Make a garland of Leontynes and Lenas
And hang it round your neck
Like a lei.
Make a crown of Sammys, Sidneys, Harrys,
Plus Cassius Mohammed Ali Clay.
Put their laurels on your brow
Today—
Then before you can walk
To the neighborhood corner,
Watch them drop, wilt, fade
Away.
Though worn in glory on my head,
They do not last a day—
Not one—
Nor take the place of meat or bread
Or rent that I must pay.
Great names for crowns and garlands!
Yeah!
I love Ralph Bunche—
But I can’t eat him for lunch.
Langston Hughes, 1967
In Palermo, amid the World War II rubble which (thanks to five decades of Mafia mismanagement) still clutters the precincts of the old city, I came upon a West African street vendor. He had spread his wares along the pavement in front of the bombed-out fac¸ade of a baroque palace and there, next to the pocket knives and plastic binoculars, he displayed an assortment of posters, some new, some old, many printed in garish colors, others curling at the edges. Among the latter was an image of Muhammad Ali dating from the mid seventies, nestling cozily alongside Madonna, the Pope, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Spice Girls and various Italian and African footballers. The only other African-American in this exalted company was Michael Jordan, who had recently completed his last season of professional basketball.
When Jordan announced his retirement, the media celebrated him as a “global symbol of America,” and the event was noted even in countries where basketball ranks beneath cribbage as a popular pastime. Inevitably, comparisons were drawn with Muhammad Ali. Yet Jordan’s retirement will merely remind any student of world sports that Ali remains incomparable.
To some extent, the US media delude themselves about the global sway of basketball. True, compared to other American sports it has at least established a toehold abroad, but it still enjoys only a fraction of the inter-continental reach of boxing, not to mention soccer. Outside the United States, and outside the basketball enclaves, Jordan is famous, first, for making more money out of sports than any athlete in history, and, second, for his association with the Nike corporation. The America of which he is a symbol is corporate America and its winner-takes-all ethic. His blackness has been deliberately submerged within his Americanness, which is reduced, in the end, to his individual wealth and success.
Since Ali’s day, the advance of blacks in big money sports has gone hand in hand with the impoverishment of the communities they come from. The escalating rewards at the highest levels—epitomized by Michael Jordan—have made black sports stars ever less representative of the black community as a whole, 45 percent of which lives below the poverty line. In Darwin’s Athletes, John Hoberman has argued forcefully that black success in sports has re-enforced “the myth of race” and distorted the development of both black individuals and their communities. Black sports heroes long ago demolished the nineteenth-century myth of the white man’s physical superiority. But its place has been taken by the equally insidious myth of black physical superiority—with its unspoken concomitant, black intellectual ineptitude. Sport, for Hoberman, has become a racial prison, though for many it still looks like a Promised Land. When Jackie Robinson broke the color bar, it was often said that major league baseball became a true mirror of American society. However, the high-profile affluence of a small number of black sports stars has now turned sports into a distorting mirror and in some ways an outright lie about a society in which, for example, white Americans enjoy a six-year advantage in life expectancy over blacks. Sports, which did so much to force whites to acknowledge the black presence in America, now contribute to the invisibility of both the real hardships suffered in black communities and the persistence of racism.
Nothing could be further from the ethos of Muhammad Ali than the no-risk business acumen of Jordan. When campaigners trying to draw attention to the plight of low-paid workers in Nike’s Southeast Asian sweatshops appealed to Jordan for help, they got the brush off. So did black Democrats in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina when they asked him to endorse their efforts to defeat the racist, homophobic tobacco champion, Jesse Helms. Ali said he didn’t want “to carry a sign”; Jordan only wants to carry the signs he gets paid for carrying. Ali’s embrace of an alternative nationality, in the form of the Nation of Islam, evolved under the pressure of events into a humanist internationalism, a sense of responsibility to the poor and powerless of all nations. Jordan’s subordination of himself to “America” made him an emblem of “globalization,” a form of rule from above by multi-national corporations. His astonishing achievements on the basketball court, and the huge rewards he has reaped from them, are advanced as justifications for “the American way,” the capitalist way. Jordan has become the embodiment of the Social Darwinism of the new world order.
Having learned nothing from history, the media hailed Jordan throughout his career as a role model. Exactly how are wealthy celebrities like Jordan supposed to set an example for those who are neither rich nor famous? Most poor people can work as hard as Jordan has, can be as law-abiding, self-disciplined and self-effacing, and will still reap little reward for their efforts. There is, in short, no way we can emulate Michael Jordan, unless we are among the minute fraction of the population with the physical attributes required by big-time professional sports. In contrast, we can all emulate at least some of what Ali did outside the ring, not the verbal fireworks, perhaps, but certainly the adherence to conscience in defiance of social pressure, the expression of the self through a commitment to a higher cause and a wider community. It was the willingness of the Greatest to link his destiny with the least and littlest that won him the devotion of so many.
America wants to forget what it did to the people of Vietnam, and has yet to pay a penny in war reparations. Yet America also wants to embrace Muhammad Ali and even convert him into a symbol of national identity. Perhaps I’ve lived abroad too long, but for me what makes Ali a role model is precisely his rejection of American national identity in favor of a broader, transnational sense of selfhood and social responsibility. Ali’s career is a standing reminder to us all that national affiliation—in sports, in politics, in life—is not natural or God-given; it is constructed and can therefore, as Ali demonstrated, be deconstructed.
There are some who have discovered belatedly and with shock that Ali was an imperfect hero. Perfect heroes, however, are not only implausible but also useless. They can only be admired, not imitated. Ali’s flawed humanity reminds us that role models are always incomplete and contradictory. Commenting on the revival of black nationalist icons in the 1990s, Angela Davis has warned, “Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and end of political practice.”
In his heyday, Ali was like a computer virus, reversing polarities, short-circuiting connections, infiltrating the marginal into the mainstream. But in the long run he became a prisoner of the electronic conduits, and today the virus guards have grown more sophisticated and more vigilant. The inflation of wages, prize-money and endorsements may have liberated sports stars from their serf-like status of the past, but it has also made them more dependent on and integrated with corporate power, and intensified the pressures for conformity. Michael Oriard has dubbed Ali “an anachronism, a kind of hero perhaps no longer possible in the age of the spectacle,” and it is true that the prospects for resistance seem more limited than in Ali’s time. Yet Ali’s story proves that those who write off such prospects are in danger of falling into the trap Bob Dylan warned about in a song released the week after Ali declared “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”
Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
and keep your eyes wide the chance won’t come again
and don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin
and there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’—
for the loser now will be later to win.
If one day we’re lucky enough to live through a sporting revolution in which the domination of finance is overthrown and sport is at last permitted to come into its own, not as an instrument for monetary gain or national aggrandizement, but as an exercise with no end but itself, I have no doubt the revolutionaries will draw inspiration from Muhammad Ali. His example of personal moral witness, of border-crossing solidarity, belongs not to sixties nostalgia, but to the common future of humanity.