TREASURE TROVE OF THE GREATEST
HE did not come, he did not see it but, as ever, he conquered all. Muhammad Ali’ s presence surrounded and pervaded us at the preview of I Am The Greatest, the new exhibition about his life which opens today at London’s O2 arena.
The most eye - catching exhibit was not the largest — a bigger-than-lifesize bronze statue, nor the most extravagant, the goldembossed gown he gave to Elvis Presley, but a battered old pair of boxing gloves with the horse-hair padding protruding from a gap in the side of one of them.
That is the glove allegedly slit open by iconic trainer, Angelo Dundee, to buy more recovery time when Ali — then Cassius Clay — was knocked down by Britain’s Henry Cooper. At Wembley Stadium on that June night in 1963 Cooper came within seconds of changing the course of ring history. Cooper’s left hook sent Clay crashing on to his backside and into the ropes in the fourth round.
The bell saved the man who would become The Greatest but Dundee, seeing his fighter was still groggy at the end of the one- minute interval, called the referee to inspect the fresh slit in that glove.
Almost another minute passed as they thought about replacing it — enough time for Clay to revive and go on.
He said of Cooper: ‘He hit me so hard that my ancestors in Africa felt it.’
Clay was saved to f i ght another day against Sonny Liston when he shocked the world by winning the heavyweight title in February 1964 before promptly announcing his conversion to Islam and changing his name.
Those events, and pretty much everything else, has a place in this lovingly compiled and beautiful exhibition.
Videos and artefacts trace his journey from a modest home in Louisville, Kentucky, to Olympic gold and three glorious world championships, through his civil rights activism and his banishment from the ring for refusing to fight in the Vietnam war.
The cruel affliction which has silenced the Louisville Lip and l i mits his movement makes long-haul travel especially difficult, meaning he could not attend the opening. There is a slim hope that he may make the flight to London before the exhibition closes at the end of August. But, just in case, he has penned his own profoundly eloquent and typically mischievous epilogue.
My favourite lines are: ‘I’d settle for being remembered as a great boxer and a champion of the people… I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was. Be cool and look out for the ladies.’