Saturday, 18 June 2016


CASSIUS Clay was just a garrulous 12-year old when he experienced the devastating loss that would transform his life for good. No, it was not the loss of a loved one. The young Cassius’ bicycle, a possession to which he felt deeply attached, had been stolen, and he couldn’t stop telling anyone who cared to listen what he would do to the thief, if only he could find him. As it happened, Cassius, named after the Kentucky slave abolitionist, Cassius Marcellus Clay, would recover neither the bicycle nor the thief. What he found instead was the attention of Louisville police officer and boxing enthusiast, Joe E. Martin, who encouraged him to put his punch where his mouth was. Cassius, later Cassius X Clay, and eventually Muhammad Ali after his conversion to Islam, listened to Joe Martin, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ali, who passed away on June 3 in a Phoenix, Arizona clinic following a brief period of hospitalisation for respiratory problems, will be rightly remembered as arguably the greatest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. He remains the only man to have won the title on three different occasions: 1964, 1974 and 1978. He towered above boxing like no other pugilist before and after him. He fought with grace and panache, and spoke about the sport he loved with inimitable passion and eloquence. Before Nas, before Drake, and well before Jay Z, Ali rapped about boxing and life with pizzazz and cadence. He was a boxers’ boxer, and a larger than life athlete who used the charisma which he possessed in abundance to call attention to the plight of black people in the United States and everywhere else. Long before Black Lives Matter, Ali embodied the struggles of black people all over the world for the inalienable right to be treated with respect and dignity.

This is the sole reason why his transition leaves a deep hole in the public imagination; for Ali was more than just a professional boxer. He got the business done in the ring quite all right. In an age not exactly lacking in stardust— think George Foreman, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, and Joe Frazier— Ali stood head and shoulders above his equally luminary contemporaries because of the way he fought—unconventionally, often with magnificent cavalierness, always leading with his mouth. As evident from many of his most famous fights—the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman, say—not only could Ali deliver a good beating; he could take one.

 Ali was a rebel with a cause, or many causes in fact; a talker with a theme; a pretty boy (as he never tired of reminding everyone) who exposed the ugliness of American liberalism; a conscientious objector; a devout Muslim and, above all, an individualist almost to the point of sedition. Ali used the boxing ring as a stage, and parlayed the freedom he found inside into the world of implications. In standing up to the American establishment in hot pursuit of a lost cause in Vietnam (“Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong”), he was the epitome of every individual down the ages who has ever had to invoke the authority of conscience.

When, in 1964, Ali visited a Nigeria still giddy with the excitement of independence, he felt instantly at home. Images from the visit show him trying on a Yoruba three-piece complete with the agbada, and his hand at the gangan drum. Such was the measure of the man. Cosmopolitan to a fault, and willing to yield to every foreign experience, so long as it was human. The only thing he resented was injustice, and he dedicated his life to eradicating it. Not even the Parkinson’s syndrome which claimed the last 32 years of his life could strip him of his identity. Ali fought a good fight, and was victorious both in the ring and outside it. Goodnight, ‘The Greatest’.

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