Written by alan pierpoint   

Thanks, Kix, for giving me the shove I needed to think about this. My comments regarding Ali and sportsmanship seem churlish now, but to be honest, that's how I felt.

Now to the task.

Ali was the most famous man in the world because . . . oh my gosh, let us count the ways. Maybe we can start with the fact that his passing has got us reaching out to each other. No other celebrity death accomplished this. The death of Michael Jackson, who succeeded Ali to the most-famous-human-being title, didn't (although it inspired me to write a long essay, even though I was never a fan.) More currently, the death of Annette Funicello, also from a long degenerative illness, didn't inspire in us the need to search each other out, although I'd be surprised if I were the only one on this list that tuned in at age 8 to the MM Club for the sole purpose of . . . well, RIP Annette. Back to Ali.



Being heavyweight champ starts you out with a billion who either love or hate you. At least it did back in the day, before there were half a dozen heavyweight champs at any one time (and who cares anymore because MMA is ever so much more destructive, and fun.) The color thing was huge, of course. Ali was a hero to every dark-skinned male person who resented white privilege and / or his nation's colonial past--dark enough to be clearly African, light enough to broaden his appeal. Then he became Muslim, and I can only guess at the impact of that conversion as it reverberated around the Islamic world. Imagine if you were a teenage kid in Indonesia or Pakistan and had grown up with tales of European colonial rule, and both admired America and hated its guts because it was white and powerful and liked to bomb other (non-white) countries, and here comes a black man who embraces your faith, stands up to the power structure of the country that's bombing the bejesus out of a country to the north or east, and refuses to join the war machine for the simplest and most humane of reasons--"I have no grudge against the Vietnamese people . . . No Vietcong ever called me 'nigger.'" And no one who ever saw him in the ring could accuse him of cowardice.

No doubt, his fighting style was a big part of it. Or, his fighting styles, since he didn't have the foot speed in his comeback years, and therefore had to mix it up more. When he had that speed, he was more in control of his fights than any other fighter I ever saw. He could, and did, decide which round to KO his opponent, predict it in advance, and usually do it. Babe Ruth called his shot once--maybe. Ali did it before every fight. What teenage boy in Algeria or old man in Malawi didn't imagine himself as Ali, floating and stinging and toying with opponents before smashing them to the canvas? (And what prep-school white boy didn't do the same? I know I did.)

For me, in assessing Ali's greatness, it comes back down to April of our junior year, at the height of the war but before the lottery, when the draft hung over all of us (although years removed due to the student deferment system). Ali made a moral choice and was excoriated for it. For my money, he was never more heroic than when he said, in essence, hell no. I won't go. And he was right. Transcendently, morally right. Today, American vets return to that battered country by the thousands to take the tour and walk the old battlefields, while Vietnam itself bravely holds the line against Chinese expansion. All that killing, all those bombs, are revealed by history to have been wasted, and therefore . . . I'm starting to feel churlish again, so I'll stop that particular line of thought.

I'll just conclude by saying that it was my privilege in the last dozen years or so of my teaching career to have a succession of Vietnamese students. Some came to us on scholarship directly from Vietnam; others were sons and daughters of diplomats stationed in places like Germany and Russia, and would arrive having taken the first 10 years of their schooling in a European language. Without exception, they were sweet, wonderful, inspiring students. They didn't want to discuss the "American War," and I respected that, but I sensed that they realized that both sides had been trapped by history, and they were ready to forgive, if not to forget, and to move beyond. Some of them, the girls especially, had never heard of Mohammed Ali, I'm sure. Perhaps the coverage of his death will rectify that. They should know the story of the gentle giant who did what he could to bring the horrible American war to an end.

Alan Pierpoint / June, '16