Muhammad Ali was the greatest, but his greatest fights took a lot out of him
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Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali stands over fallen challenger Sonny Liston, shouting after knocking him down with a short, hard right to the jaw during their bout in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965. (John Rooney / Associated Press)
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Muhammad Ali listens to a Nation of Islam speech at Chicago’s Coliseum in 1968. ( Jim O’Leary / Chicago Tribune)
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A Zairian in traditional clothing leads Muhammad Ali through a crowd at the airport in Kinshasa, Zaire (now known as Congo). Ali arrived in a chartered Air Zaire plane from Paris for a 1974 world championship fight with George Foreman, the famed “Rumble in the Jungle.”
(Horst Faas / AP)
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Muhammad Ali stands in the ring at the Windy City Boxing Club with gym owner Clarence Griffin in 1977.
(Luigi Mendicino / Chicago Tribune )
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Muhammad Ali speaks during an interview in 1977 for a French television program in Paris. (Patrick Riviere / Getty Images)
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Muhammad Ali attends Chicago’s Independence Day Parade in 1979.
(Michael Budrys / Chicago Tribune)
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Muhammad Ali watches as the flame climbs up to the Olympic torch while taking part in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. (Doug Mills / Associated Press)
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Muhammad Ali signs a poster-size replica after being honored with the 2,189th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, during an unveiling ceremony in 2002 in Los Angeles.
(Jim Ruymen / Reuters)
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Joe Frazier sits with Muhammad Ali at the NBA All-Star Game in 2004 in Philadelphia.
(George Reynolds / McClatchy-Tribune)
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Golfing legend Arnold Palmer shakes hands with three-time world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali as basketball player Dwyane Wade looks on Jan. 2, 2007, before the Orange Bowl between Louisville and Wake Forest. (Lynne Sladky, AFP/Getty Images)
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Muhammad Ali attends a game between the Phoenix Suns and the San Antonio Spurs on March 9, 2008, at US Airways Center in Phoenix.
(Lisa Blumenfeld / Getty Images)
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Muhammad Ali attends the Norman Mailer Center’s fourth annual Benefit Gala on Oct. 4, 2012, in New York City.
(Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images)
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The “I Am The Greatest, Muhammad Ali” exhibition at the O2 arena, which hosts high profile boxing fights in London, on June 4, 2016.
We never really knew Muhammad Ali, because, in his heyday, he never stopped talking long enough to let us. Most likely, that was not by chance.
In life, he was “the greatest.” He told us that for so long that we eventually just shrugged and accepted it. In death, and with the benefit of quiet reflection, a more accurate label would be “the most complicated.”
To say Ali, who passed Friday night at a hospital in Phoenix, was a boxer is to say John Wooden was a basketball coach. There is so much more.
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Ali, then Cassius Clay, was No. 175 in a graduating class of 175 in his Louisville high school. Some 47 years later, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of humanities from Princeton. He won an Olympic gold medal in 1960 for the United States, then later allowed the story to be retold for years that shortly after his return from the Rome Games, after being refused service at a restaurant because he was black, he threw the medal in a river. After he lit the torch at opening ceremony for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, he was awarded a new gold medal, reportedly replacing the 1960 gold he had merely lost along the way.
He patterned his career after that of Georgeous George Wagner, a pro wrestler. The flamboyant Wagner and his sport were all an act, and Ali saw inspiration in that. Some chroniclers of the Ali era saw him as a decent boxer, who, out of the ring, was mostly a “preening narcissist.” Others saw him as a great boxer — Roger Kahn likened the quickness of his jab to “a lizard’s tongue” — who helped break down racial barriers in the ‘60s and 70s.
He refused the military call during the Vietnam War, grabbing huge headlines with the reason for his refusal: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
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The outrageous was Ali’s calling card. He said at one point that the only way blacks would be free from the oppression of whites was if blacks “take 10 of the states and separate from America.” Author Mark Kram wrote of one of Ali’s favorite shock-value routines. He would tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, going on a three-day drinking binge. When Lincoln awoke, Ali said, the first thing he said was, “I freed whooooooooo?”
As quickly as Ali became famous, he became a man of the people. When he traveled, he attracted crowds rivaling the Vatican courtyard awaiting white smoke. He never missed a photo op, but he also never missed a chance to visit a prison or hospital or orphanage. Just as often as not at the orphanage, the child sitting on his lap was white.
Muhammad Ali acknowledges the cheers of the crowd during halftime of the gold-medal basketball game between the United States and Yugoslavia at the Atlanta Olympic Games on Aug. 3, 1996.
(Paul Morse / Los Angeles Times)
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He had 61 fights and that was probably 20 too many. He was heavyweight champion three times and his three battles with Joe Frazier and his “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974 with George Foreman, while cementing his fame, probably contributed to his deteriorating neurological condition in recent years. Doctors labeled Ali’s condition a form of Parkinson’s disease, something suffered by many outside boxing. The boxing world heard that, looked around at examples nearby everywhere, and rolled its eyes. Like so many whose career canvas is a canvas, Ali got hit in the head a lot.
In the end, like most fighters, he stayed too long. Included in the five defeats he suffered was one to Trevor Berbick. It was held Dec. 11, 1981, was called Drama in the Bahamas, and it was hardly that. Berbick won a unanimous decision, Ali retired for the last time, and five weeks later turned 40.
His trilogy with Frazier produced riveting drama, a 2-1 record for Ali and some of the most brutal rounds in boxing history. In his battle with Foreman in Zaire, Foreman chased and battered him for seven rounds. Ali took it, Foreman punched himself out, and Ali knocked him out in the eighth.
“Near the end of the fight,” Foreman says, “we were in a clinch. Ali whispers in my ear, ‘George, is that all you got?’ And, as a matter of fact, it was.”
Foreman, who blessedly has escaped the ravages of his sport, said recently that he called Ali frequently at his home in the Phoenix area and learned that “if you get him early in the morning, you can understand him.”
More recently, Ali had become unable to converse.
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Character actor Abe Vigoda, known for his roles in “The Godfather” and the television series “Barney Miller,” died Jan. 26, 2016. He was 94. Read more.
(Jon Simon / AP)
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Glenn Frey, who co-founded the Eagles — one of the most commercially successful bands of the last half-century — and left behind a trove of indelible melodies including 17 Top-40 hits died Jan. 18, 2016. He was 67. Read more
(Dan Steinberg / AP)
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English actor Alan Rickman, best known for roles in “Love Actually,” “Die Hard” and as Professor Snape in the “Harry Potter” films, died Jan. 14, 2016, after battling cancer. He was 69. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
102/105
David Bowie, the innovative and iconic singer whose illustrious career lasted five decades, died Jan. 10, 2016, after battling cancer for 18 months. He was 69. Read more.
(Ron Frehm / AP)
103/105
Former New York Philharmonic principal conductor Pierre Boulez, who moved between conducting, composition and teaching over a long career that made him one of the leading figures in modern classical music, died Jan. 5, 2016. He was 90. Read more.
(Christophe Ena / AP)
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Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, revered as one of the most influential cinematographers in film history for his work on several classic films, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter,” died Jan. 1, 2016. He was 85. Read more.
(Tamas Kovacs / EPA)
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Former U.S. Congressman Michael G. Oxley, who helped write a landmark business regulatory law following the collapse of Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., died Jan. 1, 2016, at age 71.
(Mary Altaffer / AP)
Advertisement
In early 1971, as a 20-something reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, I went to Ali’s camp at Deer Lake, Pa. He was training for the first Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden. After sparring, he met a small group of reporters and talked. Nonstop. Notebooks filled until ink ran together. Hyperbole flowed. No question was unwelcome and no answer comprehensive. It wasn’t a news conference, it was a circus.
But I loved it. All the reporters did. My story was as disjointed as Ali’s answers. There was no new information, nothing particularly constructive. No diamonds, just rhinestones. But I was thrilled just being there, and I’m not sure that additional age and experience would have changed that.
Outside of Vietnam veterans who had every right to dislike him, Ali somehow became what he always told us he was. The greatest. After a while, few questioned that, though it remained difficult to define why or how. He was a carnival barker who somehow morphed into Socrates. He became a cultural icon, whatever that is.
He was famous beyond the ability of the word to define that; loved as an athlete, beloved as a person. His stature is global. His name appears on lists with Nelson Mandela, John Kennedy and Winston Churchill. He stopped boxing 35 years ago, but never stopped being a hit.
For years, his health has left him anything but the greatest, but we never stopped thinking it was so.
Bill Dwyre was a three-times-weekly sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 2006-15. Before that, he was sports editor of the paper for 25 years. Dwyre was named national editor of the year by the National Press Foundation in 1985 for the paper’s coverage of the ’84 Olympics and winner of the Red Smith Award in 1996 by the Associated Press Sports Editors for sustained excellence in sports journalism. He was sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal from 1973 to 1981, when he joined The Times. Dwyre was named National Headliner Award winner in 1985, sportswriter of the year in Wisconsin in 1980 and sportswriter of the year in California in 2009.
