Professional boxing is well past its prime as a sport. The era of over-the-top promoters such as Don King — decidedly dubious too — and flamboyant fighters such as Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sonny Liston, and the greatest of them all, Muhammad Ali, is gone. Perhaps Mike Tyson in the early 1990s represented the last of that genre, his acclaim as a fearsome African-American boxer following a tradition that went back to Jack Johnson, the first man of colour to win the world heavyweight title in the early 20th century.
That age is over. Boxing killed itself with its sleaze and mix of showbiz and sport, with the showbiz sometimes overwhelming the sport. Allegations of fixing and the failure of a series of successful boxers, who had come up from the streets, literally, to settle into a stable and model retirement also painted the sport and its pursuit as some sort of aberration. Tyson’s imprisonment for rape was a case in point. The success of the black boxer in itself became a cause not merely for celebration and social mobility of a community, and set of talented individuals, but for stereotyping.
Thankfully Ali didn’t live to see this decline of his beloved calling. He did live physically, but mentally he was ailing. Parkinson’s disease had long claimed his faculties. By then, though, he had achieved enough for a dozen lifetimes. Ali, who passed away on Saturday, was not just a boxer. He was a boxer whose career glittered at just the right moment, in the turbulence of the social movements of the 1960s. His life captured the unrest and the unease of the Civil Rights Movement and the black person’s quest for equality.
As a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, he was sent to prison for refusing to sign up for the draft and fight against those he said he had no quarrel with: “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” He paid with liberty but won respect. Strange as it may seem today, the refusal to fight a war between two nations led to him being stripped of his world title. This was a demonstration of American influence on boxing and politics back then in the 1960s, but in hindsight does seem bizarre.
Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in the American South. It was a tough childhood, but the boy had talent and pluck. He had a way with his fists and feet — coming to be regarded as one of the fastest movers in the ring — and a way with his words. His doggerel verse before big fights and his one-liners made him famous as the “Louisville Lip”. The phrases and coinages were outlandish and played to the gallery.
Turning up in Britain in 1963 to take on the ageing but gallant Henry Cooper, Ali announced that the British had a Queen but no King: “I will be your King.” Before the fight at Wembley Stadium, Ali predicted he would win in five rounds. Win he did, though the fight was controversial and Cooper almost knocked out Ali in the fourth round, with the latter apparently using stimulants to recover. This was only a teaser trailer. Ali’s compelling rivalry was with Joe Frazier, and their three fights were among the most memorable in history.
The Ali-Frazier rivalry had a background. Ali was the light-heavyweight champion in the 1960 Rome Olympics. Frazier had won the more coveted heavyweight gold medal four years later in Tokyo, and never let Ali forget that. Their first encounter — called simply “The Fight” or “Fight of the Century” — was an emotional wringer because Frazier had become champion following Ali being stripped of the title after his anti-war protests.
Ali pulled no punches, literally and figuratively. He resorted to a psychological battle — “mental disintegration” — to use a phrase made famous decades later by Steve Waugh’s Australian cricket team. Old-fashioned sledging was used to posit Frazier as the favourite of the white establishment, the black who sold out. It was a contest between two champions, both undefeated in the ring. Frazier won, but Ali never forgave him and out-boxed him in two subsequent fights, particularly in the pulsating “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975, considered by boxing fans to be perhaps the greatest bout ever. Sarcastic till it hurt, Ali dismissed his opponent with withering lines: “Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife.”
The Thrilla in Manila was preceded by the “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974, the fight in Kinshasa (Zaire, now Congo), where Ali regained his title by defeating George Foreman, who had won it by beating Frazier shortly after the first Frazier-Ali fight. In these fights, Ali was the uber entertainer and his own best publicist. He came to be known for his rope-a-dope tactics, resting against the ropes and encouraging his opponent to flail away and tire himself out, thus becoming Ali’s “dope”.
Why did Ali become such a mascot for not just sport but for race, identity and the quest for equality in a very divided American society, the essence of which is difficult to gauge in a time when the United States has elected a black President He learnt his lessons the hard way. As an Olympic gold-medal winner he expected a hero’s welcome at home, but found himself thrown out of a whites-only eatery. In disgust he threw his medal into the Ohio river. Yet, he didn’t give up, using his sport and his reputation to make a political argument, even giving up his “slave name” (Cassius Marcellus Clay) and following Malcolm X into Islam, as a symbol of protest, and becoming Muhammad Ali.
No African-American sportsperson had the sort of political and social impact as Ali did, not Jackie Robinson and not Althea Gibson. Jesse Owens came close when he shattered Hitler’s Aryan supremacism nonsense in Berlin in 1936. Nevertheless he returned to an America that practised what amounted to apartheid, and had Owens taking the luggage lift (as opposed to the passenger lift) at the New York hotel where a reception was held in his honour. To make ends meet, he was forced to participate in freak events such as a race between a man and a horse.
Ali was fortunate to be born 30 years later. He benefited from a new awakening, but he also helped further that awakening. He was recognised as an authentic post-racial American hero, and in 1996 it was this man who lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta, a city with such a loaded legacy of race relations. It was Ali’s most satisfying moment: his Greatest Day. Now he’ll play rope-a-dope with the angels.
The writer is distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation
