The greatest 01/23/2007
I CAUGHT the Ali-Foreman fight again on ESPN late last Thursday night, which made me sleep late again, but it was worth it. That fight in October 1974 in Zaire, billed “The Rumble in the Jungle,” is my absolute favorite. I like it even better than the “Thrilla in Manila,” which took place a year later.
I can still remember the air of electricity generated by the Ali-Foreman fight in this country. Ali had become very popular by then and had legions of diehard fans here. I was one of them. I am not a betting man and have never betted money on fights. (I’ve betted life and limb only on causes, but that’s another story.) But I kept telling friends that if I were to put my money on that fight, I’d put it on Foreman. I loved Ali, but, alas, Foreman was just going to kill him.
Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his time. Frazier, who had beaten Ali during his comeback, hadn’t just lost to Foreman, he had been pulverized. I saw the fight, and I swear Frazier lifted up an inch or two as Foreman caught him with an upper hook, which sent him to dreamland. I hoped for the best and feared for the worst. The best being that Ali would be floored instantly, the worst being that he would be maimed permanently. As it turned out, that was what Ali’s people were thinking, too, as the documentaries revealed. They very literally feared for his life.
I won’t go into the fight but urge the reader instead to look it up with that background in mind. You can imagine the frenzy that followed its result. It was Edsa People Power I and II combined, with the breathtaking ecstasy coming from the future downfall of this government thrown in. For Ali did not only do the improbable, which was to win the fight, he did the impossible, which was to knock out Foreman. Hercules could not have done a more Herculean deed. For days afterward, the jeepneys I took home during late nights reeked of alcohol and resonated with loud conversations about the fight. It also echoed with lamentations from people who lost big from betting on the "llamado" [favored].
The fight was shown on ESPN because it was Ali’s 65th birthday last week. One he had wanted to celebrate quietly but which the world would not let him. For good reason: Ali is more than a boxer, he is a freedom fighter. His arena isn’t the ring, it is the world. He isn’t just a sports hero, he is a hero in the epic sense of the word. As observers have observed, he doesn’t belong to the company of Joe Louis, he belongs to the company of Nelson Mandela.
Looking back, incredible as Ali’s triumph was over Foreman, it wasn’t the most incredible. For Foreman wasn’t Ali’s greatest challenge, the one foe that loomed invincible, that threatened to crush anyone and anything in his path. Nor was it Sonny Liston, the ex-con whom you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley and whose brute strength made him the most fearsome fighter a decade before Foreman. Ali’s greatest enemy was the US government.
Or more specifically the Racist and Imperial America that that government represented. The martial law babies will probably not be able to fully appreciate it, but it’s almost mind-boggling how Ali defied the draft during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He was at the height of his career and stood to lose everything by it. He stood to lose his title, his money and his fame. Far more than that, he stood to earn the revulsion, the spite and the condemnation of the country he lived in.
And did: He was stripped of his title, he fell into penury, settling for what little he could lecturing in colleges, his erstwhile friends disappearing faster than his bank deposits, and he became one of the most hated men in America. To this day, even his kids are astonished that he lived to be 65 -- and metamorphosed from pariah to icon, from leper to legend. Ali was far more hated than Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and they killed King and Kennedy. Yet for the strangest reason (Ali always claimed Allah was his shield), no one lifted a murderous hand against him.
Why did he refuse to go to war? Because, as he put it: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home, and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going 10,000 miles from home to murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”
Later, he would add, “No Vietcong ever called me a nigger.” Somehow that seemed more poetic than saying, “Healer, heal thyself.”
Those words take on particular resonance today in light of what George W. Bush is doing to America. Except that there is no Ali to say: Why should I go 10,000 miles from home to free a people when right here in the home of the free and brave freedom is being extirpated everywhere and bravery replaced by fearful acquiescence?
No, Foreman was not Ali’s greatest enemy, and much as I delight watching that fight again and again, I revel even more running in my mind again and again Ali’s even greater fight against Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s America. Ali didn’t do the rope-a-dope there, he just slugged it out toe to toe, armed with the fists of conviction and the fury of belief. And showed the world that he couldn’t just land a flurry of punches on his opponents, he could also take a haymaker—and remain standing.
Ali won that fight, in more ways than one. Richard Harris would sum it up beautifully: Other fighters would have given up their souls to gain the championship of the world, Ali gave up being champion of the world to gain his soul.
The greatest? You bet he is.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=44975
I can still remember the air of electricity generated by the Ali-Foreman fight in this country. Ali had become very popular by then and had legions of diehard fans here. I was one of them. I am not a betting man and have never betted money on fights. (I’ve betted life and limb only on causes, but that’s another story.) But I kept telling friends that if I were to put my money on that fight, I’d put it on Foreman. I loved Ali, but, alas, Foreman was just going to kill him.
Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his time. Frazier, who had beaten Ali during his comeback, hadn’t just lost to Foreman, he had been pulverized. I saw the fight, and I swear Frazier lifted up an inch or two as Foreman caught him with an upper hook, which sent him to dreamland. I hoped for the best and feared for the worst. The best being that Ali would be floored instantly, the worst being that he would be maimed permanently. As it turned out, that was what Ali’s people were thinking, too, as the documentaries revealed. They very literally feared for his life.
I won’t go into the fight but urge the reader instead to look it up with that background in mind. You can imagine the frenzy that followed its result. It was Edsa People Power I and II combined, with the breathtaking ecstasy coming from the future downfall of this government thrown in. For Ali did not only do the improbable, which was to win the fight, he did the impossible, which was to knock out Foreman. Hercules could not have done a more Herculean deed. For days afterward, the jeepneys I took home during late nights reeked of alcohol and resonated with loud conversations about the fight. It also echoed with lamentations from people who lost big from betting on the "llamado" [favored].
The fight was shown on ESPN because it was Ali’s 65th birthday last week. One he had wanted to celebrate quietly but which the world would not let him. For good reason: Ali is more than a boxer, he is a freedom fighter. His arena isn’t the ring, it is the world. He isn’t just a sports hero, he is a hero in the epic sense of the word. As observers have observed, he doesn’t belong to the company of Joe Louis, he belongs to the company of Nelson Mandela.
Looking back, incredible as Ali’s triumph was over Foreman, it wasn’t the most incredible. For Foreman wasn’t Ali’s greatest challenge, the one foe that loomed invincible, that threatened to crush anyone and anything in his path. Nor was it Sonny Liston, the ex-con whom you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley and whose brute strength made him the most fearsome fighter a decade before Foreman. Ali’s greatest enemy was the US government.
Or more specifically the Racist and Imperial America that that government represented. The martial law babies will probably not be able to fully appreciate it, but it’s almost mind-boggling how Ali defied the draft during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He was at the height of his career and stood to lose everything by it. He stood to lose his title, his money and his fame. Far more than that, he stood to earn the revulsion, the spite and the condemnation of the country he lived in.
And did: He was stripped of his title, he fell into penury, settling for what little he could lecturing in colleges, his erstwhile friends disappearing faster than his bank deposits, and he became one of the most hated men in America. To this day, even his kids are astonished that he lived to be 65 -- and metamorphosed from pariah to icon, from leper to legend. Ali was far more hated than Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and they killed King and Kennedy. Yet for the strangest reason (Ali always claimed Allah was his shield), no one lifted a murderous hand against him.
Why did he refuse to go to war? Because, as he put it: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home, and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going 10,000 miles from home to murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”
Later, he would add, “No Vietcong ever called me a nigger.” Somehow that seemed more poetic than saying, “Healer, heal thyself.”
Those words take on particular resonance today in light of what George W. Bush is doing to America. Except that there is no Ali to say: Why should I go 10,000 miles from home to free a people when right here in the home of the free and brave freedom is being extirpated everywhere and bravery replaced by fearful acquiescence?
No, Foreman was not Ali’s greatest enemy, and much as I delight watching that fight again and again, I revel even more running in my mind again and again Ali’s even greater fight against Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s America. Ali didn’t do the rope-a-dope there, he just slugged it out toe to toe, armed with the fists of conviction and the fury of belief. And showed the world that he couldn’t just land a flurry of punches on his opponents, he could also take a haymaker—and remain standing.
Ali won that fight, in more ways than one. Richard Harris would sum it up beautifully: Other fighters would have given up their souls to gain the championship of the world, Ali gave up being champion of the world to gain his soul.
The greatest? You bet he is.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=44975
posted by dqfan06 @ 2:51 AM
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