It’s the reverberations. Yes, not the rumbles we are talking about, it’s the reverberations. The death of Muhammad Ali will obviously force people’s minds to talk about his epic boxing matches against Joe Frazier, George Foreman, or there will be retrospectives about his epic “rumbles” against racism and war. But we have to understand the reverberations in order to know Muhammad Ali as what he will be remained: the most important athlete to ever live.
When Dr. Martin Luther King was up against the war in Vietnam in 1967, he had to face severe criticism by the mainstream press and his own advisors who told him not to focus on “foreign” policy. But Dr. King forged forward, and to justify his new stand, publicly announced, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all—black and brown and poor—victims of the same system of oppression.”
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he said that Muhammad Ali made him feel like the walls were not there.
When John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists on the medal stand in Mexico City, one of their demands was to “Restore Muhammad Ali’s title.” They referred Ali as “the warrior-saint of the Black Athlete’s Revolt.”
When Billie Jean King was fighting to win equal rights for women in sports, Muhammad Ali would say to her, “Billie Jean King! YOU ARE THE QUEEN!” She admitted that this made her feel brave in her own skin.
The question is why? Why was he able to create this kind of radical waves throughout the culture and across the world?
What Muhammad Ali did was to redefine what it meant to be tough and collectivize the very idea of courage. Through the Champ’s words on the streets and deeds in the ring, bravery was not only standing up to Sonny Liston. It was speaking truth to power, no matter the cost. He was a boxer whose very presence taught a simple and dangerous lesson fifty years ago: “real men” fight for peace and “real women” raise their voices and join the fray. Or as Bryant Gumbel said years ago, “Muhammad Ali refused to be afraid. And being that way, he gave other people courage.”
That’s why Ali’s most famous line would not be, “I hospitalized a rock. I beat up a brick. I’m so bad I make medicine sick” or anything of such kind. It was when he was suspended from boxing for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. He was attending a rally for fair housing in Louisville when he said,
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
What a way to rage war! This is not only an assertion of black power but a statement. It’s a statement of international solidarity: of oppressed people coming together in an act of collective resistance. It was a statement that connected wars abroad with attacks on the black, brown and poor at home, and it was said from the most hyper-exalted platform our society offered at the time: the platform of being the Champ.
Unfortunately, these views didn’t only earn him the hatred of the mainstream press and the right wing of United States of America. It also made him a target of liberals in the media as well as the mainstream civil rights movement, who didn’t like Ali for his membership in the Nation of Islam and opposition to what was Lyndon Johnson’s war.
But for an emerging movement that was demanding an end to racism at any cost and a very young, emerging anti-war struggle, he was certainly a transformative persona.
Full articles can and should be written about his complexities – his fallout with Malcolm X, his depoliticization in the 1970s, the ways that warmongers attempted to use him as a prop as he suffered in failing health. But the most important aspect of his legacy is that the moments in the 1960s when he refused to be afraid. As he said years later, “Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free.”
Again it’s not the fight, it’s the reverberations. They are still being followed by a new generation of people. They make sure that the Champ’s name will outlive us all.
Bill Russell said it best in 1967. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. I’m worried about the rest of us.” That is truer than ever.