What would the world have been without its geniuses and exceptional talents? Human history would have been a dull monotony of uninspiring facts. Humanity itself would have been gravely endangered by its sheer ordinariness and the unmitigated evil of banality. Civilization owes its dazzling triumphs over nature, its remarkable strides towards self-actualization to these gifted game-changers. Without them, the world would have been a poorer place indeed.
These extraordinary men and women worked so hard at their game that you would think their life depended on it. In most instances, it actually did. They can be an uncomfortable troubling reality; a fearsome nuisance. Simply because they rupture reality as we know it, or challenge conventional norms and established practice as routinely perceived, they are often subject to hardship, persecution and even the occasional violent death.
The often fatal contradiction between visionary genius and apprehensive society was succinctly put by the late American writer, John Kennedy Toole himself echoing another major contrarian, Jonathan Swift. Toole should have known. After unsuccessfully hawking the manuscript of his novel to various publishers for eleven years, the poor chap committed suicide only to be posthumously lionized and feted in absentia by American society. According to him: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, the dunces are all in confederacy against him”. (A Confederacy of Dunces).
Human nature is naturally and stupendously wasteful. The oceanic plenitude of time and the sheer prodigality of human possibilities allow for this relentless wastage of human and other resources. But somehow, we always manage to come back to our senses and pay handsomely for the initial error of judgement. At the end of it all, the sacrifices of genius are appreciated by a grateful and contrite humanity and they assume their rightful place in the pantheon of heroes.
This past weekend, the world said goodbye to one of such extraordinary people. The human race stood still as Mohammad Ali exchanged mortality for immortality. It was a parting reserved for kings and the very greatest of the human breed. The man famously known as the Louisville Lip would have been nodding in bemused acknowledgement. Supremely self-confident, self-irony was a stranger to him. For decades, he had shouted himself hoarse from the roof top that he was the greatest . Now, wasn’t he? And yet he was just a boxer, or was he?
Unarguably the greatest boxer of all time, the former Cassius Clay was also one of the most serially endowed personalities of the epoch: a poet marked by genius, a talented dramatist and a gifted orator. Had he given much thought and time to it, Ali would have been an extraordinary political practitioner. Like his beloved country, the 1960 Olympics Light Heavyweight Champion and three times Heavyweight Champion of the world was a master of the art of ceaseless self-renewal and creative explorer of the limits of human possibilities in punitive exertions.
Mohammad Ali invented modern boxing by reinventing the ancient art of fistic confrontation. Before him, boxing was a mere blood sports of two men pummeling each other unto death on a blood splattered canvas. With him, it became a game of refined violence and consummate intelligence combining stunning physical coordination with acute mental awareness. It was the invention of total boxing: bobbing and weaving with your fists, your tongue, your eyes, your legs and your brains. The lion may be stronger than Androcles but Androcles is smarter. The brain is mightier than brawns.
Here is one of God’s gifts to humanity. We leave it to the authority of Norman Mailer, the great American writer and a boxing aficionado himself, who once dumped Gore Vidal on a pile of pudding in a nasty spat. Mailer wrote two great books on Mohammed Ali’s epic duels. According to him, these fistic contentions could no longer be described as boxing. They were gladiatorial chess enacted at the highest and most refined level of human intelligence.
If Mohammad Ali had left it at that, he would still have made the galaxy of avatars as one of the most extraordinary prize fighters of all time. But Ali was much more than a boxer. He was a moral genius and supreme political hero who proudly and stoutly refused to follow the American dominant collective to do evil, and at a time when it was particularly dangerous and feckless to do so. In doing so, the poor nigger of Louisville, who was neither a card-carrying intellectual nor a professional political philosopher, redefined the very concept of modern citizenship and its obligations to a fumbling and faltering super-security state.
Nobody ought to have doubted Ali’s sterling patriotism and intense nationalism. He ate America and breathed America. At the 1960 Olympics Games where he took the gold medal barely out of High School, the then Cassius Clay let it be known to everybody within and without earshot that he did it for his beloved country. According to eyewitnesses, for two weeks of the games, the boy from Kentucky State wore his gold medal as a badge of honour and affection for his country.
Half a decade later, the Lip of Louisville had gone on to spectacular fame and fortune as the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the world with the uncanny knack for predicting when his opponent would fall and managing in the process to dump the monstrous mobster, Sonny Liston, on the canvas twice. A boxing superstar had arrived at the American supermarket.
For the first Liston fight, Ali was a rank outsider by 7-1. Everybody thought that the menacing hulk with a fearsome reputation as a doyen and denizen of the American under-world was going to take the loquacious fellow apart and make a mince meat of him. Even Ali’s own handlers had failed to organize a victory party. They probably thought that if there was going to be a gathering at all, it would probably be an all night vigil at Ali’s hospital bedside praying for his survival.
But something was beginning to happen to boxing as they all knew it. It was no longer a duel of brute force but an imaginative tour de force of elaborate bluff and bluster; a cerebral game in which the opponent is first psychologically destroyed before being physically and clinically dismantled. It was no longer about bare knuckle physical savagery and joyous bloodletting but a triumph of refined mind over vulgar strength. The wildest animal can be tamed and domesticated by superior human intelligence.
But if this was Ali’s hour of gold, it was also America’s hour of lead—to borrow from the title of Charles Lindbergh memorable memoir. An ethical and moral lacuna had opened up in God’s own country. The Vietnam War was raging and consuming everything. The nation found itself in a double bind. The IQ requirement for enlistment was lowered and Ali became eligible for war service to his nation. A draft was issued.
Ali chose to fight rather than to flee, risking everything in the process. Ali flatly refused to be drafted to war on the ground of being a conscientious objector. The uppity upstart has finally got his comeuppance, or so it seemed. Tempers were inflamed along racial lines in America. Revulsion against the great prize fighter rose and Ali was summarily stripped of his title and banished to the dungeon of the unworthy. He became an object of hate-filled messages.
But the great boxer was not going to be fazed by all this. He had faced greater hostility in the ring and triumphed. To those who saw him as a traitor and draft dodger, Ali famously retorted: “I ain’t got no problem with them Vietcong. Them don’t call me nigger”. It was a mortal rebuff and moral reproach to an America that has failed to face its own inner demons while seeking to lord it over other nations.
Like the doughty and redoubtable fighter that he was, Ali fought on, losing so much but gaining global respect and admiration for his heroic stance. He had become a pariah in a country he loved and admired so much. His inability to practise his trade caused him so much trauma and private pains. But after an epic legal slugfest the American Supreme Court eventually ruled in his favour.
There is as yet no perfect human society. We must give it to America that it is a land of ceaseless self-surpassing and unrelenting self-interrogation which allow it to come to term with its own moral absurdities. It is a wonderful trick for national rejuvenation. Yet in the particular case of Mohammad Ali, there are those who argue that the damage had already been done, that he was only allowed back into the ring after he was past his glorious prime and after his superhuman reflexes had been dulled by humiliation and adversity.
This is neither here nor there. For it can also be argued that it was the memory of injustice and humiliation that allowed Ali to summon deep reserves of courage and resilience when they mattered most and against the physical ferocity of stronger opponents leaving us with classics of human exertion such as the “rumble in the jungle” and “thrilla in Manila”. Ali showed us the elastic limits of the human capacity to absorb physical punishment. It was ritual suicide by installment.
Ali had taken enough blows to fell even a stubborn elephant. But for thirty two years, he bore the resultant affliction with great dignity and Olympian pride. It was his longest bout and it showed in the charred hulk of a once magnificent physique. When the hour of the grim reaper finally came, it was a grateful nation that mourned and buried one of its greatest sons ever. Ali had died the way he would have wished: an all-American hero and a global icon. He didn’t need to tell us that. He had earned his spurs. Human beauty has triumphed over human bestiality.
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