khandor’s sports blog

Muhammad Ali at 70: What he meant, what he means

Muhammad Ali’s brilliance was not that he was an antiwar prophet. He wasn’t Malcolm X in boxing gloves, debating foreign policy between rounds, jabbing his hands and then saying, “So how about that Cuban missile crisis.” But unlike the Ivy League advisors who made up the “best and the brightest” in power in those days, Ali understood that there was justice and injustice, right and wrong. He knew that not taking a stand could be as political a statement as taking one.

Ali, strictly in boxing alone, was an all-time great. He was an Olympic gold medalist at 18, the sport’s first three-time heavyweight champion and the participant in multiple matches that contend for the title of Fight of the Century. But it was his highly improvisational political courage that transformed him into a legend.

Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam was front-page news all over the world. In June 1967, he was found guilty of draft evasion by an all-white jury in Houston. The typical sentence was 18 months. Ali received five years and the confiscation of his passport. He immediately appealed, and his sentence was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ali, undefeated and untouched at this point in his career, was stripped of his title for refusing to serve in the military, beginning a 3 1/2-year exile from the ring.

One group that deeply understood the significance of Ali’s stand was Congress. The day of his conviction, the House voted 337 to 29 to extend the draft four more years. It also voted 385 to 19 to make it a federal crime to desecrate the flag.

By 1968, Ali was out on bail — with no boxing ring to call home. But he was never more active, because a young generation of blacks and whites wanted to hear what he had to say. And Ali obliged. In 1968, he spoke at 200 campuses. In one speech, brimming with confidence — as if the might of the U.S. government were no more menacing than a club fighter — Ali said, “I’m expected to go overseas to help free people in South Vietnam and at the same time my people here are being brutalized; hell no! I would like to say to those of you who think I have lost so much: I have gained everything. I have peace of heart; I have a clear, free conscience. And I am proud. I wake up happy, I go to bed happy, and if I go to jail, I’ll go to jail happy.”

The significance of what this meant to people around the globe cannot be overstated. Even in extreme isolation in an island prison, Ali’s courage reached a former boxer turned political prisoner named Nelson Mandela. After his release, Mandela said: “Ali’s struggle made him an international hero. His stand against racism and war could not be kept outside the prison walls.”

June 20, 1967 marks a special day in the history of sport.

There are 2 very good reasons why one man only will always be remembered as THE most important heavyweight champion of all-time.

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Reason #1

This Day in History: When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight

The summer of 1967 marked a tipping point for public support of the Vietnam “police action.” While the Tet Offensive, which exposed the lie that the United States was winning the war, was still six months away, the news out of Southeast Asia was increasingly grim. At the time of Ali’s conviction, 1,000 Vietnamese noncombatants were being killed each week by U.S. forces. One hundred US soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month.
 
Anti-war sentiment was growing and it was thought that a stern rebuke of Ali would help put out the fire. In fact, the opposite took place. Ali’s brave stance fanned the flames. As Julian Bond said, “[It] reverberated through the whole society. …[Y]ou could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war before began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.”
 
Ali himself vowed to appeal the conviction, saying, “I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in this stand – either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.”
 
Already by this point, Ali’s heavyweight title had been stripped, beginning a three-and-a-half-year exile. Already Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had begun to distance themselves from their most famous member. Already, Ali had become a punching bag for almost every reporter with a working pen. But with his conviction came a new global constituency. In Guyana, protests against his sentence took place in front of the US embassy. In Karachi, Pakistan, a hunger strike began in front of the US consulate. In Cairo, demonstrators took to the streets. In Ghana, editorials decried his conviction. In London, an Irish boxing fan named Paddy Monaghan began a long and lonely picket of the US Embassy. Over the next three years, he would collect more than twenty thousand signatures on a petition calling for the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight title.
 
Ali at this point was beginning to see himself as someone who had a greater responsibility to an international groundswell that saw him as more than an athlete. “Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people. I’m no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money.”

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Reason #2

FINAL SCORE: RAPTORS 76, Cavaliers 93
Complete Game Info

Forget about any type of in-depth analysis for this game. There’s no need to say more than this:

TOTAL REBOUNDS: Cleveland 48, TORONTO 32 [-16]

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If the Raptors have to play without Chris Bosh for many more games, and Kris Humphries remains a no-go, due to his broken leg, there is NO CHANCE whatsoever this team will be able to garner the 8th and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

No Mas. 

Raptors Notebook: Bosh thinks team could stand to get nastier
On Tuesday … Chris Bosh, the team’s star, said that no, his team is not tough enough.

“I don’t think so,” Bosh said. “I think we have the potential to do that. Have we been the last month? I don’t think so.”

So the reporter then turned to coach Sam Mitchell, who deftly avoided the question despite some persistence …

“… if Chris feels that way, he is in the locker room with those guys and he understands his teammates. We just got to get back to being aggressive in the way that we play, on defence, on offence. If that entails being a little bit more nastier, than that’s what it entails. If our captain feels that way, then I agree with him.”

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Which calls to mind ‘the Truth’ of the following line of dialogue from Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning film, ‘Million Dollar Baby’,

“Girlie, tough ain’t enough.” – Frankie Dunn

Harsh, accurate, Words of Wisdom for the Ages.