FLAWED BUT STILL THE GREATEST
A boxing giant, political activist and man of peace who exhibited beauty and faults
THE sweat-soaked basketball player heads for the locker room after his first match back from an extended spell in rehab for substance abuse. A father, dragging his child by the arm, leans over a barrier and shouts at the star: ‘What kind of role model have you been for my son?’
The player stops and in a gentle but firm voice replies: ‘How about you just let me be a basketball player and you be the role model for your son?’
The search for an all-time sporting hero ended early for me. On February 26, 1964, I was walking in that two-by-two formation favoured by teachers. I was eight. Somehow (the jannie talking to the teacher? A snippet of conversation on the street?) I learned that Cassius Clay had defeated Sonny Liston. It was shocking. I was old enough to appreciate that. The monster had been slain by someone who had been regarded as a loud-mouthed fool.
I am now condemned to a daily search for the holy grail of my car keys. I can hunt for my glasses when they are on the end of my nose. I arrive in rooms only to discover I don’t know why I am there but I remember that day more than half a century ago for the profound impression it made and for the enduring presence of Muhammad Ali in my life.
It was significant, too, in that I appreciated even then that Ali (as he became immediately after the fight) was not universally popular, was even reviled. I learned that sporting heroes need not be perfect. This led to a strong belief, confirmed by personal experience and exposure to sports stars, that the concept of role models was so big a lie, it could be put on the side of a bus. There are lessons one can learn from sports greats. But they are as likely to fall into the category of how not to live rather than that of how to live.
Ali, in all his uniqueness, is no exception to that truism. His greatness is unquestioned in three areas: as a boxer, as a political activist and as a man of peace and goodwill. But this vast greatness was a landscape with ugly hollows, septic swamps and long grass where shameful secrets hid. He emerged, though, to climb the mountain. There are lessons in that ascent.
It may be a heresy but there is cause to preach that his boxing career is the least important of his legacies. He was a fighter of myth and fairy tale, defeating the genuine giants of Liston and George Foreman. He was also the ultimate victor in that awful and awesome triptych with Joe Frazier. He never avoided an opponent and became world heavyweight champion three times.
Yet even this astonishing achievement is marked with some reservations. Ali was beautiful in the ring but he could also be ugly. His taunting and merciless destruction of Ernie Terrell was prompted by his opponent continuing to call him Clay. Ali’s anger was understandable but his retribution was vicious, spiteful.
More grievously, he caused enduring hurt to a great, noble fighter. Frazier, whose background was more racially oppressed and financially limited than that of his rival, was denigrated as a gorilla and wrongfully, shamefully dubbed an Uncle Tom. Ali made mistakes in his career. It is to his credit that he came to regret them.
His strength of belief, paradoxically and fatally, weakened his professional life. The second strand in his life — political and religious activism — robbed him of three of his best fighting years when he was suspended for refusing to be drafted for service in the Vietnam war. Ali is regularly superseded in all-time pound-for-pound lists by such as Sugar Ray Robinson but many good judges, Hugh McIlvanney and Budd Schulberg among them, believed his boxing prime was spent on the sidelines. They testified that The Greatest could have been even greater.
His sacrifice to his faith went far beyond boxing. He refused to be drafted in April 1967. I was approaching my 12th birthday. I can still recall the hate that stance unleashed. Ali became a cuddly, loved figure as he lurched towards death, shaking but silent as the result of a Parkinson’s-type illness.
But he was detested by sections of the USA and beyond in this era of murderous racism and casual discrimination. He had cause to fear for his life but did not waver. He travelled the country, speaking in public, confronting his critics. His message was uncompromising and he perhaps served the Nation of Islam without recourse to an inner wisdom displayed in his later years.
His breach with Malcolm X, who was subsequently assassinated, reflected poorly on Ali. He dismissed his mentor and teacher with the ease normally reserved for dispensing with a used tissue. He remains, though, one of the most powerful advocates for political change in the USA of the 20th century.
His private life, too, was riddled with contradictions. The orthodox Muslim was a philanderer. His abuse of women certainly was emotional but there have been accusations that it was physical too. His beauty, then, was marked by scars.
One need not search far in his professional, political and personal life to find flaws, some of them profound and damaging to others. Yet he remains my sporting hero long after that first moment of epiphany some 56 years ago.
Why? Because he showed both the wonder of man and his limitations. He came to accept his greatness and his frailty. He produced art in the ring and presaged rap in his street poetry but also inspired it in others. A documentary of his Rumble in the Jungle with Foreman — When We
Were Kings — won an Oscar. He was chronicled by the great writers of his age: Norman Mailer, McIlvanney, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, David Remnick.
He was inspiring, educational and intriguing because he did not fall into that contrived box labelled role model. His significance is more enduring. One can marvel at physical greatness while recoiling at personal insult. One can appreciate strength while spotting weakness.
Ali was a human being whose life was inflated by the strong breath of talent and the subsequent fame it invigorated. But he remained, in essence, like you and me.
It is fascinating to note he suffered from phobias and comforting to discover he could overcome them. The fighter who shrugged off the advances of such as Foreman could tremble when walking on to an aeroplane. He came to embrace these moments. ‘We can’t be brave without fear,’ he would say.
He faced his final illness with similar courage. He did not hide. He lit the flame at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 with his disease ensuring it was an extraordinary physical challenge that would reveal him starkly to the world in his weakness but also in his strength. It takes a lot of illness, a surfeit of suffering to be as strong as Ali.
He died in 2016. Asked in his final days whether he raged at the hand he had been dealt, railed at the irony of such a beautiful body being diminished with indignity, he demurred quietly. But did, the interrogator pressed, he ask why him? ‘Why not me?’ he replied.
He was not perfect, he was not immortal. But he was The Greatest. The Scottish boy of 1964 was fascinated by him. The incipient pensioner of 2020 still finds in him a lesson, a caution, an occasional distaste, and a joy. It is the most generous of bequests from a hero.