ALI INSPIRED HOPE, PRIDE
My father considered him a loud-mouthed draft dodger. It was our first real disagreement.
As a kid, I would sit with my father in front of the black-and-white RCA television set, the rabbit ears adjusted just so, and peer through the snow on the screen at the fight unfolding before us.
For my dad, who left home at age 18 in 1942 and joined the Navy while war raged in both Europe and the Pacific, the boxer on the screen was nothing but a loud-mouthed draft dodger.
It didn’t matter to him that the boxer possessed lightning in his hands and thunder in his fists, or that he danced around the ring like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. He was someone Dad rooted against, no matter who the man was fighting — be it Joe Frazier or Alfredo Evangelista.
I’d puff with pride when the ring announcer would say something like, “Introducing, from Louisville, Ky., he’s wearing red trunks, he weighs 215 ... here is Muhammad Ali.” It was a generational thing. The old man would cheer when the other boxer landed a blow. I’d let out a hoot when Muhammad Ali left his opponent flat on his back or staggering against the ropes.
‘STRIKE CITY’
For me, Ali was the personification of hope at a time when Louisville needed just that.
A public relations or advertising guru in town had dubbed it “The City of the Seventies” in a bank’s marketing campaign, but it was anything but that.
Downtown was ailing as folks had moved to the suburbs, leaving once stately buildings to decay, be torn down and eventually be replaced by parking lots.
Working-class neighborhoods near downtown had been demolished and filled with bleak government-owned apartment complexes. Fourth Street, long the city’s shopping and entertainment hub, was a ghost town.
Louisville was gaining its reputation as “strike city” because of frequent work stoppages at Ford, General Electric and other manufacturing companies around town.
The city was being torn apart by riots and protests over a federal judge’s order to integrate the Jefferson County Public Schools, which along with the old Louisville Board of Education had for years adopted an unofficial policy of “separate but equal.”
There wasn’t much to be proud of in those days in Louisville.
Although Ali had long moved his base of operations from Columbia Gym — where Joe Martin taught him to punch and jab, and bob and weave — and taken up residence in rural Pennsylvania or Michigan or Cherry Hill, N.J., Ali was still ours.
‘LOUISVILLE LIP’
In most of his fights, Ali was introduced as being from Louisville even years after he moved away. The Louisville Lip. The Greatest of all Time. And if you didn’t care about his politics, he was something to be proud of in a city that, at the time, seemed to have little going for it.
If you did care about his politics, well …
He didn’t subscribe to the notion that a black man couldn’t or shouldn’t be outspoken like he was, or that a boxer should shut up and let his fists talk for him.
Ali wouldn’t allow the government to tell him he had to join the Army and participate in a war with which he didn’t agree. He stunned the folks like my father when he explained why he wouldn’t be inducted thusly:
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger; they never lynched me; they didn’t put no dogs on me. ... Shoot them for what?”
He made some people uncom- fortable when he converted to Islam and gave up the name Cassius Clay, which he called his “slave name.” He rebelled and advanced civil rights.
Some anger like my father’s still exists toward Ali. When Kentucky House Speaker Greg Stumbo suggested placing a statue of Ali in the Capitol, a number of people emailed and wrote letters opposed to the idea.
“Ali should NOT be in the Capitol,” one person wrote. “That is a spot for statesmen — not for boxers and draft dodgers.”
Ali came into my consciousness long after he took Rome and the world by storm, winning the gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Olympic Games and after his battle with the federal government over his induction into the Army.
He gave me my first opportunity to really disagree with my father about something — him.
He came for me at a time when he was in his 30s and his boxing skills were beginning to fade, when he used his guile rather than physical superiority to beat boxers much younger and stronger than he.
And he came at a time when the city needed a hero.