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Monday, September 27, 2010

WHY OBSESS ABOUT BULLSHIT? I knew this would come up. As it has, in the comments. To wit: "Frazier was TWICE the champion the POS Ali could ever dream of being." Be patient. I'll get to this. But there's an important point at stake and I'll get to it in the right order.

I know I'm speaking to a subset of a subset here, but the truth is what it is, regardless of the preconceptions and gaps in the minds of the audience. Old 'conservatives' never saw Ali as anything but a disruptive troublemaker and rooted continuously for a humiliation that never quite came, no matter how fervently they yearned for it. Probably why they abandoned boxing as a sport. You younger kids have probably been raised with a metrosexual aversion to boxing as a sin akin to dogfighting, never mind what that says about your assessment of those who compete in it willingly.

This is a lesson for both of you. I'm not talking down here. Just clearing away some of the cobwebs and the distortions of time. Which is what a lesson it is, even if it's conducted for the benefit of talented intellectual equals who know things that just aren't so.

There are jarring contradictions in both your points of view. And something shining in the space between them.

I have to begin with some non-sequiturs. My first outreach is to the (comparative) kids who regard me as something like Methuselah, even if I amuse you from time to time. You're not really superior to boxing. It's just that boxing has become inferior to your sense of good entertainment. You're not averse to violence. You play incredibly violent video games. You thrive on acts of semi-accidental mayhem in the form of viral videos that show you, vividly, broken bones and other bloody injuries. Many of you are fans of sports -- the NFL and NHL -- whose game action can maim, crippple, and kill the participants. Others of you are devoted fans of professional wrestling -- despite its obvious fakeries -- and the new mixed martial arts style of one-on-one combat. Still others of you are happily willing to claim that "Raging Bull" is one of the greatest movies ever made. (HINT: It wasn't.) For ALL of you, my message is this. None of these can ever compare to the drama of an old-style heavyweight championship boxing match and the champions who fought them. You're superior to nothing. What you are is jaded and ignorant.

My second outreach is to the dinosaurs who insist on hating Muhammed Ali. I know how this argument works. I heard it from my own dad and countless other "boxing fans." Who was better? uh, Joe Louis was better. Because he defended his title 25 times and humiliated Hitler's Aryan champ, Max Schmeling. Rocky Marciano was better because he retired undefeated. And, least convincing of all, Joe Frazier was better because he was a patriot from Philly who knocked Muhammed Ali on his ass once and never tried to pretend he was a world-important figure. (Also called The Rocky Effect: Frazier becomes an honorary Italian and therefore not really black somehow but, uh, Philadelphian. Think I'm kidding? The bizarre truth of the buildup to the first Ali-Frazier fight was that those who were the most frightened of black uprisings in the wake of the Radical Sixties rooted for dark-skinned Frazier against the scary light-skinned Nemesis named Muhammed Ali. Why? You tell me. But Ali seemed at the time completely uncontrollable, a man with a mind of his own. As opposed to Frazier. Who liked hats and leisure suits. Regardless of that, he was an honorary white man doing battle against the evil black man.) Usually, they'll cite all three as superior to Muhammed Ali because look at all the things they did Ali didn't do.

Now for the shining thing. Ali.

Seriously. Think about it. Before Ali, no one had ever regained a lost heavyweight title. He did it twice. A political title fight? Give me a break. The first Ali-Frazier fight was for them the second Schmeling-Louis fight, a confrontation in which civilization itself was on the line. What they forgot was that there was a first Schmeling-Louis that put White America's hero Joe Louis on his ass. Yeah. There was more than one Ali-Frazier fight too. The politics of that are obviously still resonating.

Oops. Did I forget Rocky Marciano? Even in his own time, he benefited from a desire for white men to win. He always got cut, always bled like a pig, and would have had his fights stopped every goddam time if he weren't the post-Joe Louis White Hope. Yeah. He had a hell of a punch. So what. There's really no art in getting beaten half to death for ten or twelve rounds in the hope that you can deliver your one freak paralyzing punch. Muhammed Ali fought at least four other fighters with a freak paralyzing punch. And they all hit him with it. He never got cut. He also never ended a fight on the canvas. That's the freakiest thing of all.

Sorry if I'm beginning to sound angry. But I am angry. I can't count the number of times I've been accused here of being a racist -- or of not taking black behavioral propensities into account in assessing the state of current events.

I oppose Affirmative Action not because I think the Fourteenth Amendment automatically swept away all forms of racism. I oppose it because it isn't helping liberate African-Americans from an anti-intellectual culture that imprisons them in a separatist, inferior, lifelong ghetto. I was ten years old when I became a fan of Cassius Clay. I was the only one in my sixth grade class who wanted him to beat Sonny Liston, the only one who predicted he would, and probably the only one who sneaked a transistor radio under the covers to hear him do it. And, boy, did he do it.

Get Matt or Lake or someone else to explain it to you. Something about him appealed to my writer's sense. He was an original. He'd only been a light-heavyweight when he won the Olympic Gold Medal. He did everything wrong in this time-honored sport. He held his hands at waist-level, almost asking to get taken out by a left hook, uppercut, or right cross. He was brash to the point of silliness. Compared to the post-Joe Louis malevolence of Sonny Liston: "He WILL kill you."

Then he dispatched Liston again with a controversial phantom punch I could clearly see in the replays, and followed it up by changing his name. "I am Muhammed Ali."

Blah blah blah blah. He fought everybody on the heavyweight boxing scene and destroyed them all. Former champion Floyd Patterson. Longtime contenders like Ernie Terrell. (MY first acquaintance with black anger. Terrell wouldn't call him by his new name; Ali tortured him in the ring: {"What's my name?" Jab "What's my name?" Jab. ""What's my name?" Ferocious combination.}) Yeah. I was a pre-teenager. I learned about the Civil Rights Movement from Muhammed Ali. And I could understand because all the hostility was so focused on one man.

And he was so clearly, obviously, and brilliantly the best. With my taste for eternity and my bent for scholarship, I could discern that he was the best ever. Faster, more elusive, and smarter than any of them. But because he never got hit, he was probably yellow. He was a loudmouth, which meant he was a con artist and a fake. He was good looking (even to white people), which meant he was one of those most dangerous of all negroes, the "high-yella."

But it always came back to the ring. That's where the truth is. What you kids are missing now. MMA is a cheat. Boxing can be beautiful. Grappling and chokeholds never are. MMA is technique, a kind of thuggish chess. Boxing is a character test, checkers with pain. I challenge anyone to find a heavyweight boxer in all of boxing history who made of boxing the art Muhammed Ali made it.

Then they took it away from him. Like vandals smashing a work of art in progress. Exactly like that.

They held a smug white man's tournament to replace him. Joe Frazier won it against a bunch of Muhammed Ali sparring partners and other also-rans, including Ali imitators who also held their hands low in imitation and got knocked into the middle of next week for their affectation.

So began the Joe Frazier era. Inheritor of a title he didn't really earn. He knocked people out. He was another Jersey Joe Walcott, only not as good because he was from Philly, not Jersey (This is a personal remembrance, don't forget...)

And then Ali was back, restored to his license. Two hurry-up tuneup fights -- God, how he needed a payday -- and Ali was suddenly in the ring in Madison Square Garden after a 3-year layoff against a seasoned titleholder who was, uh, "TWICE the champion" he was. Even on the scorecard after fourteen, Ali got knocked down in the 15th round and despite his being up in seconds the decision went to Frazier.

Thus was the stage set for a multi-part war. All the old baggage was still in play. Old white men were still in Frazier's corner, pleased with his victory over the presumptuous one. Then George Foreman threw a wrench in the works. He destroyed Joe Frazier utterly. Five knockdowns in two rounds. (Don't hold me to that. If it's not exact, it's close.) A brand new, New Generation,  ultra-slugger Heavyweight Champion.  Foreman was bigger and taller and more hard-hitting than anyone, including the ghost of Joe Louis. No one could last two rounds against him. Bam Bam Down Done. More awesome in reputation even than Mike Tyson at his height. No lie.

I apologize to everyone who actually knows this history. But I beg you to remember that I didn't begin to write The Boomer Bible in its current form until I discovered that people don't know much about history. So, if you already know all this, just pretend you don't for the sake of those who really don't. I guarantee you it's more dramatic than Lost. Because it's true.

Almost parenthetically during the Foreman reign of terror, there was a second Ali-Frazier fight, which Ali won handily by decision. Restored to fighting condition, he knew how to outpoint the slugger from Philly in a twelve-round contest. No big deal. Two over-the-hill fighters blah blah blah... When's Foreman fighting next?

Problem was... Foreman was going to fight Ali. And how the cynics in the sports press pounced. The fight would be in Zaire. The sums discussed were princely. Ali was milking the last watery ounce of his celebrity to make a HUGE payday. The logic was inevitable. Frazier and Ali were evenly matched. Foreman had annihilated Frazier. Ali was even more past it than Frazier, yesterday's news. Ali was a dead duck. QED.

And Ali was old. To put it in perspective, I listened to that first Liston-Clay fight when I was ten. The Foreman-Ali fight was going to happen when I was in graduate business school. We had midterms that night and raced to the apartment of the guy we knew who had the new-fangled thing called HBO (or was it PRISM?) where the fight would be on live.

Subsequently, Norman Mailer wrote an entire book about that fight (the only Mailer book I like). He spends a whole chapter on the first round, from his seat in the first row. The sound of the punches Ali took in the gut from the most fearsome puncher the world of boxing had ever seen. You can find the book for yourself. (It's called "The Fight.") The metaphors are painful even to read. Then came the spontaneous Ali strategy of the rope-a-dope. Which wasn't all that sophisticated. Take punches, take punches, take punches, and take punches to my gut until you are tired. And then I'll kill you. Which he did in the eight round. After lying against the ropes and taking the most ferocious body blows in history for seven and a half rounds, here comes Ali, suddenly dancing and jabbing and punching in a flurry so fast that Foreman is on the canvas in mere seconds. My favorite moment is the punch Ali does not throw, at the very end, because Foreman is already done. (That moment of restraint is frozen in my memory because it reminds me of the referee's decision to keep sending Cleveland Williams back into the buzzsaw after the second knockdown in Round 2 of that fight. It was their hatred of Ali that prolonged that fight, which should have have been over after the second knockdown and was inexcusably prolonged after Williams finished Round 2 flat on his back.) Loving Ali is not sedition. It's glorying in an American original, ultimate underdog, winning wonder.

After the Foreman knockout, we screamed, we yelled, we ran all over the campus proclaiming our unalloyed joy at the greatest upset in heavyweight boxing history. And, uh, yeah, there was a West Point graduate and a Navy aviator on the scene cheering with us.

A day before that contest, I had clipped a column by Red Smith from the New York Times. It was titled, "All Ali has left to lose is his presumption." I carried it in my wallet until it literally dissolved.

So. Suddenly. Ali is once again the heavywight champion of the world. What does he do? He gives another title shot to the man who is "TWICE the champion" he ever was, Joe Frazier. Because he's such a snivelling coward and all.

Which results in the greatest heavyweight championship fight the world has ever seen. The only prizefight that rivals "Rocky" for number of punches thrown. Back when title fights still lasted 15 rounds. Nothing will ever compare again. Pardon the three segments.


Note that one of the commenters is Ken Norton, chosen because there is no one who has ever hated Ali more than he does.The more things change, the more they stay the same.


I apologize for the poor video quality. Just remember. We didn't get to see it while it was happening. What we heard at the times was that Frazier had made Ali a beaten man by the end of the tenth.


And then, suddenly, somehow, the Antichrist beat Frazier to a pulp in the 13th and 14th rounds. Interestingly enough, the unavailability of actual fight footage prior to the age of the Internet has enabled Ali haters to continue to insist that Frazier was always better. He just wasn't. Not seeing what actually happened made it easier to pretend about what happened and what didn't.

But. The thing is, they're both stupendous champions. American champions. They're not ideological opponents. They're competitors in the same line of work. What Marxists never understand. One of Ali's best friends today is George Foreman. God bless him. And God bless America.

Ask me when I began to doubt the reports of the mainstream media.

P.S. I read this out loud to the Missus before I posted it. Didn't want to offend anyone, don't you know. She said, "How do you do this podcast thing? It would all be so much better if people could hear you read it."

I said, "I have no idea."

She said, "Find out."

Does anybody know?

UPDATE. Nobody wants me to do a podcast yet (your loss, believe me; I read like Paul Schofield) But I'm used to the fact that there will be no interest if I'm not philophilosophizing about Lost. (You know. the 8-year TV series consisting of flashback memories of all the people who died in a plane crash 8 years ago. What the alphabet TV networks call suspenseful. Like Hawaii Five Oh. Kewl.) Finally. An intelligent response to this post. By somebody who isn't and was never js. He calls himself Thucydides. Which you can't call yourself if you're not smart.

The Ali I don't care for is the Ali myth. The one who appears on, say, ESPN Classic when a parade of lefty sportswriters (redundant?) play the usual game of status-seeking and prove their totally-not-racist credentials by talking up how much they loved Ali and everything he "represented" - which usually ends up being their side of the 60s culture war. The ones who love to wax poetic about Ali only, or primarily, because doing so lets them get in another dig against racist conservatives. I don't care for them or their Ali.

So what I appreciate about this post was the opportunity it provided to see what a less *political* appreciation of Ali might look like. Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a more honestly political appreciation?

You offer Ali as an American original, a look at "who we've always been." I like that. I especially like it because you don't claim that what we've always been is without its warts. Ali shows us something shining about ourselves, but he also shows us something about the parts that don't shine.

Love of violence. Americans love to fight, Patton said. I don't think he was wrong. We do like to fight, we like violence. There's a touch of the barbarian in the American soul. Maybe that will help us avoid the ultra-civilized hell of the Europeans.

Defiance of authority. Ali dodged the draft in the name of individual conscience. The same spirit which animated that move animates the Tea Party's stand against reckless government acquisition of property. I know the parallels aren't perfect, but we have to take the good with the bad. Do you like American individualism taking a stand against an oppressive state? Well, you're also going to get draft dodgers and those who refuse to "serve" with that.

Showboating. Americans are ebullient, uncouth, proud. Sportsmanship was taught for generations, I think, to counteract some of our native tendencies toward showboating. That such things are no longer taught or enforced is due to systemic lack of will. Ali isn't responsible for them and he doesn't "represent" the modern decay. He represents tendencies which have always been there.

For both good and ill I think I buy that Ali is an example of who we've always been. I'm not ashamed to like him.

What's wrong with this guy? Can't we like get him arrested for parking tickets or something? You know he made a bunch of money during the Bush years. He must have stolen it from somebody.

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