Muhammad Ali: Never the White Man’s Negro

[Dave]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/opinion/muhammad-ali-never-the-white-mans-negro.html

Muhammad Ali: Never the White Man’s Negro
By Joyce Carol Oates
June 6, 2016

CASSIUS CLAY, born in 1942, was the grandson of a slave; in
the United States of his boyhood and young manhood, the role
of the black athlete, particularly the black boxer, was a
forced self-effacement.

White male anxieties were, evidently, greatly roiled by the
spectacle of the strong black man, and had to be assuaged.
The greater the black boxer (Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Ezzard
Charles), the more urgent that he assume a public role of
caution and restraint. Kindly white men who advised their
black charges to be a “credit to their race” were not
speaking ironically.

And yet, the young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali refused to play
this emasculating role. He would not be the “white man’s
Negro” — he would not be anything of the white man’s at all.
Converting to the Nation of Islam at the age of 22,
immediately after winning the heavyweight championship from
Sonny Liston, he denounced his “slave name” (Cassius
Marcellus Clay, which was also his father’s name) and the
Christian religion; in refusing to serve in the Army he made
his political reasons clear: “I ain’t got no quarrel with
them Vietcong.”

An enormous backlash followed: where the young boxer had
been cheered, now he was booed. Denunciations rained upon
his head. Respected publications, including The New York
Times, continued to print the “slave name” Cassius Clay for
years. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his refusal
to comply with the draft, Ali stood his ground; he did not
serve time, but was fined $10,000 and his boxing license was
revoked so that he could not continue his professional
career, in the very prime of that career. In a gesture of
sheer pettiness the State Department took away his passport
so that he couldn’t fight outside the country. After he was
reinstated as a professional boxer three and a half years
later, he had lost much of his youthful agility. Yet he’d
never given in.

The heart of the champion is this: One never repudiates one’
s deepest values, one never gives in.

Though Ali had risen to dizzying heights of fame in the
1960s, it was in the 1970s that his greatness was
established. Who could have imagined that, being reinstated
as a boxer after a lengthy suspension, Ali would expand the
dimensions of the sport yet again; that, past his prime, his
legs slowed, his breath shorter, out of an ingenuity borne
of desperation he would reinvent himself as an athlete on
whose unyielding body younger boxers might punch themselves
out. He could no longer “float like a butterfly” but he
could lie back against the ropes, like a living heavy bag,
and allow an opponent like the hapless George Foreman to
exhaust himself trying to knock him out.

What is the infamous Rope-a-Dope stratagem of 1974 but a
brilliantly pragmatic stoicism in which the end (winning)
justifies the means (irreversible damage to body, brain).
The spectator is appalled to realize that a single blow of
Foreman’s delivered to a non-boxer might well be fatal; how
many dozens of these blows Ali absorbed, as in a fairy tale
in which the drama is one of reversed expectations. In this
way, with terrible cost to come in terms of Ali’s health, he
won back the heavyweight title at the age of 32, defeating
the 25–year-old Foreman.

Great as Ali-Foreman was, it can’t compare to the trilogy of
fights between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, 1974 and 1975;
Frazier won the first on points, Ali the second and third on
points and a TKO. These were monumental fights, displays of
human stamina, courage and “heart” virtually unparalleled in
the history of boxing. In the first, Ali experienced the
worst battering of his life, yet he did not give up; in the
second and third, Ali won against an exhausted Frazier, at
what cost to his health we can only guess — “The closest
thing to dying,” Ali said of the last fight. Yet,
incredibly, unconscionably, Ali was exploited by managers
and promoters who should have protected him; his doomed
career continued until 1981 with a devastating final loss,
to the much-younger Trevor Berbick. Ali then retired,
belatedly, after 61 fights, with 56 wins.

What does it mean to say that a fighter has “heart”? By
“heart” we don’t mean technical skill, nor even unusual
strength and stamina and ambition; by “heart” we mean
something like spiritual character.

The mystery of Muhammad Ali is this spiritual greatness,
that seemed to have emerged out of a far more ordinary, even
callow personality. With the passage of time, the rebel who’
d been reviled by many Americans would be transformed into
an American hero, especially amid general disenchantment
with the Vietnam War. The young man who’d been denounced as
a traitor was transformed into the iconic figure of our
time, a compassionate figure who seems to transcend race. A
warm, sepia light irradiates the past, glossing out jarring
details.

Ali had long ago transcended his own origins and his own
specific identity. As he’d once said: “Boxing was nothing.
It wasn’t important at all. Boxing was just meant as a way
to introduce me to the world.”

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of “On Boxing.” She is this
year’s recipient of the A.J. Leibling Award for Excellence
in Boxing Writing.

[Dr. Jew Zeuss]

Proves US lawyers are whores looking for sugar daddies