Muhammad Ali, as big a sports star as this country has ever produced, the biggest sports star anywhere over the past 50 years, has passed away at the age of 74, after being hospitalized with respiratory issues this week. His death sent reverberations throughout the world late Friday night.
Once, even before he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, when he was still Cassius Clay, Ali became the loudest star athlete of them all, even as he had already begun calling himself the greatest of them all. But across the past three decades, as he retreated into Parkinson's and into himself, disappeared really into a long silence, putting a kind of quiet between the reality of his later life and who and what he was when he was in his prime, it had gotten harder to properly explain to the young just who and what he was, what he meant, as he came out of the 1960s and into the '70s in a rush, everything happening as fast as he was in a boxing ring.
But he must be explained, put into the proper context and proportion, even as fast as things keep moving in sports; even the '90s already seem like the distant past for Michael Jordan, another American athlete who became famous around the world, even though he was never as famous as Ali was. The passage of time does not change how big Ali was at the height of his own fame, when he really did feel like the champion of the world, and not just in boxing. Maybe there are fans of soccer who think Pele was as big and important and even magical as Ali was. Well, in that debate, we can agree to disagree. It will always have to be us against the world.
"There's still nowhere I can go where they don't recognize me," Ali said to us one time in Vegas, at the end, when he was just hanging on, when he would end up slumped on his stool the night he fought Larry Holmes.
He was right about that. The Holmes fight was in 1980. Holmes won every round. It would come out later that the Nevada State Athletic Commission had ordered Ali to the Mayo Clinic before that fight for a neurological exam. But he was allowed to fight, if you can call what we saw that night a fight. Somehow the kid who had come out of Louisville in the '50s and first made the world pay attention to him at the 1960 Olympic Summer Games in Rome had made it that far -- too far, of course -- in a violent sport that gave him everything and later took everything.
More than anything, though, Ali was a product of the '60s. He was made for the '60s. It was there that he became, in all the big ways, the first modern athlete, and a completely American original. He didn't just change the way boxing looked. He changed everything.
There was a time, in another America, when the highest compliment you could pay star athletes, in any sport, was to say they had some Willie Mays in them, even though it was only about what Mays did on a ballfield, never what he said, even if they did call him the Say Hey Kid. Then Ali came along, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, talking and talking and talking. This isn't about whether or not you think he was the best boxer of all time, whether you believe Joe Louis was better in his prime or Rocky Marciano or Sugar Ray Robinson. This is about Ali's dazzling talent, not just with his feet and with his hands, but the dazzling talent to simply be himself. Because there had never been anyone like him and, as hard as the children of Ali have tried in all the years since, there never will be anyone quite like him. This is about his dazzling self.
The first time I saw Ali fight in person was the most forgotten of the three fights against Joe Frazier, at Madison Square Garden. The first one ended with maybe the most beautiful left hook -- from Frazier -- you will ever see and the last one was the Thrilla in Manila, perhaps the most famous prizefight in history, even more famous than Ali beating George Foreman in Zaire. Even that night, when I was still in college, was ridiculously exciting, really from the time you got into a taxi cab and said, "Take me to the Garden." The air was different when Ali was in the building, and in the ring. It always was.
In the summer of that same year came Ali-Foreman in Zaire, the "Rumble in the Jungle," the night of rope-a-dope, when he hung on the ropes and let Foreman punch himself out, before Ali came off those ropes and thrilled the world again. I watched that fight on closed circuit in a theater in Boston, and when Ali did come off the ropes, when he seemed to be everywhere at once against Foreman, the people in the theater stood and chanted his name, as if he were in the building with us. And had done something to the air again, as he made the world cheer.
Sometimes it is all right, in the great conversation of sports, to simply explain things this way: You had to be there. Ali simply can't be explained by all the old fight footage, or the interviews with Howard Cosell, or even the moments of extreme cruelty he showed to Frazier when theirs became a rivalry against which all others have been measured since. It is almost impossible to explain why his name change mattered the way it did and his conversion to the Muslim faith and his opposition to the Vietnam War. But it all seemed to matter, tremendously.
You wonder now what it would have been like for him without Parkinson's. You wonder what kind of character he would have become -- or remained -- as he became an old man. We will never know. This isn't a eulogy for Ali as much as a valediction for who he was, what he did, what he meant. No heavyweight ever fought quite the way he did. No athlete ever had the personality he did. You had to be there. Man, did you ever.
SoE: Remembering Ali, The Greatest
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