Ali bomaye
I'll write a little about Muhammad Ali- what's this blog even here for if I don't?
He was a significant figure for me, as for many. His poster was on my wall when I was a teenager and throughout university, I watched all the documentaries and films, read three biographies, have watched all his famous fights (apart from the later ones, which I could never bring myself to).
He was the primary gateway to so many of my main interests - boxing, the counter-culture, protest music, false history and propaganda, the antihero, soul music, Africa, what it actually means to be a great man.
He met in the middle (like Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese, but perhaps even more so) of so many areas - he was there in great literature, in hip-hop, soul and folk music, in blockbuster films and documentaries, in postcolonial studies, in civil rights, in poetry, in celebrity, in religious education, in our understanding of health and illness ... but most of all, he was in sport. He was in boxing.
Some boxing experts might tell you that, though he was "The Greatest", he wasn't the greatest boxer, not even the greatest heavyweight. I believed this for a while, swayed by those five losses on his record. But such equivocation doesn't really pass muster. No other heavyweight won so many great fights against great opposition, lit up three different eras in the same way, went through so much to get where he got to, over and again. No other heavyweight, simply, was as good. Not in his prime. Or as close to his prime as he was allowed.
I regularly, on this blog and elsewhere, beat the drum for modern sport, refute the myths of our elders that it was so much better in their day. Nonsense. Nowhere do these blowhards talk as loud as in boxing. No modern boxer, they say, could live with Hank Armstrong or Gene Tunney or Ray Robinson or Willie Pep or whoever ... it gets boring. But with Ali, it's true, or close to it.
He was, in some ways, the first modern sportsman. He is measurable as a heavyweight by the standards of the old world and the new. Floyd Patterson, a former heavyweight champion he beat twice, was 6 ft and 86 kg. Heavyweight champion! That's how much I've weighed myself on a bad day. Any idea that it wouldn't be criminally irresponsible to put such a man in with the Klitschkos or Anthony Joshua is plain silly. But Ali was different. Ali was a modern heavyweight size - 6 ft 3, between 95 and 105 kg at different points in his career, no extra flab.
And just watch him fight - he just looks better than modern heavyweights, even without the rose-tinted glasses - quicker (light years quicker), more skilled, tougher, cleverer. He'd still be giving away a fair bit of weight to someone like Wladimir Klitschko, but I do think Ali would have dominated this era. Look at George Foreman, bested by Ali in 1974, who came back for the heavyweight title and beat some top fighters, overweight and 20 years past his prime. The heavyweights of the 70s were the greatest heavyweights, the time when the cream rose to the top and the talent gathered in that division - Foreman, Frazier, Norton, Chuvalo, Terrell, Foster, Quarry. And Ali was the best of them.
So, yes, I think that's what's important to me. Ali was the greatest, as well as being the Greatest. That's not a myth. Because, let's be honest, there's a lot that is myth.
The Rumble in the Jungle is myth. The truth is magnificent, but the truth has been cast aside for the myth, that Ali just sat on the ropes for 8 rounds and then took everyone by complete surprise with one punch. Watch the fight. It didn't happen like that. Rope-a-dope was a small part of what he did. He fought toe to toe early on, was active in patches in every round, just covering up occasionally. What's more, the commentators (well, some of them) could tell exactly what was happening, were predicting the outcome before it happened.
It's a myth that he was loved. He was hated. Hated so much that most people were praying Sonny Liston, previously the most hated man in America, would beat him in both fights. Liston, the devil white america knew, was considered the lesser of two evils. The likes of Liston, they felt, they could keep down, and, tragically, they did. Ali they could not contain. They tried, and failed. Did he earn their respect eventually? Maybe from some, but I'll tell you what, it's jarring watching the coverage of the Fight of the Century from 1971 and hearing respected commentators still calling him "Clay", 7 years after he'd said that was his slave name and demanding it not be used anymore ... racism, eh.
Equivocation and myth-busting serves some purpose with Ali - what's the point of pretending his refusal to fight in Vietnam was, right from the off, some great altruistic act? The truth is more complex, but means just as much. What's the point in pretending he couldn't be mean and vindictive? He was a boxer, for heaven's sake.
I wrote about tragedy recently. Tragedy in rock'n'roll music. There's tragedy in sport too, and some might see Ali as a tragedy, watch those brutal fights with Frazier, Norton, Foreman and Holmes and only be able to see a man slowly dying. But Ali was given the sporting afterlife and the sustained mental capacity to tell us that, no, he wasn't a tragedy, he wouldn't change a single moment, so let's believe that. Let's look at him lighting the flame at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 as a triumph, not a horror show.
Ali is already myth. I've just got to accept that. The myth of the proud child Cassius Marcellus Clay (actually, though Ali rejected it as a slave name, the original Cassius Marcellus Clay was an abolitionist) who was rejected for his race, threw his medal in the river, metamorphosed into the superhero Muhammad Ali, beat the monster, stood up for the oppressed, had his powers stripped from him, came back to beat his arch rival in an epic trilogy, beat the next monster, sang his own songs, wrote his own choruses, lost to his successor, came back for one last triumph, then metamorphosed again into Muhammad Ali the becalmed icon of whatever anyone wanted him to be an icon of.
This is going to sound a little unlikely, a little too-good, but it its true. My first encounter with Ali was this - I remember there was a massive framed poster of him in the kitchen in some Chiswick house of considerably posh, white folk, when I was 5 or 6 (if you're wondering how far his influence spread). "Who's that?" I asked someone. "Muhammad Ali". "Is he alive or dead?" "Not sure, kind of neither" ... and, after that moment, honest to goodness, Ali was in my head as this being that transcended life and death, that inhabited a rarified air beyond my understanding. Of course, that "kind of neither" can be taken a different, sadder, way, but there is no more legendary, more storied figure of our time, no one more outside the traditional boundaries, so little contained by our preconceptions. He shook up the world.
He was a significant figure for me, as for many. His poster was on my wall when I was a teenager and throughout university, I watched all the documentaries and films, read three biographies, have watched all his famous fights (apart from the later ones, which I could never bring myself to).
He was the primary gateway to so many of my main interests - boxing, the counter-culture, protest music, false history and propaganda, the antihero, soul music, Africa, what it actually means to be a great man.
He met in the middle (like Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese, but perhaps even more so) of so many areas - he was there in great literature, in hip-hop, soul and folk music, in blockbuster films and documentaries, in postcolonial studies, in civil rights, in poetry, in celebrity, in religious education, in our understanding of health and illness ... but most of all, he was in sport. He was in boxing.
Some boxing experts might tell you that, though he was "The Greatest", he wasn't the greatest boxer, not even the greatest heavyweight. I believed this for a while, swayed by those five losses on his record. But such equivocation doesn't really pass muster. No other heavyweight won so many great fights against great opposition, lit up three different eras in the same way, went through so much to get where he got to, over and again. No other heavyweight, simply, was as good. Not in his prime. Or as close to his prime as he was allowed.
I regularly, on this blog and elsewhere, beat the drum for modern sport, refute the myths of our elders that it was so much better in their day. Nonsense. Nowhere do these blowhards talk as loud as in boxing. No modern boxer, they say, could live with Hank Armstrong or Gene Tunney or Ray Robinson or Willie Pep or whoever ... it gets boring. But with Ali, it's true, or close to it.
He was, in some ways, the first modern sportsman. He is measurable as a heavyweight by the standards of the old world and the new. Floyd Patterson, a former heavyweight champion he beat twice, was 6 ft and 86 kg. Heavyweight champion! That's how much I've weighed myself on a bad day. Any idea that it wouldn't be criminally irresponsible to put such a man in with the Klitschkos or Anthony Joshua is plain silly. But Ali was different. Ali was a modern heavyweight size - 6 ft 3, between 95 and 105 kg at different points in his career, no extra flab.
And just watch him fight - he just looks better than modern heavyweights, even without the rose-tinted glasses - quicker (light years quicker), more skilled, tougher, cleverer. He'd still be giving away a fair bit of weight to someone like Wladimir Klitschko, but I do think Ali would have dominated this era. Look at George Foreman, bested by Ali in 1974, who came back for the heavyweight title and beat some top fighters, overweight and 20 years past his prime. The heavyweights of the 70s were the greatest heavyweights, the time when the cream rose to the top and the talent gathered in that division - Foreman, Frazier, Norton, Chuvalo, Terrell, Foster, Quarry. And Ali was the best of them.
So, yes, I think that's what's important to me. Ali was the greatest, as well as being the Greatest. That's not a myth. Because, let's be honest, there's a lot that is myth.
The Rumble in the Jungle is myth. The truth is magnificent, but the truth has been cast aside for the myth, that Ali just sat on the ropes for 8 rounds and then took everyone by complete surprise with one punch. Watch the fight. It didn't happen like that. Rope-a-dope was a small part of what he did. He fought toe to toe early on, was active in patches in every round, just covering up occasionally. What's more, the commentators (well, some of them) could tell exactly what was happening, were predicting the outcome before it happened.
It's a myth that he was loved. He was hated. Hated so much that most people were praying Sonny Liston, previously the most hated man in America, would beat him in both fights. Liston, the devil white america knew, was considered the lesser of two evils. The likes of Liston, they felt, they could keep down, and, tragically, they did. Ali they could not contain. They tried, and failed. Did he earn their respect eventually? Maybe from some, but I'll tell you what, it's jarring watching the coverage of the Fight of the Century from 1971 and hearing respected commentators still calling him "Clay", 7 years after he'd said that was his slave name and demanding it not be used anymore ... racism, eh.
Equivocation and myth-busting serves some purpose with Ali - what's the point of pretending his refusal to fight in Vietnam was, right from the off, some great altruistic act? The truth is more complex, but means just as much. What's the point in pretending he couldn't be mean and vindictive? He was a boxer, for heaven's sake.
I wrote about tragedy recently. Tragedy in rock'n'roll music. There's tragedy in sport too, and some might see Ali as a tragedy, watch those brutal fights with Frazier, Norton, Foreman and Holmes and only be able to see a man slowly dying. But Ali was given the sporting afterlife and the sustained mental capacity to tell us that, no, he wasn't a tragedy, he wouldn't change a single moment, so let's believe that. Let's look at him lighting the flame at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 as a triumph, not a horror show.
Ali is already myth. I've just got to accept that. The myth of the proud child Cassius Marcellus Clay (actually, though Ali rejected it as a slave name, the original Cassius Marcellus Clay was an abolitionist) who was rejected for his race, threw his medal in the river, metamorphosed into the superhero Muhammad Ali, beat the monster, stood up for the oppressed, had his powers stripped from him, came back to beat his arch rival in an epic trilogy, beat the next monster, sang his own songs, wrote his own choruses, lost to his successor, came back for one last triumph, then metamorphosed again into Muhammad Ali the becalmed icon of whatever anyone wanted him to be an icon of.
This is going to sound a little unlikely, a little too-good, but it its true. My first encounter with Ali was this - I remember there was a massive framed poster of him in the kitchen in some Chiswick house of considerably posh, white folk, when I was 5 or 6 (if you're wondering how far his influence spread). "Who's that?" I asked someone. "Muhammad Ali". "Is he alive or dead?" "Not sure, kind of neither" ... and, after that moment, honest to goodness, Ali was in my head as this being that transcended life and death, that inhabited a rarified air beyond my understanding. Of course, that "kind of neither" can be taken a different, sadder, way, but there is no more legendary, more storied figure of our time, no one more outside the traditional boundaries, so little contained by our preconceptions. He shook up the world.
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