EMINENTOES: The Butterfly's Sting
Beston, Paul
EMINENTOES PAUL BESTON The Butterfiyg Sting Muhammad Ali's greatness took a toll on him-and the rest of us. F YOU WATCH ESPN CLASSIC LONG ENOUGH, you'll come upon the footage. It's the...
...In 1945, he headed ashore at Okinawa with a platoon of boys who called him champ...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006...
...Unlike Ali, his slow pull back to acceptance came despite his war record, not because of it...
...and "I am the greatest...
...His puzzlement that night was shared by millions of Americans, white and black, who didn't know what to make of the raving lunatic in their living rooms...
...I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong," he said famously...
...In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 to overturn the conviction, but by then Ali had become a hero of the counterculture...
...He won the title shortly after the end of World War I, a conflict in which he did not serve, claiming that he was the sole support for his wife and a large extended family...
...It is the first iconic moment in a career filled with them...
...One of the most divisive figures of the 1960s, he is widely viewed today as a racial hero almost on par with Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Ali dropped into that world like a traveler infected with an exotic virus...
...Jack Johnson...
...Ali against Frazier in 1975, his body thicker at age 33, winning a fight so savage it even made him humble, talking in whispers afterwards about the transience of life...
...Ali at 35, taking a right from the lethal Earnie Shavers, out on his feet to all who could see in Madison Square Garden--except Shavers-and making wide eyes and swiveling his hips and mocking laughter to put him off the scent...
...This represents quite a shift from an earlier time, when forgiveness had to be earned...
...Much has changed in the intervening years...
...His antics are re-created daily by athletes, 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 actors, musicians, and others in public life or aspiring to get there...
...Paul Beston is a writer in New York...
...AndAli could not be quarantined...
...Americans are very forgiving...
...and going further back, bare knuckle champion John L. Sullivan, who was known to enter saloons and announce, "I can lick any sonofabitch in the house...
...He wasn't kidding...
...It is not surprising that rock and roll and sports have been increasingly connected via cross marketing and promotion campaigns...
...physical strength with Victorian religious and moral ideals...
...Sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote: It would be an insult to every young American who sleeps today from Flanders to Lorraine, from the Somme to the Argonne, to crown Dempsey with anylaurels of fighting courage...
...He had seen what the Nation could do to heretics like Malcolm X, who had once been his mentor and friend...
...For one thing, Clay is known as Muhammad AlL For another, he suffers from Parkinson's disease, and says little...
...Though Dempsey always maintained his innocence, he seemed to sense a core of truth in Rice's words...
...State boxing commissions across the country revoked his boxing license while his lawyers appealed an initial conviction for draft evasion...
...After he became champion, his then ex-wife resurfaced, alleging that he had lied to secure his exemption...
...She accused him of being a draft dodger, what was then called a "slacker...
...Ali's act was part ofa generation's undermining of a whole set of ideas about self-restraint, civility, and tradition: in short, manners...
...In his moment of victory, Clay leaps to his feet and begins pointing over the ropes to the sporting press that had picked him to lose, shouting "Eat your words...
...Ali against Frazier in 1971, when he was knocked down with possibly the most perfect punch in boxing history, but was standing upright before Frazier had even been led away by the referee...
...EMINENTOES PAUL BESTON The Butterfiyg Sting Muhammad Ali's greatness took a toll on him-and the rest of us...
...the virus spread...
...His legend wasn't about content, but form...
...The older Ali showing the intuitive genius of great athletes who sense they have to improvise, as in his victory over George Foreman, when he formulated his famous "Rope a Dope" tactic between rounds, not even bothering to tell his cornermen what he was thinking...
...That was the Old America talking, where honor meant "the good opinion of those who matter" (as James Bowman has described it), not integrity to one's personal value system...
...Only silence astonishes now...
...He deliberately prolonged some bouts to punish men he disliked...
...They were anything but pacifist, opposed integration, were virulently anti-Semitic, and believed whites were an evil race concocted by a mad scientist...
...Sugar Ray Robinson...
...The late Mark Kram, who spent years coveringAli P A U L B E S T 0 N for Sports Illustrated, maintained that Mi's draft resistance was forced on him by the Nation, right down to the infamous "Vietcong" tag line...
...Jack Dempsey was heavyweight champion for most of the 1920s...
...But in Mi's case this timehonored process has lacked the requisite repentance on the part of the offender...
...Like Ali, he was an electric performer and a compelling personality...
...What's really striking about Mi's draft record is how it became integral to the reverence in which he is now held...
...He has been called "the first rapper" (admiringly), and he was indeed the sports world's analogue to rock and roll...
...The bout's lead broadcaster, Steve Ellis, tries to interview Clay, who keeps shouting "I shook up the world...
...The bitterness he sowed outside of it contended with other emotions when he finally got down to plying his trade: The young Ali of the unmatched footwork and speed in his hands, the casual flouting of boxing fundamentals, which his physical gifts allowed him to pull off...
...It had to hurt profoundly, and-giving credit where due--Mi never seemed terriblybitter about it...
...he called them bums, and later developed demeaning nicknames for them...
...In the era of free love, Ali could be heard fulminating against interracial relationships and declaring that "sisters" who went with white men deserved to die...
...And so, if it is true that no man ever gave more to sports, it is also true that no man ever took so much away...
...Cassius Clay had charisma worthy of a long line of great American showmen...
...Maybe he was just glad to be alive...
...While Clay rants, Ellis laughs and tries to draw Louis into it, tapping the old champion's chest as if to say, "Isn't this a scream...
...It seemed innocent enough in the beginning...
...There was the Ali that made all of his fights into spectacles, carnivals, Third World extravaganzas, sometimes ugly sideshows, but always shows that seemed necessary to see...
...It also came because Dempsey made one grand gesture of atonement: when World War II broke out, he enlisted at nearly 50 years of age...
...They have become the same product, though anyone old enough to remember crew-cut NFL players, some of them playing on weekend furlough from military duty, knows that it wasn't always so...
...Consider the experience of one of Mi's predecessors on the heavyweight throne, who faced a somewhat analogous set of circumstances...
...Except in the ring, where content and form became one...
...Standing next to Ellis is former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, who was providing commentary on the broadcast...
...Dempsey was put on trial in federal court and acquitted, but the stain of the accusation lingered...
...Mi had very much...
...It's the aftermath of the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in 1964, the fight in which Clay wins the heavyweight championship as a huge ~_underdog...
...One of the first things Ali said after announcing his opposition to Vietnam was, "I don't have to be what you want me to be...
...Where to conclude but with Ali in the ring...
...Louis, who wears a pained, befuddled expression, doesn't think so...
...rI"~HE AWARDING OF THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL is per| h a p s the capstone of a long-running cultural JI_ celebration of Ali...
...But working class pastimes like baseball were "influenced by the standards of sportsmanship that rubbed off on them FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 EMINENTOES from the dominant culture," writes Bowman...
...It is also true that baseball and prizefighting, to name the two most popular working class sports of the early 20th century, were hardly known as gentlemen's occupations...
...Without up-to-date notions of Victorian honor, they probably would not have survived" Part of the Victorian influence was a movement beginning in the late 19th century known as Muscular Christianity, which originated in a concern among certain Protestant denominations that their churches had become feminized and were failing to retain the allegiance of men...
...t~HERE SIMPLY AREN'T PRECEDENTS for American E athletes behaving like AlL Yes, any number of ~ , progenitors can be proposed--Dizzy Dean...
...But his egotism soon revealed a generous supply of sadism, especially as the Nation of Islam became the dominant influence on his worldview (if not his sex life...
...Only near the end of his boxing career did he attain some measure of forgiveness...
...Though Muscular Christianity ebbed after the First World War, the Victorian ideal of sportsmanship continued to shape the conduct of American athletes well into the first half of the century...
...Members of the Nation of Islam had no standing to lecture about race relations or the morality of American foreign policy...
...The churches had previously discouraged athletics, but now they attempted to fuse masculine Ali's act was part of a generation's undermining of a whole set of ideas about sel# restraint, civility, and tradition ~ in short, manners...
...He taunted his opponents in the ring, standing over them with arms raised when he knocked them to the canvas...
...Christy Mathewson, one of the first great baseball heroes of the century, was often called the "Christian Gentleman...
...I'm free to be what I want...
...It also includes the man formerly known as Cassius Clay, whom Bush lauds for his "beautiful soul...
...And yet Dempsey still wrote, as an old man, about the slacker business: "It never will be over, in my own heart...
...Over the years, often buried under the weight of the Ali mythology, Ali's critics have accurately pointed out the hollowness of his position...
...Instead, the culture has apologized to him...
...Those statements didn't make it into the section of the recently opened Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville devoted to "cross-cultural understanding...
...Armed Forces, claiming conscientious objector status as a minister of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam...
...and "I'm the king of the world...
...He missed the big chance of his life to prove his own manhood before his own soul...
...But he no longer needs to speak...
...Cut to more than 40 years later, in the East Room of the White House, where President Bush confers the Presidential Medal of Freedom on a group of distinguished recipients that includes historian Robert Conquest and General Richard Myers...
...T IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE that the adulation in J which Ali is held today has as much to do with $,_ Vietnam, or even race, as with this rebellion of personality...
...he recited rhyming doggerel predicting their demise...
...In 1967, he refused induction into the U.S...
...Most members of cults have little more to lose...
...Eventually, he became beloved...
...Both Ali and the new music carried a message of liberation but left behind an awful lot of vulgarity in the course of freeing the repressed...
...it would be natural for the passions that Mi aroused to cool, and for some forgiveness to come his way, as well as appreciation for his more positive qualities...
...He was a champion with few equals, difficult to resist entirely...
...Regardless of whose idea it was, Mi's exile cost him an estimated $10 million in earnings as well as the prime physical years of his career...
...Babe Ruth...
...His use of racial slander on Joe Frazier has onlyin recent years been acknowledged...
...From its spores came Reggie Jackson, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, Dennis Rodman, Deion Sanders, Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, and Ron Arrest, among a legion of other droning, preening egotists...
...he described how he would "float like a butterfly/sting like a bee...
Vol. 39 • February 2006 • No. 1
