Why India's sports stars like Sachin won't ever come close to Ali's greatness
"God came for his champion. So long the great one," tweeted Mike Tyson, following fellow boxing legend Muhammad Ali's death on June 3. "This man. This king. This hero. This human! Words cannot express. He shook up the world! God bless him," said pop superstar Madonna.
These two tweets, by two of the biggest icons alive, in a large measure, encapsulated the the person Muhammad Ali was. He was "The Greatest", stinging opponents like a "bee", while floating like a "butterfly", bringing down ferocious opponents - Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sonny Liston.
"I done wrassled with an aligator, I done tussled with a whale. Only last week I murdered a rock, inujured a stone, hospitalised a brick. I am so mean, I make medicine sick," Ali said before his "Rumble in a Jungle" fight with Foreman for the heavyweight title. And "aligators" and "whales" they indeed were - Ali's opponents. His bout with Frazier in 1975 at Manila was so brutal that he confessed it was the "closest thing to dying".
However, perhaps more than his achievements in the boxing ring, what defined Ali more was his stand against discrimination and war, and his support for civil rights in a socially turbulent and racially segregated America in the 1960s and 1970s. He was denied service at all-white restaurants, even the Chamber of Commerce told him that it didn't have time to co-sponsor a dinner even after Ali returned from the Rome Olympics with gold.
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| Muhammad Ali had some of his most memorable fights with Joe Frazier (left). |
He had written in his autobiography The Greatest that he had thrown his Olympic medal into the Ohio river out of disgust after a fight with a white motorcycle gang, which started when he and his friend were refused service at a Louisville restaurant because of their colour. The story may be apocryphal and Ali may have only misplaced the medal, but the point was made.
He was to soon become the symbol of black pride, of political defiance, and indeed of the unrest that characterised that era, much to the consternation of white America. After winning the world heavyweight title in 1964, Ali, born Cassius Clay, declared his allegiance to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, and shed his birth name, which he considered to be a "slave name".
If that wasn't bad enough for the racist mainstream American society of the time, his refusal to be drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam was the last straw. "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," aid Ali adding, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger!"
White America considered him a typical "uppity", arrogant black youth who liked to mess with the establishment. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and banned from boxing following his refusal to serve in the army. He also faced prison sentence for draft evasion, before the US Supreme Court overturned the conviction. He was, at that time, among the people most hated by white America.
Ali's firm position against the unpopular Vietnam War made him an antiwar hero for a section of the American society, and his treatment at the hands of the so-called "patriots" earned him sympathy and support.
All that Ali had achieved and the heights that he touched were in spite of the tremendous hurdles that were put in his path.
Ali said, in 1970. “They don’t look at fighters to have brains. They don’t look at fighters to be businessmen, or human, or intelligent. Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people. Beat up on each other and break each other’s noses, and bleed, and show off like two little monkeys for the crowd, killing each other for the crowd. And half the crowd is white. We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.”
This was the extent of difficulties that Ali and others from his community faced, something which the Indian sportspersons, least of all the cricketers, can ever imagine. They are mollycoddled and hero-worshipped by most of us, we afford them the luxury of swanky cars and posh bungalows, we jump on anybody with all our might if he speaks even a word against our "cricket god", we derive vicarious pleasure and satisfaction at the wealth they earn from brand endorsements, and are the first ones in the queue to buy those products.
Without intending to belittle the struggles of our sportspersons of today, let's say this: the way we put individuals like Sachin Tendulkar, or Mahendra Singh Dhoni, for instance, on a pedestal is totally uncalled for. The way we have been going ga-ga over Virat Kohli lately is also how it should not be. Cheering good performances is not wrong, but the way we go overboard with our admiration for sportspersons in India is. It will be tempered when you think long and hard about the difficulties Ali faced and defeated.
Cassius Clay was never as fortunate as the Indian cricketers of today, for instance. Neither was Muhammad Ali. We would never know how a Sachin, Dhoni or Kohli would have fared if faced with the same odds as Ali.
But we will understand that the struggles of Ali were far bigger and on a completely different level, and then we will realise the shallowness of our admiration for the stars of today. And that's when we will truly comprehend the legend of Muhammad Ali.
Imagine being a champion, yet not being so. Ali had to face that ordeal in white America; who among our big cricket stars, for example, can claim to gave endured such hardship? His 35-year-long fight with a debilitating disease like Parkinsons is another poignant story of hardship.
But Ali took all of these on his chin, and yet emerged stronger. As Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao said, "Boxing benefited from Muhammad Ali's talents, but not as much as mankind benefited from his humanity."
A great sportsperson and human being, Muhammad Ali has been a source of inspiration for generations of sportspersons and fans alike. His life and achievements show exactly what he was that the present generation of sportspersons are yet to become. They also counsel us to have a sense of perspective in our hero-worshipping. If somebody deserves our unqualified admiration it has to be Muhammad Ali.
As famous promoter Don King said, "Ali will never die... Like Martin Luther King his spirit will live on. He stood for the world."