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In 2003, Bill Ayers showed up at the Film Forum in New York City for a Q&A after a screening of The Weather Underground. He was a harmless-looking man, soft spoken, wearing glasses and two earrings. Someone in the audience asked him about the sexual habits of revolutionaries on the run.
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What separated Ali from the contemporary fighter, an unusual species of blowhard, was his willingness to concretize his boasts where it mattered most: inside the ring. Yes, Ali was an unstoppable braggart, a man whose self-aggrandizement (which preceded his social consciousness by several years) was too often conflated with racial pride, but there was little disconnect between his proclamations and his achievements. Not only did Ali face the very best heavyweights of two eras, but he also faced a slew of tough contenders whose own legacies were stonewalled by the fierce competition of the 1970s: Ken Norton, Ron Lyle, and Earnie Shavers. When Ali returned from his exile, which lasted three and a half years, he faced the number-one-ranked heavyweight in the world: Jerry Quarry.
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What Ali did in the ring was not revolutionary for the simple fact that not a single distinguished heavyweight in his wake could reproduce his style. In a way, Ali was like Dizzy Gillespie, whose virtuosity—one step beyond—could not be duplicated or surpassed for nearly thirty years, or until Jon Faddis began hitting notes not even Gillespie could reach in his prime. Of course, there were variations on the Ali style among the heavyweights—think of flashy Greg Page and flamboyant Michael Dokes—but, for the most part, smaller fighters adopted its main ingredients. The closest a heavyweight came to successfully incorporating the Ali method may have been jab-and-dance master Larry Holmes, who sparred with Ali in the early-1970s and went on to butcher “The Greatest” in one of the saddest spectacles ever seen in a boxing ring.
But the flashpoint reflexes, the improvisatory moves, the stamina needed to dance gracefully for fifteen rounds, the explosive hand speed, the decking, dodging, and darting (all done seemingly in double-time)—these had never been seen before among the bigger divisions. After all, his aspiration as a fighter was madness: to resurrect Sugar Ray Robinson as a heavyweight. More influential, of course, was his personality, part vaudeville, part rassling routine, part mad preacher, part the Dozens. Egotism, insult, exhibitionism, incivility—Ali changed boxing in more ways than one. Even during the most primitive era of prizefighting in America, when fights to the finish were common, a certain amount of gentility was expected. When John Morrissey defeated John C. Heenan to retain his heavyweight title in a gruesome slugfest in 1858, the occasion, blood-soaked or not, called for a strange ritual etiquette: “All the courtesies of war followed with the utmost grace at the end of the close of the fight. Morrissey was carried over to his fallen foe and, in the French style, kissed his hand in token of his valor.”
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Because Ali was a “common man” symbol for a revolutionary movement primarily sparked by middle-class baby boomers, he was adopted with almost comic blind faith by activist liberals, despite the fact he was often intrinsically opposed to their ideals. Ali did not drink. He did not smoke. Drugs were strictly verboten. He was well-dressed and clean-shaven. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was the last book he would thumb through. His disavowal of involvement during the struggles of the civil rights era was in stark contrast to the philosophy of disobedience practiced by progressives throughout the 1960s. Worst of all, perhaps, his segregationist stance was distinctly at cross-purposes with the Utopian vision of his newfound champions. Later, when Ali was accepted by moderates and liberals alike, his hobnobbing with brutal—even insane—despots such as Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos, Muammar Gaddafi, and “Papa Doc” Duvalier was something his leftist backers could only cringe over.
To make matters even more perplexing for some liberals, Ali was a Republican in the 1980s, supporting Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch, and George H. Bush, among others. But Ali, more than anyone, understood the complexities and contradictions of his own myth. This was made clear by the publication of Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser in 1991. Oral biographies had been in the air at the time—Jackson Pollack by Jeffrey Potterton, Truman Capote by George Plimpton, and Edie Sedgwick by Jean Stein, for example—but these were all written after their subjects had died. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times was unique in that it was an authorized work and, in that, its subject had few qualms, if any, with negative testimony about his life and actions. What were his personal sins, whatever they were, compared to a life lived at public white heat for over twenty years?
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“I've made my share of mistakes along the way but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven't lived in vain.”
—Muhammad Ali
Fugitive Days
JACK JOHNSON IN EXILE
April 5, 1915—Down, at last, in the twenty-sixth round of a bout fought under a blistering sun before thousands of hecklers, even there, in Havana, more than three hundred miles away from American bedrock. Down, and at the feet of “The Pottawatomie Giant,” Jess Willard, a cowpuncher who lumbered out of the Great Plains, shucking spurs, lassos, chaps, all the way to the heavyweight championship of the world.
From the moment he lost his title to a primitive “White Hope” in an equally primitive ring set up in Cuba, Jack Johnson—renegade, dandy, scourge of America (where, to his everlasting misfortune, interracial marriage was banned in several states)—was a burnt-out case. Even before losing to Willard and relinquishing his status as “The Black Avenger,” Johnson had sent a telegram to his mother in Chicago that read in part: “I AM TIRED OF KNOCKING AROUND.”
Oh, yes, Johnson has been wandering, through fugitive days, for years, ever since fleeing Chicago in 1913 after being convicted of violating the Mann Act, a federal law meant to curb prostitution but that was occasionally used to enforce Bible Belt virtue by prosecuting celebrities with libertine tastes. (Indeed, Johnson was not even the most famous celebrity tripped up by the Mann Act; that distinction goes to Charlie Chaplin, acquitted in 1944, or perhaps rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry, who spent nearly two years in prison after being convicted of transporting a fourteen-year-old across state lines for immoral purposes.) And Johnson was a staunch devotee of lowlife: Although