This thread is supposed to be a tribute to Ali, not a debate, so I won’t pursue this (unless you want to open a thread in Great Debates) except to say that this article (the first one I found that comments on the crowd) contradicts most of what you said about the fight in China — the arena wasn’t sold out, or even half full, and it appears that those who did attend went mainly to see Andrew Golota, a top tier heavyweight fighter. I wasn’t there, but the source seems credible.
But I agree that by tomorrow, pretty much the whole world will know who died.
I enjoyed watching him fight when I was a kid but he just wouldn’t shut up. I was somewhat pleased when Kenny Norton broke his jaw and when Joe Frazier put him on his back. Just to shut the guy up.
A great sports legend and perhaps an even greater person. He did a lot of good with his fame and fortune. I’m afraid our Facebook feeds will soon be full of whines about why he gets attention in death and some average veteran does not or why he’s being honored even though he refused to fight in Vietnam. I think Ali chose the more principled path. This guy was huge, probably an order of magnitude more significant than any living athlete.
Hey China Guy. I’m betting You Weren’t There. I recall people betting against him because he wouldn’t stop talking about how great he was, year in and year out along side that creepy shill, Howard Cosell (yuk). It got fairly tiring but there again China Guy, you probably weren’t there.
The greatest boxer who ever lived, a man of principle, and a humanitarian. He also gave the world Trash Talk; and his pre-match taunting of Joe Frazier was truly reprehensible. So his legacy is not entirely unmixed.
I was there. Although Ali certainly earned his sobriquet The Louisville Lip it was always done with such wit, brio and style that it was difficult to dislike him for it. Certainly some did (there are always some) but the real Ali haters hated him not for his trash talk but for the fact that he was a Negro who didn’t know his place, who refused to pay obeisance to the white boxing establishment. That establishment found a way to strip him of his title when he couldn’t be beaten fairly but they could never keep Ali down for long. He was always his own man and that stuck in the craw of the people who had run boxing for so long.
The cockiness and boasting was a lot of what made Ali a legend and a lot of fun. There are some guys (Trump) who can’t pull that off without looking like dicks but Ali was indeed the greatest and was just speaking the truth. If you can back it up, you aren’t bragging.
I never said Ali wasn’t a great boxer, Frank. Maybe you can help with the following. There was a documentary about his disease and retirement done in the late 80’s or early 1990’s. Ali was interviewed and when reflecting upon his youth he said, “I was nothing but a loud mouthed nigger”.
I was floored by his statement. The documentary is out there Frank. Wanna help find it? Lemme know.
I was there but I didn’t base my opinion of the man on what haters thought about him. Don’t get me wrong, I am an underdog fan so I wanted him to lose every fight until he finally lost to Leon ( remember this was also because he was mostly fighting guys who couldn’t ever beat him on a fluke as time went on ). Ali taught me to be able to separate the sports figure from the man and there simply wasn’t an athlete that I admired more growing up.
That Norton fight was huge in my growing up. I was really young. No athletic event had as great of an effect. That was the first time I’d seen Ali fight. I was on vacation in Florida and I’d just lost a battle with a sandspur patch. I went into the house to get the sandspurs pulled out and the waterworks were flowing. While this was going on, I started watching the fight. Watching him get his jaw broken then seeing him get back up and keep fighting turned the waterworks off for me. That was how a champion deals with adversity.It shamed me. This man had shaken off a broken jaw and kept fighting and I was bawling over thorns. While I didn’t want to have my jaw broken I absolutely wanted to be able to react to it with the resolve that he showed. I learned how to take life in stride. I never lost that respect and as I learned more about him, that respect has only grown. He was greater out of the ring than in it.
It is funny how little things can make people come to different opinions about the same events. You saw a braggart getting beaten, I saw how a great person reacts to adversity and something I wanted to incorporate into my own life view. I saw it as one of the most noble things I’d ever seen. It showed me that he was not just a windbag, there truly was greatness there that shone under adversity. Nothing I’ve ever learned about Ali has changed that opinion. He was a great role model in and out of the ring. His fighting persona in no way detracts from these things.
So, I don’t think it was bad to feel good that he lost. It was the right reaction to the persona he was playing. He set himself up to be hated and played it better than any other athlete could and he bore the animosity like a true champion should and when it was his time to go down he handled it with class, fighting to the end. I’d say that even if you felt that he was too mouthy at the time the 35 years he’s had since his last fight would possibly lead you to see that his boxing persona was simply that, a persona and would be able to judge the man for who he was, not for who he played. The loudmouth was such a small part of the individual he was. YMMV.
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”
“I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”
His boxing skills were almost incidental. He was a great leader, a great symbol, and a great man.