The other side of Muhammad Ali (3)

This is the third week, Sohia’s Diaz has reached for the true es­sence of Muhammad Ali; be­yond the empty razzmatazz. Ali, the standard of manliness was, at death, packaged as a show but he had a core that was as hard as a flint. After Ali’s lawyers gave a Federal Court a list of ninety convict­ed murderers, rapists, sodo­mites, armed thieves, and oth­er miscreants who had been allowed to fight in New York, it ruled that the state’s deni­al of a ring license to Ali was “arbitrary and unreasonable.”

That was how Ali got to return to the ring in USA; against Oscar Bonavena – in New York. And thus began Act Two of the Ali drama. In Act One, he was a young and rhythmic dancer, swift as lightening – both with his fists and legs, and would float away from opponents’ blows. But with the Ali-Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, still in New York, Act Two incepted.

A word please about his 1971 visit to Nigeria; once the Nigerian Airways air­craft had steadied after take­off, the pilot announced that The Greatest was among the passengers, and he invited Ali to the cockpit. Ali poked his head into the cockpit and ran out shouting that every pas­senger should please come and see “This amazing sight; its unbelievable that the Pilot and the co-Pilot are Blacks. I have never seen such a thing in the US. They never told us that black Pilots and Black Engineers existed. Thank God I’m travelling to Nigeria where they must have a black President and Nigerians take care of their own affairs”!

On the night Ali fought Fra­zier, Frank Sinatra took pic­tures for Life magazine at ringside. Ed Sullivan, Alan Shepard, Bill Cosby, Michael Caine, Hubert Humphrey and Burt Bacharach were among the luminaries in the crowd. Please google their names if you do not know them. 750 journalists got press creden­tials; 500 other journalists could not. Frazier won the fight. Ali’s reaction: “If I was young, I’d have danced for 15 rounds. Joe wouldn’t ever have caught me. But I was three-and-a-half years out of shape. He punched hard; he pressured me good. And lay­ing on the ropes to save ener­gy, I lost some rounds I could have won. But it would be wrong to say I gave the fight to Joe. I didn’t give it away. Joe earned it.”

Time magazine wrote: It was a kind of epiphany that those who watched realized how much they missed him and how much he had con­tributed to the world of sport. Students of boxing will pore over the trio of Ali-Frazi­er fights, which rank among the greatest in fistic history, as one might read three acts of a great drama. They would remember the shenanigans, the Ali Shuffle, the Rope-a-Dope, the fact that Ali had brought beauty and grace to the most uncompromising of sports. And they would mar­vel that through the wonder­ful excesses of skill and char­acter, he had become the most famous athlete, indeed, the best-known personage in the world.

New York Times columnist William Rhoden wrote, “Ali’s actions changed my standard of what constituted an ath­lete’s greatness. Possessing a killer jump shot or the ability to stop on a dime was no long­er enough. What are you do­ing for the liberation of your people? Muhammad Ali is how we measure a hero”.

This why I quarrel with the nonsense the Nigerian me­dia poured out about Ali: yes, it was good to remember, as someone wrote “all of that raw drama, the greatest story in sport, but we also remem­ber Ali for what he did not do, which was have a career dur­ing what should have been his absolute prime. Ali had just turned 25 when he lost his boxing licence. By the time he returned he was almost 29. He was never the same again. To be the same as he was at 25 would have denied the laws of nature. The most shock­ing thing about Ali’s career is that we missed his golden years, when youth and expe­rience would have coincided. He was a different fighter be­fore and after his suspension. He surrendered the best years of his life for a moral princi­ple”.

Those lost years are the true hallmark of his great­ness - that he would surren­der millions of dollars and white America’s adulation and a chance that would nev­er come again for what he be­lieved in.

Sports Illustrated wrote: “When Ali came back in 1970, and all those epic fights with Frazier and Foreman were still before him, how did he deal with the loss of youth? With guile. Experience. Cunning. And by soaking up punish­ment in a way that he’d nev­er had to during his dancing years. In a man so lavish­ly blessed, Ali’s greatest as­set of all was his heart. “Per­haps his most vexed discovery in his second career was that he could take a punch,” wrote David Remnick in King Of The World: Muhammad Ali And The Rise Of An Ameri­can Hero. “And he took hun­dreds of them: from Frazi­er, Foreman, Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers, Holmes, Leon Spinks; from a parade of sec­ond-rung heavyweights, from a platoon of sparring partners who were instructed to bang away at Ali in the gym, the better to toughen him up for the bouts themselves. Learn­ing to take a punch was a form of short-term survival for Ali - it was the secret to the great triumphs in Zaire and the Philippines - but it was a long-term disaster.”

Ali’s most distinguishing was his courage; that virtue of the heart. It took courage to master Sonny Liston and be­come heavyweight champion of the world aged 22. It took courage to change his name from Cassius Clay to Mu­hammad Ali. It took courage to refuse to fight in Vietnam. It took courage to fight for the Black cause. It took courage to lose his golden years and it took courage to become world heavyweight champion three times.