The Most Adored Athlete—Muhammad Ali
Though Ali won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960,
at the time the experts didn't think much of his boxing skills.
His head, eyes wide, seemed to float above the action.
Rather than slip a punch, the traditional defensive move,
it was his habit to sway back, bending at the waist—
a tactic that appalled the experts. Lunacy.
Nor did they approve of his personal behavior:
the self-promotions, his affiliation with
the Muslims and giving up his “slave name” for Muhammad Ali.
At the press conferences, the reporters were sullen.
Ali would turn on them. “Why aren't you taking notice?”
or “Why aren't you laughing?”
The public as well had a hard time accepting him.
Then, three years after Ali defended the championship,
there came the public vilification for his refusal to
join the army during the Vietnam War.
The government prosecuted him for draft dodging,
and the boxing commissions took away his license.
He was idle for 3.5 years at the peak of his career.
In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled
that the government had acted improperly.
But Ali bore the commissions no ill will.
There were no lawsuits to get his title back
through the courts. No need, he said,
to punish them for doing what they thought was right.
Quite properly, in his mind,
he won back the title in the ring,
knocking out George Foreman in the eighth round
of their fight in Zaire—“The Rumble in the Jungle”.
Ali was asked on a television show
what he would have done with his life,
given a choice. After an awkward pause—a rare thing,
indeed—he admitted he couldn't think of anything
other than boxing. That is all he had ever wanted or wished for.
He couldn't imagine anything else.
He defended boxing as a sport:
“You don't have to be hit in boxing.
People don't understand that.”
Oscar Wilde once suggested that you kill the thing you love.
In Ali's case, it was the reverse:
what he loved, in a sense, killed him.
The man who was the most loquacious of athletes
now says almost nothing: he moves slowly through the crowds
and signs autographs. He has probably signed more autographs
than any other athletes ever, living or dead.
It is his principal activity at home,
working at his desk. He was once denied an autograph by his idol,
Sugar Ray Robinson, and vowed he would never turn anyone down.
The ceremonial leave—taking of great athletes
can impart indelible memories, even if one remembers
them from the scratchy newsreels of time—
Babe Ruth with the doffed cap at home plate,
Lou Gehrig's voice echoing in the vast hollows
of Yankee Stadium. Muhammad Ali's was not
exactly a leave-taking, but it may have seemed so
to the estimated 3 billion or so television viewers
who saw him open the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.
Outfitted in a white gym suit
that eerily made him seem to glisten
against a dark night sky,
he approached the unlit saucer with his flaming torch,
his free arm trembling visibly from
the effects of Parkinson's disease.
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 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.