Muhammad Ali

A rote obituary cannot do justice to Muhammad Ali. He was a true fighter and a rebel everyone had to eventually love, a jokester who saw the serious rot at the heart of society. Ali was all this and so much more. An entire generation knows Ali only through his brave and graceful three-decade battle with Parkinson’s disease. He made rare public appearances during this time, usually to pay tribute to former boxing enemies like Joe Frazier or to open big sporting events like the Olympics, but the only reason we got to see this magnanimous Ali is because he fought the big fights on the world’s behalf much earlier – as an athlete who astonished the world, a civil rights activist who spoke tirelessly for the black people across the US and an anti-war campaigner who defied authority. Ali was something to everyone at every stage of his storied life. As Cassius Clay he took the boxing world by storm, the young black man who defeated Sonny Liston in 1964 and destroyed the race barrier in sport as no person since Jesse Owens had before. Ali never strayed from his convictions and paid the price – choosing prison over being a tool of US imperialism. His fight against injustice had begun early. Soon after he won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960, Ali threw the award into the Ohio River after being refused service at an ‘all-whites’ restaurant. That medal was restored to him in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, where Ali lit the torch despite showing evidence of his worsening ailment as he stood on the podium. He claimed the world heavyweight boxing title three times, even though it was unjustly snatched away from him, at the peak of his career in 1967, when he refused to answer the call to be inducted into the US Army during the war on Vietnam – against a people with whom Ali said he had ‘no fight’. The heavyweight champion was banned from the sport by an all-white jury that robbed him of four years at the top of his career. Ali heroically reclaimed the title in 1974, and then again, after losing it briefly, in 1978 – an achievement which is unique in the sport. The field of sports has often encouraged social and political conformism. To become marketable you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That was never Ali’s way. Born as Cassius Clay to a working-class family in Louisville in 1942, he became Muhammad Ali when, influenced by the great Malcolm X, he converted to the Nation of Islam. To his eternal regret later, he did not follow Malcolm X when the latter grew disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its supreme leader Elijah Muhammad and left the organisation. Ali too eventually drifted away from the Nation. Like Malcolm X, he was too much of an iconoclast to be bound by the strictures of people smaller than him.

The greatest athlete ever in his field, he was the genius who redefined boxing and set a standard that no one has yet matched. He won 56 of the 61 fights he contested through his astonishing career. He had such bravado and righteousness that those who faced him inevitably cowered. In the boxing ring, and beyond it, he contested life with astonishing poise and grace. It was a grace which made it easy to forget that the light-footed man with lightning speed weighed over 200 pounds and stood well over six feet tall. The magic that made Ali the fighter that he was, and the man that he became as a result of his own beliefs, held the world in thrall. In Pakistan, as in many other countries around the world, national holidays were declared to mark the days of his fight, such as the occasion when he took on George Foreman in 1974 in Zaire to reclaim the title taken away from him. There was a holiday too in 1978 when he fought and won against Leon Spinks, the man who had unexpectedly defeated him some months earlier. Ali is now treated like a secular saint. On the occasion of his death, let us remember that he received this stature because he challenged everything that was wrong in his time, that he transcended the sport that he redefined. Let us remember his constant willingness to take on the system and use his words, as hard-hitting as his left jab, to voice the feelings of so many and to speak up for the underdogs of society. The truth Ali told us stings like a butterfly; thanks to him we are closer to buzzing like bees. We can be certain that we will not see the like of him again. Farewell, The Greatest.