Round 1: Having acknowledged the futile challenge of having to write an original introductory sentence for an essay about a man who is literally the most exhaustively written-about figure of our lifetimes, I refuse to step forward and take it on.
I know this means my first sentence that’s actually about Muhammad Ali will be taken as The First Sentence, and that it will most likely express an opinion about the Greatest that some other writer has expressed before me. Much like good Twitter handles, the remaining virgin terrain of literature about Ali has been so reduced that you can only access it by balling your fists and bashing your keyboard. So, here’s a take that no one else has ever expressed: Muhammad Ali clocszKL Mdsak;lsdfadfskl;dfms.adfls;fv ijghjvdfgklsgl;./dfgsklmbh.
Round 2: I wish I possessed a tenth of the unbridled joy that even late-model Ali radiated when performing a magic trick—followed immediately by a demonstration of how the trick is done, as he felt tricking people into believing that he had magic powers was a violation of his faith— or pulling a practical joke on someone. Even after being shown how to do it, I still can’t rub my thumb and forefinger to make a fly-like buzz, which Ali delighted in buzzing around peoples’ ears.
Round 3: I used to think that gym owners who claimed that retirement-era Ali came and worked out in their establishments were full of shit, until I saw Ed Bradley’s profile of Muhammad Ali 1996; Even seeing that 60 MINUTES segment today, I’m still thunderstruck to see the champ actually moving and hitting a heavy bag as if the years of creeping rigidity and decay were just a dream. It’s apparently a fairly common phenomena known as kinesia paradoxa, where muscle memory overrides the Parkinson’s symptoms.
Round 4: It must have been painful for such a rightfully proud man to see pity in fans’ eyes and journalists’ articles: Imagining the living death of a physically incandescent man being trapped in a Parkinson’s-frozen body makes it terribly easy to write eulogistic hagiography long before the man is actually dead, and Ali lived almost as long with Parkinson’s than he did before it started robbing him of his greatest instrument.
Round 5: Only Ali could teach Superman how to box and then beat his ass — Superman takes a ferocious pummeling that would raise even Tex Cobb’s eyebrows in envy—to stand as Earth’s champion against an invasion by a games-obsessed alien race. What could have been a campy footnote [see Ali’s battles with Mr. Tooth Decay] turned out to be one of the best Superman comics ever published. You wouldn’t get the same result with a George Foreman or Leon Spinks.
Round 6: One of the lesser-known records Ali held was the World Championship in unlikely athletic/intellectual pairings, with modernist poet Marianne Moore writing the liner notes to the then-Cassius Clay’s 1963 spoken-word/sorta-singing record I AM THE GREATEST. Ali’s record [not the vinyl one] was held until Mike Tyson and Joyce Carol Oates broke it in 1987.
Round 7: It’s difficult to not see prime-ish Ali fights in terms of cultural metaphor, even when they don’t quite connect to the zeitgeist of that moment. The legend of the third Ken Norton fight has grown so large—held in New York City less than a year after the infamous “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline and the “Welcome to Fear City” pamphlets, during an NYPD strike that turned Yankees Stadium and its immediate area into a wallet buffet for scads of muggers—that it distorts our perception of the actual fight. Norton had Ali’s number from round one of his career-defining performance in their first fight, having a very Frazier-like style blessed with much longer arms, more height and more working eyes than Smokin’ Joe had. Ali won a split decision in their second meeting, looking the most ripped and focused of any of his post-exile fights. The third? Poetic license demands that, on that atmosphere of terror on a chilly September night, Ali’s razor-thin margin of victory on the scorecards [8-6-1, 8-7 and 8-7] should be seen as the champ and the judges mugging Norton of his victory.
Round 8: Sometimes Ali’s ring career and society at that moment were one. His first fight with Joe Frazier was promoted as “The Fight of the Century” but was more of a fight for the country’s soul and imagination: 1971 America refused to believe that Vietnam was a ghastly mistake so that the anti-war Ali had to lose that fight, there’s no other way it could have gone down. Their second fight was a letdown for Joe Sixpack, with Ali using the guile of a tunnel rat more than the power of an F-4 Phantom to frustrate Frazier and his bob-and-weave style of bombardment on Ali’s way to a decision victory. 1975’s Thrilla in Manilla, held six months after the last chopper left the roof of the Saigon embassy, was a pyrrhic validation for Ali and the anti-war movement as well as the violent allegory the country probably needed to deal with their cornermen waving off the fight with Hanoi in the 14th round. [A 14th round that probably would have lasted indefinitely, but still.]
Round 9: I don’t know what to make of Ali’s other signature win, his 1974 upset of the intimidating but still establishment-supporting George Foreman, in this context. The Rumble in the Jungle came two and a half months after President Nixon resigned in disgrace. Uh, how’s this: After destroying an exhausted Foreman with a one-two off the ropes, as Foreman falls you can see Ali cock his right to hit him again but holds it as he watches Big George hit the mat. That undeployed haymaker is Ford pardoning Nixon. Okay, maybe that metaphor doesn’t work.
Round 10: In case you feel like the first half of 2016 has been especially rough, here’s six months of 1980 to compare: July: Peter Sellers dies. August: Dorothy Stratten is murdered, and hundreds in Texas and the Caribbean are killed by Hurricanes Aline and Allen. September: The Iraq-Iran war begins. October: Ali takes a hellacious beating from Larry Holmes. November: Jimmy Carter loses the Presidency to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. December: John Lennon is murdered.
Round 11: Not that he had much choice about it, but it’s admirable how much of Ali’s lifelong correction of his mis-education was done in public. Much like the backhanded compliment that Ali “transcended” race [as if being black was a stage that you have to level-up from to get anywhere in this country], it does Ali’s legacy a disservice to sanitize the unsavory aspects of his life, particularly the sometimes shocking places his opinions on integration, women and interracial relationships went to as he charted his uniquely personal and spiritual evolution.
Round 12: “Well, Hitler had a dog who liked him” Dept.: NBC big shot Dick Ebersol claims to be responsible for Ali being the one to light the Olympic cauldron on the opening night of the Games’ 1996 centennial. Well, that’s a massive “1” in his plus column. Muhammad Ali, standing before the world, damaged but unbowed, lighting the fire at the event that ignited his own rise to beloved global icon. Now that’s good television.