by Olatunji Dare

When Ebony magazine dropped Muhammad Ali from its canonical roster of the 100 most influential African Americans some thirty years ago – a roster on which he had figured prominently for 25 unbroken years, I was bewildered.

The de-listing came nearly two decades after the Thriller in Manila, Ali’s third and final match-up with Joe Frazier, ranked by boxing experts as the greatest bout of all time.  Both fighters came out of the encounter significantly damaged.  Frazier could not get out of his corner for the final round, the 15th; Ali was too exhausted to celebrate.  He would say of the encounter that it was “the closest thing to death.”

The thrilla itself, as Ali called the Manila clash with poetic lyricism, came a year after the Rumble in the Jungle – another Ali coinage –in which Ali taunted and battled the fearsome George Foreman to an 8th-round knockout in Kinshasa, in former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo.

That outcome does not tell the full story, however.

For seven furious rounds, Foreman had thrown at Ali blows that would have felled an ox.  Ali had absorbed them on his arms and body.  The resulting internal injuries took months to heal, and it is a wonder that Ali returned to the ring the following year to face his old nemesis, Smokin’ Joe.

The de-listing came some five years after Ali had cut a pitiful figure in an ill-advised challenge to his former sparring partner and reigning world champion, Larry Holmes, with Holmes literally pleading with the referee to stop the fight and save Ali from needless punishment.

It came literally on the heels of Ali’s final ring appearance in 1981, in the Bahamas, against Trevor Berbick, a well-muscled, ponderous pugilist. Ali lost on all three score cards.  His courage showed through and through in that fight; he displayed flashes of brilliance and inspiration.

But the razor-sharp reflexes were long gone.  Body and mind no longer syncopated.

It was a poor imitation of the Mohammad Ali who had dominated my generation’s consciousness like no other person.  He had endeared himself to us with his exquisite physique, his matchless boxing skills, his lightning-quick hands, his supreme confidence, his courage, his defiance, his inventiveness, his pride in his black heritage, his eloquence and, yes, his brashness.

So, his work was done and he now belonged in the past, this man with the most recognizable visage in the world, at once hero and legend? And this, according to Ebony, the quintessential journal of the Black Establishment, not some pesky publication with a reputation for putting back in his or her place any black person who stepped out of the line according to Jim Crow?

And this was well before Ali’s speech was slurred almost to the point of being barely comprehensible, before his voice became a faint echo, before his body was palsied by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease and the countless hammer-blows to the head he had absorbed in 61 fights.

The de-listing also came a decade or so before the toll of those fights was on global display at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, Georgia.

For about 30 seconds that seemed like an eternity, the world held its breath as mind and will seemed locked in elemental combat with the once-magnificent but now tremulous body of Ali, poised to ignite the flames of the Games of the XXVI Olympiad.

It was not a pretty spectacle.

But Ali’s indomitable mind and will prevailed, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.

I cannot now recall the metrics Ebony employed to determine who was influential in the African American community, nor indeed what in its judgment constituted influence.

Ali had long ceased to be in the limelight, but could he be written off as a marginal figure from the past, with little or no contemporary influence?

The world did not think so.  TIME magazine named him Athlete of the (20th) Century.  The BBC voted him the greatest athlete of the century.  President George W. Bush conferred him the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest honour.

He was a fixture and revered presence at Davos, the Swiss city where the most influential people in the world gather every winter to discuss important global issues.  He rarely spoke, but his presence somehow gave some authenticity to the proceedings; if Ali was there, the debates and discussions must be about real people.

At the time of his first fight with Joe Frazier, Ali was one of the most polarising figures in America, venerated by African Americans and white liberals on the other hand and execrated by Establishment and conservative whites in equal measure.

To the delight of the one, he had refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, saying he “ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcongs,” and that no Vietnamese ever called him “nigger.”  To the implacable anger of the other, he was an unpatriotic draft dodger who had dared to embrace a faith they considered dangerous and threatening.

This latter group was rooting for Frazier and looking to him to put Ali away once and for all.  Ali framed Frazier as an “Uncle Tom,” a symbol of black subservience to white authority, taunted Frazier as a gorilla, and made remarks about Frazier’s looks and skin colour that would have been judged offensively racist if made by a white person.

If that was marketing hype, it was marketing hype taken too far.  It rankled till the end of Frazier’s life. He would say, apropos of Ali’s titanic struggle to ignite the flames at the Atlanta Olympics, that he wished Ali had fallen into the cauldron.

Not a few consider rather overdone, mean-spirited even, Ali’s clinical demolition of former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson and the challenger Ernest Terrell, both of whom continued calling him Cassius Clay long after he had disavowed that name. For every punch Patterson threw, Ali countered with six crisp, lacerating blows. Patterson was carried out of the ring.  Terrell fared just    a little better.

I have no quarrel with that.  It was payback.

Ali’s last visit to Nigeria was a disaster, not on account of his waning stature but on account of the cause he had come to pursue.

He had come as an envoy of the Carter Administration to lobby Nigeria to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The mission was dead on arrival.

Ali’s handlers should not have allowed him to undertake it.  It was incongruous that the country that had stripped him of his heavyweight title for political reasons and rendered him inactive for three years at his prime should be sending him abroad to campaign for a boycott of the Olympics for political reasons.

It was unlike Ali not to have perceived the incongruity.  Still, you could never accuse him of selling out.

It is his great legacy that he brought grace and glamour and elegance to the brutal sport of boxing.  He was a pillar of inspiration to young people all over the world striving to make a mark not just in boxing but in every sport and in public affairs.  He identified with the poor and downtrodden in society.  He was a goodwill ambassador-at-large for many worthy causes. He made boxing a money-spinning industry from which boxers could earn fortunes.

In the closing years of his life, time and tide and personal circumstance conflated to transform Ali into a secular saint of sorts, revered and almost irreproachable.

This generation will not see another like him.

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This article was first published in The Nation

 

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