Happy Birthday Champ

The New York Times


January 17, 2007
Sports of The Times
Time Stands Still for One Who Never Did
By DAVE ANDERSON

In the years when Muhammad Ali, mischief in his eyes, shouted that he was “the greatest of all times” and correctly predicted the round when his next opponent would fall, he also forecast his impact on boxing’s future.

“When I go,” he proclaimed, “the game’ll go to the graveyard.”

Not quite. Boxing still has its health in some of the lower weight classes, but the heavyweight division that Ali ruled is in intensive care. With four obscure heavyweight champions decreed by four obscure governing bodies, there is no one familiar champion. If those four supposed titleholders marched through Times Square, few, if anybody, would recognize any of them or even know any of their names.

But if Ali, even in his dull mask of Parkinson’s disease, were to appear there today on his 65th birthday, he would stop traffic.

Happy birthday, champ. You were correct. After your last fight, late in 1981, Larry Holmes prolonged the dignity of being the heavyweight champion, then Mike Tyson glorified its brutality until Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis exposed him as a bully. Now it’s almost as if the heavyweight division doesn’t exist, but that only goes to prove that at 65 you’re still the people’s heavyweight champion. Even the people who never saw you then.

You’re the reason the best boxing now isn’t the live bouts on HBO, Showtime or ESPN. You’re the reason the best boxing now is on ESPN Classic whenever you, Joe Frazier and George Foreman dominated the Golden Era of heavyweight boxing.

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Other eras usually had only two rival heavyweights: John L. Sullivan and Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson, then Patterson and Sonny Liston.

But you conquered Liston twice, then you conquered both Frazier and Foreman in what amounted to a round-robin. You were 2-1 with Frazier, 1-0 with Foreman. And you always made it fun.

When you and Frazier each were guaranteed a record $2.5 million for your 1971 bout and the promoters predicted a $20 million gross, you jumped up and yelled, “They got us cheap, Joe.”

When Malaysian officials literally put your and Joe Bugner’s gloves in a jail cell for safekeeping before your 1975 bout, you rolled your eyes and said, “The gloves ain’t done nothin’ — yet.”

With or without the title, you fought all over the world: Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Tokyo, Vancouver, Dublin, Jakarta, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, San Juan, Munich and Nassau in the Bahamas as well as Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Las Vegas, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Cleveland, New Orleans, Atlanta, your hometown, Louisville, Ky., and even lonely little Lewiston, Maine.

With or without the title, you were a “world” heavyweight champion. There was never a boxer who was such a world traveler, and there never will be again.

The shame, as your trainer Angelo Dundee has often said, was that nobody “ever saw you at your best,” which he thought would have been during your three-and-a-half-year exile, from 1967 to 1970, over your refusal to step forward for induction into the Army during the Vietnam War.

You had said, “I got nothin’ against them Vietcong,” and when you went to court as a religious objector to the war over what you called “my beliefs” as a Muslim, you turned many Americans against you.

Not long after you lost a unanimous 15-round decision to Frazier in your 1971 extravaganza at the Garden, the United States Supreme Court ruled in your favor. But it wasn’t until you used your rope-a-dope strategy to conquer the sullen, surly Foreman with an eighth-round knockout in Zaire in 1974 that America put you on a pedestal.

When you were asked whose idea the rope-a-dope was, you said: “Me. I don’t have no trainers. They just work with me.”

After you battered Frazier in Manila and were asked what that epic in brutality had been like, you sighed, “Next to death.”

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In hindsight, maybe you should have retired after Manila. If you had, maybe you wouldn’t be afflicted with Parkinson’s. But you enjoyed the stage and you couldn’t pass up the money. You kept fighting long, hard battles with Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers, Leon Spinks and eventually Larry Holmes (the only time you were ever stopped) before your last bout late in 1981 with Trevor Berbick.

In another year, the Parkinson’s syndrome was in your slurred words, then in your face, then in your body.

Even so, you stole the show at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when you held the torch at the opening ceremonies. And wherever you go, you’ll always steal the show. But maybe you remember your reaction the day the Supreme Court ruling came down.

“I just want to sit one day and be an ordinary citizen,” you said. “Don’t be in no more papers. Don’t talk to nobody. Just rest.”

Feel free to do that now, champ. You can stay home and just rest. Happy 65th birthday, champ.