I found out that today was Muhammad Ali's 70th birthday and was feeling decidedly controversial. All I saw was praise. Praise, praise, praise! Greatness here, legend there. No one seemed to be making any mention of the more shady years of Muhammad Ali. I was aware that these shady years existed, these years in the extreme right, so I set out to find out more about them.
I didn't have to look very far. The ever dependable Matthew Syed had got their first, filed his copy, The Times had it, the anti-story! Good job he had done, too.
The speech at a KKK rally where he advocated racial segregation and spoke out against inter-race marriages, the speech in full Nazi uniform to the American Nazis, the man was divisive in the extreme. Yesterday, the 16th January, was Martin Luther King day, for goodness sake! The two men couldn't be further apart. (It's interesting and nothing more to pose the question, what if Muhammad Ali had shared the views of Martin Luther King Jr. who died in 1969? What if Ali had continued his legacy?) Would I have acted differently to Ali? King's stance is so famous because it goes against the natural reaction to turn against your oppressors.
Still, why didn't people (apart from Syed) talk about it? Why was there no clause in the unending fountain of praise the poured forth today that mentioned all this?
The answer is, of course, that Muhammad Ali is a poet. The best sort of poet - an orator, and one with a cause. And as well as being a poet, he was the most charming man of the 20th century, when not in Nazi uniform, that is. In this age of heavyweight tossers, Ali was a thoroughbred whose trash-talk was thought out, measured, and not just choreographed to entice punters to shell out for the match on Sky Box Office.
When I say Ali was a poet, I don't mean the little rhymes he came up with, though they are obviously poetic.
"We gon' get it on, 'cos we don' get along'"is a pleasant ditty and it rhymes and is, in a sense, poetic. But Ali was more than that. Everything he did was poetic. To watch him skipping rope was poetic. Even watching him sparring, allowing himself to be pummeled, preparing his body for pain - it was all poetic. He's no poet in the way Robert Frost or Whitman were poetic. Ali was more visceral, not to be found in some book with his name at the bottom of the page. He was right there, rippling and dripping and talking, his voice rising and falling safe in the knowledge that everyone in his presence was absolutely captivated.
When Ali says, "I done wrestled with a alligator. That's right. I have wrestled with a alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail!" this is more than poor grammar. It's language 'made strange' - it's literary. Why are we taken in by it? 'Cos he 'done wrestled', he 'done tussled', he 'done handcuffed'. Ali is all action. He done it!
Norman Mailer, who chronicled the 'Rumble in the Jungle' in his book 'The Fight', writes, "for Ali to compose a few words of real poetry would be equal to an intellectual throwing a good punch." He isn't talking Ali down, more emphasising that Ali was a fighter, first and foremost, not an intellectual. What Mailer is referring to isn't the little rhymes that Ali would spout at press conferences but the more serious, private, and seemingly shallow poetry that Ali took great pride in and insisted in showing Mailer, who he regarded as the 'Champ' of writing.
Ali was all action. Mailer said he ran a marathon everyday in his speech alone. But he had a purpose, even after he moved away from the Nation of Islam, who had clearly begun manipulating him, towards a more peaceful, reflective, conventional Sunni Islam. His stance on the Vietnam War - "No Vietcong ever called me 'Nigger'!" - endeared him to millions across the globe whilst simultaneously alienating him from white, middle class Americans. Ali didn't care. They had probably never liked him anyway. No, Ali's purpose was wider, he was taking on the world. He was doing it, doing, always doing, and doing it for the black man.
My evening finished with re-watching 'When We Were Kings' which, as I had expected, annulled any of my self-consciously controversial reservations about Ali. How could it not? When Ali is placed next to the wooden, horribly insensitive, probably ignorant George Foreman, Ali is on a different level. When Foreman walks off the plane with his Belgian Shepherd, he blows it with the Zairois, even with the added surprise that he is actually black, blacker than Ali.
Ali is on a mission that is wider than a boxing match. It's spiritual and it's African. Being in Africa means something to him. He has a purpose wider than knocking down George Foreman. When he goes out jogging he's messing around with the kids, lifting them up, inciting their 'Boma yé' chant. We don't always like sportsmen who claim to have a purpose wider than winning. That doesn't fit, we say. Be a politician in your own time. For now, you must win. But Ali so clearly believed it, spoke it with poetry, with rhetoric, and drew us in.
By those final rounds, me, just like 120,000 Zairois in late October 1974 are shouting "Ali, boma yé! Ali, boma yé." And George Foreman hitting the deck is greeted with a cheer, a restrained cheer, because I'm not in Kinshasa and people in Exeter are trying to sleep.
Ali was infectious. Humans are drawn to engaging people and it doesn't matter what they are talking about when it is said in such a way. I now understand the happy birthday messages. I feel like I've spent a day with Ali, warts and all. And when faced with such a man who had such faith and such confidence in his cause and such ability and such sporting class and grace and sheer unadulterated brute force, I hereby accept defeat to the flea who supposed to go down in three, Muhammad Ali. In the words of Don King, "Ali even motivates the dead."
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