RIP Muhammad Ali

Originally published on June 3, 2016

Another icon from my childhood, Muhammad Ali, has died. I heard the sad news this morning and have been thinking about him all day. The sport of boxing was different back when Ali was in his prime and I was in elementary school. The big title fights between he and Frazier and Foreman were each like the Super Bowl. They dominated conversations among my buddies and me on the playground at recess for weeks leading up to them.

And as a young boy growing up during tumultuous times, Ali was more than a champion fighter for me. He represented my first sampling of a generational gap, the first time I realized that it was even possible to take a different position than my parents (and that it really was okay), the foreshadowing of a rebelliousness awakening in me, mostly kept in check out of fear and love and respect for my parents and the customs that accompanied the 1970s in the Heart of Dixie.

I lived a sheltered life as a young boy and knew little of the turbulent goings-on as opposition to the Viet Nam War and racial tension escalated around me. But when I listened to Merv Griffin or Dick Cavett or Howard Cosell interviewing Muhammad Ali, I instinctively knew that hidden behind his rhymes and grandiosity, something important was being said and that I needed to know about it.

My father considered “Cassius Clay” (as he always referred to him) a “draft dodger” which was despicable in his eyes, as two of his sons — my older brothers — were drafted into the Army to serve during the same war to which Ali was conscientiously objecting. It was a bitter pill for my father, himself a sailor in the Navy during WWII. My father had little tolerance for Ali’s swaggering bravado and antics inside the ring, either; humility being among my father’s most valued character traits.

Meanwhile, I led “Ali, Ali” chants on the bus ride home from school on the day of the “Thrilla in Manilla” and laid down two-to-one odds with lunch money, guaranteeing an Ali victory, in the same way Joe Namath guaranteed a win for the Jets in the Super Bowl a few years earlier. But I kept my mouth shut in the living room as we watched the fight on our black and white TV and practiced my version of the “rope-a-dope” in my bedroom in between rounds behind closed doors. At 10, I surely knew who held the power in my home.

By the time Ali lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, some fifteen years after his last fight and weakened by Parkinson’s Disease, I expect he was seen by most as a less polarizing figure — as one of the greatest athletes of all time and a respected spokesperson for civil rights. But I don’t think my dad’s opinion of him changed much.

These are two men for whom I have tremendous respect, for very different reasons. I’d like to think they’ll have an opportunity to work out their differences now.

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some other darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father…. Shoot them for what? How do I go to shoot down them poor little black people, little babies, children and women? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” — Muhammad Ali (1967), on why he refused to fight in Vietnam.