The beauty of Greatness

“AINT YOU SEEN GEORGE?!?!!!!! HE’S SLOW AND DUMB LIKE A MUMMY….HE CAN’T CATCH A MAN AS FAST OR AS BEAUTIFUL AS ME!

….

I DONE SOMETHIN NEW FOR THIS FIGHT

I DONE TUSSLED WITH A WHALE

I’D A  HANDCUFFED LIGHTNIN’ THROWN THUNDER IN JAIL…

THAT’S BAD…

ONLY LAST WEEK I MURDERED A ROCK

INJURED A STONE HOSPITALISED A BRICK

I’M SO MEAN I MAKE MEDICINE SICK…

IM BAD, BAD, FAST! FAST! FAST!!

ONLY LAST WEEK I SWITCHED A LIGHT OFF IN MY BEDROOM, HIT THE SWTICH WAS IN THE BED BEFORE THE ROOM WENT DARK!”

When Muhammad Ali lifted the Olympic torch in Atlanta, 1996, it was as momentous an occasion as it was touching. For, just as when Ali accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005, the event was symbolic of how the American establishment had finally managed to capture and cast Ali in their own desired image – a man who they had spent years, public money and federal investigations on, in trying to tie down during the ‘60s, without any success at all. Age has left Ali with Parkinson’s disease: he needs support to move even his hands and struggles to deliver basic speech. In his younger days, Ali was a freak, an animal who roared in the blaze of spectacle. Spectacle was his opium, his forte, his sprawling masterpiece: never did a man look so comfortable in front of a camera, either inside or outside of the boxing ring. 

Ali’s boxing career was punctured by a 3-year ban he received for refusing induction into the US army during the Vietnam War. The ban lasted from 67 till 70, and arguably deprived Ali of his best boxing years. Before being banned, he was heavyweight champion of the world and had not been beaten once in 35 fights. He skipped across his turf, gliding up, down, bobbing and weaving from one side to the other. His hands would dangle by his hips, clapping every so often, rather than shielding his head. He fought in mercury: glancing away from punches and then snapping back with darting jabs.

“EVERYBODY STOP TALKING- ATTENTION! DIDN’T I TELL YOU I WAS THE GREATEST OF ALL TIMES?!…

“I SHOOK UP THE WORLD!! I SHOOK UP THE WORLD!!”

In 1967, just after it became known that the US army would draft him into the armed forces, Ali fought Ernie Terrell. Terrell, a Black American like Ali, tried winding Ali up by calling him by his slave name, Cassius Clay. Ali, in political awakening at the time, was furious – Terrell could do nothing worse than call him by the name given to him by slavemasters. Ali completely brutalised Terrell, and made sure the fight lasted the full 15 rounds (refusing to deliver the final blow) in order to dish out as much punishment as he possible could, shouting WHAT’S MY NAME UNCLE TOM to Terrell while lacing his head with jabs and hooks. “Uncle Tom” the name given by Black people to a Black person who was seen to treat the barbarity and oppression let loose by American authorities as something to bathe in and smile at.

America ended the Ali-Terrell fight in uproar and the media savaged Ali for being inhumane, indecent and dangerously cruel. Ali was 25 at the time, and had just announced to the world that he had no reason to go to war: he “had no quarrel with no Vietcong”. The Terrell fight served to further freeze the public’s perception of Ali as a “draft-dodger”, a man afraid of standing up for his country, a coward who could fight in the ring but not where it mattered. Ali’s induction ceremony into the army was only around the corner, and formed headline news across the States: could the heavyweight Champion of the world really go head to head with US foreign policy?

NO VIETKONG EVER CALLED ME NIGGER.

I GO OVER THERE I SHOOT SOME PEOPLE, COME BACK HOME I’M STILL A NIGGER

Ali refused to accept the draft. He was stripped of all of his titles and fighting licenses. There were final-round attempts from some of those close to Ali to try make him change his mind. Some tried to convince him, as was most likely the case, that he wouldn’t actually have to go to Vietnam, yet be pictured in bootcamp training for a few weeks, before being freed to do as he pleased. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison, pending an appeal. Interviews of Ali outside the courtroom after refusing the draft show a man visibly shaken, even anxious. The pictures are the most frightened Ali ever looked in public. He looks tired, the crusts of his eyes burned over, his darting smile frozen out, his voice reduced from its rattling roar to a drawl. He looks shit-scared. Muhammad Ali loved to box. It was the one thing he knew, the one thing he could do well. A man who finished near the bottom of all his classes at school and once scored 78 in an IQ test, it was the one thing he could earn a living from.

I’M READY FOR THIS!

THEY CAN’T GET ME I’M READY!!

I’M READY TO DIE! I’M READY TO DIE!

Ali had appealed his conviction on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, insisting that as a Muslim minister, it was against his religious beliefs to fight for an army in a warzone. The decision went all the way to the US Supreme Court and eventually in 1971, four years after refusing to enter into the army, Ali’s appeal was granted. Ali had spent those four years developing his abilities to speak publicly, as a religious leader. In the ‘60s and 70s, Ali supported the same line as the Nation of Islam, a group of at times militant Islamists, for whom America was but a lost cause, a place which Blacks would have to desert to achieve freedom, a bloody nest, far too entangled in a cobweb of misery for there to be any kind of redemption from the past. The Nation of Islam expounded divisive and at times ugly beliefs during this period. They asserted that the “White man” was the Devil and the single enemy of the Black world. They preached that Whites were inherently opposed to, and driven to try and exploit Blacks.

WHY SHOULD BLACKS TRY AND BE NICE TO THEIR OLD SLAVE MASTERS? US BLACKS NEED OUR COUNTRY, WE AINT GONNA SIT AROUND AND SINK TO YOUR LEVEL!

IT’S TIME WE HAD OUR OWN NATION! WHITES AINT GOT NO BUSINESS MIXING WITH NEGROES!

BLUE BIRDS DON’T FLY WITH RED BIRDS!

Ali had grown in up in Bible-Belt territory: in a (relative to Blacks at the time) lower middle-class family in Louisville, Kentucky. Ali converted to Islam from Christianity alongside his brother. This conversion was not at all strikingly different for Black Americans at the time, and simply followed a logical trend. Ali had grown up unable to sit down at his local restaurants by white people. Ali had sat among Black people who were denied the right to vote by election-day taxes and literacy tests. Ali had attended a Black-only school, and had seen the utter contempt the American establishment held for Black people and their attempts, at every new dead-end, to use Blacks as a sledgehammer – a tool to drum up a racket and direct social fury, and then, chipped and bloodied, worn and scarred, dump on the side and burn once the path was clear again.

John F Kennedy had won the Presidency on the back of a campaign around civil rights, and then once elected, merely stumbled around the issue for 3 years, offering up a small string of half-policies and the occasional soundbite. Kennedy the man who turned a blind eye when black freedom riders were being arrested and sent to jail en masse for sitting on a bus in Mississippi, in 1961. Kennedy the man who promised to end housing discrimination with ‘one stroke of a pen’ and started to receive bucket-loads of pens through his Presidential mailbox, such was his lack of conviction around the issue.  Blacks bore the brunt of poisonous, goddamn-ruthless leaders such as Lyndon Johnson, under whose guidance the FBI threatened to blackmail Martin Luther King with allegations of King’s infidelity, such was their opposition to Black people breaking the law in order to obtain the rights afforded to everyone else in America.

The Nation of Islam not only critiqued the obstacles, in all their many sizes and shapes, which Black Americans faced in the 1950s and ‘60s, yet demanded black confidence and even arrogance. Ali would often sit in press conferences, as the academic Grant Farred notes, merely stroking the dark skin of his cheeks and jaw with the palm of his hand, shouting LOOK AT ME…I’M SO PRETTY! AINT I PRETTY?! I’M BEAUTIFUL! AIN’T NO ONE AROUND MORE PRETTY THAN ME!! Ali would mention his upbringing: being taught to worship a white god, with a white son and white angels, and learning of white heroes – Tarzan – running around jungles in Africa. The Nation of Islam violently refuted all of this: be damn proud of being Black, it’s the best and in America’s barbaric reality, only thing you have.

I’VE BEEN IN PRISON FOR 400 YEARS ALREADY…ANOTHER 4 OR 5 DOESN’T MATTER TO ME

Ali’s actions were symbolic of the colossal weight of the energy within the Civil Rights movement, in which those involved appeared engulfed by the most simple, radical notion: that there is something more important than the self, something so condensed in love and empathy, that it breeds anger and even hatred. And without this bristling charge, is the notion of social change is not an empty cartridge: a gun without a bullet which, as we so often bare witness to in the political arena, offers little but a sharp pain to the ear? Ali’s refusal to enter the army represents the final threshold of political action, the point at which ‘political action’ transcends the limitation of the first word ‘political’, exploding through the realm of the personal, a force now as majestically creative as it is traumatic.

Having returned to the boxing arena in 1971, Ali eventually fought himself into embarrassment. He won a handful of fights masterfully, with the same craft and rasping narrative which had characterised his early career. Yet he kept on fighting, only retiring after defeats to Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick at the age of 39. Fighting was a drug for Ali: a necessity, the source of his own character and ego, as well as of wealth and the money he used to support his on-going divorce cases and hungry entourage. By the point of the Holmes defeat, what in retrospect looks like the early stages of Parkinson’s disease had already kicked in: his voice was slurred, and he was no longer able to move with anything like the same pace and grace which had characterised his early style. His radical politics took a backseat as the ‘70s wore-on, engulfed by the hurricane of Ali’s charade: the attempts to fund and maintain a sense of national importance and international stature. He was photographed with Gerald Ford in the White House, and later became a coat-hanger for the PR machines of the Reagan, Carter and Clinton presidencies.

Yet there is still something, the faint burn of an old idea, it seems, which turns in Ali’s mind, away from the cameras and even in front of them. The documentary “The trials of Muhammad Ali” paints a scene: after Ali was presented with the aforementioned Medal of Freedom by George Bush in 2005, he meets Louis Farrakhan, a former member of the National of Islam as well. A bewildered Farrakhan explains that after congratulating Ali on receiving the medal, Ali – trembling and stuttering from Parkinsons – leaned slowly into Farrakhan’s ear, whispering, repeating: “still a nigger. still a nigger. still a nigger”.

WE CAME IN CHAINS! WE CAME IN CHAINS! EVERYWHERE I LOOK I SEE CHAINS! CHAINS! 400 YEARS AND WE STILL IN CHAINS!! 

CHAINS!

CHAINS!

CHAINS!

CHAINS!