As he reaches his 65th birthday, we find that Muhammad Ali's legend has held up remarkably well over the course of time.
There are indeed second acts in American life, but dramatic transformations like his are usually reserved for movie plots. How does a man who made his living punching people in a boxing ring rise to a level of notoriety that would make him one of the most reviled figures in our national culture?
And then, how does that same person undergo a metamorphosis where, his status as a cultural hero and icon firmly secure, he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom and lights the torch in an emotional ceremony at the 1996 Olympiad?
How is Muhammad Ali still one of the most beloved and recognizable figures on the planet, more than 25 years after his final pro fight?
"The main thing that has kept his image going is the electronic age," says Hank Kaplan, the noted historian/archivist and member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. "He came along at a time when television was starting to play an important part. He was perfect for television then, and television continues to keep him alive in people's minds."
We are a society that is obsessed with celebrity, much of it phony and unwarranted, completely lacking in substance, and often the creation of marketing campaigns. The true legend defies formula; there is no blueprint for manufacturing one. There is not one thing, but rather a combination of things, responsible for stamping Muhammad Ali as a legend for his time, and all times. But even that is not enough. While there may be a number of ingredients that comprise the bricks, something must suffice as the "mortar" — something that is not easily defined, except to say that people do not commonly possess it or have any means by which to acquire it.
Whatever it was, Ali had it.
In a most fundamental way, Ali separated himself from the pack by virtue of his abilities in the ring. He indeed had the "goods." What he showed fight fans, right from the outset, was something they hadn't seen before and arguably haven't seen since, which is a big man (6-foot-3, 200-220 pounds) who moved with the speed and grace of a lightweight.
Of course, if it stopped there, we wouldn't have a story some 45 years later.
"Ali did two things nobody else could do," says Thomas Hauser, author of the best-selling book, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. "First, he was the best fighter in the world. And he was this extremely good-looking, charismatic individual. What he did that everybody could do, but most people don't, is that he stood up for his beliefs. And he took huge risks for doing what he believed in. Whether you agreed with him or not, you had to give him credit."
Ali knew how to build a brand
Ali was a master practitioner of the art of branding, by way of pure instinct. Unlike most Hollywood stars of the time, he understood that even bad publicity was better than no publicity at all. He knew that even if fans were agitated by his audacity, they would pay money to come see him fight anyway, if only to watch him get his comeuppance. This notion did not happen upon Ali by accident. He freely admitted that the idea of a "shtick" came from observing the famous wrestler Gorgeous George, who positioned himself not so much as an athlete but as an entertainer. But Ali added his own improvements as no one else could.
No one can build a brand, much less an enduring legend, without co-opting the media to some extent. It was in that arena that Ali was at his most industrious. The principle is quite simple — if you are a good interview, you are going to get more attention from the press. Most athletes, as interview subjects, are generally insipid. Ali was obviously quite the opposite; he worked the press better than anyone.
It can and should be argued that Ali understood the nature of the boxing business, as well as sports as a means of entertainment, better than any fighter who ever lived. He knew that the championship itself only meant as much as the commodity who held it, so he made himself an essential part of hyping any event he was involved in, even going so far as to brand his opponents. From that standpoint, he was way ahead of his time and remains well ahead of almost all the fighters who followed him. Most boxers consider it drudgery to go the extra mile in promoting their own fights. Take former welterweight champion Zab Judah, for example, who complained, after losing his crown to Carlos Baldomir, "I have no excuses, but my promoter [Don King] messed me up. All week, I was doing his job of promoting the fight by making appearances all over the place."
Ali must have been laughing out loud when he heard that. Today's fighters, many of whom suffer from lack of real guidance, think the revenue is just going to generate itself. Ali knew better. A lot better.
But whether there was a fight to be promoted or not, Ali, virtually from the beginning of his professional career, spoke to White America with a brashness and arrogance that was absolutely unheard of at the time.
To put that in its proper perspective, remember that this was an era when, as the young Cassius Clay trained at the fabled Fifth Street Gym on Miami Beach, he had to commute every day across the bay to and from his hotel in a Miami neighborhood called Overtown, because blacks were not allowed to domicile on the beach. Black athletes, who were commonly denied opportunities in freelance atmospheres such as professional boxing, rarely if ever spoke or acted "out of turn." That lesson was learned with the rise and fall of former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. When Joe Louis was climbing the ladder toward heavyweight supremacy, he made a conscious effort to avoid the kind of behavior that Johnson had exhibited, and which had outraged the establishment.
Ali appeared to invite the outrage.
"He was so truthful. He was so honest," says Kaplan, who observed the young Ali (then known, of course, as Cassius Clay) from the very first day he walked into the Fifth Street Gym. "He didn't do any rewrites. All the things he said just came right out of his brain and off his tongue, almost without even thinking about it, because that was how he felt. It was refreshing and different."
More than a 'pioneer'
Some have called Ali a "pioneer," which is too limiting. To refer to him in that way implies that he constructed a model for others to expand upon, develop and improve. But there was no improving upon Ali. He was one of just a handful of athletes who were truly singular. In many ways he was not just the first, but the "only." In terms of his personality outside the ring, all athlete-entertainers come after him have been — and will continue to be — cursed in a sense because whatever they do, they will be seen as derivative of him. To use a cliché, they "broke the mold" when they made him. "It's an injustice to say that anyone was like Muhammad," said his longtime trainer, Angelo Dundee.
America has seen its share of athletes who have had an impact on society. Jackie Robinson no doubt served as an inspiration for young African-Americans for years after he broke the 20th-century color line in Major League Baseball.
Joe Louis, who was beloved by whites as well as blacks, may well have paved the way for Robinson.
But while they were undoubtedly aware of the effect they were having, they didn't necessarily go out of their way to be standard-bearers.
Neither did Ali, at least not at first. But once he found himself in the fray, he proactively sought to affect change. And unlike many public figures of today who take "stands" knowing that there is a safety net beneath them, Ali knew there could — indeed would — be dire consequences for some of his actions, but undertook them anyway because they represented what he truly believed was right.
A man of moral courage
When he declared his association with the Nation of Islam, he knew that many of the fans and the media who had previously seen him as playfully outrageous would now view him as suspicious, sinister and threatening. When he refused induction into the military, he may not have suspected he would actually serve prison time, but we was prepared to accept that he might be prevented the opportunity to retain his heavyweight title and continue boxing.
He could have easily capitulated at any time, but backing down from his strongly-held convictions was simply not his way.
This brand of moral courage had the residual effect of inspiring other black athletes to stand up for themselves, and spread the message of empowerment to their fellow African-Americans. It goes without saying that the likes of Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) and others were profoundly influenced by Ali's example, and drew strength from it.
Ali was in the midst of the civil rights and anti-war movements, becoming a central figure in the national dialogue. He was a perfect fit, coming, in the minds of many, with the right message at the right time. He fed off those espousing anti-establishment positions and in turn, they fed off him.
"The white world's conscience - he was playing on that," says Kaplan. "And they were weakening. Some of them were saying, 'He's a bigmouth, but he's not that far wrong'."
No athlete has ever approached the impact Ali had in the social arena. That much is undisputed.
The question is who consciously recognizes it now?
"To generations that came after him (Ali), he's famous for being famous," according to Hauser,"but people have no idea what he really stood for."
If they had shared the same spirit of social consciousness as Ali, Tiger Woods, for example, might have boycotted the Masters because of the questionable race and gender-biased membership policies of Augusta National, and Michael Jordan would never have unceremoniously declined to support Harvey Gantt, the Democratic civil rights leader, in his Senate bid against Jesse Helms with the rather self-serving excuse that "Republicans buy sneakers too."
Of course, this generation of athletes is more or less de-sensitized to extreme injustice. The main consideration is that there are endorsements to protect, and therefore comments are screened through the filter of political correctness.
It's about their own version of image-building for profit.
To be sure, he's going to remembered long after Jordan and Woods are forgotten, but in a sense, Ali has gravitated in this direction as well.
In the wake of a recent $50 million licensing deal with a company called CKX, and the events that have led up to it, Hauser feels Ali has taken on a commercial bent that has, in effect, turned him into a quasi-establishment figure and blurred his real significance in the landscape of American culture.
"That's one of the things I bemoan about Ali," he said. "A little over a year ago he went to the White House to accept the Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. He gave him that photo op. He showed up at the Republican National Convention. He says nothing about the war in Iraq. He's been carefully managed in that regard. He's so thoroughly packaged and homogenized that I don't think he could be a political force now."
In a recent entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Hauser wrote, with regard to the 2001 film in which Will Smith played the former heavyweight champ, "The movie Ali represented a unique opportunity to depict its subject for current and future generations that didn't experience his magic. It cost the staggering sum of $105,000,000 to make and was backed by a multinational promotional campaign that cost tens of millions of dollars. But instead of being faithful to the legacy of its subject, Ali turned its hero into a virtual Disney character."
One might excuse Ali for being more commercial in his latter years, as he may be entitled to it. "Just look at him like a retired statesman," says Kaplan.
But none of this should detract from what Ali stood for during his heyday.
Sadly, the latter-day athletes who seem to have been influenced most by the persona of Ali are those who seem obsessed with drawing attention for its own sake. While the likes of Dennis Rodman, Deion Sanders, Chad Johnson and Terrell Owens have sought to model some of their outrageous behavior after Ali, they have lost sight of what made Ali truly significant, or for that matter, what made his bravado, for lack of a better word, "fun."
"Ali did a lot of things with a wink," Hauser says, "and you can get a long way with a wink. A lot of these guys today don't wink."
What endures, when all is said and done, is a legacy that reflects a certain undeniable magic Ali projected. And maybe the important part is not whether succeeding generations attribute it to Ali, but that society has become better as a whole because of it.
"It was about standing up against the war in Vietnam and saying that unless you have a very good reason for killing people that war is wrong," said Hauser. "It was that every time he looked in the mirror and said, 'I'm so pretty' what he was really saying before it became fashionable was 'Black is Beautiful'.
"Reggie Jackson told me once that he grew up ashamed of being black. He was ashamed of his hair. He was ashamed of his color. He thought it was better to be white than black. And Ali changed all that for him. The experience of being black changed for millions and millions of people because of Muhammad Ali."
There are indeed second acts in American life, but dramatic transformations like his are usually reserved for movie plots. How does a man who made his living punching people in a boxing ring rise to a level of notoriety that would make him one of the most reviled figures in our national culture?
And then, how does that same person undergo a metamorphosis where, his status as a cultural hero and icon firmly secure, he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom and lights the torch in an emotional ceremony at the 1996 Olympiad?
How is Muhammad Ali still one of the most beloved and recognizable figures on the planet, more than 25 years after his final pro fight?
"The main thing that has kept his image going is the electronic age," says Hank Kaplan, the noted historian/archivist and member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. "He came along at a time when television was starting to play an important part. He was perfect for television then, and television continues to keep him alive in people's minds."
We are a society that is obsessed with celebrity, much of it phony and unwarranted, completely lacking in substance, and often the creation of marketing campaigns. The true legend defies formula; there is no blueprint for manufacturing one. There is not one thing, but rather a combination of things, responsible for stamping Muhammad Ali as a legend for his time, and all times. But even that is not enough. While there may be a number of ingredients that comprise the bricks, something must suffice as the "mortar" — something that is not easily defined, except to say that people do not commonly possess it or have any means by which to acquire it.
Whatever it was, Ali had it.
In a most fundamental way, Ali separated himself from the pack by virtue of his abilities in the ring. He indeed had the "goods." What he showed fight fans, right from the outset, was something they hadn't seen before and arguably haven't seen since, which is a big man (6-foot-3, 200-220 pounds) who moved with the speed and grace of a lightweight.
Of course, if it stopped there, we wouldn't have a story some 45 years later.
"Ali did two things nobody else could do," says Thomas Hauser, author of the best-selling book, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. "First, he was the best fighter in the world. And he was this extremely good-looking, charismatic individual. What he did that everybody could do, but most people don't, is that he stood up for his beliefs. And he took huge risks for doing what he believed in. Whether you agreed with him or not, you had to give him credit."
Ali knew how to build a brand
Ali was a master practitioner of the art of branding, by way of pure instinct. Unlike most Hollywood stars of the time, he understood that even bad publicity was better than no publicity at all. He knew that even if fans were agitated by his audacity, they would pay money to come see him fight anyway, if only to watch him get his comeuppance. This notion did not happen upon Ali by accident. He freely admitted that the idea of a "shtick" came from observing the famous wrestler Gorgeous George, who positioned himself not so much as an athlete but as an entertainer. But Ali added his own improvements as no one else could.
No one can build a brand, much less an enduring legend, without co-opting the media to some extent. It was in that arena that Ali was at his most industrious. The principle is quite simple — if you are a good interview, you are going to get more attention from the press. Most athletes, as interview subjects, are generally insipid. Ali was obviously quite the opposite; he worked the press better than anyone.
It can and should be argued that Ali understood the nature of the boxing business, as well as sports as a means of entertainment, better than any fighter who ever lived. He knew that the championship itself only meant as much as the commodity who held it, so he made himself an essential part of hyping any event he was involved in, even going so far as to brand his opponents. From that standpoint, he was way ahead of his time and remains well ahead of almost all the fighters who followed him. Most boxers consider it drudgery to go the extra mile in promoting their own fights. Take former welterweight champion Zab Judah, for example, who complained, after losing his crown to Carlos Baldomir, "I have no excuses, but my promoter [Don King] messed me up. All week, I was doing his job of promoting the fight by making appearances all over the place."
Ali must have been laughing out loud when he heard that. Today's fighters, many of whom suffer from lack of real guidance, think the revenue is just going to generate itself. Ali knew better. A lot better.
But whether there was a fight to be promoted or not, Ali, virtually from the beginning of his professional career, spoke to White America with a brashness and arrogance that was absolutely unheard of at the time.
To put that in its proper perspective, remember that this was an era when, as the young Cassius Clay trained at the fabled Fifth Street Gym on Miami Beach, he had to commute every day across the bay to and from his hotel in a Miami neighborhood called Overtown, because blacks were not allowed to domicile on the beach. Black athletes, who were commonly denied opportunities in freelance atmospheres such as professional boxing, rarely if ever spoke or acted "out of turn." That lesson was learned with the rise and fall of former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. When Joe Louis was climbing the ladder toward heavyweight supremacy, he made a conscious effort to avoid the kind of behavior that Johnson had exhibited, and which had outraged the establishment.
Ali appeared to invite the outrage.
"He was so truthful. He was so honest," says Kaplan, who observed the young Ali (then known, of course, as Cassius Clay) from the very first day he walked into the Fifth Street Gym. "He didn't do any rewrites. All the things he said just came right out of his brain and off his tongue, almost without even thinking about it, because that was how he felt. It was refreshing and different."
More than a 'pioneer'
Some have called Ali a "pioneer," which is too limiting. To refer to him in that way implies that he constructed a model for others to expand upon, develop and improve. But there was no improving upon Ali. He was one of just a handful of athletes who were truly singular. In many ways he was not just the first, but the "only." In terms of his personality outside the ring, all athlete-entertainers come after him have been — and will continue to be — cursed in a sense because whatever they do, they will be seen as derivative of him. To use a cliché, they "broke the mold" when they made him. "It's an injustice to say that anyone was like Muhammad," said his longtime trainer, Angelo Dundee.
America has seen its share of athletes who have had an impact on society. Jackie Robinson no doubt served as an inspiration for young African-Americans for years after he broke the 20th-century color line in Major League Baseball.
Joe Louis, who was beloved by whites as well as blacks, may well have paved the way for Robinson.
But while they were undoubtedly aware of the effect they were having, they didn't necessarily go out of their way to be standard-bearers.
Neither did Ali, at least not at first. But once he found himself in the fray, he proactively sought to affect change. And unlike many public figures of today who take "stands" knowing that there is a safety net beneath them, Ali knew there could — indeed would — be dire consequences for some of his actions, but undertook them anyway because they represented what he truly believed was right.
A man of moral courage
When he declared his association with the Nation of Islam, he knew that many of the fans and the media who had previously seen him as playfully outrageous would now view him as suspicious, sinister and threatening. When he refused induction into the military, he may not have suspected he would actually serve prison time, but we was prepared to accept that he might be prevented the opportunity to retain his heavyweight title and continue boxing.
He could have easily capitulated at any time, but backing down from his strongly-held convictions was simply not his way.
This brand of moral courage had the residual effect of inspiring other black athletes to stand up for themselves, and spread the message of empowerment to their fellow African-Americans. It goes without saying that the likes of Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) and others were profoundly influenced by Ali's example, and drew strength from it.
Ali was in the midst of the civil rights and anti-war movements, becoming a central figure in the national dialogue. He was a perfect fit, coming, in the minds of many, with the right message at the right time. He fed off those espousing anti-establishment positions and in turn, they fed off him.
"The white world's conscience - he was playing on that," says Kaplan. "And they were weakening. Some of them were saying, 'He's a bigmouth, but he's not that far wrong'."
No athlete has ever approached the impact Ali had in the social arena. That much is undisputed.
The question is who consciously recognizes it now?
"To generations that came after him (Ali), he's famous for being famous," according to Hauser,"but people have no idea what he really stood for."
If they had shared the same spirit of social consciousness as Ali, Tiger Woods, for example, might have boycotted the Masters because of the questionable race and gender-biased membership policies of Augusta National, and Michael Jordan would never have unceremoniously declined to support Harvey Gantt, the Democratic civil rights leader, in his Senate bid against Jesse Helms with the rather self-serving excuse that "Republicans buy sneakers too."
Of course, this generation of athletes is more or less de-sensitized to extreme injustice. The main consideration is that there are endorsements to protect, and therefore comments are screened through the filter of political correctness.
It's about their own version of image-building for profit.
To be sure, he's going to remembered long after Jordan and Woods are forgotten, but in a sense, Ali has gravitated in this direction as well.
In the wake of a recent $50 million licensing deal with a company called CKX, and the events that have led up to it, Hauser feels Ali has taken on a commercial bent that has, in effect, turned him into a quasi-establishment figure and blurred his real significance in the landscape of American culture.
"That's one of the things I bemoan about Ali," he said. "A little over a year ago he went to the White House to accept the Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. He gave him that photo op. He showed up at the Republican National Convention. He says nothing about the war in Iraq. He's been carefully managed in that regard. He's so thoroughly packaged and homogenized that I don't think he could be a political force now."
In a recent entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Hauser wrote, with regard to the 2001 film in which Will Smith played the former heavyweight champ, "The movie Ali represented a unique opportunity to depict its subject for current and future generations that didn't experience his magic. It cost the staggering sum of $105,000,000 to make and was backed by a multinational promotional campaign that cost tens of millions of dollars. But instead of being faithful to the legacy of its subject, Ali turned its hero into a virtual Disney character."
One might excuse Ali for being more commercial in his latter years, as he may be entitled to it. "Just look at him like a retired statesman," says Kaplan.
But none of this should detract from what Ali stood for during his heyday.
Sadly, the latter-day athletes who seem to have been influenced most by the persona of Ali are those who seem obsessed with drawing attention for its own sake. While the likes of Dennis Rodman, Deion Sanders, Chad Johnson and Terrell Owens have sought to model some of their outrageous behavior after Ali, they have lost sight of what made Ali truly significant, or for that matter, what made his bravado, for lack of a better word, "fun."
"Ali did a lot of things with a wink," Hauser says, "and you can get a long way with a wink. A lot of these guys today don't wink."
What endures, when all is said and done, is a legacy that reflects a certain undeniable magic Ali projected. And maybe the important part is not whether succeeding generations attribute it to Ali, but that society has become better as a whole because of it.
"It was about standing up against the war in Vietnam and saying that unless you have a very good reason for killing people that war is wrong," said Hauser. "It was that every time he looked in the mirror and said, 'I'm so pretty' what he was really saying before it became fashionable was 'Black is Beautiful'.
"Reggie Jackson told me once that he grew up ashamed of being black. He was ashamed of his hair. He was ashamed of his color. He thought it was better to be white than black. And Ali changed all that for him. The experience of being black changed for millions and millions of people because of Muhammad Ali."
