What Muhammad Ali taught me about my father
Muhammad Ali passed away Friday, June 3rd, 2016. I will leave the obituaries and tributes to others more informed. However, I found it appropriate to share a story about Muhammad Ali and my father.
My father was born in 1926 in rural Maine - a generation, a culture, a race and a world just about as far removed from the great boxer as is imaginable. My father was a white, middle-class, middle-aged Maine Republican who, though well-traveled, had lived the vast majority of his life in a place where nearly everyone was like him. From our geographically, racially, politically and culturally homogeneous island, we observed the turbulence of the 60's remotely: We watched the 60's on television, and we watched friends and family dutifully leave for Vietnam and return (most often) with little to report directly. People in our part of the world are known to be taciturn, and to internalize the horrors and the demons that trouble them... perhaps to express through drink or suicide - but seldom through words or public revelation of emotion.
Television, as stated, was our window to the wider world. There were three channels - sometimes four if the atmospheric conditions were just right. Television in the late 60's and early 70's was more than disturbing. To the credit of my parents, they did not shelter my sister and me from the nightly network news - which was an unremitting visual and audio theater of the inexplicable and terrifying. To me, a young child, the world seemed to be a bomb slowly and painfully exploding, spreading mud, blood, death and anger across the globe. Watching the nightly reports from Vietnam, I could almost smell the cordite and the cigarette smoke from every man's lips; feel the stifling, diesel and jet-fuel choked jungle; experience the emotional exhaustion of the soldiers in their empty-eyed stares into the television cameras... all of which was mirrored on the streets of my own country - burning cars in the streets, tear gas and fire hoses, angry black and white protesters throwing rocks and bottles at soldiers and police.
We safely watched this world in 30 minute snapshots from our living room - silently, with no explanation offered by our parents as to what was going on. We were too young, and they were too overwhelmed by confusion for there to be any meaningful commentary. This was the 60's to us.
Many years later - after the Vietnam War was over, after the violence in American streets had subsided - Muhammad Ali was the Greatest. His fights were the biggest events on television, and he himself was the biggest personality in sports. Over time, I gradually learned that Ali had once been an Olympic champion named Cassius Clay; that he'd become Muhammad Ali and converted to Islam (whatever that was); and that he'd nearly lost his freedom and his career by avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War. Somehow this became a topic of conversation between my father and me. I asked him what he thought about Ali, and Ali's decision to avoid the draft. Was Ali actually a coward?
My father was unexpectedly and uncharacteristically expansive in his answer - the first time he'd ever discussed his deeper adult views of the world. I cannot quote him, but I can paraphrase. My father said something like:
"This man is a black man from the south. It's a hard world down there for blacks. When he was Cassius Clay he became a champion and he beat a white man to do it. He's going to be hated like you and I will never know. And feared. White people are very afraid of the black people now, because they are fighting back. Cowardice has nothing to do with it. Hard to see how a boxer is afraid to die; and hard to see how any of these civil rights people can be called cowards. I don't agree with draft dodging. I don't agree with all the violence, and I don't think you can just change your religion that way, but I was too old for this war, and I'm white. If I'd been him, I might have done the same - but I probably wouldn't have had the courage to do it. I'd have just gone along and done what I was supposed to do. He is a great man - black or white. It is men like him that change the world for the better."
