‘I am the greatest,” Muhammad Ali used to say, and I began to guess as much when he was still Cassius Clay and arrived at the Louisville, Ky., airport after boxing his way to an Olympics gold medal in Rome.
I lived in Louisville myself — once went to church just a few blocks from where he was raised — and tuned into the live broadcast on local TV to watch this amazing, funny hometown athlete I had been cheering.
“Where is that Floyd Patterson?” he asked a man with a microphone. “I want that Floyd Patterson.” The fact that I still remember those words 56 years later tells you something.
Here was this precocious amateur, having won the light-heavyweight division in Rome, saying in so many audacious words that he was ready to whip the heavyweight champion of the world. While I knew he had a way to go, I also figured he would eventually arrive at some supreme destination, either by knocking people out with his lightning-fast jabs or flabbergasting the world with his personality.
Boxing back then was still a major sport in America, and I loved it. I came to see with ever greater clarity how exceptional this local guy was with his grace, his big-man speed, his dodging, weaving and dancing and not least his ring intelligence.
He would figure out strategies and they would work, such as leaning on a rope while someone he called a dope wore himself out. OK, George Foreman was no dope, but he did get tricked and, as Ali said about himself, he could be so mean he could make medicine sick.
The memory I like best, however, is about the time in 1975 when I was on a fellowship at the University of Michigan. Going for the heavyweight championship again, Ali was facing Joe Frazier, who had beaten him once.
The theater was full for this “Thrilla in Manila.” It was as if the several hundred black folks in the Ann Arbor audience had a compact. Every time Ali would connect with one of his jabs, they’d all shout, “pow!”
There was no questioning that this audience was on Ali’s side, and no wonder: He was a messenger about black pride, about standing up for yourself, about the need for justice. And so, when Frazier failed to come out of his corner after the 14th round, they stood and cheered not just for Ali, but for what he represented, or so it seemed to me.
Ali especially enlisted in causes bigger than himself when he changed his name, adopted the Islamic faith, began speaking out for peace and was a conscientious objector to the draft. It was sad when blows to the head helped induce Parkinson’s disease, leaving him slow of mouth and minus the old vigor. But his efforts in reaching out only increased and he became a symbol of caring.
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