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Muhammad Ali and Nevada

Nevada was a co-conspirator in the blacklisting of Muhammad Ali.

The young boxer fought in Las Vegas in 1961 as Cassius Clay, defeating Hawaiian Duke Sabedong. By 1967, he was back as Muhammad Ali, now the heavyweight champ seeking to fight Floyd Patterson.

Ali by then had joined the Black Muslims and opposed the war in Vietnam. Patterson considered himself Christian redeemer against Ali’s Muslim faith (“He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan”; “The image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation”).

Nevada’s Gov. Paul Laxalt, whose cronies included organized crime figure Moe Dalitz, called the supposedly independent state athletic commission to the state capital for an “emergency” meeting and urged them to cancel the Ali/Patterson fight. They did.

Novelist Budd Schulberg wrote of Ali, “He thought he had it made in Las Vegas, but at the last minute the governor decided it would not be in the best interest of the great state of Nevada. The Mafia, yes; Ali, no.”

Laxalt didn’t actually say he engineered the cancellation because of Ali’s views, of course—though his attitude was shown plainly by his refusal to call Ali by his name. Laxalt’s fig leaf was that he considered the impending fight to be a poor bout that might reflect badly on the state’s image because Patterson had fought poorly against Ali in their previous fight: “If Patterson should win, eyebrows would be raised all over the world.” Two weeks earlier Patterson had needed just one round to KO Bill McMurray in Pittsburgh—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is, which is important to a later part of the story.

Sportswriter Roy McHugh: “If Patterson doesn’t belong in the same ring with Clay [Ali], who does?”

Years later, boxing promoter Bob Arum said the fight left Nevada because he stayed at Las Vegas’s Desert Inn, owned by Dalitz, and Dalitz told Arum, “I don’t want that [expletive] draft dodger in this town. It’s not good for the town.” In another version of the Arum story, billionaire Howard Hughes was involved in driving Arum to cancel the fight. These angles on the story have never been substantiated.

Patterson, who said he had fought his first fight against Ali with a back injury, was anxious for a rematch and a comeback and was unhappy about Laxalt’s decision. “Patterson doesn’t think this is a mismatch,” said fight promoter Al Bolan. “He was shocked when I told him about it. He said he couldn’t believe it.”

What is known is that whether the rematch between Ali and Patterson would have been a worthy bout was a call for the state’s boxing regulators, who are supposed to be left alone by politicians who want to pressure them for reasons unrelated to athletics.

From Nevada, the issue moved to Pennsylvania, where the fight had been approved five weeks earlier and where Republican Gov. Raymond Shafer (disclosure: second cousin to this writer) had signaled his approval. When the fight was scheduled for Pittsburgh, the two Republicans spoke on the phone and then Shafer ordered it be banned by a state commission, a reversal of his original position. “If it’s not good enough for Nevada, it’s certainly not good enough for Pennsylvania,” Shafer said.

Pennsylvania Athletic Commissioner John Vaughn said, “It just isn’t right. We’ve got the best two fighters in the world. How can anyone object to that? We told them that we would accept the fight. The whole commission has accepted it.”

Two years later, Laxalt tried to rewrite history about 1967. When Nevada was being considered for a 1969 Ali/Joe Frazier bout, Laxalt—still calling the champion by the wrong name—said he still would not allow Ali to fight in the state. “We were the first state to stop Clay from fighting after he refused induction into the army,” Laxalt said, which was not the case. Nevada was not the first state and at the time Laxalt arranged cancellation of the Patterson fight, Ali had not yet refused induction.

—Dennis Myers

Taxing issue

County funds political group

The Washoe County Commission has voted unanimously to contribute $5,000 to by a political group seeking to transfer Dennis Myers federally managed public lands into state hands. Commissioners voted on May 24 to pay a $1,000 membership fee to the Nevada Lands Council and gave the council another $4,000 as an outright grant.

“If it was illegal or wrong, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Jeanne Herman Washoe County Commissioner

The money was provided under consent agenda items covering individual commissioners’ discretionary funds, which are normally non-controversial items like dental care for veterans or travel money for the Galena High School band—two of the other items approved at the same time as the Lands Council grant. Currently, each commissioner can designate $20,000 each year to purposes of his or her choice, and most commissioners over the years have avoided uses that could be contentious.

This contribution was sponsored by Commissioner Jeanne Herman, who did not comment on the agenda item during its handling. Commission records indicate that she has sponsored similar grants in earlier years, including to national groups.

When asked about the tradition of giving funds only to noncontroversial purposes, Herman said, “It wasn’t my decision to establish that tradition, and there wasn’t any reason to not do that [fund the Lands Council].”

Herman said she does not try to influence other commissioners in their choices when they provide money to animal shelters or school projects.

“I wouldn’t pay for picking up every dog in town,” she said. “You know, if it was illegal or wrong, I wouldn’t have done it. The other commissioners have the same ability. … I don't have the right to influence the other commissioners in their use of discretionary money.”

Established in February, the Nevada Lands Council was formed “to provide the resources necessary to secure control of federal public lands within the borders of Nevada by transferring their ownership and management to the state,” according to its mission statement.

Three people offered public comment on the consent agenda, which is normally waved through without debate. None of them commented on the Lands Council contribution, nor did any of the county commissioners address Herman’s choice of recipients for her discretionary funds. She also allocated some of her funds to senior citizen programs.

Former Republican U.S. Senate candidate Demar  Dahl's Nevada Lands Council is heavily funded  by taxes. He is seen here at a 2014 meeting on  public lands.

Asked about it later, Commissioner Kitty Jung—who presided at the meeting—said she has not objected to Herman’s choices of recipients for her discretionary funds over the years.

“I didn’t say anything, and I don’t normally object, because I don’t want other commissioners to tell me where to spend my money,” she said. “But I can’t tell you that I’m happy about it, especially considering that we are still under negotiations with the governor and Senator [Harry] Reid” about public land transfers.

There seems little doubt that the issue of whether public lands stewardship should be controlled by state or federal government can be defined as a controversial political issue. A “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the late 1970s and early 1980s gave way to a “county supremacy” movement. A standoff over Cliven Bundy’s failure to pay his fees to graze cattle on public lands led to an armed standoff near Bunkerville in 2014. Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service offices have been bombed three times in Nevada.

Asked about the wisdom of the county taking sides financially on such a hot issue, Herman answered, “There isn’t any rule as to what you can use it for.”

“The Washoe County Commission should be ashamed of itself for using taxpayer funds to help billionaire corporations screw the people and our public lands,” Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada director Bob Fulkerson said. “If the Koch-funded Nevada Lands Council gets its way, vast swaths of the last of the best of what’s left of public lands in the lower 48 will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Public lands are the crown jewels of our Republic. Selling them off is like eating the seeds, consuming for our own immediate selfish ends what rightfully belongs to our grandchildren.”

He said the county “must explain to the public why it supports this anti-American, tea-party insurgency.”

Asked how he knew the billionaire Koch brothers are helping fund the Nevada Lands Council, Fulkerson referred us to an article in High Country News, which reported that the Kochs help fund the American Lands Council, which was founded by Demar Dahl of Elko County. And Dahl is also director of the Nevada Lands Council.

Indeed, it is possible that this movement would not exist if it were not for corporate and government money. The American Lands Council has received money from county commissions across the West, including Churchill, Elko (Dahl is an Elko county commissioner), Esmeralda, Eureka, Lander, Lincoln, Lyon, Nye, Pershing, White Pine and Washoe counties in Nevada—all without much publicity.

Jung said the Washoe Commission has done considerable study and consultation with experts on the consequences of county acquisition of federal land. She said one expert basically said, “If we had all the public lands here and we had one good wildfire here, it would put the county in debt.” The cost of providing public services to federal lands has been a central focus of debate over federal land transfers.

This is not the first instance of Nevada governments supporting political groups. For many years, the Nevada Legislature gave $1,000 a year to join the American Legislative Exchange Council, an anti-gay conservative organization that supported South Africa during apartheid and—until recently— denied climate change. The Nevada funding was sponsored by the late Washoe County Sen. William Raggio and was never questioned until ALEC became controversial. In 2011, the Nation magazine ran an investigative series on ALEC, and the Trayvon Martin case in Florida in 2012 threw a spotlight on ALEC’s efforts to spread “stand your ground” laws in state legislatures. The Nevada Legislature is no longer associated with ALEC.

In April, Rex Steninger of the Nevada Lands Council was quoted by the Elko Daily Free Press responding to a quote from U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell that was not provided in its full context in the article.

Steninger said, “If all that wasn’t enough to convince everyone that the federal government has been completely taken over by the environmental extremists and political correctness, how about Jewell’s dream that all visitors to our national parks need to see signs ‘in their first language.’ Or her statement that our parks ‘have ignored important parts of our nation’s story’ like lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.” Ω

“Publiclandsarethecrown jewelsofourRepublic.”

Bob Fulkerson Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada

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