Leading OFF
Forward-thinking Ali lived to see his ideals affirmed
Perhaps the easiest way to measure the scope of Muhammad Ali — icon, symbol and agent of change — is by considering all that Ali lost for what he believed in. He turned around and won it back, and then some.
This is a man who stood up against the Vietnam War — not when it was at its nadir, but when public approval for it easily topped 50% — and lost everything that fame and his talents had given him, from the heavyweight title to the right to work to even, for a time it seemed, the right to stay out of jail over his beliefs. He had refused induction into the U.S. Armed Forces in 1967, saying he was a conscientious objector, a stance that also cost him his heavyweight title.
His principled stand against conscription led to a conviction for draft dodging, nearly four years without a fight and the permanent loss of what are typically a boxer’s best, most profitable years.
As sportswriter Jimmy Cannon put it: “The best three years in the life of his body had been put up as collateral for his beliefs.”
People talk about the moment Walter Cronkite famously expressed his skepticism over the Vietnam War on Feb. 27, 1968. Ali did it almost two years earlier. “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said, pointing out how nobody in Vietnam had ever called him the vicious word he often heard growing up in segregated Louisville.
It can be said that Ali’s words did more to turn the tide of the country against the war than the actions of the famous newsman.
This is quite a legacy by itself, for any man, but it is also merely the responsibility Ali believed came with the fame he’d earned for living as anything but a pacifist. He fought in such remarkably colorful ways, though, both in promotion and in the ring itself, that Americans were able to prolong, just a few decades longer, their ability to separate the barbarism of the sport from their plea- sure in it.
A similar disconnect is taking place with the NFL, and that sport has billions of dollars, lifelong formed habits and an army of public relations representatives to support it. Boxing had ... Ali. There were some other supporters, but none with anything close to his heft.
It was conventional wisdom that boxing was fading, and that Ali, essentially, kept it going.
And the extent to which the sport has faded from the public consciousness is only exacerbated by the heights it reached, thanks to Ali.
Not just great sportswriters, but great writers, including Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, across mediums worked to capture what Ali was about. A Life magazine photographer, ringside at an Ali fight, was Frank Sinatra.
And indeed, even late-career Ali, in his fight against Larry Holmes, relegated Sinatra to second billing on the Caesars Palace sign in Las Vegas.
The world had a desire to be close to Ali, something that continued long after he retired from boxing, even after Parkinson’s disease robbed him of his speed, agility and wit, the pleasures of it parceled out in short yet satisfying bursts.
Last week, complications related to Parkinson’s ultimately robbed him of his life, and the world embraced him again.
No one knows who the heavyweight champ is today. Everybody knew who Ali was.
There is a lesson here, one that is echoed throughout American history, one that is simultaneously hopeful and a note of warning at once. Ali spoke out in what were considered the most divisive terms during the 1960s, but history has a way of changing, of moving forward as progress is made and the center of debate shifts That Ali became a unifying figure would have struck anyone who lived through his greatest heights of fame and eloquence as impossible. But it all happened, and it happened fast.
The country hasn’t come around on much of what Ali stood for with anything like a majority view. Ali advocated for Islam, and a major party presidential candidate and most certain nominee has promised to keep Muslims from entering the country.
Somehow, Americans found consensus on Ali.
It is my belief that this happened because, if given enough time, America gets it right on the people it gets to know best. Few were better-known, over a period of several decades, than Ali.
The country came to understand him for what he was — a man of brilliance, in skill and in intellect, who never stopped trying to do right by the world, in ways large and small.
To disagree with Ali on a given issue would be far different than the small-mindedness required not to respect him for the way he advocated for those beliefs, or to understand where he came from to arrive there. And it didn’t take that long, either. President Ford invited him to the White House after he defeated George Foreman, one of the many moments when logic dictated that he’d be overmatched, yet Ali prevailed.
Sonny Liston was a huge favorite when Ali defeated him. Ali was supposed to be too green, too small. And a decade later, Ali beat Foreman despite the opposite problems — 32 years old, too thick around the middle, no longer able to miss an opponent’s punches, let alone the hammer blows of peak-era Foreman, who had made quick work of Joe Frazier and Ken Norton. Not Ali. It is doubtful that consensus much mattered to Ali, who was true to himself and true to his word. Unlike his contemporary Martin Luther King Jr., though, he got the chance to live long enough to see the world accept his contributions as not merely brave but vital, even as the struggle for racial equality to which they both devoted their lives continues.
And then there is the beauty of Ali: the flights of fancy in the ring, the enormous grin that followed the perfect putdown, a glistening, shining champion of a presence in the American psyche.
Ali told Playboy in 1975 that he’d like to be remembered this way: “As a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could — financially and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality.”
He spoke of his religion, and then he concluded this way: “And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”
Nobody did, though. And nobody will.