[00:00.84]The Most Adored Athlete—Muhammad Ali
[00:07.56]Though Ali won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960,
[00:13.56]at the time the experts didn't think much of his boxing skills.
[00:17.32]His head, eyes wide, seemed to float above the action.
[00:21.24]Rather than slip a punch, the traditional defensive move,
[00:25.02]it was his habit to sway back, bending at the waist—
[00:28.56]a tactic that appalled the experts. Lunacy.
[00:32.27]Nor did they approve of his personal behavior:
[00:35.02]the self-promotions, his affiliation with
[00:38.43]the Muslims and giving up his “slave name” for Muhammad Ali.
[00:42.51]At the press conferences, the reporters were sullen.
[00:46.10]Ali would turn on them. “Why aren't you taking notice?”
[00:49.58]or “Why aren't you laughing?”
[00:51.92]The public as well had a hard time accepting him.
[00:55.58]Then, three years after Ali defended the championship,
[00:59.19]there came the public vilification for his refusal to
[01:02.74]join the army during the Vietnam War.
[01:04.89]The government prosecuted him for draft dodging,
[01:07.95]and the boxing commissions took away his license.
[01:11.14]He was idle for 3.5 years at the peak of his career.
[01:15.09]In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled
[01:18.42]that the government had acted improperly.
[01:20.73]But Ali bore the commissions no ill will.
[01:23.65]There were no lawsuits to get his title back
[01:26.83]through the courts. No need, he said,
[01:29.37]to punish them for doing what they thought was right.
[01:31.80]Quite properly, in his mind,
[01:34.19]he won back the title in the ring,
[01:36.32]knocking out George Foreman in the eighth round
[01:39.31]of their fight in Zaire—“The Rumble in the Jungle”.
[01:42.53]Ali was asked on a television show
[01:45.18]what he would have done with his life,
[01:47.17]given a choice. After an awkward pause—a rare thing,
[01:51.67]indeed—he admitted he couldn't think of anything
[01:54.34]other than boxing. That is all he had ever wanted or wished for.
[01:58.36]He couldn't imagine anything else.
[02:00.91]He defended boxing as a sport:
[02:03.37]“You don't have to be hit in boxing.
[02:06.14]People don't understand that.”
[02:08.05]Oscar Wilde once suggested that you kill the thing you love.
[02:11.93]In Ali's case, it was the reverse:
[02:14.69]what he loved, in a sense, killed him.
[02:17.70]The man who was the most loquacious of athletes
[02:20.77]now says almost nothing: he moves slowly through the crowds
[02:25.20]and signs autographs. He has probably signed more autographs
[02:29.11]than any other athletes ever, living or dead.
[02:31.94]It is his principal activity at home,
[02:34.35]working at his desk. He was once denied an autograph by his idol,
[02:39.67]Sugar Ray Robinson, and vowed he would never turn anyone down.
[02:43.79]The ceremonial leave—taking of great athletes
[02:47.68]can impart indelible memories, even if one remembers
[02:51.37]them from the scratchy newsreels of time—
[02:53.76]Babe Ruth with the doffed cap at home plate,
[02:56.91]Lou Gehrig's voice echoing in the vast hollows
[03:00.05]of Yankee Stadium. Muhammad Ali's was not
[03:02.93]exactly a leave-taking, but it may have seemed so
[03:06.17]to the estimated 3 billion or so television viewers
[03:09.41]who saw him open the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.
[03:13.35]Outfitted in a white gym suit
[03:15.97]that eerily made him seem to glisten
[03:18.11]against a dark night sky,
[03:19.60]he approached the unlit saucer with his flaming torch,
[03:22.84]his free arm trembling visibly from
[03:25.09]the effects of Parkinson's disease.
[03:27.35]It was a kind of epiphany that those
[03:29.88]who watched realized how much they missed him
[03:32.33]and how much he had contributed to the world of sport.
[03:35.65]Students of boxing will pore over
[03:37.90]the trio of Ali-Frazier fights,
[03:39.98]which rank among the greatest in fistic history,
[03:43.37]as one might read three acts of a great drama.
[03:46.50]They would remember the Ali Shuffle, the Rope-a-Dope,
[03:50.11]the fact that Ali had brought beauty and grace
[03:52.87]to the most uncompromising of sports.
[03:55.03]And they would marvel that through
[03:56.96]the wonderful excesses of skill and character,
[04:00.12]he had become the most famous athlete, indeed,
[04:03.16]the best-known personage in the world.
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