“You guys
will never start a revolution.”
It was a common tease I expressed to my Seniors this past school
year. A complete analysis of the reasons
for that is the subject of another journal perhaps, but certainly one of the
reasons would seem to be the lack of exemplars in our current time frame. At a time when sports figures are famous for
thumping their chests whether they have accomplished anything or not, when
politicians find support by feeding racial/cultural prejudice rather than
having a vision, and when protesters seem belittled by both sides as ineffective,
old hat, or immature, the figure of Muhammad Ali seems like any other figure in
a history book. Millions of words will
be written and spoken about his life, many of them far more heartfelt,
literate, and poignant than any I can muster, but I hope that something here
can be meaningful to those I know who did not experience Ali in the same way
that I did. (And that would include all
those of you not yet born in any part of his functional life.)
There
is always a danger in reflecting back on our thoughts and opinions of past events. Time has a great tendency to modify our memory,
so that we find ourselves imagining that we must have thought then what
we think now. In reality, many of
our actual thoughts and feelings at the time might dismay us now, had they been
carefully recorded. I often think of
things that I said and did in my youth that embarrass the current me as part of
my personal history. A key to living
well is to continue to grow, and to put behind us the limited, misbegotten
opinions and actions of our youth, before we “knew better”. The people who do this effectively are the
ones I admire and respect the most.
The
sports heroes of my early youth were guys who assuredly never did anything controversial, much less “wrong”. That image was mostly due to a media that
kept the majority of their shenanigans under wraps. At some level, we all knew that Mickey Mantle
and Willie Mays couldn’t be perfect, but the lack of media attention to
their less savory activities allowed us to happily buy into the fiction that
those things didn’t really matter. Every
once in a while, an athlete would come along to challenge our rose-colored view
of things, but for the most part they stayed out of politics and social
controversy.
The
moment I think I became aware that this guy was vastly different seems to have
been when he “upset” Sonny Liston, and responded by changing his name and
introducing us to the word “Muslim”. You
might look at the time frame and say, “But Dave, you were only 10 years old!” You would be right about that, but let’s keep
it in context. My father was a Golden Gloves
boxer in his youth and the Navy, keeping a speed bag hanging from a homemade
frame in our basement at least until the time I graduated college. My Grandpa Brinker and I consistently watched
the “Big Time Wrestling” matches on television, which to a kid didn’t seem all
that much different than professional boxing.
We watched boxing matches whenever the TV carried them, even if they
were rebroadcasts long after the actual event.
Not being able (or perhaps willing) to spend the money on a
closed-circuit broadcast, it was sometimes a whole year later before those
fights came on. I was familiar with the
names (and sometimes the fights) of Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson,
Sugar Ray Robinson, and even that brutal beast, Sonny Liston.
Liston
was a massive, hulking brute of a man likely as not to demolish the younger,
taller, more slender Cassius Clay. I
think many of my elders would have been perfectly happy with that, considering
the brashness with which Clay approached the fight. As a youngster myself, naturally lacking in
the appropriate sense of respect for what boxing at that level required, I
found Clay amusing. He made up
poetry! He predicted victory by the
round in which it would occur! He mugged
for the cameras and danced around the ring as though he weighed 90 pounds, not
200+. Who knew boxing could be so much
fun? To be honest, most other boxers
seemed like sullen, rather stupid men who “let their fists do the talking.” Where was the fun in that?
I also
recall a book that my parents had – some sort of “Year in Review” type of book,
or maybe a Readers’ Digest condensation.
It contained a cartoon of Clay doing his shuffle around the fallen body
of Liston, wearing a “crown” fashioned from a skunk, and captioned, “I am the
Greatest!” The implication seemed
obvious, and I couldn’t help but wonder (I think), “Why would they dislike him
so much?”
A lot
of that had to be because of the whole Muslim thing. I didn’t know any Muslims. I didn’t even know any Black people. I was aware that there was a lot of racial
tension in the country, but I didn’t feel any of it in Vienna, WV. In fact, my dad had once even told me the
story of the good fathers of Parkersburg who had gotten wind of the Hell’s
Angels headed our way for the express purpose of beating up all the Black
people in town. Supposedly, those good
fathers had marched down to the Belpre Bridge with their shotguns and told
those Angels to skedaddle. (As apocryphal
as it sounds, it does indicate the general attitude toward race in our area.) What could there be about being a Muslim that
so many people found threatening in some way?
Be all
of that as it may, there was plenty of opinion floating around that the Liston
fight had been “fixed”, an opinion that gained steam after the second, more
suspicious fight. Boxing had always had
the taint of being controlled by criminal elements, and a number of Hollywood
movies had heightened that feeling. If
Ali was somehow playing a part, it was the greatest role ever.
The more bouts he won, the more
obvious it became that he was impossibly good.
No amount of skepticism could deny it.
He was far too quick, nimble, and mobile to be as big as he was. He was far too powerful and durable to be so
tall and lithe. He created a new
definition of “boxer”, one that included incredible intelligence and
personality. How could anyone possibly
possess all these characteristics?
Ironically, he was to eventually add even more abilities to his repertoire.
And then, it all came apart at the
seams. By 1967, I was 13, feisty,
pubescent, and developing a growing social consciousness. Totally oblivious to my existence, Ali made
the most critical decision of his life, and in doing so planted a seed within
my too-slowly-developing sense of the key lessons of life. This one was: Principle is more important
than pride, accolades, or the criticism one might have to endure. How could a man surrender everything he had
worked all his life for just to make a point?
And what was that point? Other
athletes had gone into the military, spending their time entertaining the
troops with exhibitions, why couldn’t Ali?
I was barely aware that Vietnam wasn’t like any other war we had ever
fought. In my family, all previous wars
were considered honorable completions of patriotic duty, but Vietnam wasn’t
really discussed or debated. At all.
Then,
those of us who had supported him had to “deal” with the implications of his
refusal to go to Vietnam. No matter how
I search my memory banks, the source of the voices eludes me, but the comments
remain quite clear: “How can a guy who beats people up for a living refuse to go
fight for his country? He could kill
somebody in the ring!” Then, as now,
some people found it easy to ignore the principle behind the action. As certain as I am about what I think now, I can
only hope that I thought the same way then.
In my family, I don’t remember anyone ever discussing whether what the U.S.
was doing in Vietnam was right. The war
just was – and when there was a war, you did your duty, went and served. All of a sudden, here was a guy challenging
the entire reason for that war, and attaching meaning to it that I had never
given any serious consideration.
(The
foregoing is not completely accurate, because I remember distinctly a Sunday
morning church service in which our Minister honored our servicemen, which
included his son, who was only about 4 years older than me. The son was in uniform and several others
were as well. The focus of the
congregation, however, seemed to be on the son of another minister. This boy had chosen to register as a Conscientious
Objector, and I had no reason to doubt that he was much too tender-hearted to
be an adequate killing machine. The
twist was that the murmur in the congregation was such that the prevailing
opinion held that this boy was just an unpatriotic ninny who didn’t love his
country enough to fight for it. I didn’t
know much about killing people, but I felt strongly that if a guy’s motivation couldn’t
be properly understood in his own church congregation, where could it be
understood? At some level, I am certain
that that incident contributed to both my strong feeling that this war was a
very bad thing, and that “church” was flawed in a substantial way. To add further irony, the minister’s son
struggled for years after his return with depression and addiction, presumably
brought on by his experiences in the war.)
Ali spelled out his opposition to
the war quite clearly and eloquently. In
doing so, he challenged every thinking person to evaluate their position on the
subject. He had no quarrel with the
North Vietnamese, and no good reason to protect the South. Most of us could identify with that
logic. I knew even fewer Vietnamese than
I did Black people. He felt mistreated
and disrespected by a large portion of Americans, and especially by the
government. I couldn’t say that I had
ever been mistreated or subjected to racist comments, but as a teenager, I
certainly knew about being disrespected and the object of prejudice. It seemed patently obvious that the
government was simply attempting to punish Ali for refusing to follow the
proscribed course. In another irony,
despite seeing the logic in all this, had I been drafted my family’s values
would have compelled me to serve anyway.
The
older I got, the closer I came to being drafted. My feeling that I would necessarily “do my
duty” did not change, but my opposition to the reasons for the war grew on a
daily basis. Meanwhile, Ali got his
license back, and battered a fellow named Jerry Quarry, who had no business
sharing the ring with him. No one saw it
as a big deal that Ali had lost the 3 best years of his fighting and
wage-earning life, but the effects were fully in view when he lost to Joe
Frazier. Once again, the naysayers
voiced their satisfaction. The
implication was, “This is what happens to people who get all loud-mouthed and
stir up trouble.” In the long run, it
turned out that his fans were to be ultimately rewarded by his two later
victories over Frazier, sandwiched around that amazing “Rumble in the Jungle”,
when he invented the “Rope-A-Dope” technique to defeat the powerful George
Foreman. (Yes, kiddies, the same
loveable teddy bear who sells counter-top grills.) Foreman was another guy who would “put Ali in
his place”, and possibly kill him – but the critics were to be disappointed
once again.
After
that last Frazier fight, most of us who loved him wished he would retire. The punishment that both he and Frazier had
endured seemed too much for ordinary mortals to ever recover from. It is impossible to know how the future would
have been different, but Ali continued to fight and to deteriorate. When it was announced in 1984 that he had
been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the final great irony began to play
out. Robbed of his speech, his movement,
and his career, it seemed that he would fade quietly into oblivion.
It is
difficult to explain how a person
turns into a symbol, but that is
precisely what Muhammad Ali did. Yes, he
did sporadically display that twinkle in his eye or his clever wit. More importantly, his mere presence continued
to motivate us to be better than we were.
It didn’t seem that he needed to speak, he only needed to appear, and we
would be reminded why it was so desperately necessary for us to try to change
the world. When he became fully public
by lighting the torch at the Atlanta Olympics, we wept at his infirmity, but
marveled at his determination to triumph once again. A symbol lighting
a symbol – the significance was obvious to anyone who had known his legend well.
Today, Muhammad Ali is dead. The very embodiment of life, joy, love, and enthusiasm is gone from us. More significantly, I worry that the exemplar of why we should consider unfairness as something to be challenged is gone. The exemplar of why we should be willing to sacrifice all our possessions in order to maintain the proper principle is gone. I can imagine no greater loss for a generation of people who do not seem to see the need for revolution