Greatest, fastest, prettiest

Three men appeared almost simultaneously on the world stage in the late 1960s and quickly punctured the prevailing myth that the Whiteman is superior to the Blackman. One of them was James Brown, the Godfather of Soul music. We thank God that we did not break our small legs and waists as we twisted them […]

Three men appeared almost simultaneously on the world stage in the late 1960s and quickly punctured the prevailing myth that the Whiteman is superior to the Blackman. One of them was James Brown, the Godfather of Soul music. We thank God that we did not break our small legs and waists as we twisted them here and there to emulate JB. Another was the Brazilian footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known worldwide as Pele. Every kid that I know called himself Pele as he kicked balls variously made of rags, maize cobs or sheep bladder.
The third man, the greatest of the three, was Muhammad Ali. During my primary school days I read in a magazine that every ghetto in America where black people lived suddenly exploded in wild racial celebration one day in 1937 when the Brown Bomber Joe Lois knocked out James Braddock to become the world heavyweight boxing champion, the first black man ever to do so. By the time I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, blacks completely dominated boxing. Muhammad Ali was the greatest of them after Joe Louis; he came into great reckoning when he knocked out Sonny Liston to become the world heavyweight champion in 1964.
In those days we had no television or video recorder, not to mention DSTV, and the only place we could see the action was at cinema theatres. I was first taken to Northern Cinema, Sokoto in 1971 to see an Ali fight. It was a 1957 fight against a white boxer called Gene Fullmer, which Ali lost on points. That year Muhammad Ali was trying to make a comeback into boxing after a four year absence but he lost to the reigning champion, “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier. Despite his loss Muhammad Ali was the biggest boxing sensation around the world. His fights elicited more excitement around the world than even the football World Cup. 
As kids we also closely followed Ali’s fascinating life outside the ring. His refusal to be drafted into the American military to fight the Vietnam War in 1967 helped to galvanise world opinion against the war, the biggest overreaching of American power since the World War Two. Ali famously said, “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Viet Cong never called me nigger.” Ali greatly popularised American ghetto slang in our generation. Soon, every hip Nigerian student was using double negatives in speech.
Ali’s 1964 conversion to the Nation of Islam made the Black American Muslim movement led by Elijah Mohammed well known around here. Ali later abandoned the movement and became a mainstream Sunni Muslim. Also well known in those days were Muhammad Ali’s divorces. He married four times in his life time and payment of alimony to former wives robbed him of most of the millions of dollars he earned in the ring. The men who accompanied Ali were very flashy in themselves, especially his trainer Angelo Dundee, his sparring partners and his flamboyant promoter Don King, the man with the flaming white hair.
The biggest of all Ali fights was the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Kinshasa in 1974. In the weeks leading up to the fight, all my friends and classmates were tense as Ali prepared for his first title fight since 1971. How we wished it was another match against Joe Frazier. Unlike Frazier, who we didn’t rate very highly, Ali was up against the reigning champion George Foreman. Foreman had a ferocious reputation and had knocked out almost every opponent in his previous fights. Unlike Ali who raved and boasted at every weigh-in, Foreman was ominously silent. Even when Ali arrived in Zaire to wild jubilation by huge crowds and Mobutu Sese Seko’s open support, we still feared George Foreman.
The fight was slated for early morning hours in Kinshasa. In those days we had no television, not to mention DSTV. The fastest way to hear the news was from the BBC Hausa Service so we woke up at 5am in the school dormitory with our hearts in our mouths. When the BBC news presenter described Ali as the Zakaran damben duniya ajin mafiya nauyi [that is, heavyweight boxing champion of the world] the school compound exploded in celebration. As Ali pummelled George Foreman, we heard Zairian fans chanting “Ali boma ye!” That is, “Ali kill him!” My classmate Aliyu Sahabi was soon renamed “Boma ye.”
Muhammad Ali was the biggest braggart in modern sporting history. At every opportunity he will rant and yell about how he will beat his opponent. At the weigh in, Ali would shout, “I am the greatest! I am the prettiest! I will knock him out in [round] 4!” At some point he broke into a song at the ringside, “I will fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” Ali evolved many boxing styles and gave an exotic name to each new style. One of them was rope-a-dope. This style was very frustrating to Ali’s opponents. He will deliver a heavy punch and then retreat to lie on the ropes, warding off punches and continuously taunting his opponent, “Don’t hit ma pretty face!” Ali later evolved another technique called Russian tank. It was audacious of Ali, at the height of the Cold War, to refer to a Russian tank as the epitome of power. I remember a picture of him demonstrating the new technique; he crossed his massive arms across his face, signifying impregnable defence.
Those of us who adored Muhammad Ali had many heart breaking moments. One was in 1973 when Ken Norton broke Ali’s jaw. Reports said the jaw was broken in the third round but Ali continued with the fight to the end, losing on points. Years later Ali regained the heavyweight boxing title for the third time but his attempt to regain it for the fourth time, after re-emerging from retirement, ended in disaster as he lost to the little known Leon Spinks.
Unlike Pele, who is totally apolitical, Muhammad Ali was deeply political. He was deeply concerned about racism in America and was a prominent member of the civil rights movement. Yet in his later years, Muhammad Ali annoyed me on two occasions. The first was in 1980 when US President Ronald Reagan tried to mobilise the world to boycott the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan the year before. Reagan sent Ali to Africa to campaign for a boycott. In Nigeria he was met with student protests and during a press conference in Lagos, Ali was reminded that four years earlier, African countries boycotted the Montreal Summer Olympics to protest sporting links between New Zealand and apartheid South Africa but the Western world opposed the boycott. Ali sheepishly said he did not know that. The second time was soon after the US presidential election of 1984 when Ali said he voted for Ronald Reagan because “he has more stuff” than his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale. To us in those days, voting for Reagan was a racial and class atrocity.
On three other occasions the sight of Muhammad Ali brought tears to my eyes. The first was during the Atlanta Olympics of 1996 when Ali struggled to light the Olympics torch, his hands trembling from Parkinson’s disease. Ali was also a very pitiful sight when US President George W. Bush presented him with a Congressional Medal of Freedom, America’s highest honour, in 2005. It was a poignant moment, like a man who refused to fight in the Nigerian Civil War receiving the GCFR. Tears also rolled from my eyes in 2012 when I saw Ali unable to stand with other VIPs at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. A man once described as “the fastest heavyweight in history” was unable to stand up and walk. Muhammad Ali was the greatest sportsman of the 20th century. He was the greatest sporting inspiration to my generation. The world may never see the likes of him again.