14.10.1999

Hero and criminal

Ian Mahoney reviews ‘Redemption song: Muhammad Ali and the spirit of the sixties’ by Mike Marqusee (London 1999, pp310, hbk, £17)

Everyone above a certain age has a favourite memory of Muhammad Ali. My own is from the 1974 ‘Rumble in the jungle’ - the 32-year-old Ali’s attempt in Zaire to regain boxing’s world heavyweight title against a supposedly unstoppable George Foreman. In one of the most mythical moments in sport, Ali, after soaking up cruel punishment throughout the match, moved off the ropes with 30 seconds to go in the eighth and hammered the tiring champion to the floor with a lightening two-hand combination.

What happened next was remarkable. At home in a small South Wales village, a room full of my (very) white, working class family - including communists, borderline racists and uncles who actually had money on Foreman - leaped to their feet and bounced round the furniture, punching the air in triumph. This book goes a long way to explain why they too felt they had won something when Foreman hit the canvas.

On February 25 1964, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world, a shocking upset of the form book. After the contest - in defiance of the traditions of the fight world - Clay spent a quiet evening in private conversation with Malcolm X, the singer Sam Cooke and awesome American footballer Jim Brown. The next morning, Ali met the press:

“I believe in allah and in peace. I don’t want to move into white neighbourhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman ... I’m not a Christian any more. I know where I’m going, and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want” (p8).

This was a startling act of transformation. Although he had been a secret member of the black nationalist Nation of Islam since 1962, for much of his career before the fight the image of Clay was essentially unthreatening to mainstream society. He was simply “brash and bold, an entertaining eccentric” (p10). Clay had been one of the US successes at the Rome Olympics. Asked by a Soviet reporter about the conditions of American blacks, he had snapped back: “To me, the USA is still the best country in the world, counting yours.” In those days, he was even proud of his name, something he was later to reject as only worthy of a “slave”: “Don’t you think it’s a beautiful name? Makes you think of the Colosseum and those Roman gladiators” (p47).

If anything, the hapless Sonny Liston was still identified in 1964 as the ‘uppity’ black man in the public’s eye, with Clay almost an honorary ‘great white hope’. This had begun to change subtly in the lead-up to the 1964 clash, much to the consternation of the fight establishment and Clay’s entourage. His then publicist, Harold Conrad, despaired: “The whole sales pitch for the fight had been Clay against Liston, white hat against black hat, and now it looked like there’d be two black hats fighting” (p77).

This book attempts to explain the remarkable metamorphosis of the impish and playful Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, at one time the embodiment of alien menace for the establishment. Fundamentally, Marqusee sees this as both a product of the personal qualities of this remarkable athlete and human being, but also the social, political and cultural context of that equally remarkable decade, the 1960s. He focuses on an historical juncture that supplied the hidden “raw materials from which [Ali] invented himself, the collective experiences crystallised in that self-construction” (p4).

United States-born writer Marqusee is the author of a number of political studies of sport, including the well regarded Anyone but England: cricket and the national malaise (1994). He is one of the few - and in my opinion one of the very best - contemporary left writers to regard sport as a worthy subject of critical study. The book has as its stated intention to “reclaim” Ali, the “greatest figure of resistance in the history of modern sport” (p4). It is brilliantly successful.

The mature Ali that emerges is an intuitively intelligent manipulator of his own image, a man constantly aware of his world role and iconographic status. But as Marqusee puts it, “It could have been different”:

“... as we retell Ali’s tale, we cannot allow ourselves to be so seduced by its hero that we forget the confusing conditions in which his story unfolded ... Doubt and contradiction, misjudgement and compromise contribute as much to the making of a hero ... as single-minded determination and clarity of purpose. At the core of the Ali story is a young man who made daunting choices and stuck to them in the face of ghastly threats and glittering inducements” (p6).

It could have been different in all sorts of ways. Alongside that young man at the core of the narrative are the 1960s themselves. A decade which revealed not only the profound revolutionary potential in the societies of advanced western capitalism, but also the abject failure of the parties that claimed to be revolutionary alternatives to give shape to, and win hegemony over, movements such as that for black civil rights. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that amongst blacks many of the most militant - like Ali - found themselves drawn to the ranks of vociferous separatism, explicitly rejecting the assimulationist projects of the mainstream protest movement led by the likes of Martin Luther King.

Of course, this had its progressive side. In early 1966 an administrative readjustment of the percentage pass mark in the army intelligence test (Ali had already failed once) made the heavyweight champion of the world eligible for service - fit for combat. Inundated by press inquiries, Ali blurted out the immortal line - “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” This sentence was to become one of the most resonant of the 60s. In that essentially personalised rejection of a war which ‘white’ society wished him to fight on its behalf we see the deep alienation of Ali and a whole swathe of young black Americans from a society that despised them. It is a sentence that reverberates with revolutionary potential.

Marqusee writes of this period with sensitivity and insight:

“His assertion of his personal prerogatives led him to embrace a universal cause. Like [Malcolm X], he emerged from the cocoon of nationalism to spread his wings as an internationalist. But he did so under the pressure of circumstances - the war, the draft, the heavyweight championship, the pull of alternative constituencies. It was Ali’s capacity to embody so many of the underlying trends of the time ... that made him a representative figure, a hero to the insurgents and a criminal in the eyes of the state” (p192).

The last irony is that this great man - once reviled, stripped of his honours, hounded, denied his citizenship and access to his very livelihood because of his brave political stand and rejection of a society he detested - is today a “genial 90s icon of harmony and goodwill” (p3). Like Malcolm X, Ali has had his political teeth extracted by the establishment.

The great merit of Marqusee’s excellent book is his refusal to accept this, to let them have someone who belongs to us.

Ian Mahoney