Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

"Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee"

A long time ago, I first learned of 'Mohammed Ali'. I must have been nine. Muhammad Ali was going to fight Antonio Inoki, a wrestler in Japan. it was a bit of a farce. What I understood of the farcical 'fight' was that Ali was the greatest boxer on the planet and Inoki was the greatest wrestler and so it was going be a fight to sort out who was 'the Greatest'. What it was, was the greatest farce, but for us Gen-Xers, the greatest moments of Ali-as-fighter were already in the past by the time we were conscious of Muhammad Ali. He was like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, a figure whose record I had to piece together in the library. And I was a young sport nut enough to put the pieces together in the school library in NYC. Sometimes it takes stupidity to open the door to knowledge.

There also was this one fight they keep playing over and over in replays of past glory:



That right there is the famous fight with Sonny Liston where he knocked him out and demanded Liston say his name. Liston leads with his left and Ali gets a cross-counter over it, into the head and Liston drops. It looks nothing like a Rocky movie, but it's considered one of the great moments in boxing.

Ali loomed large in my imagination the more I read about him. His record prior to his suspension seemed immaculate. Although he had lost to Joe Frazier in '71, he had gone comeback to beat him in '74 and '75. He certainly fit the bill of the Greatest as far as I could tell.



There was also the 'Rumble in the Jungle' fight with George Foreman in '74 that kept coming up in conversation to do with Ali.



Ali lost some important years during the middle of his career when he conscientiously objected to being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. He famously quipped "No Vietnamese ever called me n-gger". How could he not be a cultural hero to the world after that?

The defiance and race consciousness were of its time, yet Ali transcended the kind of ordinary discourses on race. He was beautiful - "how can I be humble when I'm so pretty?" he asked rhetorically. He was fast and graceful, and possessed that marvellous wit. Above all, he demanded to be recognised as "the Greatest". When he met the Beatles he still insisted he was the Greatest, but that they were beautiful too, just like him. And so the banter went with Ali.

I did catch the broadcast of a few his fights towards the end of his career. I remember distinctly the two fights with Leon Spinks, one where he lost surprisingly on a split decision, and then the one where he came back and beat Spinks on an unanimous decision. Just as he had done with Frasier, Ali had gone back and beaten the guy who beat him. Then he fought Larry Holmes and lost and then Trevor Berwick and lost, which were his last fights. If anything the Holmes fight showed he had stayed the ring too long. Even as a kid, I could see that he wasn't the guy that he once was when he thumped Sonny Liston with the cross counter.

I think about it now and I'm a little surprised my parents let me watch this stuff but the truth is, Ali was such a showman, it was must-see television. And as good as Holmes and Spinks were, they were never the kinds of campions Ali was in his heyday. Truly, we would not see that kind of dominance until Iron Mike Tyson came along, and Tyson was a completely different kind of boxer and champion as well as a showman. Just as Ali - myth, record and all - belonged to the Baby Boomers, Iron Mike - his myth, record and all - was very much of Generation X. Ali was such a presence in the world, he was like a one man mission statement.

Then, there was this carton show:



The years after he left the ring were more fraught. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in his early 40s, and by the time he was carrying the torch at the Atlanta Olympics in '96 he was shuffling like an old man. It was sad, watching him with his arm shaking and his stiff facial expression without a smile. He wasn't tense, he was fighting his twitches all the way as he raised the torch. It was meant to be triumphant but looking back on it now, it's painful and pathetic.

Perhaps Ali is better to be remembered for his greatest win, the one against George Foreman, immortalised in the documentary 'When We Were Kings'.



Rest in peace Muhammad Ali; we will certainly never see the likes of him ever again, for he truly was The Greatest.