Inspirational star became humanised in vulnerability
Champion endured because of his struggles
THIS year has been marked not by an unusual amount of celebrity deaths, but the unusual reaction to the inevitability that awaits us all.
It says something about the extent to which our society has shrivelled into self-regard that coverage of a famous death now often centres on how terrible it makes us feel, rather than an attempt at analysing why the life in question became famous in the first place.
This tired routine has played out in the aftermath of the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, in particular, the self-obsessed of a certain age telling the world what the departed meant to them.
There will be attempts to do the same with the passing of Muhammad Ali, but he was too big for that.
This was no celebrity death. Ali was no mayfly flitting about the hothouse of modern fame. He endured as one of the most inspiring and loved figures of the modern age. Certainly there has been no sporting figure better known or regarded.
The important question to ask is why: Why him? Why did Ali become a man known by everyone, and loved by practically all of them?
Given that his renown has outlived his sporting career by 40 years, his brilliance as a boxer is not a sufficient explanation.
Vulnerability was undoubtedly a part of the reason.
Photos of the man in his athletic pomp were reproduced everywhere yesterday, and he was in tremendous physical condition in his fighting prime. He was extremely good looking, with deep, handsome eyes, and the deterioration from that to the stooped figure struggling with Parkinson’s disease caused instinctive pity.
Proud and brilliant men do not easily accept that, but the world saw Ali struggle, and they compared the patient to the champion, and it humanised him. Because at his finest, with his quick mind, his sometimes cruel tongue and his devastating artistry as a pugilist, he could look super-human. The best sports people do; they manage things with balls, fists or running shoes that we find difficult to understand.
They elevate themselves to a superior place, and Ali’s greatness was further burnished by some of the coverage he received. Thanks to the writing of the likes of Norman Mailer, and through later biographies by Thomas Hauser and David Remnick, his deeds were captured for the generations that followed him. A marvellous work like Mailer’s The Fight makes Ali seem vital and irresistible.
The extending reach of TV and radio in the 1970s facilitated that, too. Ali was a star in an age when the world was becoming more easily understood thanks to technology, and spheres like celebrity and sport were thrown together.
Ali goofing with The Beatles, for instance, worked for both sides of that meeting, broadening the fame of the group and the boxer alike.
His intelligence provides one of the most powerful explanations of why Ali was perhaps more famous and more loved when his death was announced yesterday than at any time in his illustrious boxing prime.
It prompted the quips that made him famous and that have been faithfully reproduced, but he could also use it with the menace of a slashing blade. In a time when fetid racist sentiment spread across much of America, Ali was a black man who was not cowed and who refused to fulfil the subservient role allotted to the black stars who had come before him.
When he shocked the world in February 1964 by defeating the champion Sonny Liston, Ali was a deeply divisive figure. This was not solely down to the colour of his skin. The preparations for that fight, which marked the emergence of the wildly charismatic figure of ageless fame, were dominated by his tireless baiting of Liston, a tendency that took a more sinister turn a decade later with his treatment of Joe Frazier.
Ali called Frazier an Uncle Tom on an English chat show. By that time, Ali’s involvement with the Nation of Islam had deepened the complexities of his public life, but the movement’s aggressive defence of black rights was attributed as an explanation for his horrible attacks on Frazier.
The latter hated Ali with a frightening passion from then on, to the point that his answering machine message was once a cruel play on Ali’s famous ‘Float like a butterfly’ rhyme, allud-
ing to the physical decline his rival later endured.
On three occasions his enormous fame was refracted through a uniquely Irish light. The first occasion was in 1972 when he fought Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in Croke Park, but that visit is more memorable for his interview with the late, brilliant RTÉ journalist Cathal O’Shannon.
His visit in 2003 was again to Croke Park, this time for the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. He shared a stage with his only close rival as the most loved man of recent decades, Nelson Mandela.
Finally, Ali visited Ennis in 2009 when he was made a freeman of the town. A crowd reported to exceed 10,000 turned out to see him. Ennis awarded him the honour because his great grandfather was reputed to have come from the Clare town.
That was subsequently disputed, but the doubts had no hope of surviving the heat of the love felt for him.
Hagiography is inevitable when a much-loved figure dies, and there will be a deluge of tributes to Ali that concentrate on his saintliness. His row with Frazier was just one instance of gracelessness, though, and his failings serve only to make him more interesting.
Ali was fascinating. To the generation who came of age in the 1970s, now slipping from middle to old age, he was their champion and to some their inspiration. To the rest of us, he was always there, a figure whose permanent place in the affections of the world was fixed decades ago.
His body and his mind once helped to make him great. Their later rebellion and the struggle he endured trying to heal them made him great in another way.
Once, he was a warrior and a champion. Then he became a survivor. There was a harrowing nobility in that last, difficult fight.
‘HE HAS A PERMANENT PLACE IN THE WORLD’S AFFECTIONS’