SPECTATOR SPORT
Greatest hits
Frank Keating
THE FIFTIETH birthday 'tributes' to Muhammad All read like obituaries. A shame. Okay, the great man may be victim to that unique sidebar and syndrome of Parkinson's disease — i.e. punch-drunken- ess caused by taking too many blows to the head. But when you carefully push the ball to deepish mid-off for the single to post your half-century you deserve, surely, some plaudits for the general innings so far. Not lamentations for the way you might have scratched around in the forties.
And what an innings! Wowsie! is the only word. Dempsey, Tunney, Louis, Marciano. . . . the very best in our trade. But Hugh Mcllvanney, said that compared with Ali `his predecessors are obscure figures danc- ing behind frosted glass'. When Muham- mad did come down from his mountain agreed, too late — Hugh said it was a sportswriter's equivalent of the Wall Street crash, 'and if you are aware of an animated blur passing your window, spare a sympa- thetic thought, for the chances are that one of our bunch will have decided he cannot go on without the greatest source of copy the world has ever known'.
Golly, can it really be 28 years ago next month that we stayed up half the night in that Fulham Road bedsit to watch him dis- mantle the blackguard, Sonny Liston? We could scarcely believe it was true. We pre- sumed a fix. We knew soon enough it wasn't. He took on anyone and everyone. Called them names, then beat them up. Here's something for A Question of Sport:
who was the Ugly Bear, the Baby Bear, the Washerwoman, the Rabbit, the Mummy, the Beaver, the Peanut? And who, unques- tionably, was the Greatest?
In the mid-1960s I wangled a job with ITV, so saw a few of his fights for teal in the glorious heyday before they got him and banned him for dodging the draft — 'I ain't got nothing against them Viet Congs'. Some dud `obituarise wrote the other day that the Vietnam line was the only memo- rable thing he ever said. Well, depends how you look at it. I chortled with the best of them the first time I heard, 'I'm so mean I make medicine sick'; 'Harry, you're not as dim as you look'; 'Get out the guns, we're settin' traps'; 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'; 'He's got two chances — slim and none'; 'I chop wood, so it's like I bor- row all my strength from trees'; 'If I say a mosquito can pull a plough, don't ask, just hitch it up.'
As well as his fluent, unrivalled virtuosity, there was a courage and valour in him. Also a bravery outside the roped square they call a ring. Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice: 'Essentially every black champion until Muhammad Ali had been a puppet, manip- ulated by whites in his private life to control his public image . . . With the coming of Muhammad, the puppet master was left with a handful of strings to which his danc- ing doll was no longer attached.'
Like all the finest winners, Muhammad also knew how to lose. The day after the first of his three epic contests with Joe Fra- zier, Ali attempted a painful smile in spite of his crushed cheekbone: 'I thought I couldn't lose, simply because I was fighting for people all over the world. If I win, peo- ple all over the world's going to think they can be winners too. You've all got to lose some to know how to win some. I feel rewarded this morning in a way, because I've been given the chance to set an exam- ple of how to lose well ... '
Once after training, about 50 of us crowded round him on the massage table asking the usual inane questions about the state of the universe. I don't know what came over me, but I asked what the best counter was to a ramrod southpaw. The joint fell silent. Ali, with delight, said it was the first technical question he'd been asked on boxing all year. He gave orders for 49 hacks to be thrown out. I got a world exclu- sive on the secret of beating up southpaws.
Unbelievers can scoff to their hearts' content. Like the man himself said, 'I don't like to be thought of as boastin'. It's just hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.'
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