ALI DID THE IMPOSSIBLE... AND WAS RIGHT, EVERY TIME
He truly was the greatest, and not just for his victories inside the ring, writes Willie Kealy
TO BE a kid in Ireland in the 1960s was to live in a backwater. 1960s Ireland was still dominated by the Church and the dynastic families who owned our industry and commerce.
They say the 1960s didn’t arrive in Ireland until the 1970s, but the generation of young people growing up in this country at the time were restless, feeling their oats, confident and no longer content to follow their parents’ path of deference to their betters and knowing their place.
The revolution may not have been happening here, but it was elsewhere and we could hear about it and read about it and see it on television. This revolution was televised, and we were watching.
The cultural changes were huge, and popular thinking among the mass of young people focused on icons from diverse parts of the world. There were, of course,the Beatles from Liverpool and Che Guevara from South America via Cuba, and murderous Mao Tse Tung from China. But one figure stood above them all — a young black man from Kentucky called Cassius Marcellus Clay, who won a gold medal as a light heavyweight boxer in the Rome Olympics in 1960 and had an awakening when he found that back home he was still just another n ***** who couldn’t get served in a whites-only restaurant.
He threw his medal in the river, turned professional and proclaimed himself “The Greatest”.
To the older generation he was brash and big headed. To the racists, he was an uppity n ***** . They never stopped looking for a Great White Hope who would shut him up, or at least a black fighter who would know his place. So desperate were many people to see him get his come-uppence, they even backed the mob-associated thug, Sonny Liston, because his mono-syllabic style suited their idea of how a black man should behave.
Young people saw it differently. They saw a supremely talented young man with confidence in his ability. They saw someone of their own generation who wasn’t going to be told who to be or how to behave by anyone. He wouldn’t show deference and he didn’t want to be told his place.
Then he proved he was right. Bigger battles only increased his stature. He took on the racist nature of American society, aligning himself with Malcolm X, another iconic figure so uncompromising he had to be killed.
He was pilloried for being ungrateful. After all he had been given so much. How could he not play the game the way it had always been played, the way Joe Louis played it? They forgot to mention that playing the game left Joe Louis a sad, impoverished wreck in his final years.
Then he became a Muslim and renounced his slave name and became reborn as Muhammed Ali. Again he took on American society with a move that was about as unpopular then as it would be today. Ignorant reporters kept calling him Cassius. He rebuked them every time and eventually they learned — and a whole generation knew that again he was right.
When he refused to be drafted into the US army to fight in Vietnam, they took away his title, banned him from professional boxing, and threatened him with jail. They called him a coward, a claim shown false by his many battles in the ring and his biggest fight afterwards with illness. To the politicians and the pillars of society he was a threat to the very existence of the American way of life. He had no respect. His morals were suspect. He was an evil influence on the young.
But the times were a-changing and a whole generation was changing with them. The direction they were going was the one pointed out at every turn by the young boxer from the racist South who made it to the top on ability alone and without compromising on any of his principles. They knew that once again he was right.
When Muhammed Ali was banned from boxing he was at his peak and if that particular piece of vindictiveness had not happened, he would have had an even more spectacular boxing career than the one in which he won 60 fights and lost only five. The way it happens is the way it happens.
Ali was a great boxer because he didn’t get to the top in an era when there were only mediocre hitters around. He fought greats — Kenny Norton and James Young. He annihilated the hitherto invincible Sonny Liston. He beat George Foreman when nobody else — including Joe Frazier — could; and he probably sowed the seeds of his future illness in three savage bouts with Joe Frazier, even though he was past his best at the time. Frazier was a phenomenal fighting machine and it was his misfortune to have been active in the Ali era. At any other time he would have been a great champion. As it was, Ali retired him after their third meeting.
But if Muhammed Ali had just been a boxer, the outpouring of love and affection and sorrow that has marked his passing would not have been evidenced this weekend. Because Muhammed was not just the greatest boxer that ever lived, popularising a sport that had being dying before he came along and has decayed since he left the ring.
He was also a great human being with plenty of human failings, but ultimately he had a spirit that would not be broken. Not by racists, not by those who thought themselves his betters, and not by those who believed they were the guardians of morals and behaviour.
He was, in the best sense, defiant. His defiance was such an important inspiration, not just to the generation that lived through his tremendous battles, but to every generation since, and his secret was simple.