Virtue and the Legacy of Muhammad Ali
Ours was a boxing household. As a boy growing up in the 1990’s, I may have read the majority of boxing magazines published in America between the years 1970 and 1995. This was because my father owned them all, or most of them. A former writer for Boxing Digest himself, my dad lived the sport, befriending some of America’s greatest fighters in the 70’s and 80’s, even training alongside of them. To grow up my father’s son was to live through inherited memory the glorious ages of “the sweet science;” to revel in remembrance of the valor of great contenders and champions past. It was also to understand the role of great fighters generally, and the heavyweight champion of the world in particular, in embodying for Americans a fire of virtue that anchored some visceral understanding of the transcendent power of the human spirit. It is a spirit we would do well to reclaim in our dogmatic age.
In the halls of fistic greatness there were many heroes who my Dad lionized for the sake of my brother and I through tales of their exploits in and out of the ring.
There was the Panamanian legend Roberto Duran, also known as “Manos De Piedra,” who reigned as lightweight champion for a decade before moving up in weight to challenge the likes of Sugar Rey Leonard, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler. Duran’s fearlessness was vaunted by my father, but Dad also highlighted Duran’s arrogance and occasional lack of discipline (after winning the Welterweight championship in a battle with Sugar Ray Leonard, Duran barely trained for the rematch, quitting in the middle of the fight in the famous “No Mas” incident).
There was my father’s close friend, “School Boy” Bobby Chacon from Pacoima, California, two-time feather and super featherweight champion, who rallied against depression following his wife’s suicide to regain the championship in a brawl with Cornelius Boza Edwards in what Ring Magazine declared “The Fight of the Year” in 1983. Chacon’s courage and heart were the stuff of myth in our house. However bruised and battered, Bobby Chacon would fight against impossible odds to power his way to victory.
Before my father’s time however, there were titans drawn from history, including boxing’s longest reigning champion, the “Brown Bomber” Joe Louis. Louis was a prolific knockout artist, of course, but it was his quiet dignity, his patriotism, and his willingness to endure in the face of American racism that made Louis a paragon of virtue in our household. These were the qualities of Louis that earned him the praise bestowed upon him by boxing writer Jimmy Cannon, who wrote of Louis, “He is a credit to his race—the human race.”
As much as Dad taught us to admire Joe Louis, and so many other great fighters down through the ages of boxing, there was one figure who stood out from among the rest in the halls of fistic glory: “The People’s Champion,” my father’s hero, the man known to the world as Muhammad Ali.
Neither my father nor I ever got to meet Ali. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. (his father was named after the famed abolitionist and diplomat, Republican Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky) Ali reigned as the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world, and the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time according to many. Dad saw Ali fight in person several times however, and fell in love with the sport of boxing while listening to the first Ali-(“Smokin’ Joe”) Frazier fight on the radio in 1971 (it was the most watched event in human history at the time).
As a child though, I can remember Dad taking me and my brother to pay a visit to the home of Howard Bingham, the great boxing photographer who was best friends with Ali, and diligently photographed him across his career and beyond. His home was bedecked with finely framed photos of various sizes of different figures and athletes, but most particularly Ali. (Most prominent of all the photos was one sitting atop the mantlepiece capturing “The Greatest” during his second title reign, his arm clasped by a grinning President Gerald Ford.) Still, my understanding of human greatness was in no small part cultivated through reflection on the trials and triumphs of Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad Ali was, arguably at least, the greatest heavyweight boxer who ever lived. He shone atop the boxing hierarchy during an era in which boxing was the jewel of the sporting world. The heavyweight champion in particular stood as a towering figure in American life (though a highly international sport, heavyweight boxing historically had been entirely dominated by Americans), an institution unto himself, as visible (in Ali’s case, more visible) than the president of the United States. Ali stood atop the sport of boxing in an age when boxing still captured the imagination of the world.
Yet that understates his accomplishments. Muhammad Ali was a cultural figure who transcended sports. He achieved a degree of influence around the world unmatched by any athlete in human history—before or since. A global phenomenon, Ali fought before massive crowds on every continent outside of Antarctica. Heads of state, celebrities and royalty routinely sought his presence. It is said that the Irish largely stopped fighting to listen to Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier—as mentioned, an occasion for which the world stood still.
Ali would not have been able to hold the attention of the world (for nearly 15 years, let us remember) if he were not both an extraordinary warrior as well as a singularly charismatic and charming (if at times obnoxious) personality. With a wit as quick as his lightning fists and feet, Ali could ignite even his critics and enemies in uproarious laughter, (or tongue lash them into retreat) when his pugilism became rhetorical. He held his own in discourse not only with great sports commentators like Howard Cossell, but on occasion with astute analysts of American politics such as William F. Buckley as well.
Still these gifts affected the world the way they did because they were wielded by a man who first was willing to sacrifice his great success to stand for the great causes of his time. Always an outspoken critic of racism, a religious iconoclast who converted to Islam and joined the ranks of Elijah Muhammad (where he surpassed Malcolm X as the most visible member of the Nation of Islam and America’s foremost Muslim citizen), Ali forfeited his claim to the World Boxing Association’s heavyweight title when he declined to be drafted into the Vietnam War.
Ali was in no physical danger from the draft, of course. He would need have done nothing other than spar and entertain the troops, as Joe Louis had willingly done during World War 2. But Ali did not believe in the war and, like many, thought it hypocritical that the American government should profess to fight for freedom by battling communism overseas while racial discrimination remained a fact of life at home. As he put it, “No Vietcong ever called me n----r.”
So then was Ali stripped of the heavyweight title and cast into boxing exile, for a time. When he returned, his quest to regain the belt took on a significance far beyond the normal stakes of the sport. His anti-war, Black nationalist, religious dissent, coupled with a genuine affection for Americans of all colors and a solidarity with poor people around the world meant that Ali stood as the embodiment of the ideals and convictions of hundreds of millions not just in America but around the world. Of course, the opposition he inspired in many was every bit as strong—and yet Ali had an uncanny capacity for making even those who disapproved of him like him. To paraphrase a bit of Biblical wisdom, a wise man makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.
In the life of Muhammad Ali we bear witness to the power of virtue in the human spirit. There are many virtues of course, and Ali did not boast all of them in equal measure. Humility, for instance, is not something Ali was often accused of mastering. (But for this he humorously asked for understanding. “People say I’m conceited and I talk too much but they must take pity on me, it’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.”)
But courage, not just physically but socially and in the form of conviction, bore its clear emblem upon his character.
Self-control, in that beneath the theatrical veneer Ali was a disciplined athlete who honed his craft while abstaining from drugs and alcohol and most of the vices that waylay famous athletes all too often, is quality for which we may assign Ali high marks.
Self-sacrifice, as Ali sacrificed his body every time he stepped into the ring, but so too was he willing to sacrifice his chance for riches and applause to stand for that in which he believed.
Loyalty to family, to friends, and to the interests of his people, was evident in Muhammad. Joy—insofar as joy is a virtue Ali was full of it, and inspired it in other people.
And ultimately faith—in God, in humanity, in himself, and in the understanding that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.
In the end, it is probably fair to say that Muhammad shared neither the politics, the religion, nor the skin color of most of the people who admired him. But it is this very fact that proves the power of virtue.
American culture today is caught in a war of dogmas, where we judge one another not on the basis of character (we can’t, because the language of character is the very language of virtue which we have lost) but on the basis of political litmus tests, which serve as character’s impoverished proxy. For various reasons, the hollowing of religion, the rise of materialism, and the consequentialist bent of modern philosophy among them, the American people struggle to think in terms of qualities of the human spirit that transcend the mere political…so too then do we struggle to produce figures who rise to the sort of greatness that transcends.
Yet such was the greatness of Muhammad Ali.
John Wood Jr. is a national leader for Braver Angels, a former nominee for congress, former Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.
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