Revisiting the Mythical Reality of Muhammad Ali

 by Frank DiFulvio  

| View comments |  Print This Post

Muhammad Ali's life has always been lived as theater, both the character and the script woven deceitfully together into the fabric of a big brash uncomfortable historic lie.

Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., turned 65 years old on January 17th. For some reason this got me thinking about his life, legacy, and legitimacy as a revered, honorable, and respected international icon. One thing that we can all agree upon is that Ali must be the envy of public figures around the world. After all, journalists tend to write two types of stories about him. He is either great or the greatest. A man of a thousand rhythmic quotes; with hands that could sting and a heart so angelically pure it could daintily float.

An appropriate description when discussing his professional accomplishments in the boxing ring, but it is far too kind an assessment of the man himself; who in many ways cannot be objectively described as moral during his early life and boxing career. Some may find that to be a form of cultural blasphemy, but to me, it is a sinfully honest opinion that has far too often been ignored by the mainstream media when discussing the mythical reality of the greatest theatrical show on earth, Muhammad Ali. 

When I was a young boy growing up in New Jersey, my Father, a no-nonsense Italian man possessing old world values, showed a contemptuous dislike for Muhammad Ali. Not because he didn’t like boxing, as he would often talk to me about the great Rocky Marciano, and how he would have put Ali in his place if the two of them had ever met in the ring. No, he despised Ali because he saw in him everything that he disliked about others; a rude, self-promoting, arrogant, and disrespectful man who seemed to show nothing but vitriolic loathing for his own country and its leaders. My Father’s low opinion of Ali was enough of an impetus to make Ali not only a youthful hero of mine, but someone that I wanted to be like. After all, I was a teenager at the time, and went out of my way to rebelliously embrace any person or cause that my Father found genuine displeasure with.   

I could remember watching Ali’s fights on television as a teenager, and cheering every time his fast and powerful fists would disfigure the face of his unlucky, and even unworthy opponents. How exciting it was to watch him bully and bloody the pugnacious face and soft pale white body of that bar room brawler turned prize fighter from Bayonne New Jersey, Chuck Wepner; or subjugate the fighting spirit of Joe Frazier by convincing him to stay seated on his own stool before the 15th round in Manila after a violent and unforgiving battle of champions. Let’s not forget his humbling of that previously unbeatable goliath George Foreman in Zaire, Africa, by sacrificing his own body in order to slay the giant champion; letting big George fall under the weight of his own menacing size and power. It was a modern day David vs. Goliath fairytale; with the same outcome. The agile and arrogant smaller man confidently predicting the impending defeat of his larger and more feared opponent; then backing up his own prophetic words in the face of overwhelming and worldwide skepticism of his ability to do so. It was breathtaking. 

Yes, it all seemed so right at the time. Ali was not just fighting to be the heavyweight champion of the world. He was fighting against war, poverty, injustice, racism, and religious intolerance. The late great George Plimpton, and still great David Halberstam, along with many other influential writers and opinion makers of the time, told us that was the case; and we sheepishly believed these sage men of unquestioned wisdom. More so even today as we look back at Ali’s boxing career, because of the sympathy that we all feel for someone like Ali; whose once strong and intimidating persona is now trembling, broken, and even small in stature. His body ravaged by the debilitating onslaught of advanced Parkinson's Disease; due to the accumulation of too many blows to the body and head that he almost seemed to welcome during the latter stages of his long boxing career.

So why kick a great and good man when he’s down? That’s not the American way, is it? Even the most recent bio flick made about Ali’s life and times, starring Will Smith, decided to premier a few years ago on Christmas Day in order to further sanctify his image. Hollywood decided to release the movie on the birthday of another great man, Jesus Christ, to help propagate the saintly image of Ali as the messiah who once fought, literally, for all good people and noble causes. Well, forgive me for what I am about to write, and prepare yourself for what you are about to read. I am no longer buying into what the spin mavens at Sports Illustrated, or the ivory tower editorials of the New Yorker Magazine, have been selling us about Ali for all these years. 

First of all, let us remember what Ali did for a living, which made him famous in the first place. He violently beat up people for money in an enclosed area with the sole intent of hurting them; for the sadistic entertainment of others. The more he hurt his opponent, the better. As Ali once said himself, “my job is to beat people up.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the fact that Ali came from a middle-class African-American family in Louisville, Kentucky, and could have found another way to make an honorable living than beating people senseless, makes his fame even more disturbing and less heroic. It can be persuasively argued that a sharecropper’s son from the South like Joe Frazier had to fight in order to survive, but Ali can’t even make that claim. He had alternatives, but by all lucidly objective historical accounts of Ali’s younger days in Louisville, he was just too damn lazy to choose an alternative career. Ali wanted the easy way out, and he was just lucky enough to be given the body and athletic ability to take advantage of his good fortune.

There are other unpleasant skeletons that silently reside in Ali’s historical closet. He often chose to be associated with both people and organizations who were not reluctant to spew their own share of racial, ethnic, and religious venom towards others; especially Jews and fellow African-Americans who happened to disagree with their social, cultural, and religious views and traditions. The anti-Semitic diatribes of Ali’s Muslim patriarch, the late Elijah Muhammad, were legendary, and make such modern day anti-Semites as David Duke sound almost cartoonish in comparison. Than there is the way that Ali unmercifully taunted his contemporary antagonist Joe Frazier; maliciously calling him ignorant and a gorilla throughout his professional career. Those ugly racial epitaphs are now posted to Joe Frazier’s forehead for a lifetime, and Ali is the one who put them there. He knowingly did so without regard to the real life human consequences for Frazier; or the public image that such defining and racially demeaning contextual remarks helped to create about Frazier in the American consciousness.

But then again, Ali’s earlier life during his active boxing career had always been lived with his own selfish needs and interests trumpeting the feelings of others; often showing little concern about the consequences of his demeaning and insensitive rhetorical musings. He left it up to others to fictionalize the historical record for him, and his minions in the media have been doing a great job in doing so for years. I just happen to be a convert from the prevailing conventional wisdom about Ali; and now see his entire historical record through the prism of an honest and open light. It is time for others to come out of the darkness and to do the same; no matter how much it hurts them to do so.

My Father was wrong. Marciano could have never beaten Ali in the ring. Ali was simply too big, too strong, too fast, and too good a fighter for the undersized Italian kid from Brockton, Massachusetts to deal with. Only in the movies does Rocky win such a fight. Just like only in the movies do men like Ali become something completely different in the present from the past life that they so publicly lived. Movies can do such things, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should partake in the historical conspiracy. As Ali once arrogantly blurted out himself, "I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest."

Ali the poet was prophetic. As for Ali the man and prizefighter, well, his life has always been lived as theater, both the character and the script woven deceitfully together into the fabric of a big brash uncomfortable historic lie; with very few of us having the courage to honestly critique the entire show. Why? Because the cultural elite are still stubbornly wedded to the mythical reality of a young and saintly Muhammad Ali. They blindly forget what he actually did for a living, refuse to hear the hurtful rhetoric that he gleefully directed towards others, and are still unable or unwilling to publicly speak out and condemn the entourage of hate that often existed in the hearts and words of those whom Ali freely chose to associate himself with throughout his early thematic life and boxing career. All because many of his longtime supporters — intellectuals, writers, actors, and opinion makers of all types and stripes — continue to naively adhere to that old vaudeville adage; the whole show, whether true or not, whether real or imaginary, must go on.

Today, with his brave and spiritually centered public call for religious and racial tolerance, and his many charitable endeavors, Muhammad Ali can finally lay claim to the status of a moral and honorable world leader. However, that doesn’t mean that we should sanitize his past in order to honor his present good deeds. A man’s legacy should be judged in whole. For Ali, to do so will not always be pleasant. For the rest of us, not to do so will be a contemptuously dishonest surrender to fictional history and settled cultural orthodoxy.

Culture: Sports

Read more articles by Frank DiFulvio