An Icon of America's Counterculture

When I was a kid, he was the first celebrity to enter into my life. At the age of four or five, I used to sit at the kitchen table and make drawings of Muhammad Ali in the ring. His boxing matches were among the first great events to be broadcast on television. He has earned an eternal place in the hall of fame of 1960s legends, along with the moon landing, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A living monument of his time.

Today, on January 17th, Muhammad Ali celebrates his 65th birthday. These days, we see a man crippled by Parkinson's, a disease that he has battled for more than 25 years. The disease has turned him into the opposite of his former self. One of the fastest men in the world is now one of the slowest. Once the epitome of virility, he now bears his suffering with dignity.

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee"

During the rise of popular culture, Ali was the first pop idol of the sport – and remains its greatest, even today. As a boxer he was unrivaled, but as a showman and public figure he soon became legendary.

Muhammad Ali's boxing style alone was a show: his lightfooted dancing in the ring, his taunting low guard that provoked and humiliated his opponents, his speed and agility in avoiding blows. He coined the famous phrase "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee", and it became synonymous with his unique technique. People used to say, "He boxes with his legs."

"I am the greatest!"

Ali claimed "I am the greatest!" at a time when he was still a virtual unknown. That earned him a reputation as a "big mouth". He rattled off his provocations in a spontaneous rhyming chant, like a rapper way ahead of his time: "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 was an icon during the heyday of America's counterculture. He refused to play by the rules laid down by white America and, in 1964, cast off his given name: "Cassius Clay is a slave name, I didn't choose it, and I didn't want it."

"No Vietcong ever called me nigger"

The great boxer had embraced the "Nation of Islam" and joined ranks with Malcolm X. Now known as Muhammad Ali, he refused to serve in Vietnam and is widely attributed with the legendary statement: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" and "No Vietcong ever called me nigger."

For this "unpatriotic" behavior he was stripped of his world heavyweight title in 1967. It was not until 1974 that he reclaimed the coveted title at the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" fight in Kinshasa against George Foreman.

In 1978, he won his third world championship title, putting the lie to the old boxing adage "they never come back".

Poetry, elegance, and ferocious flying fists

But perhaps it was more than just his unwavering political views that made him into a living legend. During the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies, hippies and flamboyant dandies aspired to a life of poetry, love, peace and kindness. This "intellectual" world could not help but be fascinated by boxing, the virility, vitality and atavism of naked violence.

Even artists and intellectuals were boxing fans and many a poet is still drawn to the intoxicating atmosphere of the ring. For intellectuals, boxers symbolize the repressed and brutal side of their tamed, civilized selves. Only Muhammad Ali embodied both sides of the coin, the poetry of motion and words, and the sheer ferocity of flying fists.

Here was a boxer who was elegant but fierce.

Indisputably the greatest athlete in his violent sport, Ali was always highly involved in social causes – and remains so to this day. At the age of 65, he has spent over two-thirds of life as a living legend.

These days when I still – very rarely, I admit – set the alarm clock for 4:00 am to get up and watch a boxing match, it is only because Muhammad Ali's famous fights were indelibly burned into the memory of the child that I once was.

Robert Misik

© Qantara.de 2007

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

Qantara.de

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