Muhammad Ali--Lessons Learned

News of Muhammad Ali's death made me think of when I used to follow the fights. There are lessons to be learned.

My Dad and I used to watch the Friday night fights together on television sponsored by Gillette (their commercial went, "How are you fixed for blades, dum dum dum/How are you fixed for blades, dum dum dum). My Dad had great affection for Rocky Marciano, a heavyweight boxer whose parents, like my Dad's, had come to the U.S. from Italy. Marciano became heavyweight champion and retired undefeated. He was a stocky man but very fit and a slugger. After Marciano retired, there were a lot of slugging heavyweights but they were heavy heavweights. They'd stand in the center of the ring and belt each other. I remember one named Mike DeJohn who was like that. Mike died in 1988 at the age of 57.

Then Cassius Clay--who Muhammad Ali after he converted to Islam--came along. He weighed over 200 pounds, but he was muscled, lean and fast, so fast. In 1964, he fought the then-champion, Sony Liston, who outweighed him by 20 pounds. Liston was called the bear.

I remember seeing a documentary of Ali that featured an interview with the colorful sports writer Bert Sugar describing the first fight between Clay and Liston. While Sugar was talking, they showed the film of the weigh-in. Liston, who was sitting on a folding chair, was crouched over, waiting for the weigh-in to begin. The film footage focuses on Liston, but we hear Clay come in and he's running around saying, "I'm the greatest! I'm the greatest! I'm going bear hunting tonight. Someone's going to die in the ring tonight!" We hear Sugar saying that  Liston was tough and mean--he'd been in prison for armed robbery and battery; he was a scary man "and he wasn't afraid of anything--". And the film closes in on Liston's face and it's clear he's looking at Clay running around out of the corner of his anxious eye. And Sugar continued his sentence, "--except crazy people."

Clay was playing mind games on Liston. And he was also fast where Liston was slow. Liston didn't come out for the seventh round and lost the title by a technical knockout. In their rematch, Clay knocked Liston out in the first round.

Clay said he turned boxing into a science. I've been at meetings and heard people ask if a competitor was playing 'rope-a-drop" with us. Clay developed the technique by pretending to be hurt by his opponent's punches and covering up and letting the other fighter wail away while Clay bounced off the ropes and looked like he was being hurt more than he was. When his opponent became tired from his exhausting and fruitless barrage, Clay turned around and finished him off.

Clay/Ali was the best fighter I had ever seen. He changed the entire pace of boxing. Was he the greatest? Maybe. If you score it on points, to use a boxing term, Marciano retired undefeated, Clay was beaten a number of times--later in his career and after a forced retirement when he was in his prime.

Interestingly enough, in 1969, during the time Ali was suspended from boxing for his refusal to participate in the army draft during the Vietnam War period, someone came up with the idea of having a computer decide who would win a hypothetical match--Ali or Marciano--and hired them  to spar for the camera and then edited the footage to match the computer's outcome. The computer thought Marciano would have won. The "superfight" wasn't broadcast until 1970, by which time Marciano had died in a plane crash. Admittedly, the computer made its decision before Ali was reinstated and went on to regain the heavyweight title that had been taken from him and before he lost the title and then won it back for a third time. Ali said the computer was racist because it was made in Mississippi. And it was, after all, a 1969 computer.

And I didn't mention that he was a poet, or at least a very facile rhymer, which Marciano, for all of his skills, never was.

I trained as a boxer. But then I lost interest. I hung around in locker rooms with a lot of older fighters who were clearly showing the brain damage that also affected Muhammad Ali, whose Parkinson's Disease was reportedly brought on by the blows he took to his head. I remember hearing someone describe how when a boxer takes a blow to the head it's similar to what happens to a yoke when someone shakes an egg. That's when I quit.

I admire Muhammad Ali for his skill and fondly remember the times I watched him in his prime with my Dad. I could probably teach a management class using Ali as an example. But I am still amazed that boxing is allowed. 

Today we are hearing  all of the complaints about concussions and pro football. But boxing is designed to cause concussions. Boxing should be outlawed. That's the last line in Humphrey Bogart's last movie, 1956's The Harder They Fall, which was about the fight game--it's a thinly disguised portrait of the 1930s heavyweight champion Primo Carnera. "Boxing should be outlawed if it takes an act of Congress to do it," Bogart says. But he was really talking about the criminals who were controlling the fight game and owned boxers whom they forced to throw fights to others--supposedly boxers like Carnera--who were big and imposing but less skilled. Boxing should be outlawed because of the damage it causes to fighter's brains.

There's a lot to be learned from the life of Muhammad Ali--his grace, his skill, his courage, and banning boxing--because of what it did to him and others and is doing to boxers every day today--is one of them.

* A footnote on the movie The Harder They Fall, which was written by Philip Yordan based on a novel by Budd Schulberg. Schulberg had the Carnera-based character Tony Moreno fight the champ played by Max Baer. Baer won the title from Carnera in 1934. They appeared together the same year in another thinly disguised movie suggested by fact in which Carnera played the champ and Baer the challenger--The Prizefighter and the Lady. In The Harder They Fall, Schulberg/Yordan took a real incident--Baer beat up the boxer Ernie Schaaf so badly that he died after a fight with Carnera who had just hit him with a left jab, and Baer got the blame. Some say the accusation was unjustified, but the blame remained. And Baer had beaten another fighter, Frankie Campbell, so fiercely that Campbell haddied. Baer was charged with manslaughter, acquitted but banned from boxing for a year. The coroner's report was that Campbell's brain had been knocked loose from his skull by Baer's blows. In The Harder They Fall, Baer plays the champ and Mike Lane plays the challenger, Moreno. The champ tells the gangsters he won't take it easy on Moreno because he got the credit for killing the boxer and champ takes pride in having done it. So Baer was, in a way, playing himself. In real life, according to his son Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro in the tv show The Beverly Hillbillies, his father was devastated by Campbell's death. But the two Baer-related incidents show that brain injuries have always been part of boxing, long before Ali.

  Copyright 2016 by John T. Aquino