Ali: The Greatest

I’m not a huge boxing fan. I can probably count on one hand how many boxing matches I have watched. It’s not that I have any objections about the sport being to0 brutal or barbaric, not in the slightest. If anything, I have great respect for men and women who are willing to push their bodies to that limit in the pursuit of glory. I’m just not that into it. However, Mohammed Ali is different. I’ve grown up with the myth of Ali, this uber-confident, beautifully graceful athlete, a titan of his era. A man whose name I’d hear being spoken with hushed reverence, in pubs and bars and crowded living rooms, by hard men who didn’t really respect anything apart from their country and their parents. But when Ali’s name was spoken they would quiet down, draw their breath, pucker their cheeks as if getting ready to be kissed; “What can we say ‘bout Ali, son. He was the greatest.”

But why was he the greatest? What made Ali the single most powerful sporting icon in the history of professional sport? What made those hard men from the British Midlands bow in appreciation and reverence? The answer is simply that, although Ali was literally the greatest boxer of his era, by all accounts technically brilliant, quick, intelligent, excelling in all the areas that make for a great boxer, ultimately Ali transcended his sport. That’s why he’s loved so dearly by so many. In a time of deep political division in his country, Ali stood up and made the boldest of statements, and thus cemented his legacy as a powerful cultural icon, a symbol of the plight of the oppressed against their historic oppressor.

When Ali refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam he made one of the most subversive gestures in US history. Ever since the revolutionary war, African-Americans had been enlisted to fight on behalf of those who in normal times would deny them their basic human rights, on behalf of those who saw them as inferior and treated them as such. These men and women had spilt blood in countless battles to defend their nation and it’s so called values of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, yet at home were denied the right to vote, locked in to a cycle of perpetual poverty, segregated from their brothers with whom they shared the field of battle, treated as second class citizens in a country that constantly told them they were free, yet consistently denied them their basic freedoms. This hypocrisy had only ever been skirted around before Ali. However, when he refused the draft, proclaiming, “I’m not gonna help somebody get something my Negroes don’t have. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die here, fighting you. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice.”, he blew the lid off centuries of deception and hypocrisy. Why should an African-American fight for a country that only ever sought to restrict and disenfranchise him and his people? Why should poor black men and poor white men be forced to fight, while the rich get to avoid the draft through money and connections?

Ali’s intransigence meant he was stripped of his world titles and banned from participating in the sport that he loved. However, in that moment he cemented his legend. He showed the oppressed peoples of the world that from now on we have a voice, we will not go gently, we can change the course of events, our destiny is in our hands. But we must be brave. Those hard men in those working class areas of Britain loved him because they saw a parallel in their recent history. It was not too long ago that millions of British working class men were cynically used as fodder in the First World War, spilling blood for an empire that denied them even the most basic rights of stable work and a decent education. In Ali we saw a man who shared our desire for change and our anger at system rigged in favour of rich, largely white, men.

This is what makes Ali a legend and in my opinion the greatest sportsman of all time. He risked his career and his livelihood to stand up for what he believed to be right. He used his platform as one the pre-eminent athletes of his era to speak up for his people, for the poor, the disenfranchised. That seems like something that would never happen in sport in this day and age, and least of all in boxing, given many of the noxious, self-involved personalities that seem to inhabit that sport now. But most importantly Ali made us realise that a better world is possible if there are enough brave people willing to stand up. In the words of the great man himself, “Impossible is just a word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”