I thought I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to pay homage to Muhammad Ali. It’s been in the news for the last week or so that he’s very ill and frail. And as reported in an article I read just yesterday, his daughter says he is still mentally strong and says he’ll stick around as long as God wants him to. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Ali. He’s a true hero, and an inspiration. And he lives his life with dignity, even now, after decades of living with Parkinson’s.  Truly amazing is a great accolade, but it’s barely adequate to describe Muhammad Ali. 

Memories of an early fight

I still remember staying up quite late and listening on the radio (or ‘wireless’, as it was known then) when he had a big fight arranged. I remember the excitement of it, and going to school the next day and everyone was talking about the fight and how he’d beaten Liston. Sonny Liston wasn’t just another heavyweight, he was as feared as Mike Tyson would be decades later. He had such an aura about him that fighters were scared to even get in the ring with him. Even today, he’s thought of as a truly frightening fighter.

Johnny Tocco, a trainer who’s worked with Tyson and Foreman, said Liston was the hardest hitter of the three, and it was actually thought he was bad for the sport since nobody could beat him. He had been a convicted criminal (he learned to box in prison), and he worked for the Lucchese crime family, as a hit man amongst other things. This then was what the young (22-year old) Cassius Clay was facing (he was still known by his birth name at the time). By rights it should have been enough to frighten him half to death, and that’s before he actually faced him in the ring.

Was Clay cowed by Liston’s reputation? It’s tempting to say no, but I’m sure he was as worried as anyone else would have been. But he kept his cool. He knew what he was doing and he had a plan. He wasn’t just a great boxer, he was a great strategist. He turned the tables on Liston by mean-mouthing him and calling him names and teasing and insulting him in all kinds of ways. He never let up, hitting him with metaphorical jabs and uppercuts time and again, way before they ever met in the ring.

Clay was written off before he stepped into the ring

And when they did, boy oh boy! Clay had won light heavyweight gold in the 1960 Rome Olympics and he had dazzling hand speed and the ability to dodge and weave that was almost unbelievable in a man his size. But the odds were stacked against him; everyone thought Liston was unbeatable, and Clay was still widely regarded as a loudmouthed kid and an upstart. By the time of the fight, 43 out of the 46 sportswriters at ringside had picked Liston to win by a knockout. It really was a foregone conclusion. For most, it was just a matter of how long Clay could stave off the inevitable.

Iconic photograph of the first round knockout in the Clay v. Liston rematch

Virtually nobody took Clay seriously. He was an unknown and was thought to be fast but only a weak puncher. His style seemed out of place in the heavyweight ring. This fight changed all that. Even before the fight, his ‘style’ was telling; he rigged himself up with a battle bus and used to go visiting Liston to taunt him.

He’d arrive at three in the morning, waking all the neighbours, and shouting how he was going to destroy him, that ‘big ugly bear’, and how he’d crawl out of the ring on his knees if he lost, ‘cos he was so convinced he would never let that happen.

His verbal skills were taken to be bragging

Yeah, but it ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up, right? It got to Liston, who, to be fair, wasn’t in the greatest shape anymore. Joe Louis knew what was going on. He said “Liston is an angry man, and he can’t afford to be angry fighting Clay.”  He was right. Liston was unsettled, and it didn’t help him when it came to fight time. But Clay knew Liston was horrendously strong and hard-hitting, and when they entered the ring he was afraid. He said later “I won’t lie, I was scared… It frightened me, just knowing how hard he hit. But I didn’t have no choice but to go out and fight.”

Right there we have the measure of the man; he had set himself a task and no matter how hard it was, and it was tremendously hard, he was going to give it one hundred percent. He laid everything on the line. He talked big, but he backed it up with real boxing skill and tenacity. The fight, in short, was a huge upset; Liston couldn’t handle Clay as he’d thought he would, and Clay was way more of a fighter than anyone ever expected. There was talk of something caustic in the water Clay’s trainer splashed in his face (was there a plot by Liston’s corner to ‘blind’ him??), and he was fighting virtually blind for a while, but he stuck with it, eventually forcing the champion into a seated defeat – Liston refused to come out for the seventh round. That was the start, the real start, of Clay’s career, and what a career it was.

A champion like no other

The history books and fight magazines are filled with Clay’s exploits, and I’m not going to attempt to encapsulate them in a few paragraphs. Suffice it to say he was an amazing champion,even coming back from defeat and regaining the title for a second time, and unbelievably for a third time as well.

All the time he entertained fight fans, and the world in general, with his amazing verbal dexterity and showmanship. Here’s the kind of things he was spouting in the run up to the Liston fight: 

“I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m fast, I’m pretty and can’t possibly be beat.”

“You’re 40 years old, if a day, and you don’t belong in the ring with Cassius Clay.” (Note: Liston made out he was 32 but it seems he probably was closer to 40)

“He’s too ugly to be the world champ. The world’s champ should be pretty like me. If you want to lose your money, then bet on Sonny.”

“I predict that he will go in eight to prove that I’m great. If he wants to go to heaven, I’ll get him in seven. He’ll be in a worser fix if I cut it to six. If he keeps talking jive, he’ll go in five. If he makes me sore, he’ll go like (Archie) Moore. If he keeps talkin’ about me, I’ll get him in three. If that don’t do, he’ll fall in two. And if he run, he’ll go in one. And if he don’t want to fight, he should keep himself home that night.”

“You tell this to your camera, your newspaper, your TV man, your radio man, you tell this to the world: If Sonny Liston whups me, I’ll kiss his feet in the ring, crawl out of the ring on my knees, tell him he’s the greatest and catch the next jet out of the country. I am the greatest!”

There has never been a heavyweight champion like him, and there never will be again. He was a one-off, unique in so many ways. He even took on the United States government a few years later, refusing to go to a distant land he knew nothing about and start killing people over an issue he didn’t understand or agree with. This was way before being anti-Vietnam war was ‘fashionable’, and it virtually cost him his career. Boxing authorities stripped him of his title and suspended his boxing licence. But Ali (he had changed his name by this time) once again stuck by his principles, even when so much was at stake. He knew that, apart from the boxing authorities’ censure, he risked a long prison sentence as well, but the prospect of that did not move him either. 

If you want to read what Ali said about his refusal to enlist, check out this page. And when you read what he said, you’ll realise why he became an inspiration to so many. 

An inspiration to millions the world over

Over a long career he has proved to be a man of great dignity, and truly a great inspiration, both in terms of sport and life in general. It’s heartbreaking to see him now, just a shadow of the man he used to be, but thankfully that’s only physical. Inside he’s still the same great man he always was. And I, like millions around the world, pray that he gets the strength he needs to cope with this, his longest, hardest, and last battle.

I never got a chance to meet Ali, but I feel like I almost know him. And this is the way millions round the world feel about him. It’s almost impossible to not love the man. I was reading just the other day that George Foreman, one of his most fearsome opponents from the past, calls him up and talks to him regularly, and he said he loved him dearly. It must be a great comfort to Ali to know that round the world there are millions who love him and pray for him. The loudmouthed upstart kid from Louisville, with all his boasting and bragging and clever  little poems, has become the elder statesman, not just of boxing, but of sport itself.

I salute you, Muhammad. And I pray that life, which so cruelly handed you Parkinson’s, shows you some respect and goes easy on you in your final months or years.