BOXING
Maggie Davey
In a land survey carried out in 1855 in the town of Ennis in county Clare, Ireland, the unremarkable note was made that one John Grady was renting a house in Turnpike Road in the centre of the town for 15 shillings a month. Around this time, and across the Atlantic, in or around Duck Lick Creek, Logan, Kentucky, a group of freed slaves, originally from Liberia, bought some land and there married, farmed and started a family. They went by the name Morehead, a name of white slave owners of the area.
Odessa Grady Clay, Cassius Clay’s mother, was the great granddaughter of John Grady of Ennis whose son Abe Grady emigrated to the United States, and the freed slave Tom Morehead was Clay’s great grandfather.
Cassius’s name itself was the same as that of a famous Kentucky abolitionist of that time. When he changed his name to Muhammed Ali in 1964 he remarked “Why should I keep my white slavemaster’s name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonoured?”
New evidence has been unearthed for a documentary to be screened on the Irish-language television channel TG4 to confirm what was until now only rumoured, and now Ali can take his place (should he wish) among the Reagans, the Kennedys and the millions of Americans who have Irish ancestors.
Ali is on record as saying that any of “slaveholder Clay’s blood” that came into his family came as a result of “rape and defilement” but now it seems the “white blood” came from an altogether different direction.
The front page of the Clare Champion, the county’s regional newspaper, featured this story heavily in recent weeks, and on the same page pictured an African family showing off their new Irish citizenship papers.
The same edition carries a story about John F Kennedy’s great grandfather, James Hickey, and remarks that they would both have lived in and around Clare at the same time. Freud and Hitler walked the same Viennese streets nothing seemed to have rubbed off in either instance.
Myths and questions about whether national characteristics are transferred in DNA can be as dangerous as they are amusing (indeed Che Guevara’s mother was a Lynch from county Galway, and the island of Monstserrat in the Carribbean is populated by black people who have Irish surnames, a somewhat Irish accent and dance to jigs and reels), but the combination of grace in speech and the flair for a fight is tantalisingly close to a stereotype.
Not least was the tactic of leaving the bigger guy to wear himself out as you dance around him calling him names (Foreman vs Ali, Kinshasa, 1974; Ireland vs England 1798 and 1914 to 1918) If only Foreman had known about Ali’s heritage earlier.