Requiem for a champ: How Muhammad Ali became 'The Greatest'
It is coming to get you, everybody knows that. Muhammad Ali knew it too, which was why he had started planning his funeral ten years ago.
His memorial service was held on June 9 in Kentucky's Freedom Hall, where Ali had fought his last bout in the city 56 years ago.
Kentucky has an equestrian history. A lone horse stood in the shade outside the hall with boxing gloves over its saddle and an Ali inscribed blanket over his hind part. Over 15,000 people, old and young, blacks and whites, Muslims, Christians and Jews were in attendance.
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Even before the warmth of the blood had not fully left Ali's body, there was a Twitter spat involving Piers Morgan of Mail Online and TV presenter Chrissy Teigen over the champ's racist comments pitted against Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump condoling the black Muslim hero's passing.
Muhammad Ali said far more inflammatory/racist things about white people than Donald Trump ever has about Muslims. #fact
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 5, 2016
Earlier, Morgan had defended Trump from people who had called him a hypocrite referring to the latter's call for a ban against foreign Muslims entering the US.
Morgan, Teigen and Trump were speaking their minds. But then, Ali had drawn his own kaleidoscopic life on such a huge and vibrant canvas that no storyteller would have dared to conjure him up.
He was born Cassius Clay in Kentucky's Louisville as the son of a sign painter father and a housecleaner mother. The stealer of Ali's 60-dollar red Schwinn bicycle had never imagined how his action was going to change the life's dynamic of the owner of his booty.
As a 12-year old, Clay could not come to terms with the loss, and to even the score, he decided he wouldn't take it lying down but fight. In that moment the butterfly, the bee, the theatrical performer in the "comedy of wisdom" and the symbol of racial pride was born, though the world came to realise it, perhaps, too late.
Long before declaring loyalty to the "Nation of Islam" group and changing his identity from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, he had refused to conform to the existing norms. By joining the group he said he was shedding his "slave name".
When he refused to fight the Viet Congs, with whom he had no quarrel, he put his heavyweight title at stake. While admitting that Ali was a supreme athlete, his opponents, both inside and outside the ring, accused him of not fighting like a real man, but like an unseen ghost who threw jabs and lethal left uppercuts at the most opportune moments.
A young Cassius Clay grew up listening to stories about a 19th century military commander bearing his own name who advocated the abolition of slavery. When he had returned from the war in Mexico, he had set free fourty slaves who he had inherited. He had later left the coveted position of being Abraham Lincoln's envoy to Russia to return to Kentucky only to continue to work for his cause.
In the 1940s and '50s when Clay was only a boy, racism in Louisville was at its peak. Clay's father was a disenchanted man. He believed that whites had come in his way of becoming a painting artist and forced him into what he was: a sign painter. He drank heavily, and let out his resentment over his wife, sometimes resulting in physical abuse.
Clay could only cling to his mother's bosom while his drunken father snored heavily in the next room. His mother Odessa recalled that even at six months, Clay had little muscular arms. Once while being in bed with her he stretched, his fist hitting her front teeth that eventually had to be pulled out. That was Clay's first knockout punch.
During his boyhood years the murder of the 14-year old Emmet Till left a scar on Clay's psyche. Till was accused of addressing a white cashier "baby". A couple of days later a group of white men pulled Till out of his bed, shot him in the head, tied barbed wire with a weight around his neck and threw his body into Tallahatchie River.
Even in grade ten Clay was no good in school. It was then that he began dreaming of a career in boxing, and started training at a local gym run by a policeman by the name of Joe Martin. He was unbelievably disciplined from the very beginning and tore through Golden Gloves competitions one after the other.
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| Muhammad Ali versus George Foreman. |
Upon Clay's return to his home town after winning the Olympic gold, a sandwich shop refused to serve him because he was black. In disgust, Clay threw his medal into the Ohio River.
The story of Ali that evolved between 1964 and 1980 was unparalleled in American history. Ali excited and provoked people not only within the ring, but also outside of it with his stands on civil rights, Vietnam and Black Power.
About Ali's vanquishing of George Foreman in Zaire, Norman Mailer wrote from the ringside, "Foreman's arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane, and in this doubled-over position he tried to wander out to the center of the ring. All the while his eyes were on Ali and he looked up with no anger as if Ali, indeed, was the man he knew best in the world and would see him on his dying day. Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. He went over like a 6-foot 60-year old butler who has just heard tragic news."
But the trajectory of the encounter with Joe Frazier in Manila was tellingly different. Ali himself admitted that it was the closest he had come to death.
Boxing is a sport cruel and often foolhardy in its own way when two contestants try their best to beat the hell out of the other with not bare, but gloved hands, especially in those days, to entertain an audience, the majority of which was whites.
Even Joe Louis has admitted that his behaviour was subject to set rules carefully hatched not to estrange white America. And Ali was the only athlete who dared to disclose the ugly side of this sport in the open.
Yet the champion and the rebel that Ali was appears to have outlived the sport that, at the same time, made him a cripple and the darling of two generations.