Like Napoleon Bonaparte or Mahatma Gandhi or Leonardo da Vinci, Muhammad Ali belongs to history. He's most like Leonardo--an artist who transcended his art, one of those few men who can be said to have changed the world. Were it not for Ali, things would be very different.
Perhaps another figure would have arisen, as fierce and intelligent and childlike and black and beautiful as he. Maybe someone else could have been as hated, as feared, as confident, and ultimately as beloved; maybe someone else could have taught us as much as Ali has. But it seems impossible. Ali was unique, the first and last of his kind.
My father didn't like him at first; he hated what he perceived as swagger and braggadocio. He didn't like it when he changed his name to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali. He didn't like it when Ali refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army.
But he always admired Ali as a boxer, and my father knew boxing. He'd been a good amateur, and when he was dying I found out he'd had one secret professional fight, using a pseudonym he filled in on an undercard after someone got hurt. He lost to a fighter who later lost to Carmen Basilio, who won titles as both a welterweight and middleweight (and who, coincidentally, sponsored a semi-pro baseball team my dad played on for a time). I remember my dad telling me how great this Clay kid was, and that I should pay attention to him because we'd never see a heavyweight like him again.
But my father also perceived Ali as "mouthy," and though I don't believe he was especially bigoted (sports and the Air Force had exposed him to a lot of different kinds of folks, and racist rhetoric was regarded as "ignorant" in our house) he was a product of his time. I'm sure he thought Ali was un-American and ungrateful.
And I don't know when he came around, exactly, but by the early '70s he was back in Ali's corner.
My father died when I was a young man--when he was still a young man, really--but not before we had a few long talks. I was surprised to learn that he would not have let me go to Vietnam had the draft continued a couple of more years, that he had been prepared to take steps to keep me out of that war. He understood that Ali had been right, and that we didn't have any beef with the Viet Cong either.
By the mid-'70s, my father realized that Ali was essentially a playful and generous figure, that despite the violence he could command, he was essentially a warrior for love. People could and did hate him. But then some people hated Jesus Christ.
A couple of years ago I wrote a song about my father and I called it "Cassius Clay." (You can hear a version of it that I recorded after learning about Ali's death last week here: tinyurl.com/zerbjwa) It is a simple structured thing. I embellish my dad's boxing career, reminisce about watching the Friday night fights and, in the final verse, acknowledge that I probably turned out a little differently than he might have expected. But the key verse in the song contains the lyric:
I remember pretty Cassius Clay/stinging like a bee/ back when he was still a negro/ before he became Ali .../My father was a middleweight/He thought the bigger guys were slow/But he said Ali was more than great/He was the best we'll ever know.
The line comes from an interview Ali gave Sports Illustrated's Bill Nack years ago. Ali was talking about how he beat Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, a fleshy coffeehouse keeper from Poland, to win a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics. After the fight, he came home to the black section of Louisville, Ky., a place called West End, and showed off to his neighbors the white shorts he had worn in his gold medal match--they were stained candy pink by the Polish boxer's blood.
"I was Cassius Clay then," Ali said. "I was a Negro. I ate pork. I had no confidence. I thought white people were superior."
I consider Ali to be both the best argument for the abolition of boxing and the best argument for boxing. He was clearly and irreparably damaged by the sport. For the last 30 years of his life he had trouble expressing himself verbally, though he retained the gleaming eyes.
Yet, were it not for boxing, there never would have been a Muhammad Ali. While Ali was athlete enough that he might have excelled as a basketball, football or baseball player, he needed the autonomy that boxing provided; an Ali beholden to a team, to a league, could never have affected world culture the way Ali the boxer could have.
Hank Aaron, the home run king, once described Ali as "a total man," adding that "when no other black athletes dared say anything, he said it for us."
An Ali beholden to a team owner could not have taken the stands he did--or could not have taken the stands he did and remained a viable presence. Baseball discovered it could live without Curt Flood and, in the 1960s, American team sports were relatively parochial ventures; no one in Peking or Prague cared about the fortunes of the Dodgers or the Celtics or the Bears.
Boxing, on the other hand, is a world sport, and the boxer answers only to himself. Ali could utter the truth; that he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong, he could refuse to wear the white man's name, he could exhibit his verbal acuity, his wit and his mind. He could define a kind of sportsman's style, for all intents and purposes he invented "trash talk," though late in his career the good humor behind his words was palpable.
Ali dragged the black oral tradition of trading humorous insults into the world's klieg-lit arenas. His style has been appropriated by rap artists and athletes who refer to it habitually, almost reflexively, probably unconsciously. And Ali's style is no longer a signifier of black American culture--like rock 'n' roll it has infiltrated the universe. The whole "in-your-face" ethos is traceable to Ali.
Ali is boxing's gift to the world. He's more important than boxing itself. Maybe there is something to the macho gnashings of apologists: Were it not for the crucible of the ring, the mano a mano contest that tends to polarize combatants into heroes and villains, saints and apostates, blacks and whites, we might never have heard of Muhammad Ali.
Who was more than great--the best we'll ever know.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 06/07/2016