In the chaos following his first career-making triumph over Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964, Muhammad Ali—still then a 22-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky named Cassius Clay—found his way to a microphone and camera in the crowded boxing ring and bellowed five words that announced his loud arrival: “I shook up the world!”
That he did. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday at age 74, was a seismic human being.
He called himself “The Greatest,” which was both a garish boast and the flat truth. Handsome, charismatic and utterly complicated, he delivered bravado and beauty that defied a brutal sport, simultaneously becoming a global celebrity, a sports hero, an activist, humanitarian, and, at times, a polarizing figure. Ali put himself front and center of a turbulent era in American life, marked by battles over civil rights and war in Vietnam. He was harshly criticized when, citing his religious beliefs, he refused induction into the military—a deeply held but controversial choice that cost him four years of his boxing prime and threatened to send him to prison. He would hold true to his decision, even when it bruised his public image, cost him his titles, financial opportunities and nearly his freedom.
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing,” he once said.
He was so much bigger than his sport. There has never been an athlete quite like him, and the corporate, modern climate surrounding sports seems to assure there won’t be one like him again. (Today’s athletes are trained to avoid politics and matters of controversy as if they will cause a ruptured Achilles; blandness is taught as a virtue) As a sheer personality, Ali cannot be replicated. He could be a loudmouth and terribly cruel (ask Joe Frazier), but also charming, often all at the same time. Telegenic and masterful at the sound bite, he was brilliantly equipped for a period in which television became the heartbeat of the culture. A camera was his co-conspirator.
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| Muhammad Ali Shook Up the World |
“What is genius but balance on the edge of impossible?” Norman Mailer once wrote, after witnessing Ali’s famous eighth-round knockout of George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 known as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight in which Ali let himself get repeatedly pummeled on the ropes by Foreman, exhausting him, before Ali sprung ferociously to life and prevailed.
The final decades of Ali’s life would be less confrontational than the earlier ones. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1984 at age 42, which would cause tremors in his limbs and eventually still his expressive face. Ali would continue to make public appearances, no longer a whirlwind of contentiousness but a beloved legend, most memorably at the 1996 Olympics, when the 1960 gold medalist appeared at the Opening Ceremony in Atlanta and lit the flame. Though Ali’s voice was diminished, his sense of humor remained intact—there was the hilarious 60 Minutes episode in which a prankster Ali pretended to fall asleep and throw drowsy punches at correspondent Ed Bradley.
A line has often been drawn connecting Ali’s diagnosis and his fighting career, and the boxer was not naive about the hazards of his sport. “I think boxing is dangerous,” Ali said on an episode of Face the Nation in 1976. “Any man who’s been hit in the head…the brain’s a delicate thing.”
In the coming hours, there will be tributes to Ali from Presidents and Prime Ministers, champions of the fight trade and from citizens everywhere, because Ali was known in every corner of the planet. This was a status that Ali sought—“He has always wanted the world as his audience, wanted the kind of attention that few men in history ever receive,” Sports Illustrated’s Mark Kram once wrote—and yet so few in history have been equipped to handle such a position. Ali not only handled it, he thrived in it, finding power in using that booming voice for the voiceless and later with simply his presence alone. He will be recalled as a great boxing champion, sure. But Muhammad Ali will be remembered because he lived up to that statement he made many years ago, as a young man, in the chaos of the ring.
He shook up the world.
Source: www.wsj.com
