The Cult: Muhammad Ali

The Cult is back, this week welcoming a man who went by many names but requires no introductions whatsoever. You can read previous entries here.

They tell you not to flog a dead horse, but unfortunately racism is still alive and kicking its ugly hooves across the globe. So, after Allen Iverson last week: round 2.

These days I barely notice when I hear Kanye West politely inform me that he's a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and some inanimate bonus-ball like 'a mountain' or 'a lightweight set of Shure Isolation Tank Earbuds in a Chanel carry-case'. It's drivel, but he can say what he likes.

Or when I hear Floyd Mayweather yawning on out about how his 'don't touch the face' fighting style has secured his place as the Greatest Of All Time. 50% of hip-hop is about telling the world how you're the baddest.

But sometimes – if I can block out the sense of the wealthy people celebrating by taking pictures of themselves, while the world slowly and then not so slowly collapses – I listen through what they're saying and hear a voice that, whether they're aware or not, is speaking through them. 60 years or so ago, there were parts of America where if they said this stuff in public, the absolute best they could hope for would be to be ignored. Not because they were boring, but because black people had no right to speak about themselves like that. It's a cruel truth, but no one was just going to hand them that right; someone had to fight for it.

So someone did.

The impression I get from all the hoary old news footage is that sport and all of life that reverberated around it was just a different world prior to Ali. Everyone was dry, humble, self-effacing. Black people because, in the midst of hostile racism in the stadiums they played in, they were required to be like that; white people out of those repressed anachronistic urges to always show that you had good manners. Before Ali, the sportsman America was most aware of saying things was Yogi Berra. 'It ain't over til it's over' and 'You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you'. Ho-hum.

'I'm so bad I make medicine sick. Superman don't need no seatbelt. Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can't talk. The man can't fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he's gonna fight me, the man needs falling lessons.' One of the most satisfying noises when he says this stuff is the whoops in the background of stiff white newspaper guys, who probably think they shouldn't, but still can't help but react.

There were black fighters before Ali, of course, successful ones – Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson –and the heavyweight division when he was at his pomp, amongst George Foreman and Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston, is seen as the high watermark. A nickel if you can tell me one single thing that any of those guys ever said. And to make it slightly harder, something that wasn't said in response to a remark Ali had made about them. I got nothing.

You can hardly blame them. Black people weren't supposed to talk; and perhaps some of them felt like if they just boxed to best of their ability, they might somehow be allowed equal footing with the whites. Life, though, tends to give nothing to people who ask if they might be allowed freedom. That the person who simply tells you they're now free to act as they please has to be the best at what they do probably goes without saying. That they then make you enjoy them being right, and you being wrong, turns them into a rare gift. You couldn't talk up enough the gift that Muhammad Ali was, and is.

Boxing-wise, he was the lighting-strike that took the sport from either technical craft or bloody slugging through crossover status into pure entertainment. He acted like himself in the ring; he was palpably aware of the crowd; he threw his arms around and spoke to his opponent. You can hear him, in a fight I watched recently, murmuring 'you're nothing, you weren't nothing before' – not an approach I figure was in the Marquess of Queensberry's original conception of the sport. But who gives a shit: that sport was conceived for Ali. Those rules were invented for him to help free the voices of a race.

The Rumble in the Jungle has gone beyond Cult – it's now cultural shorthand for 'something exciting'. According to the tetchy boxing forums I wandered through, it is a lie that's passed into popular memory that Ali basically spent seven rounds leaning on the ropes, taking punches, letting Foreman zip himself into his own sweating, wilting bodybag before storming into life in the eighth. Ali, as the footage of it testifies, was a lot more engaged in the fight than that.

But – but. That was the basis of what he was doing, and it's beautiful because of the dynamic it created – he'd shot his mouth off to high heaven beforehand, proclaiming the return of the greatest; and now, in the eyes of the world, the greatest had no greater approach than to come off looking slightly cowed by the punching power of Foreman. Which made Foreman try to punch him even harder. The electrical shift in the Ali-devoted crowd is special, as they suddenly realise that a journey they thought was heading one way is in fact, had always been, heading in the complete opposite direction, as a flurry of killer punches land on a defenceless, exhausted Foreman. After that fight, anyone who still protested that Ali's strongest suit was that he talked a good game had been knocked out. He was the best at talking, yet it wasn't even what he was best at.

To Michael Parkinson, 1974. 'You don't really psyche them out, you make them fight harder… and that's the thing – it makes them fight too hard. It makes them anxious, they gotta get you. Like I told George, I said, 'Okay sucker, I'm backing up on the ropes, and I want you to take your best shots'. And I just stood there, 'Come on show me something, show me something…' He was swinging so hard, flailing all on the ropes… I said, 'Man, this is the wrong place to get tired.'

Words: @tobysprigings

Illustration: @Dan_Draws