Yes, he was the greatest!
He was the tree that made a forest. One man whose life touched the entire Planet. He was the Mandela of boxing, the redeemer of a brutal sport which he rescued from being a mere savage spectacle and refined to sweet science. Just like Julius Caesar said of himself in 47 BC, Muhammad Ali came, […]
He was the tree that made a forest. One man whose life touched the entire Planet. He was the Mandela of boxing, the redeemer of a brutal sport which he rescued from being a mere savage spectacle and refined to sweet science. Just like Julius Caesar said of himself in 47 BC, Muhammad Ali came, he saw and he conquered.
There will never be another Muhammad Ali. Providence donated him to the world to show us the power within each individual: Only you can limit yourself. Muhammad Ali said he would conquer the world of boxing; he did. He said he would live true to his conscience; he did, even if the American system was not quite ready to tolerate a black man claiming that all men were born equal.
When President Obama visited Vietnam the other day, what came to my mind was that Muhammad Ali was right about his stance on that country all along. But it took his country almost five decades to come to terms with it. By refusing to be drafted to fight against the Vietnamese, Ali chose the lonely path of heroism that was to define the rest of his life. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger”, he famously said.
While growing up, Ali experienced first-hand the racial discrimination Blacks were subjected to. Shortly after winning the Olympic gold medal for America, he and his friends were denied entry to a restaurant because they were black. Then they had a fight with a white gang. In disgust, he threw his gold medal into the Ohio River.
In 1964, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, dropping his former “slave name”, Cassius Marcellus Clay. He identified fully with the Nation of Islam, the African American Islamic movement aiming to improve the condition of black people in America. With the heavyweight boxing title in the kitty and a brand new identity, Ali was to go on to become a universal brand for excellence, courage, uprightness and wit. He was the first man to become a three-time world heavyweight champion (1964-1967, 1974-1978, 1978-1979).
He described himself as the astronaut of boxing, dismissing fellow boxing greats, Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey as mere jet pilots. The world conceded those bragging rights to him because he completely rewrote the book of boxing: leaving himself wide open, tantalising opponents and injecting blurry speed and trade mark choreography to brighten a sport that had all but been dismissed as a show of brawn by brainless bums. Measured with an omega-scope, Ali’s jab covered 16.5 inches in four-hundredths of a second, which is the same time as the blink of an eye.
For me, the fight that finally defined Ali and put him up there in the pantheon of the gods of boxing was not the celebrated triune with Joe Frazier. It was the one he christened “Rumble in the jungle”, between him and George Foreman in Kinshasa in1974. Before Ali appropriated that phrase, it had been used to describe the feeling one had just before having to move one’s bowels. Before that bout, Foreman’s record was 40-0 with 37 knockouts. He could slay a bull with a punch!
Ali was so gifted at propaganda that he convinced Zaireans that George Foreman was a white man while he, Ali, was their own son who had returned home to beat the white man on their behalf. They believed him despite the fact that Foreman was the blacker of the two. He even composed a poem for the fight:
Last night I had a dream, When I got to Africa,
I had one hell of a rumble.
I had to beat Tarzan’s behind first,
For claiming to be King of the Jungle.
For this fight, I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tussled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And throw thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
Just last week, I murdered a rock,
Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.
I’m so fast, man,
I can run through a hurricane and don’t get wet.
When George Foreman meets me,
He’ll pay his debt.
I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree.
Wait till you see Muhammad Ali.
Ali prevailed over Foreman as he did against many vicissitudes of life. What the world has learnt from the life of Muhammad Ali is that it is good to live for something, and that nothing is impossible if one sets one’s mind to it. “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it”, he said. “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
I can’t really say goodbye to Muhammad Ali. I’m confronted by his greatness whichever way I turn. The physical Muhammad Ali may have expired at 74, but the ideas he stood for cannot. People like ‘The Greatest’ cannot die!
Re: Time to tweak NYSC
Dear Sir,
It is clear that the rot that infests even the most noble idea has found home in the NYSC scheme. However, what irks me more than anything else is this scratch card charge of N3,000 to enable prospective corpers register online. Public outrage did not stop NYSC management from implementing this fraud. Scratch-card charge has been the latest scheme through which civil servants prey on desperate members of the public. As for their conditions, Corp members are left to their own devices, from sourcing place of primary assignment to housing. And deductions are made monthly from their meagre allowances in favour of a National Youth Service Foundation; billions have thereby been illegally collected. We must all continue the campaign against maladministration in the scheme.
M T Usman ([email protected])