The Greatest has been granted his last request. The most recognisable man on the planet has gone to touch gloves with his maker after the longest, bravest, most anguished struggle of his
phenomenal fighting life.
The final bell has tolled for the boxing artist formerly known as Cassius Clay.
As those sonorous chimes reverberated around a saddened world, they signalled the end of his protracted battle with one of the most pernicious diseases to afflict mankind.
Muhammad Ali is still the all-time heavyweight champion of the world. Forever will be.
'Float like a butterfly
Sting like a bee
The hands can't hit
What the eyes can't see'
Simplicity was but one part of the complex sum of Ali's genius but in this basic, brilliant rhyme he set down the definitive statement of his unique gift for the art he truly ennobled.
At a stroke of the pen he conveyed his God-given talent with his fists into the minds of kings and commoners alike.
None of us - not Norman Mailer, not even Budd Schulberg, certainly not we humble reporters of his story - have succeeded in putting the mighty Muhammad into words with the lyrical clarity of the man himself.
From the butterfly to the bee. From the Ali Shuffle to the Rope-a-Dope. From the Rumble in the Jungle to the Thrilla in Manila. From Clay to Ali, he found the explicit phrase to match his epic performances.
Most prizefighters are at their most articulate in the violent language of the most primitive workplace in sport.
The most extraordinary pugilist of all found expression outside as well as inside the ring. Ali spoke in the tongues of poets and, after he found Islam, the prophets.
Nor would he be silenced when the Louisville Lip, as his home town dubbed its ranting young Cassius for his boyish bragging, was reduced to a Parkinson's whisper.
As the sickness lowered the volume and slowed the diction, so the precious words were chosen with more sparing effect.
He also found other ways to communicate. Perhaps most amazingly of all, given the convulsive shaking of his hands, he became an adroit magician.
The disease was well advanced when Ali came to London for one of his several anointings as Sportsman of the Century, on this occasion by the BBC.
He dined at The Savoy in worshipful company. When supper was over, the Lord of the Ring invited a group of autograph-hunters to join our table. My then 11-year-old son was among them.
Muhammad sat him on his knee while he performed his conjuring tricks with playing cards, handkerchiefs and match boxes. As he did so, he whispered: 'What's my name?'
'Mr Ali, sir,' my boy replied.
Muhammad chuckled, almost silently: 'Lucky you said that. Otherwise I'd have to give you a whuppin' like that Mr Terrell.'
The mind, as sharp as ever behind the veil of his medical condition, had taken him back to February 2, 1967.
To the red-neck city of Houston, Texas. To the night when tough Ernie Terrell came to challenge the world champion by refusing to call him by his adopted Islamic name.
'What's my name?' asked Ali as the referee called them from their corners.
'Cassius Clay,' replied Terrell.
'What's my name?' demanded Muhammad, time after time after time, as he rained punch after punch after punch on his insolent opponent but kept withholding the knock-out blow so he could inflict further retribution, round after round.
It was a message hammered out not only to the head and body of one foolishly bigoted, if brave, individual but to white America at large. A message delivered by the Black Muslim champion of civil liberty and freedom of speech.
'They ain't done me no wrong
So I ain't got no fight
With them Vietcong'
In 1967, with America at war in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali declined induction into the United States Army.
The heavyweight champion of the world, the glistening totem of his nation's global power, refused to fight.
That decision required at least as much courage as even the most extreme of his conflicts in the ring.
There were undercurrents of racism in the ensuing torrents of public outrage. Less than 24 hours after he failed to answer his country's call to enlist, Ali was stripped of the WBA belt and banned from boxing.
Within two months he had been convicted of draft evasion, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. He never served his time.
After three years of appeals he lifted the last, lingering threat of incarceration by announcing what proved to be a temporary retirement from the ring.
Within another 12 months America had relented, if not forgiven. Ali's comeback was already under way by the time the Supreme Court set aside his conviction.
Redemption, adulation, deification even, were to be a lot longer coming for the devilishly handsome black boy who announced that he had cast his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after returning triumphant from the 1960 Games in Rome, only to be denied service in a Louisville diner because of his colour.
Thirty-six years later - on that warm and emotional night in a stadium in Atlanta when the world watched with its heart in its mouth and a tear in its eye as he defied Parkinson's to safely ignite the 1996 Olympic flame - they gave him a replica.
So then he let slip a hint that maybe he hadn't thrown his medal away, after all.
A mischievous sense of irony was one of Ali's most constant companions throughout three marriages, America's shifting affections and all those 61 fights for cash earned the hardest way.
It was with him that evening when the Games went to the deepest south of the old slave state of Georgia.
He took it to the White House when George W Bush presented America's most famous conscientious objector with his country's highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It was at his side when former President Bill Clinton went to Louisville to open the Muhammad Ali Center, a permanent shrine to his majesty, and a building of hope for young black Americans.
From draft dodger to freedom fighter. From the fastest mouth in the Midwest to supreme sporting icon.
From reviled to revered.
From the maternity ward at Louisville General Hospital at 6.35pm on January 17, 1942 to his rocking chair beneath the shady trees of his ranch at Berrien Springs, Michigan, this was the most improbable journey.
One which improved and excited the lives of all those of us fortunate enough to encounter him along the momentous way.
It is a story summoned up from the indomitable spirit, told from the enormous heart and beaten out by the lightning fists of Muhammad Ali.
It is a profoundly human parable for the American way of life. In its gut, it is the chronicle of the No 1 fighting man.
'Old Archie Moore
Will hit the floor
In round four'
''This ain't no jive
Cooper falls in five'
Mere world champion boxers are happy simply to win. Cassius Marcellus Clay took additional, wicked delight in successfully predicting the round in which he would despatch his opponents on a 10-second ride to oblivion.
Archie Moore, the grandaddy of all the light-heavyweights, had pushed the immortal Rocky Marciano to the brink of defeat on a previous excursion into the heavyweight domain.
Come 1962 in Los Angeles he duly slumped to the canvas in the fourth three-minute stanza, as ordained in verse by the younger, bigger, and above all faster, legend in the making.
Feet of Clay? Not where Cassius was concerned. Old Archie was the first fighter of serious repute to experience at close quarters the dancing feet, blurred hand speed and elastic movement which have been beyond the human range and most fanciful imagination of all the other giants of the prize-ring.
It was not the raw fact of the knock-out that night which alerted the world to the advent of a sublimely different talent.
What caught the eye of the early observers was that the fast-talking kid from Kentucky was even quicker than Moore. Faster, in fact, than many a middleweight.
How rapid? Inevitably, the most stunning analogy was his own: 'Man, I'm so fast that when I switch off the light by the door I'm in bed before the room goes dark.'
A couple more gallops and the young thoroughbred from bluegrass country was ready for London and Henry Cooper.
Clay's crystal ball was still in transparent working order even though, come an expectant Wembley Stadium, there was to be a dramatic slip between tip and lip.
Destiny, of a sort, awaited Cooper, also. The heavyweight champion of the British Empire became only the second of four men to knock The Greatest off his feet.
So focused was Clay on his fifth-round prediction that he wasn't paying full attention in the fourth when Our 'Enry sent him sprawling and semi-conscious against the bottom rope.
Had that trademark left hook not exploded so close to the bell which rescued the heir apparent to boxing's bloody throne, history would have been rewritten.
Angelo Dundee, the resident saviour in the great man's corner, made sure that the prophecy of a new messiah coming to grace the most violent game would be fulfilled.
Wise Angelo called the referee to examine a sudden, surreptitious slit in his man's glove. Clay was given extra time to recover before that fated fifth round. Time to ready himself for the two-fisted assault on the parchment-like skin thinly covering Cooper's eyebrows, a barrage which set the blood flowing in buckets and had the referee intervening, just as Clay had foretold.
We marvelled that night that he had been able to get up at all after being hit by 'Enry's 'Ammer'.
We did not realise it then but we had just borne witness to another superhuman facet of this supernatural athlete. His chin. That jaw which might have been hewn from the rock in which America sculpts the images of its Presidents.
That jaw which refused to let him go down even when it was broken by the under-rated Ken Norton.
That chin which was, at one and the same time, his last line of defence but the curse upon his future health. Had he not been able to withstand so much brain-rattling punishment Muhammad Ali might have carried on talking himself into a different sphere of supremacy.
His image might be joining that gallery of Presidents high on Mount Rushmore, the first to be carved in black stone.
If America can install a movie actor in the White House and California elect a bodybuilder as state governor, why not high office for the most charismatic athlete of them all?
As it was, that ability to absorb more sledgehammer blows than would be good for a buffalo took him on to the totally unpredictable night when he won the world heavyweight title for the first of an unprecedented three times.
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