Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (28 page)

In sum, Ali is now being retroactively turned into a forerunner of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. “A bargain has been struck,” says Robert Lipsyte. “Ali and the people around him get their money. And I’m glad Ali is making money. He’s showing great gallantry in the face of his physical condition, and he never made what he should have made before. But the trade-off is, Ali is no longer threatening. He’s safe; he’s comfortable. He’s another dangerous black man who white America has found a way to emasculate. You know, white America still hasn’t figured out how to deal with powerful black male figures who don’t play football or basketball other than to find ways to tame them and take away any real power and influence they might have. So the bottom line is, if we can control Muhammad Ali, it makes us more powerful. And at long last, we’ve brought Muhammad Ali under control.”

Mike Marqusee, author of
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties
, is in accord with Lipsyte and observes, “Ali’s power in the third world grew precisely because he was a symbol of defiance against racism and the use of United States military power abroad. And those issues are very much alive today; so it means a lot to the powers that be if Ali can be used to suggest to the rest of the world that they aren’t problems anymore. Governments and corporations have this incredible power to incorporate imagery and attach whatever meanings they choose to that imagery in pursuit of their goals. Nothing can take away Ali’s past. It happened; it’s part of history. But that history is now being plundered and deliberately obscured to sell commercial products and, more significantly, ideas. Ali is being reduced to serving as a mouthpiece for whatever ideas and products those with influence and power want to sell. And the people guiding him are letting it happen for narrow financial reasons.”

“Most great athletes can sell Wheaties,” notes Ramsey Clark. “But they can’t impact upon social and political issues. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to do both.”

Clark’s voice is significant. As Attorney General of the United States, he oversaw as a matter of duty the 1967 criminal prosecution of Ali for refusing induction into the United States Army. However, he has long been aligned with liberal causes and has worked closely with Ali on a number of occasions.

“There’s a common tactic among the dominant opinion-makers,” says Clark. “They want to influence the population they’re communicating with, so they transmit information selectively and create an image that’s unreal but very powerful. On the one hand, they’ll demonize their subject. Or in the other direction, they’ll overlook the sins of someone they want to popularize and focus on the aspects of that person’s life which reflect values they want to promote. It’s a question of what those in power want to impose and consider safe. And what we have now in many of the depictions of Ali is the portrait of a man who is heroic, well-intentioned, and good—all of which he was and still is—but who is presented to us in an unreal artificial manner.”

Ron Borges of the
Boston Globe
has followed Ali and the American scene for decades. “It’s not uncommon for historical figures to slip out of focus when removed from their time by several generations,” says Borges. “But this is something more. There’s a deliberate distortion of what Ali’s life has been like and what his impact on America really was. Maybe someone thinks that this sort of revisionism makes Ali more acceptable. But acceptable to whom and for what purpose other than selling products and making money? They’re cutting out all the things that made him Ali. Frankly, I wonder sometimes what Ali is about these days other than making money. I know that, underneath the façade, Ali is still there. But to a lot of people, it’s like he’s a ghost. Twenty-year-olds today have no idea what Ali was about. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just another celebrity. That’s what it has come to, and it steals Ali’s true legacy.”

Dave Kindred authored a number of ground-breaking stories about Ali for the
Atlanta Constitution
and
Washington Post
. “In the past,” says Kindred, “there were reasons, a lot of them, for admiring and respecting Ali. Now you’re asked to admire and respect him because he’s a living saint. And I never thought of Ali as a saint. He was a rogue and a rebel, a guy with good qualities and flaws who stood for something. But now, it seems as though he stands for everything and nothing. All of the barbed edges have been filed down. His past is being rewritten. They’re trying to remove any vestige of Ali that might make it harder to use him to sell automobiles or expensive watches or whatever other product he’s endorsing at the moment. That, to me, is the heart of it. Ali today seems to be blatantly for sale. He’s trotted around to high-profile events and events where he’s paid large sums of money for being there, and often I find myself asking, ‘What’s he doing there?’ I assume he enjoys it. I’m sure he likes the attention. His need for the crowd has always been there and he’s entitled to the money. But the loss of Ali’s voice is very sad. And I’m not talking about his physical voice, because the people around Ali have figured out a way to deal with his infirmities and still keep him center stage. I’m talking about content and hard edge and the challenge that attached to some of the things Ali said in the past. There was a time when Ali forced us to think about race and religion and many of the other fundamental forces that affect our lives. He was right on some things and wrong on others, but the challenge was always there. And that Ali is gone now, with the result that there’s a whole new generation—two generations, actually—who know only the sanitized Ali, and that’s very sad.”

Jeffrey Sammons, a professor of African-American studies at NYU and author of
Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society
, is in accord. “What’s happening to Ali now,” says Sammons, “is typical of what has happened to so many black figures. It’s a commodification and a trivialization. Maybe the idea is that, by embracing Ali as a society, we can feel good about having become more tolerant. We can tell ourselves that we’re not like those bad people in the 1960s who took away Ali’s title and his right to fight. But by not showing what Ali was, we’re also not showing what American society was at that time. And if the rough edges on Ali are filed down, you have the revision of history in a very dangerous way. By distorting America’s past, you make it impossible to understand the past. And if you can’t understand the past, then you won’t be able to understand the present or the future.”

None of the above comments is intended to take away from Ali’s greatness. Each of the speakers is a longtime admirer of Ali. Each of them would no doubt agree with the assessment of boxing maven Lou DiBella, who says, “In many respects, the way Ali is portrayed today is simply a reflection of how well-loved he is and the fact that he’s a great person. All of us are open to adoration and, in Ali’s case, he deserves it. He’s older, wiser, and mellower now than he was decades ago. He enjoys being who he is. And whatever good things he gets, he deserves them.”

Still, Ali’s legacy today is in danger of being protected in the same manner as the estate of Elvis Presley is protecting Elvis’s image. New generations are born; and to them, Ali is more legend than reality, part of America’s distant past.

Meanwhile, 2004 has brought more of the same. The year began with IBM, Gillette, and Adidas featuring Ali in multinational commercial campaigns. Tashen Books published an Ali coffee-table tome bound in silk and Louis Vuitton leather that retails for $3,000 a copy with a “special edition” that sells for $7,500. The book is entitled
GOAT
, which is an acronym for “Greatest of All Time” and also the name of Ali’s personal company.

“I think it’s significant,” says Jerry Izenberg, “that the book is named after Ali’s corporation and not Ali.” Then Izenberg adds, “For those who didn’t live through the 1960s, it takes some work to understand the true importance of Ali. And people are lazy; the media is lazy. No one wants to read and study. So they take the product that’s given to them by IMG, Columbia Pictures, and others, and accept it whole cloth. The result is that, the further removed in time we become, the more Ali is distorted. And I get very angry about that because the distortion of history breeds ignorance. If Ali isn’t remembered as the person he truly was, we’ll all be poorer. It will wipe out some very important lessons that America learned. Let’s face it; most people today don’t have a clue about Ali. They have no idea what Ali and the country went through in the 1960s. Ali isn’t the same person now that he was then. Like most of us, he changed as he grew older. But I don’t worry about the changes in Ali. I worry about the misperception of what Ali stood for. Ali can be all things to all people but, unless there’s truth, it’s worthless.”

Ali in the 1960s stood for the proposition that principles matter; that equality among people is just and proper; that the war in Vietnam was wrong. Every time he looked in the mirror and preened, “I’m so pretty,” he was saying “black is beautiful” before it became fashionable to do so. Indeed, as early as March 1963,
Ebony
magazine declared, “Cassius Marcellus Clay—and this fact has evaded the sportswriting fraternity—is a blast furnace of racial pride. His is a pride that would never mask itself with skin lighteners and processed hair, a pride scorched with memories of a million little burns.”

And Ali’s role in spreading that pride has been testified to by others:

ARTHUR ASHE:
“This man helped give an entire people a belief in themselves and the will to make themselves better.”

REGGIE JACKSON:
“Muhammad Ali gave me the gift of self-respect.”

HOSEA WILLIAMS:
“Ali made you feel good about yourself. He made you feel so glad you are who you are; that God had made you black.”

In sum, the experience of being black changed for millions of men and women because of Ali. But one of the reasons Ali had the impact he did was because there was an ugly edge to what he said.

By focusing on Ali’s ring exploits and his refusal to serve in Vietnam, while at the same time covering up the true nature of Nation of Islam doctrine, the current keepers of Ali’s legacy are losing sight of why he so enthralled and enraged segments of American society. And equally important, by rewriting history and making Ali out to be in the mainstream of the black civil rights movement, the revisionists demean Ali’s personal struggle because they gloss over the extent to which he was cut off from mainstream suppport.

Thus, Ramsey Clark warns, “Legacies are important but they have to be true. The distortion of a legacy is a distortion of public truth and a disservice to history, as are all distortions of values and character.”

Ali himself once recalled, “For three years, up until I fought Sonny Liston, I’d sneak into Nation of Islam meetings through the back door. I didn’t want people to know I was there. I was afraid, if they knew, I wouldn’t be allowed to fight for the title. Later on, I learned to stand up for my beliefs.”

Ali’s views have changed since then, but he is unrepentant regarding what he once believed. “Elijah Muhammad was a good man,” Ali has said, “even if he wasn’t the Messenger of God we thought he was. Not everything he said was right, but everyone in the Nation of Islam loved him because he carried what was best for us in his heart. Elijah taught us to be independent, to clean ourselves up, to be proud and healthy. He stressed the bad things the white man did to us so we could get free and strong. If you look at what our people were like then, a lot of us didn’t have self-respect. We didn’t have anything after being in America for hundreds of years. Elijah Muhammad was trying to lift us up and get our people out of the gutter. I think he was wrong when he talked about white devils, but part of what he did was make people feel it was good to be black. So I’m not apologizing for what I believed.”

It’s the ultimate irony, then, that so many of the people shaping Ali’s legacy today are “spin-doctoring” with regard to his beliefs. Ali stood up for his convictions and sacrificed a great deal for them. Indeed, in a recent commercial for IBM’s Linux system, Ali speaks the words, “Speak your mind; don’t back down.” So why hide the true nature of what Ali’s principles were?

Also, it should be said that, in 2004, there’s a particularly compelling reason to mourn the lost legacy of Muhammad Ali.

We live in an age marked by horrific divisions amongst the world’s cultures and religions. If we are to avoid increasingly violent assaults and possibly a nuclear holocaust, the people of the world must learn to understand others with alien beliefs, find the humanity in their enemies, and embrace that which is good in those they abhor.

Muhammad Ali is the ideal messenger for this cause. He is a man who once preached an ideology that was anathema to most Americans; an ideology that he himself now rejects in significant measure. Yet America has found the humanity in Ali, embraced the good in him, and taken him into its collective heart. And vice versa.

Also, it should be noted that, were he so inclined, Ali is still capable of influencing public debate. All he would need to say is two words regarding the current war in Iraq: “
It’s wrong!
” That wouldn’t dictate what people think, but it would have a significant impact on what a lot of people thought about. However, instead, Ali has held to the theme advised by those around him and advanced when he was asked about al-Qaeda in June 2002.

“I dodge those questions,” Ali told David Frost on
HBO Real Sports
. “I’ve opened up businesses across the country, selling products, and I don’t want to say nothing and, not knowing what I’m doing, not [being] qualified, say the wrong thing and hurt my businesses and things I’m doing.”

It’s hard to imagine Muhammad Ali in the 1960s declining to comment on war and racism for fear that it would hurt his business ventures.

Great men are considered great, not only because of what they achieve, but also because of the road they travel to reach their final destination. Sanitizing Muhammad Ali and rounding off the rough edges of his journey is a disservice both to history and to Ali himself. Rather than cultivate historical amnesia, we should cherish the memory of Ali as a warrior and as a gleaming symbol of defiance against an unjust social order when he was young.