Brunt on Ali: The Greatest turns 70
Posted January 17, 2012 12:19 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Editor’s note: This Last Word column by Stephen Brunt originally appeared in the December 26 issue of Sportsnet magazine.
Muhammad Ali is ailing.
You know that, of course, you’ve known that for the better part of three decades. At least from the night in 1980 when he stood passively and was beaten by Larry Holmes, Ali has been in decline, has been slowly falling to pieces like a block of obsidian ceaselessly pounded by waves.
What you may not know is that in mid-November, not long after he appeared almost ghostly at the funeral of his great rival Joe Frazier, Ali was rushed to hospital after falling unconscious. The incident was kept quiet, despite a 911 call, and by the time it did reach the press, Ali was already home again, celebrating Thanksgiving with his family, dehydration the official cause.
But no one was pretending he was fit, that he was getting better, that everything was just fine. “He may or may not be going in the direction you or I like, but no one is on alert,” family friend John Ramsey told the Louisville Courier-Journal.
On Jan. 17, Ali turns 70, which will be an occasion for celebration and for reflection, a day on which the appropriate tributes will be offered to a man who was arguably the greatest athlete of the 20th century, and was without question its greatest global athletic celebrity. But underlining those kind words will be the issue of Ali’s mortality, and by extension the mortality of the generation that continues to dominate the culture even as it enters its autumn.
It is always thus when the sporting heroes of our youth go to their great reward: the deaths of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, though revelations of their less-than-noble qualities as human beings had long before exploded their bubble gum card myths, were for an older demographic occasions to lament innocence lost, and to take a furtive glance at that great big clock on the wall.
Ali is different, though. For the Boomers, who refuse to cede control, who made 40 the new 30, and 50 the new 40, and who like to imagine a zippy Viagra-fuelled old age that seems an awful lot like youth, the very notion of approaching the finish line is something to be denied.
And Ali is them, and us. He is truth and he is beauty. He is, like many a rock musician, someone whom parents first ridiculed, then dismissed, then found threatening. He is a generational point of demarcation.
That’s why the hero worship, why, even as his sport has declined, even while—as with those past athletic icons—less savoury aspects of Ali’s personal life came to the fore (one can float like a butterfly even with feet of clay), his aura has only burned brighter even as his health has failed. Most stories written about him now are a kind of sentimental hagiography. The seminal post-boxing moment came in 1996, when a trembling Ali lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta, and stomachs dropped, and tears were shed, and someone who was once happy to spout Nation of Islam truths about blue-eyed devils fully morphed into a universally beloved and harmless object of pathos.
Now, Muhammad Ali is dying, in the way that we’re all dying, but perhaps more rapidly, more vividly, before our very eyes, not at a ripe old age, and how to process that? How to process, as well, that we all watched it happen, that we all played a part, that we were complicit in his destruction?
Years back, a subtle but enormously significant semantic shift took place within the Ali camp. What he had then was Parkinson’s syndrome—symptoms caused by boxing-related brain damage. That link was made explicit and unequivocal by Ali’s own doctors in Tom Hauser’s authorized oral history Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, published in 1991. What he has now is Parkinson’s disease, which strikes out of the blue, is ethically neutral and puts none of the blame on the blows delivered by Henry Cooper and Joe Frazier and Ken Norton and Earnie Shavers, or on the people who paid money to watch those blows rain down, to watch Ali display his magnificent skills, his magnificent heart, his magnificent chin, and almost always end with his hand raised.
To suggest that wasn’t true, that perhaps commercial considerations factored into that re-diagnosis was to invite a quick, angry letter from Muhammad Ali Inc.—pretty tough to keep the Ali business going if people feel guilt rather than simple pity every time they look at him. When he’s gone, though, who with a clear conscience will look back on his terrible decline and convince themselves boxing had nothing to do with it?
So it is a complex brew of sadness and remorse and memory and regret and yes, fear, that is whipped up here.
Maybe he’ll outlive us all. Maybe we’ll be celebrating his 80th and 90th birthdays, the remains of the Love Generation in its dotage, still cheering on the man who defied authority and defied the odds, made fisticuffs art, who took a brave stand and hung around in the ring too long for his own good because he so loved being him.
If not, though, the outpouring of emotion that will be unleashed will be like nothing we have experienced before.
