Against Parkinson’s, Muhammad Ali proved himself again

When Muhammad Ali died over a  week ago, the memories spooled back inevitably to the glory days of the man who called himself the Greatest, a champion whose life intertwined with America’s traumas of race, faith and war. It was a chronicle of valor asserted in the most public of arenas scrutinized by an audience […]

When Muhammad Ali died over a  week ago, the memories spooled back inevitably to the glory days of the man who called himself the Greatest, a champion whose life intertwined with America’s traumas of race, faith and war.
It was a chronicle of valor asserted in the most public of arenas scrutinized by an audience that spanned the globe.
But there was another narrative, just as striking to some admirers, of a private courage beyond his klieg-lit renown.
For the minority afflicted by Parkinson’s disease, Ali’s 30-year struggle with the same illness magnified the broader status he built from his boxing prowess as a black man who embraced radical Islam, refused to fight in Vietnam, earned the opprobrium of the establishment and yet emerged as an icon.
“It was his longest bout, and one that ultimately he could not win,” the reporter Patrick Sawer wrote in The Telegraph, referring to Ali’s illness.
Yet the affliction “only served to increase the worldwide admiration he had gained before the disease robbed him of his powers.”
As a global superstar, Ali touched many lands, and Britain felt a particular bond. Boxing fans recalled his far-flung bouts – the “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was then called, in 1974; “The Thrilla in Manila” in the Philippines against Joe Frazier a year later.
But in Britain, his two defeats in the 1960s of Henry Cooper, a much-loved British heavyweight who died in 2011, and his feisty appearances in prime-time television interviews left an indelible mark.
“He is universally celebrated in death, in no small part, because he was always larger than life,” the columnist Gary Younge wrote in The Guardian, one of several British newspapers that printed a special supplement to commemorate Ali’s death.
There was another side, too. A series of images, made by a British photographer, Zenon Texeira, in March and published this week, showed the ravages of an illness that had made him almost unrecognizable compared with earlier times. And yet, characteristically, he raised his fists as if still fighting.
That is no mean feat. Parkinson’s is one of a cohort of incurable afflictions whose victims undergo an enduring transformation, an inexorable slide from wholeness.
One moment they have control of their movements, their limbs, their life. The next, those abilities begin to slip. The voice might slur. The fingers quiver. A firm gait gives way to a limp, a stumble. The outcome is not declared by some referee standing over the fallen loser to the roar of the victor’s fans. It is offered by a physician, quietly. There is no simple knockout; only attrition.
Yet Ali did not shy from public view. With trembling hands he grasped the Olympic torch at the Atlanta Games in 1996. He was among the white-clad dignitaries at the London Games in 2012. He inspired in the least expected of ways.
Consider, for instance, this story from my friend Michael Holman, the former Africa editor of The Financial Times and a companion on many travels on a continent that had taken Ali as a hero.
Told that he had Parkinson’s in 1986, Holman found little understanding of his condition as he crisscrossed Africa.
“As the tremor became more pronounced, the questions about the cause became more frequent,” he told me. “My explanations seldom satisfied.”
“Then came the news that the man who triumphed so memorably over George Foreman in the rumble in Kinshasa was a victim. All I had to do was to point to my shaking hand and say his name. Incomprehension was replaced by understanding, skepticism by sympathy.”
“Muhammad Ali,” he said, “became my unseen companion in my travels through Africa.”
In later years, too, Ali’s public appearances came to offer what an editorial in The Guardian called “fragile and tragic witness” to “his indomitable humanity as a stricken warrior.”
“That took as much courage as anything else he ever did.”