Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

by Thomas Hauser

  Ron Borges of the Boston Globe has followed Ali and the American scene for decades. “It’s not uncommon for historical figures to slip out of focus when removed from their time by several generations,” says Borges. “But this is something more. There’s a deliberate distortion of what Ali’s life has been like and what his impact on America really was. Maybe someone thinks that this sort of revisionism makes Ali more acceptable. But acceptable to whom and for what purpose other than selling products and making money? They’re cutting out all the things that made him Ali. Frankly, I wonder sometimes what Ali is about these days other than making money. I know that, underneath the façade, Ali is still there. But to a lot of people, it’s like he’s a ghost. Twenty-year-olds today have no idea what Ali was about. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just another celebrity. That’s what it has come to, and it steals Ali’s true legacy.”

  Dave Kindred authored a number of ground-breaking stories about Ali for the Atlanta Constitution and Washington Post. “In the past,” says Kindred, “there were reasons, a lot of them, for admiring and respecting Ali. Now you’re asked to admire and respect him because he’s a living saint. And I never thought of Ali as a saint. He was a rogue and a rebel, a guy with good qualities and flaws who stood for something. But now, it seems as though he stands for everything and nothing. All of the barbed edges have been filed down. His past is being rewritten. They’re trying to remove any vestige of Ali that might make it harder to use him to sell automobiles or expensive watches or whatever other product he’s endorsing at the moment. That, to me, is the heart of it. Ali today seems to be blatantly for sale. He’s trotted around to high-profile events and events where he’s paid large sums of money for being there, and often I find myself asking, ‘What’s he doing there?’ I assume he enjoys it. I’m sure he likes the attention. His need for the crowd has always been there and he’s entitled to the money. But the loss of Ali’s voice is very sad. And I’m not talking about his physical voice, because the people around Ali have figured out a way to deal with his infirmities and still keep him center stage. I’m talking about content and hard edge and the challenge that attached to some of the things Ali said in the past. There was a time when Ali forced us to think about race and religion and many of the other fundamental forces that affect our lives. He was right on some things and wrong on others, but the challenge was always there. And that Ali is gone now, with the result that there’s a whole new generation—two generations, actually—who know only the sanitized Ali, and that’s very sad.”

  Jeffrey Sammons, a professor of African-American studies at NYU and author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, is in accord. “What’s happening to Ali now,” says Sammons, “is typical of what has happened to so many black figures. It’s a commodification and a trivialization. Maybe the idea is that, by embracing Ali as a society, we can feel good about having become more tolerant. We can tell ourselves that we’re not like those bad people in the 1960s who took away Ali’s title and his right to fight. But by not showing what Ali was, we’re also not showing what American society was at that time. And if the rough edges on Ali are filed down, you have the revision of history in a very dangerous way. By distorting America’s past, you make it impossible to understand the past. And if you can’t understand the past, then you won’t be able to understand the present or the future.”

  None of the above comments is intended to take away from Ali’s greatness. Each of the speakers is a longtime admirer of Ali. Each of them would no doubt agree with the assessment of boxing maven Lou DiBella, who says, “In many respects, the way Ali is portrayed today is simply a reflection of how well-loved he is and the fact that he’s a great person. All of us are open to adoration and, in Ali’s case, he deserves it. He’s older, wiser, and mellower now than he was decades ago. He enjoys being who he is. And whatever good things he gets, he deserves them.”

  Still, Ali’s legacy today is in danger of being protected in the same manner as the estate of Elvis Presley is protecting Elvis’s image. New generations are born; and to them, Ali is more legend than reality, part of America’s distant past.

  Meanwhile, 2004 has brought more of the same. The year began with IBM, Gillette, and Adidas featuring Ali in multinational commercial campaigns. Tashen Books published an Ali coffee-table tome bound in silk and Louis Vuitton leather that retails for $3,000 a copy with a “special edition” that sells for $7,500. The book is entitled GOAT, which is an acronym for “Greatest of All Time” and also the name of Ali’s personal company.

  “I think it’s significant,” says Jerry Izenberg, “that the book is named after Ali’s corporation and not Ali.” Then Izenberg adds, “For those who didn’t live through the 1960s, it takes some work to understand the true importance of Ali. And people are lazy; the media is lazy. No one wants to read and study. So they take the product that’s given to them by IMG, Columbia Pictures, and others, and accept it whole cloth. The result is that, the further removed in time we become, the more Ali is distorted. And I get very angry about that because the distortion of history breeds ignorance. If Ali isn’t remembered as the person he truly was, we’ll all be poorer. It will wipe out some very important lessons that America learned. Let’s face it; most people today don’t have a clue about Ali. They have no idea what Ali and the country went through in the 1960s. Ali isn’t the same person now that he was then. Like most of us, he changed as he grew older. But I don’t worry about the changes in Ali. I worry about the misperception of what Ali stood for. Ali can be all things to all people but, unless there’s truth, it’s worthless.”

  Ali in the 1960s stood for the proposition that principles matter; that equality among people is just and proper; that the war in Vietnam was wrong. Every time he looked in the mirror and preened, “I’m so pretty,” he was saying “black is beautiful” before it became fashionable to do so. Indeed, as early as March 1963, Ebony magazine declared, “Cassius Marcellus Clay—and this fact has evaded the sportswriting fraternity—is a blast furnace of racial pride. His is a pride that would never mask itself with skin lighteners and processed hair, a pride scorched with memories of a million little burns.”

  And Ali’s role in spreading that pride has been testified to by others:

  ARTHUR ASHE: “This man helped give an entire people a belief in themselves and the will to make themselves better.”

  REGGIE JACKSON: “Muhammad Ali gave me the gift of self-respect.”

  HOSEA WILLIAMS: “Ali made you feel good about yourself. He made you feel so glad you are who you are; that God had made you black.”

  In sum, the experience of being black changed for millions of men and women because of Ali. But one of the reasons Ali had the impact he did was because there was an ugly edge to what he said.

  By focusing on Ali’s ring exploits and his refusal to serve in Vietnam, while at the same time covering up the true nature of Nation of Islam doctrine, the current keepers of Ali’s legacy are losing sight of why he so enthralled and enraged segments of American society. And equally important, by rewriting history and making Ali out to be in the mainstream of the black civil rights movement, the revisionists demean Ali’s personal struggle because they gloss over the extent to which he was cut off from mainstream suppport.

  Thus, Ramsey Clark warns, “Legacies are important but they have to be true. The distortion of a legacy is a distortion of public truth and a disservice to history, as are all distortions of values and character.”

  Ali himself once recalled, “For three years, up until I fought Sonny Liston, I’d sneak into Nation of Islam meetings through the back door. I didn’t want people to know I was there. I was afraid, if they knew, I wouldn’t be allowed to fight for the title. Later on, I learned to stand up for my beliefs.”

  Ali’s views have changed since then, but he is unrepentant regarding what he once believed. “Elijah Muhammad was a good man,” Ali has said, “even if he wasn’t the Messenger of God we thought he was. Not everythi
ng he said was right, but everyone in the Nation of Islam loved him because he carried what was best for us in his heart. Elijah taught us to be independent, to clean ourselves up, to be proud and healthy. He stressed the bad things the white man did to us so we could get free and strong. If you look at what our people were like then, a lot of us didn’t have self-respect. We didn’t have anything after being in America for hundreds of years. Elijah Muhammad was trying to lift us up and get our people out of the gutter. I think he was wrong when he talked about white devils, but part of what he did was make people feel it was good to be black. So I’m not apologizing for what I believed.”

  It’s the ultimate irony, then, that so many of the people shaping Ali’s legacy today are “spin-doctoring” with regard to his beliefs. Ali stood up for his convictions and sacrificed a great deal for them. Indeed, in a recent commercial for IBM’s Linux system, Ali speaks the words, “Speak your mind; don’t back down.” So why hide the true nature of what Ali’s principles were?

  Also, it should be said that, in 2004, there’s a particularly compelling reason to mourn the lost legacy of Muhammad Ali.

  We live in an age marked by horrific divisions amongst the world’s cultures and religions. If we are to avoid increasingly violent assaults and possibly a nuclear holocaust, the people of the world must learn to understand others with alien beliefs, find the humanity in their enemies, and embrace that which is good in those they abhor.

  Muhammad Ali is the ideal messenger for this cause. He is a man who once preached an ideology that was anathema to most Americans; an ideology that he himself now rejects in significant measure. Yet America has found the humanity in Ali, embraced the good in him, and taken him into its collective heart. And vice versa.

  Also, it should be noted that, were he so inclined, Ali is still capable of influencing public debate. All he would need to say is two words regarding the current war in Iraq: “It’s wrong!” That wouldn’t dictate what people think, but it would have a significant impact on what a lot of people thought about. However, instead, Ali has held to the theme advised by those around him and advanced when he was asked about al-Qaeda in June 2002.

  “I dodge those questions,” Ali told David Frost on HBO Real Sports. “I’ve opened up businesses across the country, selling products, and I don’t want to say nothing and, not knowing what I’m doing, not [being] qualified, say the wrong thing and hurt my businesses and things I’m doing.”

  It’s hard to imagine Muhammad Ali in the 1960s declining to comment on war and racism for fear that it would hurt his business ventures.

  Great men are considered great, not only because of what they achieve, but also because of the road they travel to reach their final destination. Sanitizing Muhammad Ali and rounding off the rough edges of his journey is a disservice both to history and to Ali himself. Rather than cultivate historical amnesia, we should cherish the memory of Ali as a warrior and as a gleaming symbol of defiance against an unjust social order when he was young.

  THE LONG SAD GOODBYE

  Muhammad Ali told me in 1997 that he planned on living until age ninety. We were on a bus in Boston en route to an elementary school for an assembly devoted to teaching students about tolerance and understanding. Muhammad’s speech was noticeably affected by then as a consequence of Parkinson’s syndrome. But he was still physically strong and his thought processes were clear.

  As we approached the school, Ali was reminiscing about some of the departed souls who had played a significant role in his life. His father, Elijah Muhammad, Sonny Liston, a few others. “Ninety would be good,” he told me. “I think I’ll live to be ninety. But if I’m feeling good when I’m eighty-nine, I might change my mind and ask God to let me live longer.”

  Ali, unfortunately, didn’t feel good as he got older. Not physically. And his decline was on display for the whole world to see.

  In September 1984, Muhammad Ali checked into the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York for an eight-day series of diagnostic tests.

  “I’m not suffering,” Ali told reporters. “I’m in no pain. It’s really nothing I can’t live with. But I go to bed and sleep eight, ten hours. And two hours after I get up, I’m tired and drowsy again. Sometimes I have trembling in my hands. My speech is slurred. People say to me, ‘What did you say; I can’t understand you.’ I’m not scared, but my family and friends are scared to death.”

  Ali, in 1984, was suffering from a series of symptoms—slurred speech, difficulty in maintaining balance, a facial mask, and a tremor in his hands—known as Parkinson’s syndrome.

  Dr. Stanley Fahn is Director of the Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Other Movement Disorders at Columbia University. In 1984, he was the supervising physician for Ali’s evaluation at Columbia-Presbyterian. Fahn spoke openly with me regarding Ali’s medical condition pursuant to a waiver that Muhammad had signed to facilitate my research when I was writing Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.

  Ali did not have Parkinson’s disease in 1984. His condition, Dr. Fahn concluded, had been caused by physical trauma that destroyed cells in his brain stem.

  “He has asked that I speak freely and completely,” Dr. Fahn told me. “So I’ll tell you my diagnosis that it was a post-traumatic Parkinsonism due to injuries from fighting. It’s highly unlikely that it all came from one fight. My assumption is that his physical condition resulted from repeated blows to the head over time.”

  In the three decades that followed, the world witnessed something unprecedented for its transparency and duration: the long slow sad physical decline of one of the most beloved icons of all time.

  We watched Ali slowly and inexorably lose one physical characteristic after another; his movement, his voice, his good looks. Once, his face had sparkled with happiness. In his later years, there were times when it seemed as though all the suffering and cares of the world were etched on that face. Instead of being drawn to images of Ali with anticipation and joy, we expected the worst.

  It prepared us for the end.

  Boxing takes a heavy toll on those who practice the trade. No fighter knows with certainty that the sweet science will lead him to a dark place. Few fighters believe that what happened to Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and countless others will happen to them.

  But all of the heavyweight champions who reigned before Ali claimed the throne died before he did. Muhammad had sixty-one professional fights against fifty different opponents. More than half of those men are known to have predeceased him. And Ali inflicted brain damage on his opponents too. The punishment wasn’t all one way.

  People talk about the lineage of heavyweight champions. Jack Dempsey beat Jess Willard who beat Jack Johnson, and so on back to James Corbett who beat John L. Sullivan. But there’s another kind of lineage.

  Like Ali, Joe Louis was a larger-than-life symbol as a fighter. Boxing fans of a certain age remember Louis in a wheelchair being brought to ringside on October 2, 1980, as Muhammad Ali was about to be brutalized by Larry Holmes. Once, Joe Louis had embodied America. He was the symbol of a nation’s strength as it readied for the inevitable confrontation with Adolf Hitler’s evil empire.

  Budd Shulberg’s notes of Louis at ringside for Ali-Holmes read as follows: “Joe Louis wheeled in—mouth hangs open—eyes staring. He holds his head in his hands. An attendant wipes spittle from his mouth. His head sags. He sees nothing. The crowd cheers as Ali comes down the aisle. Louis doesn’t see him.”

  Later that night, Schulberg wrote, “Our Joe Louis, the greatest before ‘The Greatest,’ destroyer of Max Schmeling, slumped beside me in his wheelchair. After the early rounds of the fight in which Larry Holmes established immediate dominance and exposed Muhammad Ali as an old man, we found ourselves calling on the Lord of this cruel sport to spare us the sight of a wheelchair for Ali.”

  In the ring, Ali always got up after being knocked down. In and out of the ring, he was willing to pay the price to accomplish what he wanted to achieve. At the end of his life, we saw
the price.

  We wanted Ali to become a hale and hearty old man like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, who grew old gracefully together. It wasn’t to be.

  In the new millennium, Ali’s physical condition crossed over a line. He went into shock from a kidney problem. There was surgery to fuse a disk in his neck. He was taken to the hospital on several occasions after falling unconscious.

  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher each suffered a long slow physical and mental decline at the end of their respective lives. But the image of a weak impaired Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher was never disseminated to the world. Ronald Reagan could have been brought to a fundraising event, had his hand raised, and smiled for the camera. It would have generated millions of dollars. But he was protected and shielded from public view.

  Ali and the people charged with his well-being chose a different path. The decision to keep Muhammad in the public eye was an inspiration to many. It was a reminder that all people, no matter how debilitated in mind and body they might be, are deserving of respect, care, and love.

  But the consequence of this decision was that the entire world was aware of Ali’s decline. We saw it happening before our eyes.

  In December 2014, George Foreman told me, “I look at a man’s insides. And Muhammad Ali is about the only human being I know of who has had no sign of deterioration inside. He was so special, and it’s still there inside him. Muhammad is as beautiful on the inside today as he ever was.”