BackMuhammad Ali: He was the greatest
The phrase 'there will never be another like him' is a plain fact in Muhammad Ali's case
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We knew Muhammad Ali was going. Stricken with Parkinsons, ailing, making fewer public appearances as the years wore on, and more trips to the hospital. We knew this day would come and leave his millions of fans—most you would think middle aged or older—with a dull, inexplicable ache of distant loss.
To many, Ali was the high noon of boxing itself but to those who feel bereft today he was more than just his sport. At his peak, Ali stood for many things to people everywhere—athletic excellence, youthful bravado, instinctive radicalism and the transformative powers of unshakeable belief.
Ali was the planet’s first global sporting superstar. This before globalisation, before the slick professionalisation of sport, before the advent of 24-hour live sports television, before the internet, before social media. In the Sixties and Seventies, he was heard about and talked about and followed, because of his boxing but at the same time, everything outside it as well. He was a product of his times, an athlete in tune and in sync with the tumult of his environment. He was both a charismatic boxing champion and a vocal champion for many causes outside the ring which athletes steered clear of—and still do.
Ali’s professional career was heavyweight boxing’s most compelling story. It put boxing on the front pages, made the title of the heavyweight champion of the world the most sought after and the fight for the belt followed all over the globe. Ali pitched himself as not only the meanest man in the world but also the funniest, the smartest, and as he described himself, the ‘prettiest.’
He was a heavyweight who possessed fight skills that appeared the opposite of heavy – almost gossamer, illusory. Airy footwork, low hands, backpedalling like he was apologetically getting out of his opponent’s path, when all that was to come was a cutting, slicing, dicing left jab or right hook out of nowhere. While his most famous description of his own style was: “Float like a butterfly sting like a bee" it’s the words that follow that has Ali in the head of his opponent: “His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see."
Outside the ring, the man himself kept slipping past form and convention, past control and collusion, to become the establishment’s most daunting challenge. As a black American athlete, Ali was a successor to Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and a predecessor to Arthur Ashe. Through his career, though he remained an original, who planted himself on a pedestal, of his own construction and definition. Calling himself The Greatest, along with being undeniably mischievous preening, was defiance and daring. An open invitation to anyone who wanted to oppose the idea: Come and get me.
Among the thousands of tributes pouring in for Ali ; old folk, like Indian football’s hero from the 1970s and 80s, Shabbir Ali for one has asked younger people, to re-discover Ali, “find out, read up on him." There are close to 50 books about him and still they’re coming. Hagiographic, reflective, insightful, lytical, analytical. The world’s most famous athlete of his time, also becamea representative of the civil rights movement through the 60s. He converted to Islam and changed his ‘slave’ name at a time when the Nation of Islam were called, “un-American." He became an anti-war protestor during the Cold War meaninglessness of Vietnam who short of being arrested, was stripped of his passport and at 25, banned from boxing for more than three years.
Even though not a boxing fan, I’ve often thought about Muhammad Ali. As the idea that came from Cassius Clay. Often I try to place him in a contemporary age, and wonder what he would be like if he were a young, strong, fast, lippy boxer today. Could he have become confrontationist, non-conformist, rap-writing superstar who took on, like he did in the sixties, every visible public injustice? Or would the world around him only produce a heavyweight version of the utterly successful and completely uninspiring Floyd Mayweather?
Sports journalists are often in a tussle over a choice that pops up from time to time—whether “focus on the sport" or, in this era of blanket television coverage and meta-data, to look at what is going on at the fringes. Ali didn’t give anyone a choice, as he was front and centre of both narratives.
As Ali aged, much around him changed, boxing and the title of its heavyweight world championlost its appeal and as Parkinsons struck, tragically Ali lost what still rings in our ears—his voice. He was embraced and appropriated by the establishment; when his shaking hands lit the Olympic Flame at the Atlanta 1996 opening ceremony, it was a moment made for teary-eyed TV. It followed a familiar script described best by Mike Marqusee: “It is the fate of all ageing sports heroes to become the receptacles of our sloppiest sentiments."
While this is a time of sadness, the sentiment required today has to be a salute, without guns, as Ali wasn’t a fan of the stuff. The Ali that we mourn today is the quicksilver-fighter, the zany-quote-giver, the foreboding adversary, the stubborn internationalist, the man whose actions, to paraphrase from the New York Times columnist William Rhoden, “changed" the standard “of what constituted an athlete’s greatness."
When the greats die, the phrase “there will never be another like him" is often totted out. In Ali’s case that is a plain fact. There cannot be another—neither fighter, athlete, public figure. This because, like William Wordsworth said, the world, is too much with us.
I would like to believe that even to his last, Ali stood for what he said in 1964, the morning after he beat Sonny Liston for his first heavyweight title and was asked about his religious and political choice: “I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be...I’m free to be what I want."
That’s who he always was: Muhammad Ali, forever free.
Sharda Ugra is senior editor, ESPN.in.
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