SPECTATOR SPORT
Muhammad Ali triumphs
Simon Barnes
IT NEVER fails. Produce Muhammad Ali and all America and most of the world break down in a storm of cheers and tears. They brought him out to light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony of the games in Atlanta, but they couldn't resist going to the well again.
The occasion the organisers of these games chose was the men's basketball final, when the millionaire members of the United States Dream Team were cruising to their routine victory against Yugoslavia. The presi- dent of the International Olympic Commit- tee, a member of the power-crazed gerontoc- racy of global sport named Juan Antonio Samaranch (but you can call him 'His Excel- lency' for short), presented him with a gold medal — a replacement for the one that Ali won at the Rome Olympics of 1960. The medal, the announcer said, was 'lost', though the story of how it got mislaid is hardly a secret. Like every other aspect of Ali's story, it says so many ambiguous things about America and sport, and in this case about the Olympic Games as well, that you wonder how anyone has the nerve to dress it up as a syrupy tale of greatness and goodness.
The fact is, after he won his gold medal, All —then, of course, Cassius Clay — took to wearing it everywhere he went. He was never a modest and retiring man. A white motorcycle gang objected to this practice. Later, Ali/Clay and the friend he was with went down to the Ohio River to wash the blood off, and Clay, in rage and humiliation, threw the medal into the water. In his auto- biography, he summed up: 'My holiday as the White Hope was over.'
Much of his career thereafter was a calcu- lated affront to white America. Nor did this go unnoticed. At his first world champi- onship fight, against Sonny Liston, the crowd shouted to Liston, 'Kill the nigger.' Liston himself was of course black.
Clay, now champion and a public figure, became a Muslim, which involved the giv- ing up of his 'slave-name'. Slaves were by tradition named after their slave-owners and their ancestors still carry these names. All also refused military service, on the grounds that 'I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.' It is hardly stretching the truth to say that All made himself the great hate object of middle-America.
And now he is beatified. How came this extraordinary 180-degree turnaround? First-
ly, there is the equally extraordinary sporting career: there cannot be more than half-a- dozen athletes in history with achievements worthy of comparison. But sport giveth and sport taketh away: Ali, with Parkinson's syn- drome, is these days a walking shadow. He looks like Buddha. One imagines that the serenity of his full-moon face is pathological, but you never know. And as he stepped for- ward, stiff and foot-dragging, to receive his medal, he raised his arms to the crowd of sobbers and cheerers in a strange, hiero- phantic gesture: here, it seemed, was Muhammad blessing urbem et orbem. He touched cheeks with His Excellency twice a strangely unAmerican gesture — then kissed his new gold medal, made again his stiff salute to the people, and, having
blessed, retreated. '
In the novel Jane Eyre, the heroine can only marry the wild, life-force-emanating Mr Rochester after he has been blinded: symbolically castrated, if you prefer. Is there something of this in the way that America has only at the end taken the ambiguous person of Muhammad Ali so unambiguously to its heart?
Ali shuffled from the basketball court, his new medal around his neck and the whoop- ing of the crowd that loved him all around. A momentary and quite unreadable change of expression; a flicker of light behind the boarded-up windows of a mansion.
Previous page
