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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590135945 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 692 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Manly Art
(They can run but they can't hide)
By George Kimball
McBooks Press, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 George KimballAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59013-594-5
CHAPTER 1
The Way It Was
Survival of the Greatest
More than two dozen men have claimed the heavyweight championship in the three decades since Muhammad Ali last owned that title, and they could, almost without exception, walk unrecognized down the main street of any major city. But, as the late publicist Irving Rudd once noted, "If Ali went into a hut in Africa, a village in Asia, the outback in Australia, or a marketplace in South America, the people would look at him, smile, and say 'Muhammad Ali!'" We're just guessing here, but you could probably add to that list a boreen in County Clare.
My children have often noted, more out of amusement than actual annoyance, that they grew up in a house in which there were more photographs of Muhammad Ali on the walls than there were of themselves. Of course, some of these included Ali and the kids: there is one, for instance, of Ali, a beatific smile on his face, holding my now-twenty-five-year-old daughter beside the swimming pool at Caesars Palace. I can date that one to the week of the 1986 Barry McGuigan-Steve Cruz fight, because Brian Eastwood's face is in the background.
Last Friday in the Bronx, Ali was honored prior to that evening's New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game. Not only did the predictable chants of "Ali! Ali!" resound during a standing ovation 50,000 strong, but millionaire ballplayers from both teams also halted their pre-game preparations, dropped their gloves and bats, and raced over to meet, and perhaps touch, a man who had stopped boxing before most of them were even born.
He was arguably the best heavyweight who ever lived, but the boxing accomplishments of the three-time world champion don't begin to explain the almost universal reverence in which the mythic figure is held in his dotage. Great boxers such as Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and Sugar Ray Robinson retained a certain popularity after their careers ended, but you didn't see any of them flying around the world to light Olympic torches or negotiate the release of hostages.
Dempsey operated a midtown saloon in his post-combat years. Robinson scuffled to make a buck as a song-and-dance man, while Louis became first a cartoonish wrestler and then a "greeter" at Caesars Palace. The financial motivation of Ali, who can still cause a traffic jam just by stepping out of a limousine, is somewhat different. He is constantly on the road these days, raising funds for children's hospices and for his nonprofit Muhammad Ali Foundation.
Proximity to famous athletes generally leads to a rather jaded view for those in this profession, if only because exposure to the human frailties of widely admired figures almost inevitably causes disappointment. From the time he first came to our attention as a sleek teenager at the 1960 Rome Olympics, it was apparent that this was a boxer unlike any other who had come before, but admiration for Ali the fighter doesn't begin to explain why he remains such a beloved figure today.
Dr. Wilbert McClure, the Boston psychologist who was his roommate at the 1960 Olympics (and who, along with Ali and Sergeant Eddie Crook, was one of three American boxers to win gold medals at those Games), noted of Ali: "He always carried himself with his head high, and with grace and composure. We can't say that about all of his detractors."
His stature was enhanced, of course, by the brave stance with which he risked everything in his opposition to the Vietnam War. ("When Ali said 'No, I will not go,'" the noted journalist David Marash wrote in a profile for Al Jazeera that never saw the light of day, "it turned a boxing champion into a moral champion.") And that reverence in which he was held has continued to grow as he has matured gracefully into a universally beloved figure.
The irony is that a man once known for his quick wit and boastful jibes has been rendered as silent as a statue of Buddha. The Ali of today would probably have more to tell us than at any previous stage of his life, but between Parkinson's syndrome and the medication he must take to control it, he is able to speak only with great difficulty — and that's on a good day. "He always spoke to the people," says Howard Bingham, the renowned photographer who has been Ali's best friend for more than 40 years. "Now they speak to him."
Many who have watched the specter of his trembling hands and his tortured attempts to speak leap to the conclusion that there has been a concomitant loss of cognitive function, sort of the way deaf people are sometimes assumed to be retarded by those who are themselves just too stupid to know better.
But Ali is not punch-drunk, or even close to it. His motor functions have been diminished, but his mind has not. "It's like he's trapped inside his body," said his daughter Laila. "He can think, he has things he wants to say, but his lips sometimes don't move to get it out."
The Ali who returned from a three-and-a-half-year exile to twice regain the heavyweight championship was a very different boxer from the one who had defeated the fearsome Sonny Liston to win his first, and the fact is that the world never saw him at his peak. Before they took his boxing license away and stripped him of the title in 1967, he was not only faster than any heavyweight who had ever lived but had continued to improve with every fight.
His second incarnation brought some of the more thrilling contests in the annals of the sport, but he could no longer rely on quickness and uncanny reflexes.
"I was better when I was young," Ali acknowledged to his biographer, but "I was more experienced when I was older. I was stronger; I had more belief in myself. Except for Sonny Liston, the men I fought when I was young weren't near the fighters that Joe Frazier and George Foreman were, but I had my speed when I was young."
Particularly in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle against Foreman and the 1975 Thrilla in Manila against Frazier, this second incarnation of Ali demonstrated something the first had never had to prove: that he could take a punch.
In the former fight he sacrificed his body in order to exhaust Foreman with a scheme he later described as "rope-a-dope" ("And," recalled Foreman, "I was the dope!"), while the latter contest was a near-death experience that put both men in hospital.
In a private moment years later, when the Parkinson's had begun to work its ravages, I asked Ali when he might have hung up the gloves if he had it to do all over again. He thought about it a bit before replying in what was barely a whisper: "George Foreman." Of course, if his career had ended on that high note in Zaire, the world would never have seen his third fights against Frazier and Ken Norton, but neither would it have had to endure its sad conclusion against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in the 1980s.
Bill Nack, who chronicled many Ali fights for Sports Illustrated, recalled that when Ali's Parkinson's syndrome first began to present itself, "he was mumbling and starting to slur, just a little bit. I remember thinking: 'Is he just tired?' Then I thought about all the times Joe Frazier had hit him and I realized he wasn't 'just tired.'"
There are Parkinson's sufferers who never took a single punch, but even Ali concedes that his present affliction is almost certainly the product of damage accumulated during those later fights.
A lion in winter, he may now be paying the price for all the joy he provided us then, but pity would be misplaced. Ali remains, as his longtime physician, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, once put it, "in a complicated society, a simple, happy man."
"He always thought that once he stopped boxing, people would forget him," says his biographer, Tom Hauser. "He really didn't understand how important he was."
The Irish Times Weekend Magazine
August 2009
Those Grady forebears had been rattling around in the Clay family closet for years, but when Ali came to Dublin to fight Al (Blue) Lewis, he didn't want to hear about them. At the time Ali was still a couple of years away from his conversion to traditional Islam, and in the theology of Elijah Muhammad it was assumed that if a man had white ancestors it must have been the result of a master raping his slave. By 2009 Ali had come full circle, and when he visited Ireland this time it was for the same reason thousands of other Americans do each year: to trace his Irish roots.
The Great St. Patrick's Day Hooley
McTigue and Siki
There is some irony, as well a bit of symmetry, to the fact that the Irish Arts Center is located in the Hell's Kitchen section of mid-Manhattan, just a few blocks removed from the spot where Battling Siki, with two bullets in his body, had crawled to his death in 1925.
Curated by Jim Houlihan, the Fighting Irishmen exhibit opened at the Irish Arts Center three years ago for what was intended to be a limited run. The fascinating collection of boxing ephemera that included everything from Barry McGuigan's shorts to Dan Donnelly's arm proved to be so popular that it has been on display ever since. At the conclusion of its stay at the Arts Center, it moved on to the South Street Seaport Museum, and from there to the Burns Library at Boston College. Next week it opens a six-month engagement at the Ulster Folk Park in County Tyrone, and there are plans to bring it to Dublin after that.
Subtitled A Celebration of the Celtic Warrior, Houlihan's Fighting Irishmen collection has also been the subject of a BBC documentary, which was screened at the Arts Center Tuesday night, along with Andrew Gallimore's 2007 film An Troid Fhuilteach (A Bloody Canvas), which explores the light-heavyweight title fight between Mike McTigue and Battling Siki that took place in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day of 1923.
For 86 years — until Bernard Dunne knocked out Ricardo Cordoba to win the WBA 122-pound title two months ago — McTigue's win over Siki remained the most significant upset in Irish boxing history, and its outcome has been the subject of some controversy ever since. There have been several attempts to recount its details in recent years, and Gallimore, a renowned Welsh filmmaker, has retold the story, assisted in that endeavor by still photographs and grainy newsreel footage shot on the night of the fight.
Although the invitation to the Irish Arts Center viewing described the McTigue-Siki fight as "a sensation attracting the attention of the world's sporting press," and as "an unknown chapter in Irish history," it would seem pretty hard for it to have been both.
Since Gallimore's documentary was produced for Telefis Éirann, an Irish-language channel, and much of the dialogue is spoken in Irish with English subtitles, it would be easy to assume a pro-McTigue bias, but in fact the strongest opinion is offered by Siki's American biographer Peter Benson, who says that McTigue's win represented a likely larceny.
The 1923 newsreel footage Gallimore used had actually surfaced 30 years ago after being discovered in the British Archive, and it served as the basis for a lengthy Sports Illustrated retrospective by the late Robert Cantwell. Cantwell's reconstruction of McTigue-Siki was entitled "The Great Dublin Robbery" and also concluded that Siki deserved the decision.
On the other hand, John Lardner, in his classic 1949 New Yorker profile of the Senegalese warrior, wrote that "the operation for the removal of [Siki's] crown was painless. The decision went to McTigue on points. There was nothing particularly wrong with this verdict, I am told by a neutral eyewitness, except that McTigue did not make the efforts or take the risks that are commonly expected of a challenger for a world's championship. There was no need to. In the circumstances, nothing less than a knockout could have beaten him, and he avoided that possibility by boxing at long range throughout."
The suggestion that McTigue was the beneficiary of a hometown decision was also addressed by the eminent African American boxing historian and essayist Gerald Early, who concluded that "Siki probably would not have beaten McTigue if he fought him in New York, Osaka, or Tangiers. He simply did not fight well."
Still, the background of the fight and its historical context make for a fascinating study, and with some significant input from Irish boxing experts Patrick and Thomas Myler (who if nothing else serve as a counterpoint to Benson's sometimes runaway enthusiasms), Gallimore's film explores it well.
Although he did manage wins over some of the best fighters of his day, by almost any standard McTigue was a career journeyman with a record of 82-25-7 when he, accompanied by his family, returned to his homeland in June of 1922.
McTigue was born in Kilnamona, near Ennis in County Clare, but when he arrived at Ellis Island ten years earlier he had listed his citizenship as "British — of Irish ancestry."
Despairing of what he was earning on mostly small-time New York club shows where he lost nearly as often as he won, McTigue hoped to fatten up both his purses and his record on the other side of the Atlantic — and he was prescient on both counts. Before the year was out he had dispatched three opponents in fights in England designed to advance his candidacy for a possible challenge to the world title. In that quest, his quarry was not Siki, but the incumbent champion, Georges Carpentier.
Still considered among the all-time great 175-pounders, the "Orchid Man" had won the European heavyweight and light-heavyweight titles in separate fights in 1913, and retained both through what was by all accounts heroic service as an aviator during the first World War. (During Jack Johnson's Mann Act exile he had also won a 1914 fight in London for something called the "White Heavyweight Championship of the World.") In 1920 he had traveled to the U.S., where he knocked out Battling Levinsky in Jersey City to win the world light-heavy title, setting the stage for his 1921 challenge to Jack Dempsey.
That bout matched a French war hero who had been awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire against a man whose non-service had labeled him a "slacker" in some quarters. Carpentier's gallantry didn't help him in the ring against Dempsey. When the two met at Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City, the Manassa Mauler knocked him out in four. Carpentier made one subsequent light-heavyweight defense in 1922, defeating Ted "Kid" Lewis in London, before agreeing, on short notice, to fight Siki in Paris on September 24th.
Siki had turned professional before the war but was a modest 8-6-2 before abandoning the ring to serve in the 8th Colonial Infantry. Born Amadou M'Barick Phal in what was then French West Africa, Siki had reportedly been the bravest soldier in his unit. His legs bore scars from his shrapnel wounds, and he had been awarded the same honors as Carpentier (the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire), lending a certain cachet to a bout between the two, even though, as Benson notes in A Bloody Canvas, many Frenchmen regarded Siki as a savage, "one step removed from a baboon."
(Though an uneducated product of the colonial system, Siki was reportedly fluent in as many as ten languages, but, the New York World once unkindly noted, "He speaks seven languages, but his total vocabulary is limited to 157 words — counting profane expletives.")
Since resuming his boxing career in 1919, Siki had gone 45-1-2 against largely undistinguished European opposition. Carpentier apparently did not consider him a serious threat, particularly in a bout whose outcome was by most accounts pre-determined. (Benson says that the script called for Siki to go down in the first and second and then be counted out in the fourth. For his cooperation Siki was to receive not only his own but Carpentier's 200,000-franc purse. Carpentier, who was both a co-promoter of the fight and a part-owner of the 55,000-seat Buffalo Velodrome, could afford to be generous.)
Siki was knocked down in the first, and none too convincingly at that, and again from a harder blow in the third. By then Carpentier had begun to berate him with racial slurs.
Whether Siki became enraged at this point or whether he had never intended to go along with the fix remains open to dispute, but in either case from the third on he began to fight with a fury, battering Carpentier around the ring and finally knocking him out with a left hook in the sixth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Manly Art by George Kimball. Copyright © 2011 George Kimball. Excerpted by permission of McBooks Press, Inc..
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