Ali was both a hero and hypocrite

There is a tendency, perhaps even an instinct, to place our heroes on a moral pedestal.

Princess Diana has, since her death, become a secular saint. The passionate but flawed woman who walked the earth has given way to a Messianic caricature that bears little relation to the person she was, or why she stirred such strong emotions.

Mother Teresa spent most of her life in this position of uncritical reverence. She was the saviour of the poor, the saintly woman who ministered to their needs. The truth is that, for all of her many admirable qualities, she was also a conservative who supported the religious ideology of contraception, which condemned millions of women to poverty.

We see the same with Aung San Suu Kyi, to some the Mother Teresa of the modern age, who turns out to have serious flaws and contradictions, not least in her curious inability to condemn the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Mynmar. In sport, too, we see this process of deification.

We yearn for heroes, people in whom we can put our faith, to the extent that we edit out their flaws, censor their blemishes, leaving only a parody to whom no real person could ever measure up. Only then do the revisionists step in to administer the belated character assassination, the build-them-up to knock-them-down narrative that is such a depressing staple of popular culture.

I was thinking of this process in the context of Muhammad Ali. At the time that he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2005, the coverage was fawning. He was positioned as peace-loving, a Ghandi-esque reincarnation who preached love and tolerance. The photographers shot away in the White House as Bush smiled, and Ali twirled his fingers. Some were shedding tears. His death last year was also met with retrospectives that were little more than eulogies. He was, we were told, a kind of Nelson Mandela with a jab and winning smile.

The truth, of course, was rather different. Ali was a member of the Nation of Islam, an apocalyptic cult that believed white people were congenitally evil, having been bred 6600 years ago in a dastardly experiment by a black scientist called Yakub. The hatred for whites was such that the group opposed the integration of the civil rights movement, agitating for a separate homeland for blacks within the borders of the United Sates.

Ali was a member of the Nation’s notorious Mosque No 12 in Philadelphia, which, according to a investigative report by the FBI, was involved with ‘‘narcotics, contract murders, bank robberies, fraudulent credit card and check schemes, armed robberies, widespread extortion and loansharking activities’’.

He was so committed to racial segregation that he spoke at a rally for the Ku Klux Klan, who shared this objective, albeit for the opposite reasons (they believed that blacks, rather than whites, were the congenitally defective ones).

‘‘Blue birds with blue birds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles!’’ Ali proclaimed to cheers from an organisation that was, at that very moment, perpetrating a campaign of terror south of the Mason-dixon line. ‘‘God didn’t make no mistake!’’

Ali was also a hypocrite in his personal life, preaching sexual abstinence while living a life of rampant promiscuity. In that, he followed in the footsteps of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the cult, and Elijah’s son, Herbert, who was Ali’s manager, each of whom had multiple affairs.

This is not to deny that Ali had heroic qualities. He was a wonderful boxer, and demonstrated great courage to oppose the war in Vietnam at a time when American public opinion was solidly behind the conflict. He spoke truth to power, even when it cost him financially.

But we can only understand Ali, and the emotions he aroused, as the man he really was, rather than the parody he became.

Was Ali a hero or a hypocrite? He was, as we should have always known, both.