“The
hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see
I float
like a butterfly and sting like a bee”
----Muhammad Ali, Heavyweight Champion of the World.
In the
film version of a teleplay written by Rod Serling, Antony Quinn portrays “a once-promising
but now washed-up boxer who faces the end of his career after he is savagely
defeated” (1) in the opening scene by an up-and-coming younger man. The film is remarkable not only for the
command performance of Antony Quinn as the aging pugilist, but also for the
dramatic performances of both Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney as supporting
actors. However, it is, perhaps, most
memorable in that the opening scene in which Quinn faces the immanent end of his
career finds him receiving a savage beating by none other than a young Cassius
Clay. The drama unfolding in the opening
moments of the film would later be repeated in real life when the young Clay
would confront two years later a much older Sonny Liston for the heavyweight
championship of the world.
The
story goes that Clay, at the tender age of 12, had gone to a police station in
his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to report his bicycle stolen. Telling the officer that he wanted to whup
whoever was responsible the policeman suggested he take up boxing. The rest, as they say, is history. For the next decade, Clay would hone his
skills.
“Clay made his amateur boxing debut in 1954.[32] He won six Kentucky Golden
Gloves titles,
two national Golden Gloves titles, an Amateur Athletic Union national title, and
the Light
Heavyweight gold
medal in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.[33] Clay's amateur record
was 100 wins with five losses. (2)”
By early 1964, young Cassius would find
himself in Miami Florida confronting Sonny Liston for the heavyweight
championship of the world.
It proved to be a difficult journey, for
unlike virtually every other sport; the boxer is not accountable to a team, nor
a team’s management and ownership. A
boxer is, or at least can be, his ‘own man’, a point and a prospect not lost
upon the emerging Clay. Borrowing from
the legendary wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner, young Cassius saw how useful
‘flamboyant self-promotion’ could be.
“A 19-year-old Ali met a
46-year-old George at a Las Vegas radio station. During George's radio
interview, the wrestler's promo caught the attention of the future heavyweight
champion. If George lost to Classy Freddie
Blassie, George exclaimed, "I'll crawl across the ring and cut
my hair off! But that's not gonna happen because I'm the greatest wrestler in
the world!" Ali, who later echoed that very promo when taunting opponent Sonny
Liston, recalled, "I saw 15,000 people comin' to see this man
get beat. And his talking did it. I said, 'This is a gooood idea!'" In the
locker room afterward, the seasoned wrestler gave the future legend some
invaluable advice: "A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your
mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous."
Accordingly,
the brash young pugilist from Louisville, dubbed the “Louisville Lip” by
disparaging sportswriters, found it difficult to get a title match with the
champion Liston. Here was a man, and
particularly a man of color, who could not be ‘controlled’.
America
had had such an experience in the early years of the last century when the
sport produced its first Black Champion.
Jack Johnson (4) proved not only to be a formidable fighter but a clear
threat to the white supremacist doctrines of racial superiority and the
Jim-Crow segregation that it produced.
Accordingly, a long hunt for a ‘great white hope’ would be undertaken
until Johnson, several years later, would finally be vanquished. The legacy of Jack Johnson made it difficult
for black athletes to break the color line and when they did one had to be, in
the words of the time, “a credit to your race”. Men like Joe Louis and Jackie
Robinson who would advance the cause of civil rights by crossing the color line
and would make it possible for Larry Doby and a host of others in baseball, and
Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston and a host of others in boxing, to emerge and
even become champions as long as they didn’t make any demands. What America, it was held, did not want was
an athlete who spoke his mind, especially if he were a black man.
Getting
a title fight, under these conditions, proved problematic. So Clay, to create pressure for such a match
would take his counsel from “Gorgeous George” and turn spectacle into
opportunity. Appearing and confronting
Liston at his training facilities, the young Clay would taunt the champion
calling him a “big ugly bear” saying that he was “too ugly to be champion” and
promising, after defeating him, to donate him to a zoo. Finally, the champion relented and a fight
was duly arranged.
The
results are, of course, well chronicled.
Clay quickly took control of the match easily outmaneuvering the
champion. In response it is held by
many, including longtime boxing expert and commentator Burt Sugar, that Liston,
as he allegedly had done several times before, had liniment put on his gloves
in order to blind his opponent. For nearly two rounds, Clay dodged and avoided
the champion as he struggled to clear his eyes, fighting nearly blind against
one of the most powerful punchers in the history of the game. Finally, his eyes cleared and when they did,
the young Cassius went to work on the aging champion until Liston threw in the
towel. In what is regarded as one of the
greatest upsets in the sport Cassius Clay became the youngest heavyweight
champion in history.
Within
days, Clay announced to the world that he had not only converted to Islam but
had changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
The
search now began in earnest for the ever-elusive new “Great White Hope”.
I am not
going to recount the history of his fights but instead I want to bring
attention to Ali the Athlete and Ali the Icon.
Ali the Athlete
For
those seeking a new “Great White Hope” be he white or black, someone who would,
in effect, silence the “Louisville Lip”, the wait would prove to be long and,
in the end, futile. For here stood on
the national stage not only the country’s most notorious braggart, but a man
who would later be voted the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.
He had
taken from Sugar Ray Robinson the boxing strategy of a much smaller man,
defense, movement, and glove speed and by training and sculpting his body
brought these skills into the heavyweight arena. Here was a man who stood six foot four inches
and fought with the skills and speed never seen at this level. In his youth, he
was always moving, always circling left, counter-clockwise, always the left
jab, and the fast left jab that would mask the hard right hand coming behind
it. His hands were said by many to be
the fastest ever seen. In addition,
there was power. Critics claim that he
didn’t have the punching power of a Liston or a Foreman or, for that matter, a
Frazier, but they are wrong. All one has
to do is watch the films of his fights with Jerry Quarry or George Chuvalo, or
Joe Frazier. One can hear over the crowd
the punches being thrown. You don’t hear
his opponent’s blows but you can hear Ali’s punches coming in as they land,
such was the power behind those hands.
He also
had the ability to slip punches, often—unheard of in boxing—of leaning back
with his chin just an inch or so out of range as he would fall back on his
heals as his opponent attempted to land a blow.
In a photo taken of the first Liston match one sees the young fighter
leaning back as Liston, arm and glove extended to the maximum falls inches
short of Ali’s chin. Liston later claimed that he quit the fight because he had
dislocated his shoulder failing to land the blows and hitting only air. This tactic, often fatal to success because
to employ it leaves one prey to a follow up blow or combination, Ali was
nevertheless able to execute because of his superior abilities to move on his
feet as well as counterpunch as he fell backwards; a skill that left many an
opponent weary of closing in for the ‘kill’.
Here was
no muscle-bound Tyson but a finely sculpted and finely tuned athlete with an
extraordinary set of skills as the photo of young Ali standing over the
vanquished Liston in the re-match in Maine clearly demonstrates. Delivering a knockout punch thrown with such
speed and at such an unorthodox angle as to be nearly unseen, he stands over
Liston, his sculpted body with muscles taut, taunting the former champion to
get up and fight. Here is classic Ali in
his prime.
Moreover,
in his prime he was something indeed to behold.
Fighting every 60 to 90 days he took the “show on the road”, fighting in
England, and Germany, fighting the Canadian and the German as well as the
European champions. With each battle, America hoped it had found its “hope”;
with each battle, Ali prevailed.
Then
called Uncle Sam; he had mired himself in this little squabble called Viet Nam.
“Keep asking me,
No
matter how long,
On the war in Vietnam
I sing this song:
I ain’t got no quarrel
With no Viet Cong.”
“Ain’t
no Viet Cong ever called me nigger, or raped or killed my mother or father,”
said the champion. An unsettling truth
blown back into the face of America.
Martin Luther King, himself struggling with the morality of our war in
Southeast Asia and counseled against taking a stand lest so doing jeopardize
the civil rights movement, would later in 1967 turn to Ali “the renegade
lyrical poet from the ring, to justify his position: ‘Like Muhammad Ali puts
it’”, said King, “’we are all—black, brown and poor—victims of the same system
of oppression”’ (5)
Citing
his defiance as a criminal act, the boxing commissions throughout the U.S.
quickly stripped him of his title and revoked his boxing license making it
impossible for the Champion to practice his trade despite sanctioning the likes
of Liston and others who had criminal records as long as their arms. For over three years, the Champ would struggle
both financially and through the legal system in an effort to appeal his
conviction, his fines and his pending prison term.
It was
during this time that the late-great sportscaster Howard Cosell would come to
his aid, inviting the Champion to appear on his weekly television sports show
and comment on both his legal struggles and on the boxing scene as the various
boxing confederations held a series of contests to decide who would be the next
champion. During this process and
afterward when others—former Ali sparring partner Jimmy Ellis and later Joe
Frazier would emerge as the duly anointed heavyweight champion—Cosell would
have Ali appear with him to analyze their skills during which the show’s host
would convey a strong suggestion that these men were mere imposters to the
throne, that they weren’t real champions because the genuine article was
sitting next to him in the studio.
Cosell
was the thinking man’s sportsman, bringing to everything he covered an analysis
of the strategies employed and an evaluation of the relative level of
execution. He also was the first
national spokesperson to recognize the legitimacy of Ali’s name change
something that, for instance, it took the Los
Angeles Times and other national media years to do. In one particular program on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” Cosell, showing his audience how he wanted to
demonstrate the intelligence that Ali brought into the ring had the Champion
review video footage of the great fighters of the twentieth century. “You say you are the Greatest”, intoned
Cosell, “Tell the audience how you would defeat the likes of Jack Johnson, Joe
Louis, Rocky Marciano and several others”.
As the tapes were played Ali calmly explained how he would prepare for each
of these men, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they could and would be
beaten.
For over
three years, during the prime of his physical skills, Ali was barred from the
ring. When he returned he was not the
same fighter. Gone were some of the
speed, and the ability to consistently stay up on his toes and circle his
opponent. Other stratagems were in
order.
The “Rumble in the
Jungle”
His
second career is memorable for the trilogy of fights with then heavyweight
champion Joe Frazier and his single fight with then champion George Foreman. He challenged Frazier losing the first bout
in part, because it was only his third fight since returning to the ring and he
clearly wasn’t prepared. Nevertheless,
the fight went the distance and Ali lost on points. He fought Frazier a second time after Joe had
lost the championship to George Foreman and won that fight on points, evening
the score. Both of these battles went
the distance, both were bruising Battles.
This set the stage for the “Rumble in the Jungle” a battle with then
heavyweight champion George Foreman in Zaire, now the Republic of the Congo.
Foreman
was then considered one of the most intimidating and vicious punchers in the
history of the game. He won his crown by
flooring the formidable Joe Frazier.
Many, even in Ali’s own entourage thought that Ali—several years
older—and now much slower, would be injured, perhaps seriously if he took on
Foreman. Some even feared for his
life.
However,
Ali, as always, assumed a posture of confidence. Studying a film of Foreman’s fights Ali saw a
weakness. George had won almost all of
his fights by knockout in the early rounds and he had not gone deep into a
fight for a long time. Watching the
films, he noticed that as he flogged one of his opponents his arms appeared to
get heavy. He would tire and as he did
his hands would come down. From this,
Ali devised a strategy—dubbed by the pugilist poet—“Rope-a-Dope” in which he would lie against the ropes and let the
Champion flail away until he tired and then put him away.
Norman
Mailer would describe what he saw at ringside and the genius of the
tactic. In the heat of Africa as Foreman
would flail away, Ali would lie back against the ropes absorbing the heavy
blows in his ribcage. The entire ring
would shake as the ropes and posts absorbed the blows. Had Ali taken these blows standing in the
center of the ring, Mailer noted, his skeleton would have had to absorb all
that energy and it would have crushed him.
Nevertheless, noted the novelist, one noticed that much of the energy
Foreman was expending was passing through Ali’s body and was taken up by the
ropes and posts and passing down into the very floor of the ring itself. Ali
had made the ring into one giant shock absorber.
It was a
dangerous strategy for in order to succeed Ali not only had to absorb the
punishment administered to his body by Foreman but he had to, at all costs,
avoid a direct blow to the head for Foreman was allowed in at close range.
Ali
would retreat from the center of the ring and lie against the ropes and motion
for Foreman to come on and attack him.
In a “peek-a-boo” posture in which he would shield his face and head
behind his gloves and ‘peeking’ through is upheld hands, Ali would taunt his
foe. “You hit like a woman, George” he
would taunt, “is that all you got, George?” he would ask. Enraged, Foreman would flail away as Ali’s
trainer and manager Angelo Dundee would scream at his man to get off the ropes
knowing how dangerous this was.
And,
danger was ever present, at each moment, with each blow, as Ali would bob back
and forth moving his head to avoid the headshots. Watching film of the fight you can see the
peril as Foreman’s forearms, particularly the right one pass by Ali’s moving
head all the way to the elbow. A direct
hit under such circumstances could be devastating, even fatal.
Finally,
as Ali had foreseen, Foreman began to tire, he began to flag, his arms began to
drop and Ali saw his opportunity quickly coming off the ropes and delivering
several blows in rapid succession dropping the champion to the floor. It was over.
An elated Ali then went to the edge of the ring where the press had set
up shop and shouted down at the assembled “I told you I am the Greatest”.
Foreman
would later say of the fight that as Ali taunted him, yelling “is that all you
got, George?” he began to realize that yes this is all I have and his
confidence began to ebb away. Ali would
attack not only your body but also your mind.
It would take George Foreman years to recover, eventually reclaiming his
crown in his 40’s and becoming the oldest man to win the heavyweight
championship.
The “Thrilla in
Manila”
This set
the stage for the final bout with Ali’s arch nemesis Joe Frazier; once again,
for the heavyweight championship of the world only this time the roles were
reversed. Ali was now the champion and
Frazier the challenger.
The
final bout, the last in his trilogy with “Smokin Joe Frazier” as he was known,
proved to be a bruising battle, after which both fighters were never the
same. The pre-fight build up to the
“Thrilla in Manila”, as ever the poet Ali described it, was as bruising for
Frazier as the fight itself. Always, as
with every opponent, Ali would cast his adversary as the great white hope, only
this time adding insult to injury by dubbing Frazier the “Gorilla” and
appearing on camera with a stuffed toy gorilla saying:
“I’ll be a-punchin’ and a-pokin’
Pouring water on your smokin'”
After a
bit of clowning, Ali quickly took control of the fight in the early rounds,
much as he had against Liston years earlier.
However, the middle rounds belonged to Frazier as the two giants of the
sport battled in the heat of the tropics.
Ali
later said that as the fight wore on it was the closest he would ever come to death
itself. It is not generally understood
but an athlete can expend an awful lot under such circumstances. A major league pitcher can lose five to ten
pounds during a game a prizefighter can expend much more than that. In fact,
under severe circumstances such as these a fighter can lose so much by way of
sweating out electrolytes and other substances as to risk internal organ
failure.
Nevertheless,
the two fought it out. In the middle of
the thirteenth round, as Ali is now in the center of the ring, winning by most
accounts on points but narrowly, he circles Frazier. Always moving left, his back to the camera,
Frazier’s face directly in front suddenly Ali delivers a hard right to
Frazier’s jaw. It happens so fast that
the ringside announcer’s don’t notice it until after the round is over and one
of them comments that Frazier has lost his mouthpiece, that piece of plastic
that fighters put in their mouth to protect their teeth and jaw. If you watch closely, you can see the blow
land flush on Frazier’s jaw, as the white piece of plastic is jettisoned. So hard is Frazier hit that the mouthpiece
doesn’t fall out unto the floor but rather sails out of his mouth parallel to
the floor with such force that it lands nine rows back into the crowd. And Frazier simply looks back at Ali, and
doesn’t go down. The round winds down,
and both fighters collapse in their respective corners. When the bell is about to be sounded to begin
round fourteen, Frazier’s manager throws in the towel. The fight is over; Ali is declared the winner
by technical knockout. Frazier sits
crushed on his stool, Ali collapses on the floor. Later that evening Frazier would be taken
back to his lodgings to begin a long recuperation; Ali would be taken to the
hospital.
Neither
would ever be the same. Ali would later
lose then regain his crown for an unprecedented third time against Leon Spinks
but in Manila, he left his best in the ring.
He was
an anomaly in his sport. A heavyweight
who fought with the speed and grace of a middleweight; a fighter that could
counterpunch while back on his heels and deliver telling punches while
backpedaling; a boxer who talked while fighting, always dangerous since one
risks, by so doing, a broken jaw, (as when Ken Norton caught Ali with a right
hand while he was mid sentence breaking his jaw in the second round. Ali finished the fight.); a poetic pugilist
who spoke his mind.
Ali the Icon
Many
today that were not yet born when Ali emerged upon the national consciousness
do not understand that as was the case with Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali
was greeted with near universal derision.
“Almost from the beginning of his career, when he was still
called Cassius Clay, his rhymed couplets, like his punches, were brutal and
blunt. And his poems, like his
opponents, suffered a beating. When in
the history of boxing [asks Henry Louise Gates] have critics been so irked by a
fighter’s use of language? A.J. Liebling
called him “Mr. Swellhead Bigmouth Poet,” while John Ahern, writing in the
Boston Globe in 1964, mocked his “Vaudeville” verse as “homespun
doggerel.” Time magazine, in a
particularly nasty triple dig in 1967 over Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War,
his embrace of Islam and name change, called him “Gaseous Cassius”. (6)
What
irritated the press was that it was always Ali who stamped his own imprimatur
on the event. Describing a blow he would
deliver to Liston in a pre-fight build up he would quip:
“Now Liston disappears from view
The
crowd is getting frantic.
But
our radar stations have picked him up
He’s
somewhere over the Atlantic.”
Ever the
showman, it was Ali, never the press that defined the event and, in the end,
that defined Ali.
Nevertheless,
he was more, much more than mere sport and spectacle, mere showmanship. Ali fused sport, spectacle, and showmanship
into cause and purpose and meaning.
Clowning before the camera he would appear on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show or with Howard Cosell and
would stop mid sentence and ask “Ain’t I pretty?” and motion for the camera,
Gorgeous George style, to zoom in for a close up. “Prettiest face in the human race” he would
tell his audience. Often, and almost
universally in the early days, the audience response would be one of nervous laughter
at his braggadocio. Partly because the audience was unaccustomed to such talk;
partly because when he said he was “the greatest” or that he had “the prettiest
face in the human race”, the audience sensed that perhaps it was true.
Out of
this came black pride. Blacks stopped
referring to themselves as Negroes, stopped using hair straightener and stopped
bleaching their skin. “Black is
beautiful” was born and a new sense of ethnic pride, a result of the emergent
civil rights movement and more than spurred on by the image of Ali. For in his form one sees not simply a black
man, but the facial features of an Asian, an African, a Latino, perhaps
Caucasian as well. One sees in the
features a certain femininity, especially in the young Ali, as well as a strong
masculine form. If one were to condense
the best features of the human species down into one person it would be Ali in
his prime.
And so
Ali not only gave doggerel poetic meaning and gave grace and beauty to an ugly
sport but in the process became a citizen of the world, an Icon, the most
recognizable face on the planet.
We will
not again see his likeness.
____
(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Heavyweight
(2). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali
(5).
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Muhammad Ali, the
Political Poet” New York Times op-ed June 9,
2016. page A-21
(6). Ibid
