“And it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true. Muhammad Ali said that. Back when he was a young man. Back when he was Cassius Clay. Before he had too many fights, and left his brain inside the ring.” — Dan Bern
Muhammad Ali said a lot of thin
gs during his colorful, controversial and remarkable career as a boxer, humanitarian and public figure. Some of what he said and did really offended a lot of people.
Just like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali was widely reviled almost 50 years ago by most people, even though these days both are put on special pedestals of respect.
Many did not like him because he was brash, confident and even practiced a strange form of hubris we so often see from too many athletes these days, as if Ali started the whole process. Calling himself, “The Greatest,” he backed it up with “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.”
But when he burst on the scene in 1964 with that victory in the ring over Sonny Liston, a lot of people didn’t like him at all because he was downright “uppity,” long before Clarence Thomas used that word to play the race card in his confirmation hearings in 1991. And he was a bad poet — “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
But what made Ali even more unpopular in the mid-1960s was his refusal to serve in the war in Vietnam. He claimed it was because of his recent conversion to the religion of Islam. A lot of people saw him as ungrateful and unpatriotic.
He explained, “I’ve got no quarrel with the Vietnamese people. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.”
Eldridge Cleaver, in his 1968 best seller “Soul On Ice,” devoted an entire chapter of the significance of the Clay-Patterson fight. Floyd Patterson was making a comeback to “bring the heavyweight title back to America” by defeating Ali.
And a lot of people back then disliked it when black athletes like Cassius Clay, Lew Alcindor, Bobby Moore and Keith Wilkes changed to Muslim names, to Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ahmad Raschaad and Jamal Wilkes.
One obscure athlete even asked to have his name changed to Lew Alcindor.
I heard many people say they
despised Ali because he got out of serving his country. And the U.S. government decided to strip him of his world heavyweight title as a result of his lack of service.
Ali in 1971 was cleared of wrongdoing and was given a chance to earn back his title in a fight with champion Joe Frazier. With most folks rooting against him, he lost in his first comeback bid and a year later lost to Ken Norton and had his jaw broken in the fight.
More than just a few times, I heard people say, “Good! Now maybe that will shut him up.”
But Ali continued to make his comeback and beat champion George Forman in Zaire and Frazier again in the “Thrilla in Manila” to regain the title.
I saw the documentary “When We Were Kings,” the story of the bout with Forman in Africa and was mightily impressed when Ali took the microphone from Howard Cosell to send a message to all kids to take care of their teeth and not eat too many sweets.
A little later, he was often seen on public service TV ads with Dr. Jonas Salk, urging people to get vaccinated against polio and other childhood diseases. He also did a lot of work as an ambassador in Africa for President Jimmy Carter.
It finally dawned on a lot of observers that Muhammad Ali was perhaps the most well-known, recognized and beloved athlete in the world, a feat matched only by Michael Jordan since then.
“The Greatest” died last weekend after a long struggle against Parkinson’s Disease. Many tributes have poured in from all over the world, some from people who didn’t really like him not so long ago.