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.

'Creed'

Rocky In Retirement

Maybe the most apt description is Nietzsche's "eternal return". At points in the past a Rocky sequel only elicited groans as Sylvester Stallone trotted out one of his trademark roles. Over in the USA of course, Rocky movies are a cult thing so it's not surprising that while Stallone lives, there's always another bite at the same cherry. It's a mixed blessing that this film is being cast as a 'spin off' from the Rocky movies.

The big difference this time is the Rocky isn't going in the ring to fight any more; he's handed that part of the mantle to the next generation where the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed goes in to fight. It's pretty much the same story arc as the original Rocky, much like 'The Force Awakens' is a beat-by-beat retread of the original 1977 Star Wars. I guess the world needed another Rocky movie just like it needed more Star Wars. It's just hard to believe that there is so much mileage in this franchise.

If you need a spoiler alert, you haven't been paying attention to Rocky movies or this blog.


What's Good About It

For once, it's not all on Rocky, and so it's not all on Sylvester Stallone to carry the film. The film has cast him as the elderly trainer, and so Rocky Balboa is there to pass on Mick's expertise. The slurred speech and the tired diction suits Rocky-as-old-geezer and lends credence to the notion that he probably took a hundred too many punches to the head.

Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed is the real revelation. He carries the film and does it with great ease. There's something cheesy about the whole movie, but then that whiff cheese goes all the way back to the original 'Rocky' movie so you just go along with it. The film is relatively short on fighting scenes that go on interminably. Instead we spend time exploring the life of Adonis outside the ring quite a bit.

What's Bad About It

'Rocky' movies aren't exactly works of penetrating realism. This film blithely follows in the tradition of a formulaic and relatively haphazard rationale for a big fight to happen in the third act.

Also, I did some maths. The events of 'Rocky IV' where Apollo Creed dies take place 1985. Which means, at youngest Adonis is 30. I know Rocky Balboa kept winning but 30 is a bit old for this story. The film glosses over it but if this Adonis character is indeed 30, he's behaving more like a 22year old than a 30 year old. As good as Michael B. Jordan is in the role, he's not exactly Mr. Believable thanks to the tenuous set up whereby he is Apollo Creed's illegitimate son, conceived just before Creed's death.

The film might have been better had the main character not been related to Apollo Creed at all, but is a fraud claiming to be the son of Apollo Creed just to get Rocky to help him.  It would have had better gags and a decent (pardon the pun) punchline when Rocky finds out and Adonis says "man, can't you do the maths?"

What's Interesting About It

This is tough. More than any other franchise other than 'Rambo', these Rocky movies might be the least surprising, biggest crowd-pleasing movies going. As Stallone famously said "they call it show business, not show art". Naturally it follows that one really ought not to expect any surprises but that abandoning of hope also promises that these films are not terribly interesting or insightful.

There is nothing in this film that we didn't know already about the character of Rocky Balboa or the universe in which he inhabits, or for that matter boxing itself. The film offers nothing new or intriguing about character or obsession or repression or fixation or race relations or the joys of getting drunk when celebrating or crying when something bad happens. There is absolutely nothing of interest or note. One wonders just for whom exactly this film was made.

Instead of trying to find what's not there, I might offer this up: The Rocky movies as a whole, including this spin off, gives us a boxer character with remarkably bad instincts about people and things, and an intuition that is best described as blunt rather than sharp. Astoundingly, the character survives all these dramatic moments in the boxing ring, in spite of his tremendously bad instincts and blunt intuition. Then, in his old age, he runs into a youngish boxer with equally bad instincts and blunt intuition, who he then takes under his wing to take on a champion - and just as it happened with him, the youngish boxer doesn't win.

There is that soaring moment just as they go into the final round where we hear the theme from 'Rocky' soar, one last time. It wasn't exactly an interesting moment, but it was for a brief moment, an emotional moment.