The last time the West Ranch Beacon covered Muhammad Ali, he was seen being embraced by Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich at a special reception held in Los Angeles.  Antonovich was helping the world remember that Ali is an individual unlike any other trillion people who were ever born, as he gave a special tribute to whom he called his friend Muhammad Ali. 

Certainly there is no reason to call Muhammad Ali anything else but his own name.   He may be the only person in the world who can simply be named, and everyone with a brain or a memory knows something about what he has done.  No need to call him “the great heavyweight boxing champion,” or the definer of an era, or a beacon of the Sixties, and of the Seventies as well.  Everyone knows this already about the man that Sports Illustrated named as the greatest athlete of the Twentieth Century. 

Muhammad Ali at the Antonovich tribute was a very quiet, gentle man.  Ali is now going towards his fourth decade of battling a Parkinson’s Disease syndrome brought on by too many ferocious blows to the head in his two decades as professional boxer.  The syndrome has not affected his unique thinking, but the nerve injury took away his controls of what were once the most unique hands in the world.  This is epic tragedy perhaps equal to the loss of hearing by Beethoven. 

Back in 1976, I saw in person the earlier, mobile butt-kicking Ali haranguing an outdoor mid-Manhattan crowd in New York City.  My first surprise was the impression of the largeness of Ali’s head.  The impression apparently distorted my sense of proportion – his head seemed to be at least twice as big anyone who had a head in the audience.   

By that time he had already stood up to two of the hardest-hitting heavyweight champions in boxing history – the late Sonny Liston and George “Grill Man” Foreman – and Ali’s head took their hardest punches without creating much of a flinch on his face.  He also suffered a horrific left-hook knockdown from heavyweight champion “Smoking Joe” Frazier in their 1971 championship fight and somehow managed to stand up before the count of ten. 

Now, seeing how large Ali’s head really was in person, I could only imagine that delivering a punch to his jaw must have been like hitting a Mack truck. 

The other feature about Ali that I noticed in person was his unique, practically Apollonian golden skin.  Ali’s father was an African-American sign painter in Louisille, Kentucky, while his mother’s skin looked even more Caucasian than black.  On his mother’s side was a lot of Irish ancestory, and some of Ali’s showmanship seemed to have been a winning combination of African-American jazz plus florid Irish blarney. It resulted in making him look a little like a golden statue that moved very quickly. 

Ali’s appeal through most of the Sixties and the Seventies was that unique showmanship adding to what was in the boxing world an original athleticism. In the boxing ring, he resembled a top athlete fighting a line-up of punching thugs.  His boxing style always went against the grain of what had been  pugilistic fundamentalism.  He hit with his hands and arms while hardly ever throwing his body weight into his blows.  The result was that he seldom knocked anyone down with one punch.  Yet in his upright stance that left him a total view of his opponents, he could pinpoint devastating combinations of left and right hands that usually finished off his adversaries long before the final bell. 

He was also clearly the greatest thinking boxing champion.  He would clutch an opponent’s upper body and arms to feel the guy’s pulse and blood pressure and to make an assessment of how long the opponent would last at his present tempo.  He performed these measurements perfectly in his epic 1974 victory over George Foreman, another great champion who like Ali is much more than just a boxing champ or a great athlete. 

Finally, Ali like Babe Ruth was a central showman of his time.  In his heyday, Ali would raise the ratings of any TV show that hosted him.  His banter and humor were as unique as his boxing style. Babe Ruth once correctly predicted his home run in a game, but Ali time and again would correctly predict the round in which his opponent would fall. 

I think that perhaps what made Ali so popular among kids like me was that unlike other athletes and boxers, he had a strong high-school hero culture engrained in his daily presentations.  Ali was the one who always seemed to say, “Ordinary life has a lot of confinement and fear, but when I’m here, we are not going to grovel in mediocrity. Instead we’re celebrating greatness and fearlessness.” 

Much has been written about Ali’s resistance to being drafted into the Army,

But even that resistance was unique.  Very few draftees in his time confronted their draft boards with risking a prison sentence.  Instead they escaped into Canada or into a plethora of deferments.  But Ali spent over three years risking a five-year prison sentence to prove the sincerity of his personal interpretation that the Qur’an compelled him not to fight in war.  It took the U.S. Supreme Court to decide that Ali’s very personal interpretation of his Islam was valid and sincere, no matter how the Qur’an might be interpreted anywhere else in the world. 

Still, I wish that this had been one fight that Ali had lost.  I would have rather that Ali had gone to prison for five years instead so that he would have been too old to fight again.  As it was, Ali was given permission to fight again, but his legs were no longer as swift as they had been. Perhaps they were only a split second slower than before, but that split second can be crucial to any pro tennis player, football player or boxer. Ali compensated for his less mobile legs by changing his ring style, allowing his opponents to exhaust themselves by reaching him with their blows.  This was a radical adjustment that earned him a lot more boxing victories and the heavyweight championship two more times.  But in the long run, his body and his nervous system paid for all the courage he showed in a boxing ring in the second part of his career. 

I think I would gladly give up something very valuable to me – even the rest of my hair – if Ali had only been permanently banned from boxing at the age of 25, when he and his legs were at the top of their game, so that the damage he later incurred in the ring would never happen, 

Yet I think George Foreman made a good point once when asked if he felt sorry for the physical struggles Ali must live with in his Parkinson’s syndrome.  Foreman responded to the effect that everything in Ali’s life was epic, and to people who lived in such magnitudes, their struggles are epic as well. 

And so – as with a Beethoven or an Achilles – I wish Muhammad Ali a happy 68^th birthday and applause for his epic life. 

Chris Sharp- Commentary

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.