Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Ali’s torch lighting in 1996 was memorable
Secret was known only to handful
It was and may always be the most indelible moment in U.S. Summer Olympic history, and it had nothing to do with competition.
It was so much bigger than that, befitting the image of the man at its center.
It was about the transformation of this country’s attitude toward an Olympic champion and global icon, whose willingness to speak his mind had made him a pariah rather than a prophet in many precincts of his own land. It was a confession of and atonement for our past sins.
It was, as I described it in the Chicago Tribune, the moment at the Opening Ceremony of the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta when Muhammad Ali lit the cauldron:
“He appeared out of the night, out of the past he shared with both the event and the region. When the light caught his dark face, caught it full, the reflection was brighter than the flame Janet Evans handed to him. It was a reflection of the possibilities the Olympics promise and rarely deliver, the possibilities for men and women to be judged by who they are and not how they look.
“Muhammad Ali, the final torch bearer at the Opening Ceremony, up there on what seemed a mountaintop, the celestial mountaintop of equality that Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached about climbing. The boxer who had won Olympic gold in 1960, then threw his medal in the Ohio River after being refused service in an all-white restaurant. The man who represented the racial and social polarization of the 1960s and early 1970s when he took a Muslim name and said he didn’t have anything against ‘them Viet Cong.’
“Ali, the world’s best-known sports figure of the last 50 years. Ali, showing 3 billion telespectators worldwide that his nation, his native South, can rise above itself in the heat of a steamy Georgia summer night. Ali, 54, his face smooth and young and his arm wobbling from a disease of age, summing up the Olympic Century. It was the greatest.”
It had taken nearly two generations after his Olympic triumph before the United States fully realized that Ali — who died Friday at 74 — was a national treasure.
“Muhammad Ali was one of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen,” U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Scott Blackmun said. “He distinguished himself both inside the ring and out. He inspired Americans in so many ways, from his gold medal in 1960 in Rome to lighting the torch in Atlanta to making an appearance at the London Games. He will continue to inspire Americans for generations to come. We are grateful for his contribution to the U.S. Olympic movement.”
Ali, the man who playfully proclaimed himself “The Greatest,” was an Olympic champion bigger than the world’s biggest sporting event because of who he became after winning the light heavyweight title as an 18-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, named Cassius Clay.
“His Olympic victory contributed to his legend, but really, in 1960, there were a lot of U.S. Olympic boxers who went on to pro careers,” Olympic historian Bill Mallon said. “It was hard to know in 1960 that Cassius Clay would later become ‘Muhammad Ali.’
“His personality made him very popular in 1960, but I would not classify him among the greatest Olympic athletes, based only on Olympic careers. However, my feeling is that he was the greatest, and perhaps most important, American athlete of the 20th century. His 1996 flame-lighting ceremony was a wonderful moment, both for him and to honor his accomplishments as an athlete and his work in civil rights in America.”
That Evans shared the moment at Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium means more to her than the four Olympic gold medals she won as the greatest women’s distance swimmer in history. The idea of having Ali light the Olympic flame came from Dick Ebersol, the longtime head of NBC’s Olympic coverage. That it remained a secret to all but a handful of people made its impact infinitely greater.
Evans, then 24 and about to swim in her final Olympics, was among the few who knew what would happen.
As the penultimate torch bearer, she had been instructed to help Ali if the shakes from his Parkinson’s disease made it impossible for him to complete the lighting ceremony on his own. She stood a few feet away, grateful there was no need to step in, forever grateful that the only thing she would share was seeing the excitement in Ali’s eyes.