Ali put the aesthetic into brutal sport

YOU’VE never had to have a love for, nor even an interest in, boxing to have known about Muhammad Ali. And if you’ve known anything about him then you’ll probably have regarded him with fondness and felt a little bit of sadness this week with the news of his death last Friday night.

Ali was, of course, much more than a champion boxer; he was that rarest of rare types - a sports person who transcended his sport to become a universally recognised, regarded and loved person.

Away from the boxing ring, Ali was many things: outspoken, charming, vulnerable, political. Outside of boxing he was known for many things, but perhaps the two things that shaped him into the man he would become were his conversion to the Muslim religion and his decision to refuse the draft to the US Army to go and fight in the Vietnam War.

Ali - born Cassius Clay in Kentucky in 1942 but later rejecting that moniker as a slave name - came to be the living embodiment of the race struggle that defined and bedevilled America throughout his career as a boxer.

His argument as to ‘why should [the US government] ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?’ was about as highly-charged a comment a black person could say in 1960s America, but Ali’s conviction was as steadfast as it was costly.

His refusal to go to war cost him dear. While he avoided imprisonment for draft dodging he was stripped of his world heavyweight titles and was unable to box - at the height of his powers - for three years after having his licence revoked.

He was also vilified by much of the American public and media, and for a few years the Louisville Lip was out of favour, but - crucially - never silenced.

It’s hard to imagine nowadays just how courageous Ali was, and we’re not referring to his time inside the ropes.

Completely at odds with the sanitised and banal professional sports men and women of the 21st century - heroes to millions who have either nothing to say or who don’t want to jeopardise their fortunes by saying anything - Muhammad Ali risked it all for what he believed.

For all their talent and popularity and steely resolve in their chosen sport, it is impossible to imagine Tiger Woods or Cristiano Ronaldo or Tom Brady taking such a stance and risking it all - the fame and the fortune - for a cause.

But Ali was different. At times he was a contradiction of terms: after the hubris came genuine humility; the pantomime braggadocio was often offset by heartfelt compassion. Those who were close to him have spoken and written of a man whose public persona in and around the boxing ring - the jive-talking and the bravado and the, at times, deep insults levelled at opponents - were at odds with a man who, while not without several flaws, was, nevertheless, a humble and compassionate man whose convictions about matters of race and religion and war and society were as deeply held and fought for as much as anything he did in the ring.

In subsequent years, after he had regained the heavyweight title for a third time and fought on further than he should have, Ali succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease and surely the cruellest irony of all is that the one fight he absolutely needed to win he didn’t. Instead, Parkinson’s - undeniably brought on by years and countless thousands of punches to the head - silenced, utterly and irrevocably, the most loquacious and gregarious of individuals.

But Ali’s illness never diminished his spirit or his charm or his appeal. Indeed, having once been a hated figure for his stance on Vietnam, Ali emerged through the 1980s and beyond as a revered figure - up there alongside Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama and others as a symbol for peace and harmony and simple goodness. Though he couldn’t actually talk his very presence and legacy spoke volumes.

It was said this week that without Muhammad Ali there would be no Barak Obama in the White House even now, 50 years on from Ali’s prime as a boxer. While it’s impossible to say if that’s true, there’s certainly a line that can be easily traced back from Obama to Ali (and others) who paved the way for what stands as better, if not perfect, racial equality in America today.

But it’s as a boxer that Muhammad Ali will be remembered first and foremost. Even those of us too young to have seen him fight live, as it were, have been raised on the quotes and the quips, the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manilla, the early years as an Olympic gold medal winner in Rome in 1960 and the day he ‘shook up the world’ by laying out Sonny Liston, right up to the regrettable last days against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in the early ’80s, when, even then, Ali’s once graceful movement and fast mouth were showing worrying of and decline.

And that’s the thing that really epitomised Muhammad Ali - that gracefulness in the ring, the fleet-footedness and, above all else, his own appreciation of the aesthetic at the core of boxing, which then, as now, can be a brutal and unforgiving sport.

Of all the writings and films produced on the life and times of Ali two stand above all else. Norman Mailer’s - the American novelist’s account of Ali’s title fight against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 - remains the high-water mark in sports writing, while Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary

about the build-up to that same fight captures most, if not all, of Ali’s multi-faceted character. Close to the end of

Mailer speaks of the moment Ali emerges from this rope-a-dope tactic to knock down Foreman in the eighth round: “It was such a classic performance, and so beautiful, that at the moment Ali hit the knockout punch Foreman began to go, Ali followed him around, and Ali had his right cocked for one more punch but he never threw it. It was as if he didn’t want to ruin the aesthetic of this man going down with a clumsy punch on the way down.”

And that was Ali the boxer. Ingenious. Courageous. Aware. Beautiful. Balletic.

Or, to give him the last word on himself, as he always had: The Greatest.