Muhammad Ali – A Personal Story

by | Jun 4, 2016 | Muhammed Ali | 1 comment

MuhammadAli-autograph-bothsides_sm
When I was 10 years old my family went to Chicago for a big family reunion. We were staying at what I thought was a pretty spiffy place called ’50th on the Lake’. Something happened at that reunion that has stayed with me my entire life. It became deeply rooted in my memory.
 
Today that memory and all the moments since came rushing back. My sister, Nancy, remembers it slightly different than I do but here is the story as I remember it.
 
Nancy and I came down the elevator into the lobby. As we exited we saw a black man sitting by himself on a couch. We both knew exactly who he was because my father was a big boxing fan at the time. I don’t think people now can understand how big boxing was back then. I really was one of the biggest of sports, along with Baseball and Football.
 
We both became very excited and very scared because, after all, this man beat people up for a living. But we knew what we had to do. We went to the desk and got hotel postcards and a pen and went up to him. In my memory I went first and asked, “Mr. Clay, may I have your autograph?” He said yes, and signed my postcard. My sister, standing right next to me, did the same thing. But this time he stopped and said, “Yes, but only if you call me Muhammad Ali.” Which she did when she thanked him. He wasn’t mean, he was kind and soft spoken when he said it. He was generous and easy going with us and it left a deep impression on me.
 
Of course, just as any of us do when we have a personal moment with a star, he was forever and always the one I rooted for. I was devastated when, 2 years later, he was stripped of his Championship after being convicted of refusing the draft. I was upset because I didn’t have him to root for anymore. Nobody else in boxing came close to being of interest to me (or to millions of others). But then, as I grew up and became aware of the larger issues in the world I realized I still could root for him. I could root for him to win his legal battle, because I believed he was in the right, and maybe then he would be able to box again.
 
And that is what happened. He came back from a 3 year layoff to fight again. Not many people gave him much of a chance since a slew of very hard hitting boxers had come up in his absence. Frazier, Norton and a particular big, hard hitting man named George Foreman.
 
It took him 4 long years of boxing to gain a fight with Foreman for the Championship. The fight took place in Kinshasa, Zaire and was promoted as ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’. While it happened in Africa I was sitting in a college pub at Brandeis University listening on the pub radio to the round recaps after each round was over. Nobody else was paying attention, but I was. I believed he would find a way to win. The press didn’t think that would happen, but millions of people around the globe believed it. They were rooting for this man to defy the odds. After all it had been 7 long years since he had been World Champion. But we believed.
 
And, in the most amazing upset since he won the title in the first place 10 years earlier, he won. He boxed a brilliant match, luring Foreman into boxing all the energy out of himself by using the now famous ‘Rope a Dope’ strategy. He knocked him out in the 8th round. I pretty much made a fool of myself in that pub with my excitement at his victory. People didn’t realize what it meant to me, but it meant a lot.
 
He ended up keeping the title for 5 years until losing and regaining it again in 1978. He was the only person to win the championship 3 times up to that point.
 
But why, besides me having met him, does he means so much to me? It’s because he believed in himself. A scrawny kid from Louisville always knew he was the greatest, and he wasn’t afraid to say it because he always knew he could back it up, and he did. He inspired me, not in athletics obviously, but in life. That if you believe and you act to make it happen, you can make it happen.
 
But it was more than that. It was also because he wasn’t afraid to grow as a man, a thinker, a human. He kept moving forward in pursuing ideas and ended up where each of us really want to end up, and that is believing love is the most important thing in the world. You can’t do much better than that.
 
It’s because of those lessons as well as his boxing career that he was the greatest to me.

The Will Must Be Stronger Than The Skill

by | Feb 11, 2009 | Muhammed Ali | 0 comments

“The will must be stronger than the skill.” – Muhammad Ali

When I was growing up my dad liked to watch boxing on TV and follow it in the newspapers. I became a big fan of Muhammed Ali after I met him in the lobby of a hotel in Chicago when I was ten years old. My sister and I hid behind a potted tree in the lobby looking at this man sitting alone on a couch in the lobby. I knew it was him and was afraid to talk to him since he beat people up for a living. We finally got up the nerve and went to ask him for his autograph. When we did he said he would give it to us ‘under one condition, that you call me Muhammed Ali’. We had asked Cassius Clay for the autograph but we left having met Muhammed Ali.

From then on I was connected to him and followed him, rooted for him, no matter what. I loved him for many reasons; for his brashness, his fun-loving nature, his fast feet and hands and his poetry (if you ever read a poem of mine you will see that I graduated from the Muhammed Ali school of poetry).

But then something far deeper and more meaningful happened than just admiring a great entertainer and athlete. He was stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing to be drafted by the Army. I didn’t understand it all but I felt it was completely unfair at the time. Three years later he was allowed to box again, but three years is like an eternity for a boxer. They just don’t come back from three years off. But he did. Not only did he come back but he was set to win back the championship by fighting Joe Frazier. He lost. Then the rematch came, only Frazier got beat by someone in the meanwhile and their fight, though monumental, proved nothing.

It wasn’t until seven years after his belt was taken from him, four years after he returned to the ring, when he was over the hill, way past his prime and facing the meanest, most hard hitting boxer that had come down the pike in a LONG time, that he had the chance to win the crown back. But he wasn’t going to win this one, he wasn’t going to beat George Foreman. He was smaller, was older, wasn’t nearly as fast or as agile as he once had been. He didn’t train as hard supposedly, couldn’t hit as hard.

I remember sitting in the pub at Brandeis University where I was a sophomore. The fight was blacked out on TV and radio but they could do radio updates at the end of each round. I was really the only one who cared in the whole place. I waited for the report every three minutes or so for round after round. It didn’t look good because Ali was just laying back on the ropes, not fighting all that much. The announcers said it was likely that one of these rounds Foreman would land a punch that would put him down, it was just a matter of time.

But that didn’t happen. As a matter of fact Foreman got tired. Ali didn’t. Ali took every punch he had to give, just let him wail away at his body until he was worn out. Then the tide turned. When Foreman could no longer get up the strength to hit hard Ali did the hitting. By round eight I was screaming with excitement as I heard that Ali had turned the corner and beat Foreman.

In the end Ali used his ‘Rope a Dope’ strategy to beat someone bigger and stronger. He won because he was smarter and he had a good plan. But don’t be fooled, he won first and foremost because his will was stronger than his skill.

Is your will stronger than your skill? If not, why not?

Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com