobutu wants drama for money like that, but King is selling a routine defense by a champion who essentially wins on schedule every year. The minister hears the pitch and then politely declines. The heavyweight title spends the entire decade inside of America, in New York and Las Vegas, selling closed circuit tickets at prize fight prices, and King is forced to go back to Ohio to promote club cards. Rocky Marciano retired in 1956 at 49-0, the only heavyweight champion who never lost. And for 19 years, no fighter ever got near his record. Then, on a night in late 1975, Cassius Clay wins for the 50th time, and the crowd applauds the way people applaud round numbers, warmly but briefly. In 1976, at 34 years of age, he defends his title one more time and retires at 51 and 0, with Liston, Frasier, and Foreman all on the ledger. Every one of those a victory. He walks away with his voice clear, his hands steady, and his memory whole. Behind him, Foreman claims the vacant championship in 1977 and holds it into the next decade. And Frazier retires in 1976 as the greatest heavyweight who never wore the belt because his entire prime ran opposite one unbeatable man. The record book now reads 51 and Half a century on. It still stands untouched. Cassius Clay's retirement looks a lot like that of Joe Lewis. Lewis, the last champion who served in a war, came home a hero, ended up owing the IRS more than a million dollars, worked the door at Caesar's Palace as a greeter, and in 1981, President Reagan waived the eligibility rules to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery. Clay gets the upgraded version of that deal. He spends the 1980s and 1990s as boxing royalty. A salaried casino ambassador, a ringside face at every big fight in Las Vegas, rich, healthy, and to love it the way retired champions are, warmly and from a polite distance. The name follows him for the rest of his life. The record books, the networks, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame all carry Cassius Clay. And when the hall opens in nineteen ninety, he goes in on the first ballot. But under a name he renounced in nineteen sixty four. He corrects every interviewer who uses it for forty straight years with the same three words. It's Muhammad Ali. The interviewers nod, and the name on the screen under his face unfortunately stays the same. People still call him the greatest, and they mean the greatest boxer. In 2000, a rapper from Queens named LL Fool Jay titles his eighth album after Earl Manigal. A Harlem playground legend everybody called the GOAT. The record hits number one, and the nickname stays where it started, on a dead street baller. When fans in this world argue about the best ever, they say the whole phrase, all four words, greatest of all time. On July 19, 1996, at the Atlanta Games, a swimmer named Janet Evans, four Olympic gold medals to her name, carries the flame up the ramp and lights the cauldron. The moment is lovely, but by August, the world has moved on. In December of nineteen ninety nine, Sports Illustrated holds its end of the century award ceremony at Madison SquareGard, and they name Michael Jordan their sportsman of the century. The Ring magazine ranks Cassius Clay the greatest heavyweight who ever lived, fifty one to know, and the ranking stands unchallenged. July thirteenth, twenty sixteen. After police kill Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota, and a gunman kills five officers in Dallas, four MBA stars, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Dwayne Wade, and LeBron James, ask the network to let them open the ESP awards. And Paul recites the athletes of earlier generations who set the example. Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, John Carlos and Tommy Smith, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Jim Brown, Billie Jean King and Arthur Adish. Back in our timeline, that list carries a ninth name, a name that sits at the very center. But here, the list stops at eight names, and the oldest living heavyweight champion watches the broadcast from a suite in Las Vegas. He's 74 years old. His record is the cleanest the sport has ever produced, but his phone doesn't ring. He turns 84. In January of 2026. In Louisville, tour buses roll past the little house on Grand Avenue where he grew up. And the guide tells the passengers that the greatest boxer who ever lived slept in the back bedroom. Then the bus moves on toward the bourbon distilleries. The airport out by the interstate is still Louisville International. The argument about him starts in a bar, but that's where it stays. The story everyone tells about the real April 28th is that it robbed Muhammad Ali of the three and a half best years of his life, the years between 25 and 28, when an athlete is in their absolute prime. The government took his title, his license, and his passport. And every version of his story treats that theft as the central tragedy. Run that decision the other way and add up what the easy path actually delivers. He keeps the belt. And he keeps the years. He retires at 51-0 with wins over Liston, Frasier, and Foreman. Strongest resume any heavyweight has ever compiled. The real man went 56-5. On paper, the alternate man is the better boxer. But his legend shrinks anyway, because the lists that rank the real Aldi first were never just measuring boxing. The five losses count in his favor. The forty-three missing months count in his favor. The world treats the gap in his record as the finest thing he ever did. The refusal is why the torch went into his shaking hand in Atlanta and why his boast became the word goat, because he proved the greatest meant something much bigger than boxing. The Army designed its Houston offer to cost him. Nothing. And that was the traft. The deal took the one thing boxing could never give him. The reason anybody outside the sport says his name at all. The real Ali absorbed years of beatings on the ropes in Kinshasa and through 14 rounds of Manila. And his doctor blamed those beatings for the Parkinson's that eventually took his voice. This version of him bites on his toes his entire career, and he grows old with his health attached. He stays quick, clear, and loud into his 80s. He walks away whole, rich, unbeaten. And every argument about the greatest boxer who ever lived ends with his name. But that's the trait. He gets everything he was promised, but gives up everything he was going to become. He's just a boxer. The greatest boxer, but just a boxer. Decisions don't get too obvious, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. Helps other people find the show and allows me to understand whether they actually enjoy it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Correzza. Thanks for hitting Control Z point. Control-Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez-Allen. If you've got a pointless decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube. That's CTRL-Z Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.