The Greatest

This past Wednesday 40 years ago the artist formerly known as Cassius Clay cornered an ex-con called Sonny Liston and used his head for bongo drums. There wasn’t much floating like butterflies or stinging like bees but there was plenty of snot and a little bit of blood. Since Liston’s brain had been dashed against its protective membrane more often than had Clay’s, he finally called it a night in the seventh.

The rules of boxing, written in Worcester sauce on a wad of napkins and stored in a vault in Las Vegas, stood squarely behind Clay’s victory. The Third Amendment, penned in lipstick under the phone number of a showgirl named Delores, clearly states that: ‘Iffen one boy goes yeller ‘n gives up, by virtoo of havin’ a can of whupass opened on him by t’other boy, then that t’other boy is the

winner, God bless’m.”

Most fighters would have had half a bottle of champagne, phoned their mothers and turned in for an early night. Those with healthy self-esteem might have called their manager the next day to demand a peak cap with their name embroidered on the front. Clay, on the other hand, woke up and changed his name to that of the most illustrious prophet of the world’s fastest growing religion. But somehow L Ron Hubbard just didn’t sound right so he opted for Muhammed Ali.

Ali’s rise emboldened a generation of closet rhyme-makers, who until then had furtively read Dr Seuss to one another in abandoned warehouses. In Pennsylvania Avenue protesters famously chanted, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many babies you kill today?” while inside the Oval Office Lyndon Johnson shot rubber bands at Henry Kissinger.

‘Why can’t we just use a nuke and prove Hiroshima weren’t no fluke?” Kissinger sighed. ‘Oh Lyndon, don’t be a meshugah goy! Just drop more incendiaries on Hanoi.”

But it was the impatient younger generation of black radicals who saw Ali as a potential standard-bearer for decisive change. Malcolm X, disenfranchised because of his insistence on autographing ballot papers, became Ali’s guru. It was an astute political move, and possibly our own Khoisan X might have gone further in politics if he had co-opted a pugilist to carry his standard and translate his philosophy into sporting glory. But then again podgy midget boxers with post-nasal drip are hard to find.

It was just the beginning for Ali, and after the Rumble in the Jungle he could name his price. Indeed, he proved too expensive for promoters eager to arrange the Whine on the Rhine, the Whipcrack in the Outback and the Burp in the Burbs.

The legend of The Greatest is as healthy as ever, even if the man himself is not. Whenever an Olympic torch is needed to be held shakily aloft, Ali is there. Whenever Americans vote on the greatest sportsman ever, Ali invariably edges out Dan Marino, Wayne Gretsky and Xena, Warrior Princess. Even Hollywood cashed in, starring Will Smith playing Richard Roundtree playing Lawrence Fishburne playing Ali.

But sometimes it all gets a little out of hand. The Times, a newspaper so dignified it no longer needs to qualify its name with a geographical reference, this week ran a feature that began thus: ‘It was an event that helped to unravel the sporting, social and cultural fabric of the world.”

The uninitiated reader was flung into a frenzy of speculation. Had evidence emerged that Hermann Goering had in fact been Leni Riefenstahl in drag? Had Mao Zedong been confirmed as the inventor of not just the modern pentathlon but also rhythm and blues? 

Indeed, anything was possible as the feature promised to examine ‘the mystery and majesty of a bout from which the forces of conservatism would never recover.” Since the forces of conservatism have recovered, one was none the wiser. Was this the bout between the Marines and Viet Cong at Khe Sanh? Maggie Thatcher with one arm tied behind her back versus Argentina?

According to the first sentence of the piece, ‘it is only in retrospect that we can pick out the events that changed the world”. How true: the sieve of selective memory and the microscope of hindsight are marvelous things. But one doesn’t need any objective distance to recognise things that won’t change the world — The Times‘s feature, for instance. Neither does Ali need to be dutifully contextualised, politically, racially and socially.

That’s one of the perks of being The Greatest. You don’t need to say a word.