Ali / American

The note on the kitchen table in Connecticut the morning of June 4, 2016 was from Gail, who was out having coffee with a friend. It read that she knew how much I loved Muhammad Ali, and that he had died. 

She didn’t want me to read it first in the Times. I grieved for Ali, dead at age 74, but I had grieved for him for years as Parkinson’s Disease stole his speed of hand and swiftness of foot, silenced the voice that conveyed his lightning wit, including what the writer George Plimpton claims is the shortest poem in the English language: 

Me? 

Whee! 

During the first half of his life, Cassius Clay won a gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In 1964 at age 22, he won the heavyweight championship of the world. Soon after, he declared himself to be a member of the Nation of Islam with a new name—Muhammad Ali—to replace his ‘slave name.’ 

Three years later he was stripped of his championship, without due process, for refusing to be inducted into the Army. “I got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he said. He faced a 5-year prison sentence but eventually was exonerated by the Supreme Court. Some said he was a stooge, manipulated by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Is that so? The same man who put the white-dominated boxing industry on notice that he was free to be who he wanted to be, not who they wanted him to be?  

Ali regained his heavyweight championship in 1974 and had three memorable fights with his most worthy opponent, Joe Frazier. Then came the long march of Parkinson’s.

Reading Gail’s note I grieved for Ali but also felt relief for him, that his long struggle was over. I don’t know if he, with his strong faith, grieved for what he had lost, but how could he have not, at times? Doubt and faith can co-exist. 

It’s likely that Ali’s Parkinson’s was caused by repeated blows to the head in the boxing ring, most of them coming after his return from his enforced hiatus. Taking away three and a half years from a boxer who’s entering his prime is akin to imposing silence on a writer from the ages of 35 to 50. 

If Ali had not been robbed of the prime of his boxing life, would he have had the wisdom to quit while he was ahead? There’s no way of knowing, and the best in whatever discipline are as driven as they are talented. But lose that precious time in his art and craft, Ali did.

He turned his back on his friend and mentor Malcolm X in the 1960s when Elijah Muhammad  turned against X. He went way out of bounds with his trash talk about Joe Frazier to promote their fights in the 1970s. But he made amends with Malcolm X’s widow, and apologized many times, publicly, to Frazier. 

Reading Gail’s note, I had to admit to myself that I grieved most for the youthful Ali and was relieved, for myself, that the old Ali’s long decline was over. Maybe I need to apologize to him. 

October 2, 2023, finishing a first draft of this post at the kitchen table in Durham, North Carolina, Gail leaving with our daughter and grandson for a non-sectarian moms and children rally for a ceasefire in Gaza. We hugged, just a little worried in the America of today. 

“Learn how to cook,” she said. 

Ali would have loved that line. And got the context too.