Much has been written and said this week about Mohammed Ali, the three-time heavyweight champion of professional boxing who died last weekend at the age of 74. Ali was a legend, both for his exploits in the ring and for his public life outside of it. He was, perhaps, the biggest, if not the most influential, sports figure of the second half of the twentieth century. But for all the praise now being written and spoken about his life, he was not always so revered. In fact, he was not always the man whose life and career are now so highly regarded by so many. He was not even always Mohammed Ali.
His first public persona was as Cassius Clay, the brash young boxer who had won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics and then turned pro at the age of 20 and took the boxing world by storm. He was an exciting boxer, with amazing foot speed and a potent combination of speed and power in his punches. He bragged incessantly and did so in rhyme, often mocking his opponents in the process. He’d predict the round when he would knock out his opponent, and more often than not, he’d follow through on the prediction.
Cassius Clay was brash, and that’s putting it mildly. “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am,” he once said. Modesty was not one of his strong suits. He defeated the supposedly undefeatable Sonny Liston in 1964 on a TKO (technical knockout) when Liston essentially gave up after six rounds. Then, having won the heavyweight crown in that fight, he KO’d Liston in the first round of their re-match. He was undefeated at that point, and would remain so until he was banned from the sport three years later.
By then, he wasn’t Cassius Clay anymore. He’d given up his “slave name” in 1964 for the one the Prophet Elijah Mohammed gave him when he converted to Islam. It was a conversion that changed his image and that changed him. No longer the innocent kid with the amazing talent and quick wit, he was now an angry young man with a chip on his shoulder. He lost a lot of his fan base during those years, becoming less trusted by the white audiences that had so enjoyed his cockiness.
Now he was strange, perhaps even a bad guy. The mainstream media even refused to refer to him by his new name. Of course, that fact just made him angrier, which made it that much harder for many white Americans to understand him, let alone appreciate his new persona. But he was defiant and he remained the best heavyweight boxer in the world in spite of not being nearly as popular as he had been.
And then came his downfall, when he refused induction into the Army during the Vietnam War. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he said in early 1966. He was stripped of his title a year later when he formally refused his induction, citing his religious beliefs and claiming to be a conscientious objector. He was convicted of draft evasion and barred from boxing for three years. His five-year prison sentence was delayed pending the appeal of his conviction, which the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in 1970.
When Ali returned to the ring, a guy named George Foreman was the champ. Ali worked his way up to a fight with Foreman and beat him to regain his heavyweight crown. That was 1974, and “the Rumble in the Jungle” was one of several fights that added to Ali’s reputation. He had previously lost to Joe Frazier in the first of three fights against that power puncher. He beat Frazier in the two rematches, the last of which was dubbed the “Thrilla in Manila,” which those who saw it said it definitely was.
Five years later, Ali lost his title to a journeyman boxer named Leon Spinks. He beat Spinks in a rematch seven months later, but then suffered two more defeats and retired for good in 1981. Three years later, he was revealed to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a debilitating neurological disorder that robbed him of his speech and much of his mobility. At some point during the next decade, Ali became an almost mythical figure, as the image of his early boxing career, his defiant stand against the Vietnam War, his return to the ring after the three year banishment, his legendary fights against Foreman and Frazier, and his battle with Parkinson’s, all combined to make the memory of him bigger than any of the separate identities he had assumed.
So it often is with legends. We remember them as an amalgam of the man or woman they truly were. Ali was a complex human being: smart and gifted and handsome and articulate, on the one hand; hostile and bitter and sometimes even cruel and merciless, on the other. He may have found peace in his conversion to Islam or he may have lived to regret that conversion. He never publicly renounced Islam, but he never spoke of it either in the last thirty years of his life.
He hardly spoke at all during those years. The fight game, which gave him and his adoring public so much, ended up robbing him and that same public of so much more. When he electrified the Olympics audience at the opening ceremonies in Atlanta, it was really his last public appearance. And that event was almost twenty full years ago.
In the end, he is remembered as that amalgam, with some focusing on his great skills in the ring, others admiring his moral stance against the war, and still others seeing that single image of his shaking hand as he lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta.
Legends aren’t real. They are the images that remain of real people who lived lives that made them seem larger than life. Ali led such a life. He will be remembered for the different times in his life when he was special and for the different ways that he made himself special.