Farewell Muhammad Ali, you really were 'The Greatest'

You have to be extraordinary to carry off a self-imposed description of yourself as ‘The Greatest.’ But Muhammad Ali, dead at 74, called himself that and no one dared to challenge him.

The rest of the world, including hard-boiled boxing writers who made their living from coining bombastic nick-names, went along with the boast. ‘I am the great-est!!’ Ali would chant. The crowd responded as if to the most self-evident truth anyone could proclaim.

More than that, the world saw no irony in Muhammed Ali’s self-glorification as his life veered dramatically from callow Olympic champion, to heavyweight champion of the world, to a conversion to Islam and not world fame as an opponent of the Vietnam War and a charismatic champion of oppressed peoples around the world.

This journey from Cassius Clay to the Muhammad Ali of legendary status is one of the great stories of American, and indeed, world history.

The legend essentially rests on Muhammad Ali’s supreme gifts as a boxer. The statistics are impressive. He fought 61 times as a professional: he won 56 fights, 37 of them by knock-outs. He was three times world heavyweight champion, in 1964, 1974 and 1978, in an era before the alphabet soap of contrived champions and jurisdictions.

Rocky Marciano had a better record in the 1950s. So did another heavyweight champion of the 1920s, Gene Tunney. Marciano, the brawler with a rock-hard left fist, and Tunney, the scholar and artist of defensive boxing, were both undefeated.

There was something of both of them, in terms of style, in Muhammad Ali’s boxing.

Like Marciano, he was an inveterate head hunter. This is why, although he was not as iron-fisted as Marciano and fought more on his toes than on his feet, he recorded so many knock-out victories.

Like Tunney, Muhammad Ali was a superior defensive fighter. His defensive skills essentially won him his first victory over Sonny Liston. The technique of ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ so discombulated the ponderous, slow-thinking Liston that he was broken psychologically and then physically as Ali, having absorbed the Liston attack for several rounds, then suddenly reverted to a quick-stepping, hard-hitting, rat-a-tap attack.

There was something, too, of the Joe Louis in Muhammad Ali’s arsenal of boxing skills, too. He had the same good looks at the ‘Brown Bomber’ and the same disconcerting ability to land his hardest punches on the weak spot of his opponent’s jaw. Like Louis, Ali always fought within the hitting zone. This made his counter-punching so lethal when he launched his attack.

There was a huge difference, though, in manner and attitude between Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali.

Louis, a gladiator of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, was trained to be poker-faced as he smashed his white opponents into oblivion. Louis’ managers knew that if their fighter showed any triumphalism in his victories, the rednecks throughout America, from the top management down to reporters, broadcasters and fans would contrive to ensure he would be blocked from fighting for the heavyweight championship or, if he was the champion, would have his title taken away from him by some contrived ‘Great White Hope’ conspiracy.

Muhammed Ali, a champion of the rebellious 1960s, loved Joe Louis as a man and a fighter. But he adored and imitated even more, Jack Johnson, the first black man to be world heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Muhammad Ali studied the old films of Jack Johnson taunting his opponents, playing with them before dispatching into kingdom come with a thunderous blow to the jaw.

He read extensively about Johnson’s life and times. Johnson’s refusal to bow to the constant oppression of the blacks in America became his own personal standard. He became a world wide champion for racial justice. He converted to Islam. And in 1967 became the most famous conscientious objector in American history when he refused to be conscripted in the US army and, therefore, involved in the Vietnam War.

He was stripped of this title and was out of boxing for four years. He was never the same boxer when he came back after this ordeal. There was the occasional unattractive meanness of spirit in his rhetoric and ring craft. But as he got older and the effects of his Parkinson’s disease emasculated his movement and his speaking ability, he seemed to become a transcendental figure. He was an everyman hero, wherever he went.

The coffee-skinned, handsome Muhammad Ali, always a great story teller, often spoke about his first fight with the massive, scowling, pitch-black-skinned Sonny Liston. There was a woman, Ali recounted, with honey-blond hair piled high, who yelled out to Liston throughout the fight: ‘Smash the nigger!’

The irony of what she was saying escaped her. But Ali knew what she was really saying. It was not him so much as what he stood for that antagonised the woman, and millions of other Americans.

This was balanced by the reverence and love that Muhammad Ali generated with hundreds of millions of people, rich and poor, black, brown, white, on every continent, of every religion, every walk of life and every age.

Poll after poll recorded his popularity as the most admired person on the planet. He was Sports Illustrated’s Athlete of the Century and the BBC’s Sportsman of the Century.

This is some achievement for an athlete whose sport is essentially barbaric. But the man and his charisma transcended the barbarism of his fighting trade to reveal the heights that the human spirit can aspire to.

I never saw Muhammed Ali in the flesh or interviewed him. But I, along billions of other people around the world, was touched by his special style, the epitome of Hemingway’s description of ‘grace under pressure.’ Grace and humour under pressure, I would add. In his prime, Ali had a wicked sense of humour to complement his wicked right hook.

I was a school teacher at a secondary school in the 1960s in New Zealand. The history lesson of the day, something about the Treaty of Versailles or whatever, would stop for the class to listen to the radio broadcast of one of Muhammed Ali’s epic fights.

There we would be listening to the blow by blow call, enthralled by an event being staged about as far away from Wellington as you could get. If the bell went for the end of class and the beginning of the play time break, the students would stay at their desks enthralled as I was in what was happening in a square ring on the other side of the world.

For those 40 minutes or so you knew that you, that class of boys and untold millions of people around the world were somehow a tiny part of a vast whole of humanity that were taking part in something much bigger than a boxing match.

Muhammad Ali, rest in peace, you were The Greatest.