1. When We Were
Kings is the title of a superb documentary film about the Rumble In
The Jungle, Muhammad Ali's classic battle with George Foreman in
Zaire, where he regained the heavyweight crown. The title is fitting,
because Ali's fame began in the ring, and it was a time of giants in
boxing's most glamorous division. George Foreman said that he, Joe
Frazier and Ali were like one person; they had been forged together
in the public imagination, but there were also Sonny Liston, Floyd
Patterson, Ken Norton, Henry Cooper, Ernie Terrell: men over whom Ali
needed to triumph to establish himself, and men who now shine in his
reflection. Watch the moment Foreman falls in the film: at ringside
the writer George Plimpton is frozen in drop-jaw disbelief, Norman
Mailer is already beginning to celebrate. Boxing has always drawn
great writers; there is no more telling display of character, no more
naked revealing of what is happening inside a man's heart, than that
time in the ring, and writers and film-makers have always known that.2. Muhammad Ali was the most important sportsman of the Twentieth Century, and would have been even had he not become the most transcendent, become a symbol for battles of conscience, for racial justice, for people far removed from power, for religious belief, for so much else. He was unquestionably the most-recognisable human being in the world; he could go virtually nowhere without being mobbed. But it started on a smaller scale. When he burst on the scene after winning his Olympic light-heavyweight gold in Rome, he brought something new to sport: showmanship and self-promotion. He carried the trash-talk of the playground and the braggadocio of the professional wrestling ring into the arenas of 'legitimate' sport.Ali's style coincided with the rise of sports television: it was the beginning of the time when sportsmen stopped being paid as competitors and began to realise TV turned them into entertainers, like movie stars. This did not mean Ali was embraced immediately or automatically. To many 'traditional' sports fans, mainly whites, he was a loud-mouth, he was uppity, he needed to be put into his place.
3. From 'I Am The
Greatest', a poem by Cassius Clay: 'The fistic world was dull and
weary/with a champ like Liston things had to be dreary'.
I once wrote about
Sonny Liston, who before Clay might legitimately have been considered the baddest
man on the planet, saying 'his only skill was hurting people'. The
white audience faced severe problems trying to decide if they should
root for Liston, a thug who'd learned his boxing in prison, to be the
one to shut 'the Louisville Lip' up. Not that they doubted he would;
he was a 7-1 favourite. Cassius Clay had irritated people calling
Doug Jones 'an ugly little man' before their title eliminator in
Madison Square Garden, which Clay won by decision. He spent the
build-up to the fight entertaining celebrities like the Beatles (his
win over Henry Cooper a few months earlier had already made him a
star in Britain) who flocked to Miami; he called Liston a 'big ugly
bear' and seemed so hyper at the weigh-in sportswriters claimed he
was scared to near-death. Clay's victory in February 1964 shocked the
world. Soon after, he announced his conversion to Islam and his
name-change to Muhammad Ali. When he won the rematch with Liston in
Lewiston, Maine, delayed and moved to its unlikely location because
boxing politics had already stripped him of the WBA version of the
title (for agreeing the rematch, rather than facing the WBA's top
contender) the surprise was such that many still believe Liston took
a dive, falling to the famous phantom punch.
4. Floyd Patterson
may have been the first black 'white hope'. Ali beat Patterson, who
had been destroyed twice in short-order by Liston, mercilessly; when the fight was
stopped in the twelfth round, he had carried 'the rabbit', in order
to inflict extra punishment on Floyd. It was partly for using his 'slave name' Cassius Clay, and partly because Patterson was promoted as the 'credit
to his race' boxer the establishment wanted to see win. In a strange way, the beating Floyd took from Ali restored some of the respect he'd lost in his two losses to Liston, returned his place among champs. Patterson had
first lost his own championship to the Swede Ingemar Johansson, then
re-gained the title; my father, whose parents were Swedes, was a
Floyd fan because of that. The generation gap was already apparent in
our house in late 1965. Ali then beat four white fighters in a row
within the space of six months in 1966: Canada's George Chuvalo,
Cooper and fellow Brit Brian London, and Germany's Karl Mildenberger.
By the time he'd finished, my dad was an Ali fan. Even when Ali
fought the guy deemed the latest, perhaps last, Great White Hope,
Jerry Quarry.
5. 'I was the
onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.'
When
Ali was called up for the draft in 1966, he had to be reclassified
1-A. He'd originally been judged 1-Y, fit to be called up
only in times of 'national emergency' because his IQ was measured at
78, which put him in the bottom 16% of Americans; the army didn't
take anyone from the bottom 30%. 'I said I was the greatest, not the
smartest' he said at the time. He would belie that statement many
times in the next few years. Clay was not a good student; he never
was a reader. But he absorbed things he thought were necessary to
learn, like a sponge, and his ability to separate what he needed to
learn from what he didn't was superb. He had the charisma to make
people, interviewers, great writers, all feel he was talking on their
level, probably because they were more eager to be understood on his.
And he could recycle old tropes, jokes, stories, and make people feel
they were brand new.
As anyone who went
through the process knew at the time, draft boards are not elected
bodies, nor civil service, they are made of up of local grandees who
rarely sent their own sons off to war. Many people thought the timing
of Ali's reclassification by the Louisville draft board, when he was
already 24, was more than coincidence, because it happened just afer
his contract expired with the ten influential Louisville millionaires
who originally backed him, and they saw the Nation of Islam's Elijah
Muhammad taking control of the fighter.
6. 'No Viet Cong
ever called me nigger'.
I write the N word here because that's what
Ali said, and because how can anyone who wasn't alive at the time
understand fully the depth of anguish and honesty in what he was
saying if they don't hear the lash of the word? Ali failed to step
forward for induction into the army in April 1967 and almost
immediately had his New York State boxing license withdrawn, and was
stripped of his titles. In June, a jury took only 20 minutes to
convict him, and the case went to appeal and eventually to the
Supreme Court. Here's how he explained it: 'what should I shoot them
for? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me, they didn't
put no dog on me. They didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill
my mother and father....How can I shoot them poor people? Just take
me to jail.' This made my decision to be a conscientious objector,
and face the consequences, so much easier.
7. In 2014 I wrote
Ernie Terrell's obituary for The Guardian:
Ernie Terrell, who
has died aged 75, lost his heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali
in the infamous 'What's My Name?' fight, one of the most brutally
cruel displays in boxing history. In the build-up to their match
Terrell insisted on calling Ali by his 'slave name', Cassius Clay.
This tactic had backfired for Floyd Patterson in an earlier loss to
Ali, but because Terrell also held the WBA belt Ali felt was his, Ali was
infuriated. He called Terrell 'an Uncle Tom nigger' and said 'I'll
make him eat those words, letter by letter'.
The unification
fight was held in February 1967 in the Houston Astrodome, where
37,000 spectators made it the biggest indoor boxing crowd ever. In
his pre-match poem, Ali talked of knocking Terrell out of the stadium
in the first round: 'The ref is frantic/Terrell's over the
Atlantic/Who would've thought, when they came to the fight/They'd see
the launch of a coloured satellite!'
For 15 rounds
Ali taunted Terrell as he inflicted as much damage as he could. He
thumbed Terrell's left eye, and later pushed it along the ring-ropes,
leaving Terrell nearly blind. By the twelfth round, Terrell was
simply covering his face, and in the thirteenth Ali landed a stream
of unanswered punches, but referee Harry Kessler never stopped the
fight. Terrell nearly lost the sight in his eye, and was never
the same fighter again. Ironically, only two months after the fight,
Clay was stripped of both his titles.
(Terrell) remained
philosophical about his beating...saying, in 2009, 'We were
fighting...I bore no animosity. What he say, all that, don't count.
That was his way of promoting the fight'.
8. The cover story
of the April 1968 issue of Esquire Magazine was called 'The Passion
of Muhammad Ali', and the magazine cover created by George Lois and shot by
Carl Fischer, is often considered the greatest of all time: a homage
to Mantegna's 'Martyrdom Of St Sebastian', Ali in his white trunks penetrated by arrows. The issue hit the stands just as
President Lyndon Johnson announced that he 'would not seek, nor shall
I accept' the nomination of his party for President. It was easy to
think we, young people protesting the Vietnam Nam war and the ongoing
problem of racial prejudice, had won. Easy, but as it turned out,
delusional.
9. While banned from
boxing, Ali toured college campuses giving lectures. Sometime I
believe in the spring of 1970, before the Invasion of Cambodia,
shootings at Kent and Jackson State, and the student strike, I was in
a packed crowd at the brand-new rink at Wesleyan, listening to Ali,
and hanging around afterwards to applaud as he left by car. I
honestly believe that absent Ali's visit, the lacrosse team, of which
I was a part, would not have been the first group on campus to vote
to join the strike. There is a clip from around that time on You
Tube where Ali faces down a young critic, telling him that white
folks are the enemy, not the Viet Cong. 'If I die, I'm gonna die
right here fighting you,' he says. We believed him, and we somehow
believed that 'white folks' didn't include us.
10. From 'I Am The
Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'This kid fights great, he's got
speed and endurance/If you sign to fight him, increase your
insurance.'
If Ali had never
become a public figure outside boxing, never revolutionised the way
we saw sport, never set sportsmen free to be entertainers, he would
still be an iconic figure based on the major fights he fought after
his return. The enforced absence from the ring cost him some of his
speed: few opponents had been able to hurt him with solid punches
before. The three fights against Joe Frazier, the Rumble in The
Jungle against George Foreman, the two split decisions against Ken
Norton, are all engrained in my memory. Some of them I only heard on
the radio, but I've since watched them over and over again, and can
see the relentless Frazier plowing forward, head down, left arm low
and cocked to deliver the hook that caused so much damage. I now
watch the Rope A Dope strategy against Foreman and think about the
courage, the intelligence, the risk Ali took. And think mostly about
the long-term damage those big fights inflicted on The Champ.
11. In 1976 I was a
press liason at the Montreal Forum during the boxing finals, at which
both Spinks brothers won gold medals. Leon Spinks' win over Cuban
Sixto Soria was the greatest amateur bout I've ever seen. In 1978 I
watched Ali retake his title from Spinks, on closed circuit at the
Dominion in Tottenham Court Road. It was the result I wanted, but I
took no joy from it. Ali would be nearly 40 when the fifth and final
loss of his career, a difficult-to-watch unanimous decision against
Trevor Berbick finally convinced him to retire. He refused to believe what he thought possible might not be.
12. From 'I
Am The Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'Then someone with colour, someone
with dash/brought the fight fans running with cash.'
Clay understood
from the first what he was doing, and in his poem he refers to
himself as a new kind of fighter, to boxing's 'New Frontier'. He
claimed to have based his style on the early TV wrestling star
Gorgeous George, but it's more likely he was copying 'Classy' Freddie
Blassie, the self-proclaimed 'King of Men', who was big in the
Louisville when Clay was young. In 1976, Ali took part in a fight
with the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, and brought Blassie in as
his manager. Watch them on the Tonight Show, guest-hosted by MASH
actor McLean Stevenson. Blassie says Ali has 'the fastest feet, the
fastest punch and now he's proven he's got the fastest brain
too...because he hired me.' Although Ali claimed it was going to be a
real fight, that was never Inoki's idea, and when Ali got to Japan
negotiations as to how the fight should be scripted broke down;
neither guy would do a job for the other. So we saw Inoki lying on
his back in the fight, using his feet to keep Ali away; easily the
least edifying moment of Ali's career. He was born to be a boxer and
a performer. He became the latter through the former.
13. In 1988, working for ABC Sports, I was in
Pesaro, Italy, broadcasting a middleweight title fight between Sumbu
Kalambay and Mike McCallum. The night before the fight I stayed up
late with the promoter Bob Arum and with Angelo Dundee, Ali's legendary trainer. I don't think I've
ever heard anyone describe someone in the way Angelo did; it was
somewhere between respect and worship, like a follower who had been
blessed in ancient times to fight alongside a demigod. And it was
sincere. I learned a lot about boxing on that trip, but I never did
discover whether Angelo actually sliced Clay's gloves to buy time in
the first fight against Cooper.
14. At the Atlanta
Olympics in 1996 I was in charge of host broadcast coverage of
basketball at the Georgia Dome. The bane of my life was any game with
the US Dream Team II, because my fellow broadcasters and journalists
would desperately try to get into broadcast/press seats, not working
but just to see the superstars. But before the game with Angola, Ali,
who of course had lighted the Olympic torch to open the games,
arrived courtside. The Angolans broke off their warmups to crowd
around, followed by the Dream Teamers who rushed out of their locker
room to join them. Here were the world's biggest superstars turned
into fan boys just like the rest of us. I walked casually down to
court side, fan boy myself, just to admire the admiration.
15. Today I woke to
the news Ali was gone, and listened to tributes and watched my
memories gather and soar. I rummaged through some boxes and found my
copy of Cassius Clay's 45, 'I Am The Greatest', b/w 'Will The Real
Sonny Liston Please Fall Down'. It's more than half a century since I
first heard it. This is a DJ copy I won in a college competition; on
the single as released the flip side is Ali singing 'Stand By Me'.
The sleeve is a bit worn, and I don't have a record player anymore,
so I couldn't play it. I just looked at the pictures on the sleeve
and heard the voice in my head, clear as it was when I was 12. 'This
is the legend of Cassius Clay/the most beautiful fighter in the world
today. He talks a great deal and brags indeedy, 'bout a tremendous
punch that's incredibly speedy....If Cassius says a mouse can beat a
horse, don't ask how, put your money where your mouse is...if Cassius
says a cow can lay an egg, don't ask how, grease that skillet.' The
world that brought that character into the spotlight no longer
exists, and a great part of the reason for that is Muhammad Ali. But
the shadow of those things that drew Ali to the spotlight outside of
the ring, those most American clouds of race, of war, of rich and
poor, still lingers over the country. It's a different country, in
part because of Ali, and he was The Greatest. Grease that skillet.
Saturday 4 June 2016
NOTE: I wrote this on Saturday, and it appeared Sunday at Newstalk.com in Ireland. You can link to that here. It was billed somewhat misleadingly as a 'list of some of the landmark moments' in Ali's career, which obviously it isn't, so I thought I'd repost it here, with my original subtitle. You can also find a version, deftly shortened by London Review of Books, at the LRB Blog here. Over the weekend, there were so many great obituaries and reminiscences, and so much great writing about him while he lived, it wasn't for me to follow those who knew him. But everybody had their own responses to Ali, and these were some of mine.
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