Introduction:

Ali in the Prison of the Present

A strange fate befell Muhammad Ali in the 1990s. The man who had defied the American establishment was taken into its bosom. There he was lavished with an affection which had been strikingly absent thirty years before, when for several years he reigned unchallenged as the most reviled figure in the history of American sports.

Thanks to backstage lobbying by NBC Sports, Ali was cast as the star in the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. At the conclusion of the eighty-four-day Coca-Cola-sponsored torch relay, he raised a trembling arm to ignite the 170-foot wire fuse leading to the giant Olympic cauldron high above the stadium. In the control room, Don Mischer, creator of this high-tech, symbolically charged extravaganza, muttered into his headset, “Get ready to help him. Help Ali light it.” But no help was needed. The fuse was lit. The cauldron blazed into life. Corporate sponsors, television executives, spectators in the stadium and television viewers in their homes breathed a sigh of relief. Ali had triumphed yet again, this time over his own physical disabilities. Before 83,000 spectators (paying $600 per ticket) and a global television audience which the broadcasters estimated at 3 billion, Ali transcended his illness and his divisive past. The New York Times described the moment as the “emotional perfect touch.” To follow it up, the organizers played the famous final peroration from Martin Luther King’s speech to the 1963 March on Washington. For Atlanta columnist Dave Kindred, the whole spectacle invoked “the world King spoke of on a day a generation ago.” King’s one-time aide, former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, was equally enraptured, describing “the presence of Muhammad Ali” as “a symbol of the fact that whether we’re Hindu, Muslim, Catholic or Jew, we’re all working together.”

However, not everyone was at ease with all the symbolic elements of this modern sporting and commercial rite. Outside the stadium, another former colleague of King’s, Hosea Williams, led a small protest against the Georgia state flag, which incorporates the stars and bars of the Confederacy, fluttering over a tournament ostensibly predicated on the principles of human equality. It was because of the gap between Olympic ideals and American realities that, thirty-six years earlier, Cassius Clay had flung his gold medal into the Ohio River. And as if to complete this chain of symbolic transfigurations, at half-time during the 1996 Olympic basketball final, with the Dream Team once again confirming American supremacy in the one sport entirely originated in America, Ali was presented with a replacement gold medal by the Olympic boss and former Francoist, Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Ali’s Olympic cameo sparked what USA Today called “a renaissance for the Greatest.” Sports Illustrated put him on its cover for a record-breaking thirty-fourth time. When We Were Kings, the long-delayed documentary account of his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman, at last reached the screens, introduced a new mass audience to the glories of Ali in his heyday and won him a share in an Oscar-night accolade. It was even rumored that Ali would be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his “humanitarian efforts.” A wave of magazine profiles, television programs, videos and books renewed (and reinterpreted) his fame. Endorsement deals flooded in—$10 million worth in a year. It says a great deal about boxing and about Ali himself that twenty years after his retirement he remained the only boxer able to attract the kind of corporate affiliations routinely offered to stars from basketball, baseball, football or track and field.

Yet during most of his boxing career, the man now being hailed as “an American hero” was far more popular abroad than at home. This genial nineties icon of harmony and goodwill had flaunted a religion that spurned racial integration and repudiated America as a decadent “wilderness.” In the name of wider and higher loyalties he refused to serve America in time of war and as a result was threatened with prison, barred from practicing his trade, harassed by his government and condemned by his country’s media. At the same time, the very actions that so enraged the defenders of “Americanism” made Ali a symbol of anti-American defiance and the quest for autonomy across much of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Like Martin Luther King or even Malcolm X—two other sixties icons with whom Ali enjoyed more than a passing acquaintance—Ali has had his political teeth extracted. It’s not surprising. When an icon accumulates as many devotees as Ali has, when it emits such a numinous glow, it becomes irresistible to capitalism. Was there a better figure to help NBC, Coca-Cola and the Atlanta business elite sell the global games to America, and sell America to the world?

It is the fate of all ageing sports heroes to become the receptacles of our sloppiest sentiments. Yet there is something more at work in this strange transmutation of the greatest figure of resistance in the history of modern sport into yet another corporate signifier, to be celebrated, deconstructed, commodified. Ali, we are told, “created his own icon.” He has become an American Adam, another Gatsby, and the raw materials from which he invented himself, the collective experiences crystallized in that self-construction, are hidden from sight.

Like many others of my generation, I have my own memories of Ali. As I grew up during the sixties, Ali was a constant presence, one of the few links between the twelve year old full of innocent enthusiasm for competitive sports and the eighteen year old full of world-weary radical rage. After moving to England in 1971, I discovered that Ali belonged not to America but to the world, and that he was adored by different sections of the population for different reasons. Later encounters with sports fans and political activists from Asia and Africa confirmed that Ali had built himself a genuinely global constituency, embracing many who loathed boxing and the values associated with it.

The only time I saw Ali in the flesh was at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He had come to town to promote his new autobigraphy, The Greatest, and was at the pinnacle of achievement and celebrity. He was immediately encircled by a vast crowd of well-dressed admirers clamoring for his autograph, a rare phenomenon at a jaded international affair of this type. I joined the crowd and waited patiently with a small slip of paper in my hand. Close up, Ali seemed physically immense, but strangely motionless amid the throng. Later I took the precious slip of paper on which the great man had scrawled his name back to my hotel room; it disappeared the next morning, presumably appropriated by one of the hotel’s Gastarbeiter staff. Nothing else was missing.

What possible justification can there be for adding yet more to the millions of words already in print on the subject of Muhammad Ali? The easy answer is that on a subject as multi-faceted as this, there can be no last word. But as the years of Ali’s incandescence recede into the distant past, there is a more compelling reason for reconsidering him. The Ali offered up for veneration in the 1990s is not the Ali of the 1960s, and the image of the 1960s that is celebrated or damned in the 1990s is a mere caricature of the original. In both cases, a complex and contradictory reality has been homogenized and repackaged for sale in an ever-burgeoning marketplace for cultural commodities.

In the nineties we have been told that the causes and complaints of the sixties are redundant, that the conflicts that once surrounded Ali have been resolved. Somehow the rights and wrongs of the hard choices he made have been declared peripheral to his legacy—as if racism and warfare, Islam and the West, personal identity, black leadership and the use of US military might in the poorer, darker countries were yesterday’s issues, no longer pertinent, no longer divisive.

The capacity of our rulers to appropriate even the most refractory figures of resistance never ceases to awe, but we should remember that the process is never complete. Ali continues to mean different things to different people, and the various meanings are by no means all compatible. In many parts of the world, including within black America, and not least among black youths who have grown up long after his departure from the scene, Ali stands for values profoundly alien to those which motivated the extravaganza in Atlanta. If we are to reclaim Ali, it is not enough to venerate the icon from afar. We have to get up close.

The Ali story is so extraordinary, with its mythic elements of redemption through suffering, its cycle of trial and triumph, that it has proved and will continue to prove irresistible to chroniclers and commentators. But as we retell Ali’s tale, we cannot allow ourselves to be so seduced by its hero that we forget the confusing conditions in which his story unfolded. It could have turned out otherwise. Doubt and contradiction, misjudgement and compromise contribute as much to the making of a hero—at least a hero who is of any real use to the rest of us—as single-minded determination and clarity of purpose. At the core of the Ali story is a young man who made daunting choices and stuck to them in the face of ghastly threats and glittering inducements. This book is about those choices in the context in which they were made.

No other sports figure (and few popular performers of any kind) was so enmeshed in the political events of his time. Ali’s entire boxing career was shaped by his intimate interaction with political and social change. This is not to paint him as a political leader, activist or ideologue. In fact, strange as it may sound, Ali was strongly driven by an aversion to leadership, activism and ideology. He resisted political involvement and, at first, rejected the burden of symbolic representation that had been foisted upon black celebrities by both white and black commentators. But such was the alchemy of the man and the moment that he was drawn ever more deeply into politics and found himself becoming ever more symbolically representative. As Frederick Douglass observed, “A man is worked on by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”