Ali at 65: The man and the myth

Boxing: Lord of the ring suffers as history is rewritten around him

Matthew Syed

Our correspondent believes that the legend surrounding 'The Greatest' continues to be wilfully distorted by the Establishment

The tributes that have been issued to greet Muhammad Ali’s 65th birthday on Wednesday provide further confirmation of how the legacy of the former heavyweight champion has been appropriated by the conservative establishment. His life is eulogised as that of a peace-loving, all-American hero. Few even allude to his subversive role in radicalising a generation of blacks and denouncing the war in Vietnam.
Inevitably, it was George W. Bush who epitomised the rewriting of history when he handed the former world heavyweight boxing champion the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the President’s eyes twinkling with suppressed excitement as he described Ali as a “man of peace” and having “a beautiful soul”.
Ali performed a little pirouette as onlookers grinned. In many ways, it represented the apogee of Ali’s rehabilitation in the eyes of white America and the culmination of the long and dubious process of historical revisionism.
Every nation fights for the way its heroes are remembered, but in the case of Ali it has been a knockout blow for the conservative elite, something that is rendered more poignant because Ali, quivering under the affliction of Parkinson’s disease, is in no fit state to have a say in the matter. In the eyes of a new generation, he is a Gandhi-esque caricature: non-controversial, utterly non-threatening and devoid of the contradictions that symbolised the deep divisions in postwar American consciousness.
The suspicion that Ali’s handlers have conspired in this anti-historical process is confirmed by the hagiographic Muhammad Ali Center in Kentucky, a temple inscribed with simpering platitudes and pacificatory iconography.
It is difficult to imagine that any youth who happened to strut in from the ghettos of downtown Louisville would leave with any authentic sense of the provocative role that Ali played in the ructions of the Civil Rights movement, or the polemical way he asserted his opposition to Vietnam: “No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.” But even more disturbingly, the youth would walk away oblivious to the shocking fact that the cause to which Ali gave his puff has failed in many of its most basic objectives.
The 2000 census was unequivocal, recording the enduring concentration of poverty, drug abuse and criminality among black Americans. Is it any wonder that liberal intellectuals discern the rancid whiff of tokenism in the accolades that continue to rain down on the former champion?
Of course, many of Ali’s acolytes will be pleased that in the rush to sanitise him in the eyes of white America, some of the hypocritical aspects of his character have been glossed over. There is little mention of the fact that he proclaimed white people were “blue-eyed devils” while not only enjoying friendships with whites but also employing many in his vast entourage. Or that he evangelised about the value of liberty while courting some of the world’s most sadistic dictators, including Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos and President Mobutu.
Many will argue that Ali was misled by his devotion to the Nation of Islam, the black religious sect headed by Elijah Muhammad, but this hardly excuses the tendency to omit all reference to its implications. Although the Nation’s theology was crudely apocalyptic — it believed white people were congenitally unjust, having been bred in a malign historical experiment, and that blacks will be rescued from Judgment Day by a wheel-shaped spaceship — it was its policies on social housing and family values that captivated Ali and other disaffected blacks.
But even here there was hypocrisy. Ali followed the example of Elijah Muhammad in moralising about the virtues of sexual abstinence while living a life of rampant promiscuity. This was never better illustrated than at the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, when Ali caused a diplomatic incident at a presidential reception by introducing Veronica Porsche, his girlfriend, as his wife. Belinda Ali, who had put up with the boxer’s philandering for years, flew to the Philippines for an explosive confrontation. They divorced two years later.
Ali’s seminal historical influence derived not only from his sporting and oratorical genius but from his intuitive grasp of his country’s traumatic history. Martin Luther King started fully to comprehend the cultural and psychic depths of racial division only after the signing of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. But this is something Ali understood deep in his bones and articulated with a poetic thrust that cut to the quick of a new generation of politically self-conscious African Americans.

But where is that melodious voice now? Who knows how Ali, freed from the terrible restrictions of Parkinson’s, would have pronounced upon the great issues that defined his era and have yet to be resolved? Who can tell how a new generation of black Americans would have reacted to his historical legacy had it not been drowned in a torrent of mushy and historically misleading sentimentality?
Ali’s tragic mistake was to ignore the evidence of his body after the bouts that left him urinating blood. He should have retired after his defeat of Joe Frazier in Manila, but no one was around to tell him. His vast entourage wanted him to box on, as did his religious mentors. Indeed, the wider world, still traumatised by Watergate and Vietnam, yearned for the escapism provided by Ali’s global roadshow, with its glorious pre-bout vaudeville.
But Ali would not have retired had the world begged him. As Ferdie Pacheco, his long-time physician, put it: “His tragedy was that he loved his life so much that he wanted to prolong it in the spotlight. The tragedy became that a man who could have been a tremendous leader for his people became muted by an illness caused by boxing. And that is when the Muhammad Ali I knew came to an end.”
In many ways, Ali delivered on his promise to shake up the world. He wielded a heady combination of sporting prowess, pungent oratory and breathtaking handsomeness to shape global consciousness for more than a decade. But we perpetrate a serious injustice upon the textured history of the era if we accept the onedimensional parody that has become the conventional wisdom.
And we will fail to understand the love, fear and loathing he inspired if we ignore his many contradictions.
The greatest? Yes, warts and all.

Spoken like a champion
Ali on Vietnam
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”
Ali on race
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognise, but get used to me. Black, confident, cocky — my name, not yours. My religion, not yours. My goals. Get used to me.”
“Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn’t choose it and I didn’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name — it means beloved of God — and I insist people use it when speaking to me and of me.”
Ali on his opponents
“Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife.”
“If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologise.” (To various challengers)
Ali on Ali
“I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.”
“I figure I’ll be champ for about ten years and then I’ll let my brother take over — like the Kennedys down in Washington.”
Ali on boxing
“Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.”
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’ ”

 Friend and foe
Joe Frazier (former world heavyweight champion)
“The Butterfly and me have been through some ups and downs and there have been lots of emotions, many of them bad. But I have forgiven him. I had to. You cannot hold out for ever. There were bruises in my heart because of the words he used. I spent years dreaming about him and wanting to hurt him. But you have got to throw that stick out of the window. Do not forget that we needed each other, to produce some of the greatest fights of all time.”
Angelo Dundee (Ali’s trainer)
“If I had to pick one memory from my years with Muhammad, it would be the Thrilla in Manila. The two men were fighting under a tin roof in the kind of heat that you can scarcely imagine. But Muhammad went toe to toe for 14 rounds of the most intense action you ever saw. He sucked up energy from nowhere and channelled it into a performance that left Frazier — a great fighter with a difficult style for Muhammad — out on his feet. I was his trainer, but I could not tell you how he did it. That is the thing about the man. Even after all those years together, he still possessed the power to shock.”
Neil Allen (Boxing Correspondent of The Times during the Ali years)
“The last Ali fight I covered for The Times was his third battle with Ken Norton in 1976. I managed to get into the dressing-room as Ali was undergoing an examination by Ferdie Pacheco (his doctor). Ali said, ‘I’m so tired. My nose might be broken and my ribs may be bust, but that’s not what it’s all about. It’s just that I am so tired, so tired to death, that I don’t think I have it any more. I can see the things to do, but I can’t do them. Should I quit, Doc?’ Pacheco nodded and muttered that it was high time. But you could see he believed he was wasting his breath. Ali was not going to stop for anyone. That is why his descent into illness was almost inevitable.”
Anthony Badger (Professor of American History at Cambridge University)
“Ali symbolised the new, aggressive approach of black America in the 1960s. He surfed the wave of heightened militancy as African-Americans sought to dictate the timetable of racial change, something that even liberals believed would be ultimately determined by whites.”
Lennox Lewis (former world heavyweight champion)
“Very few sportsmen stand up for what they believe, because they are worried about how it might impact upon sponsorship and image. Ali was different. He put his principles first and changed the course of history. He made it easier for the black athletes that followed. But he was also a brilliant fighter. I remember watching his second fight with Leon Spinks (in 1978) as a kid and being blown away . . . He showed that intelligence is the key to success in boxing, a philosophy I always adopted.”