Muhammad Ali
(January 17, 1942-June 3, 2016)
The Greatest One’s Legacy
Written by Dan McDonald
Muhammad Ali has passed away. He was
one of the great boxers of the Twentieth Century. Some might claim Louis or
Marciano was equal or superior. We will never know. We just know that in his
prime, when he was in full training, he had no equals. Ali managed to be much
bigger than simply a heavyweight champion of the world. He became a cultural
icon whose impact left no one neutral to his presence. He used his
boxing greatness to leave an exclamation point on American culture.
I will not write about his legacy as
someone who was always on Ali’s side in the controversies. It is important for
me in trying to understand Ali’s legacy to know that for many years I was
uncomfortable with him, even enraged by what he represented. He was arrogant
when I appreciated humility. Perhaps it is a shame it took me so long to
appreciate him. But perhaps what I felt towards him in younger days shows all
the more the legacy he left behind.
The first time I heard of Cassius Clay, was as a kid on the
bus in a rural northern school district. One of the other kids on the bus was talking
of the Sonny Liston v. Cassius Clay fight. Liston was favored, but Ali, or Clay
as he was then known won by knockout. He had predicted it. He was perhaps the
only one that had predicted that outcome.
It was a time of turmoil. America
was going to war in Southeast Asia to help the South Vietnamese to remain free.
Meanwhile racial divides within the United States were being addressed. Some
African-Americans were wondering about the irony of being drafted to fight in a
war to keep South Vietnam free while the eradication of oppression against
people of color was only slowly and painfully being addressed in the United
States.
The heavyweight champion boxer gave
up what he viewed as his colonial imposed Christian religion and Christian name to accept
his new name as a convert to Islam. He was served with draft papers, and in
reply he served notice he would not serve in the military as he was not at war
with the people of North Vietnam. He went to jail.
Many of us who were patriotic white
Americans were offended by what Muhammad Ali had done. In our minds, America
was the greatest nation on the face of the earth. We were committed to freedom
and liberty and equality. Slavery had been wrong and now it was illegal.
Segregation had been wrong and we were dismantling it. As a nation we had not
always treated people of color as equals, but now we were giving them equality.
He was causing trouble when he should have recognized the strides we were
making. He rejected our Christianity. He had not one shred of humility. He was
living in the greatest nation in the world and was pompously declaring himself
the greatest. He was a troublemaking arrogant man. Whomever he fought we were
for whether it was Frazier or Foreman or any other fighter.
It has taken me the entire span of
Ali’s life to begin to understand the importance of what he was doing. My white
culture had decided that our America was the greatest nation on the earth. Here
was a heavyweight boxing champion of the world declaring himself to be the “greatest.”
We Americans took pride in being “the greatest” collectively, but individually
we had been taught to be humble. My idea of the perfect athlete had been Lou
Gehrig as portrayed by Gary Cooper in “Pride of the Yankees.” We had individual
humility connected to our collective national pride. Collectively, as a nation
we reeked of pride and arrogance but we took pride in being individually
humble, citizens of the greatest nation on earth.
Ali turned the tables and questioned
everything we valued. He turned his back on our Christianity and refused to
serve in our military and instead of accepting individual humility within our
greatest nation claimed individually to be the greatest. He pushed the line
from being the greatest boxer by right of his winning the world championship to
pushing it in our face and saying his individual greatness was as true as our
collective national greatness.
As a nation he would have happily enshrined him into our national pantheon of heroes if he had accepted his place
with the grace of individual humility while embracing our national greatness. We would have declared him an
equal and made room for him in our gradually integrating shrine of heroes. But
Ali seems to have seen that as a temptation he could not accept. The temptation
to accept that America could give someone the gift of equality was a blasphemous offer that he rejected. That has been part of the American fantasy
for our centuries. We moved quickly from being a nation which expressed ideals
about equality to being a nation believing it was in our power to liberate men
and women and give them equality. For Ali, that American fantasy of being able
to give someone equality was anathema.
To use a boxing metaphor, Ali
stepped into the ring to fight an opponent who was saying to him, if you prove
yourself one of us, we will grant you equality. He was replying to us, “I am
already an equal. Are you worthy of being my equal?” No one perhaps in
American history had so turned the tables in his dealing with America. We were a nation with a white power structure that had labeled and identified people by races, naming them as savages, slaves, and illegals. We were the greatest nation but we were willing to
confer equality to people willing to show themselves one of us. Ali pronounced himself the greatest and was offering equality to anyone worthy of standing with him. He turned the tables.
In time most of us learned to respect him and he also grew in
his understanding of life, because as he pointed out we aren’t the same at
fifty as we were at twenty.
He made us uncomfortable. We loved
the idea of equality. He demanded to be treated as an equal in his humanity and
demanded to be recognized for his accomplishments in his sport. His claim to
humility had to be a hidden one for he used his individual greatness as a
one man attack on our own idolatry of national superiority that was coupled with
personalized individual humility. He showed personal greatness with a submerged hidden humility as a counter punch to the system that had in his youth refused to recognize his equality. His legacy is that he lived as an equal and
called upon us to wonder if we were worthy to be his equal. He was truly a
remarkable man in all that he accomplished.
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