Muhammad Ali dead at 74, a man of power of influence until the end
SO much will be said about Muhammad Ali, and so much was said by him. But in the end perhaps all we need is that single image.
SO much will be said about Muhammad Ali, and so much was said by him. But in the end perhaps all we need is that single image.
It might be the most famous picture in sport. It is Ali standing over Sonny Liston after the savage conclusion to their second fight in 1965.
The great boxer’s fists have done their work. Liston, knocked out cold after just two minutes and 12 seconds, lies listless on the canvas. Now, as Ali stands over his battered opponent, his mouth takes its turn. Ali’s words, his body, his every sinew scream: “Get up. I’m not done with you yet.”
It is a stunning image of unbridled power. Yet it was not merely how Ali exerted his power in the ring that made him the most compelling and most influential athlete of his, or any, generation. It was the way he attained, controlled and — despite the efforts to suppress him — maintained that power that sets him apart.
For most athletes the performance is central. The persona exists purely in the arena. For Ali, the fights were merely an extension of his being. Just one expression of his rage against injustice, his vast self-confidence and sadly, when he could not walk away, even his self-delusion.
The story of Cassius Marcellus Clay, named in honour of a southern abolitionist, is more potent still because it is also a snap shot of 20th-century America.
Cassius was the son of descendants of slaves, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942. A time when African-Americans in the deep south who had gained their freedom, but not their civil rights, were fighting yet another of what some had come to consider “the white man’s wars”.
Ali lived with his parents and brother Rhaman in a small bungalow in a black neighbourhood in Louisville known as the West End. His father eked out a living painting signs in what Ali later would call a “black middle-class” area.
The difference with the white middle class was stark. In segregationist Kentucky, blacks could not enter some restaurants, use white toilets or attend certain schools. Ali’s first boxing coach would talk of driving to a local restaurant to fetch hamburgers while most of his fighters sat in the car because they couldn’t go in. The roots of Ali’s indignation are obvious. His entry to the ring was far more circumstantial.
As he wrote in his autobiography, the 12-year-old Cassius was so angry when his bicycle was stolen he told a policeman he planned to “Whup” the thief when he got hold of him. The policemen suggested that, if he wanted to get his revenge, he better learn to fight first.
Ali’s rise from the local club in Louisville to the national stage was relentless. Despite his athletic physique, he resisted others sports and devoted himself purely to boxing. By the age of 18 he was on the plane to the 1960 Rome Olympics where he won the light heavyweight gold medal.
Forgotten by most is that Ali tried to pull out of the US Olympic team weeks before the Games because of his fear of flying. Some on the flight claim Ali tried to disguise his obvious fear by loudly bragging he would bring the gold medal home. It was a prophecy that, like some many others, would be fulfilled. This time by knocking out Zbigniew “Ziggy” Pietrzykowski of Poland in the final.
Ali’s amateur exploits had already attracted attention. The gold medal gained national exposure. By 1964 he had done enough to earn a shot at Liston’s world title. He started that fight against the accomplished, powerful veteran as a rank outsider. He finished, to the surprise of everyone but Ali, as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
“In explaining how a 22-year-old from Louisville would overcome his powerful opponent, Ali uttered perhaps his most famous line: “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
It was as much the lead-up to the fight as what happened in the ring that would come to define Ali. As he had mocked his own fear of gravity on the flight to Rome, Ali mocked Liston in the pre-match press conferences. In explaining how a 22-year-old from Louisville would overcome his powerful opponent, Ali uttered perhaps his most famous line: “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
It was no idle boast. As a portent of what was to come, the fleet-footed Ali would use his unusual blend of agility and power to evade Liston, then strike like lightning. “Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see,” Ali had accurately predicted.
Even in those earliest stages of his professional career, Ali was as much performance artist as athlete. A rapper before there was rap. In 1963 he made a recording of some of his poems and steam-of-consciousness boasts.
Later, with the connivance of big-fight promoters like the shock-haired Don King, Ali would produce pre-fight patter that was entertaining, almost ridiculously boastful yet, given his feats in the ring, somehow more than just egotistical cant: “I’ve wrestled with alligators, I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning and thrown thunder in jail.”
A WAY WITH WORDS: Ali’s greatest quotes
The brutal rematch with Liston that produced the iconic image was controversial. Some claimed Liston, who had links with the mob, had taken a dive. But Ali’s reputation as both the “Louisville Lip” and a fighter of rare ability, was made. It was not an image that sat comfortably with white, conservative America. Even as Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement began to gain ground, Ali’s braggadocio confronted and offended white sensibilities. More so because a man born and raised as a Methodist had announced immediately after winning the heavyweight title he had joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
Ali’s political views were already well known. But the change of name and religion put him at the forefront of the Black Power movement. More so when, in 1967, he refused military conscription for the Vietnam War.
Ali’s rationale stands as one of the most potent quotations of both the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protests: “I ain’t got nothin’ against Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger.”
Ali was stripped of his world heavyweight title and banned from the ring for more than three years by the New York State Athletic Commission. Between the ages of 25 and 28, in his athletic prime, the most powerful and famous athlete on the planet was unable to compete because his conscience, and his upbringing, found the war repugnant. During his banishment, Ali toured universities speaking about black rights and even appeared in a short-lasting Broadway musical. Despite being a branded a coward and traitor by some, he refused to back down.
The US Supreme Court overturned Ali’s ban in 1970, and he entered the stage of his career that would define him as a fighter and entrench his reputation as the most famous sports star on the planet.
Because it has been so richly chronicled, and because it was the fight in which Ali regained his world title, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ in 1974 stands as his defining moment as an athlete.
George Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his day. Brutally savage, brooding, seemingly unbeatable. Ali and Foreman were paid a then unthinkable $5 million each by the president of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seki, a notorious dictator, to hold the fight in the Zaire capital, Kinshasa.
After absorbing Foreman’s best blows with his customary “rope-a-dope” strategy, he knocked out the stunned Foreman in the eighth round.
Ali’s three fights with the accomplished, powerful “Smokin” Joe Frazier also form a large part of his boxing legend. Frazier inflicted Ali’s first defeat in 1971 before Ali beat him in 1974. The tie-breaker was the epic ‘’Thrilla in Manila’’ in 1975, fourteen rounds of such brutal savagery that it remains a mystery how either walked out of the ring.
Frasier elicited from Ali as side that divided opinion in the media and even among the African-American community. Before their first, Ali had taunted Frazier as “ignorant” and, in the ring, called him an Uncle Tom — the term used for those slaves who sold their soul to white masters.
To his dying days, the taunts wounded the proud Frazier who would ask “What does Ali know about the ghetto?” But, after the pair battled to near exhaustion in the ‘Thrilla In Manila’, Ali offered what might be the closest he ever came to an apology.
“Joe Frazier is a real, real fighter,” said Ali. “He is the toughest man in the world. Nobody can put pressure on me like he can, can take what I gave and come back to hurt me. If I’d taken the punches he took there I’d have quite long before he did. He is a man.”
Ali would retire with a career record of 56 wins and five losses. But the last three defeats against journeymen were not so much signs of athletic vulnerability but an unwillingness to concede the end had come.
Infamously in 1976, Ali fought the Japanese martial arts expert Antonio Inoki in an exhibition that left him battered and weakened by the constant kicking. That was part of a decline into Vaudeville. A defeat to the previously unknown Leon Spinks in 1978 was the nadir of his career. Winning the title back in a lacklustre rematch meant Ali was the first three-time heavyweight champion. But the victory was hollow and the honour seemed symbolic.
THE GREATEST: Ali’s five best fights
Ali retired in July, 1979 but, having lost a fortune, returned for a big money match with Larry Holmes. Ali was overweight and had the shaking hands and slurred speech that betrayed the first signs of the Parkinson Disease that would be officially diagnosed in 1984.
Holmes pummelled the out of shape and shuffling Ali. So too did the unheralded Trevor Berbick in Ali’s final fight in 1981.
Yet even as his power and his health declined, Ali’s reputation never waned. “I’m the most recognised and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around,” he once said. “So people far in the villages didn’t know about them.”
ALI THE MAN
His private life had been restless, tumultuous. Ali had seven daughters and two sons with his four wives. One daughter, Leila, would follow him into the ring despite Ali’s misgivings.
The great civil rights activist was no fan of female empowerment — at least not between the ropes — yet, later, when Leila compiled an impressive 24-0 career record, including a victory over the Frazier’s daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, Ali would express his pride and admiration.
How Ali’s fights — and his career as a whole — contributed to the Parkinson’s disease that debilitated him throughout his final decades was a constant subject of conjecture. Had the sport that had provided such a powerful lectern robbed him of his physical dignity and his gift of oratory?
In public, Ali would stoop and mumble into the ears of friends and advisers. Physically he seemed weakened, even incapacitated. But his very presence remained strong and charismatic.
Inevitably, because he could no longer produce the sparkling repartee, Ali gradually withdrew from the media spotlight in which he had once danced. But he continued to travel, promote causes and meet with the heads of states and dignitaries who clamoured, still, to bask in his aura.
Beyond the ring, there was a reconciliation of sorts with a nation in which Ali had once felt a despised outsider and in which he had waged war on the establishment. Although, as ever, this was largely on Ali’s terms.
One of the main streets in Louisville was named Muhammad Ali Boulevard. but most symbolically at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Ali lit the cauldron at the opening ceremony. His appearance was a close-kept secret and when he emerged and grasped the flame in his trembling hand it was as if, for one moment at least, America’s south — shamed by its history of slavery — had come a full circle. The image of a black man at the centre of the most important event in Atlanta history was, in its own way, as potent as that of Ali standing over Liston.
The only time I saw Ali up close personally was at the 1996 US PGA golf tournament played at the Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville. His birthplace but not, because of his childhood experiences, a city he had always fondly called home.
Ali’s coming out at the Olympic Opening ceremony a few weeks earlier had put him back in the public spotlight and there was a whisper he would turn up at the tournament to greet another sporting Jack Nicklaus.
A few of us went out to the ninth hole where Nicklaus was playing his practice round and found Ali shuffling slowly onto the green. Incredible given their storied careers ran parallel, the pair had never met.
Tellingly, Nicklaus reached out to shake Ali’s hand and to put an arm around him. The symbolism was unmistakeable. The black man from the once racist south who had forsaken his religion and, for a time, even his nationality meeting the white man whose game symbolised established, conservative country club America.
But if Ali had come to meet Nicklaus, an act of courtesy in his home town, the pecking order was still clear. The golfer was clearly in thrall of the stooped, but still powerful figure before him.
Two sporting greats. But only one of them was, and will always be, The Greatest.
Originally published as Muhammad Ali dead at 74, a man of power of influence until the end
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