Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, who is a writer and former educator from North Calais.
[I] listened to the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight on the radio in 1964, reveling in the incredulity of it all; visualizing the outrageous young challenger dazzling the hulking champion with a series of blistering jabs and perfect, whistling right hands. I didn’t know if it would work. I prayed it would. The announcer began the fight with doubts that Clay would get past the first round but as the evening wore on and I strained to hear changes in his inflection, it slowly became apparent that it was Liston who was out of his league, his thunder neutralized by lightning.
I’d been thrown out of an all boys Catholic High school the year before. The brothers who taught there thought I was crazy and I thought they were, but it was in retrospect , one of the best things that ever happened to me – even though it temporarily broke my mother’s heart. Cassius Clay broke my father’s. Especially when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and joined up with the “Black” Muslims as they were known in White America.
One of the few things the old man — who was only 52 and would pass away the next year — regularly did with me when I was growing up was watch boxing on Friday nights via “The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports.” We saw Dick Tiger, Kid Gavelin and Emile Griffith. He rooted on the older guys: Archie Moore …”The Mongoose”; or Carmine Basilio, a former onion farmer who once beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the middleweight title.
He knew full well what it would cost him and he did it anyway. His convictions outweighed any fear.
Ali was an idol of my youth, jammed snugly between Mickey Mantle and Bob Dylan with a chip on his shoulder and sense of defiance. He was my first rebellion. I loved him when it seemed the rest of the world hated him, not only adults but even my teenage peers. We were a blue collar neighborhood, generally destined to follow our parents into factory work or homemaking and upsetting the order of things wasn’t taken lightly, even by baby boomers who would eventually cause enough havoc on their own. But this was the ’60s before the “Sixties,” only weeks since the Beatles had appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.
And the newly crowned heavyweight champion seamlessly coalesced into the zeitgeist of tumultuous change: incessantly bragging; successfully and sometimes poetically calling the round in which an opponent would hit the canvas; holding his hands down low, relying more on speed and agility than power, the whole while turning the grim sport of boxing on its ear with a flamboyance that transcended the sport itself, attaining legendary status almost immediately both in and especially out of the ring.
His eloquent refusal to “Go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights” was initially met with outrage but also served a clarion call to the generation once called “war babies” but now looking for the courage to stand up to their own government and say “No.” And then he took it a step further: “This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”
He knew full well what it would cost him and he did it anyway. His convictions outweighed any fear. He paid the price … millions of dollars; three and a half years in the prime of his career; and, some boxing experts say, just enough of his speed and skill to make the remainder of his boxing life a far more risky venture than it might have otherwise been. He took on the threat of imprisonment by boldly declaring: “I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.” In the next several years, millions of Americans stood up with him. Suddenly, loving him wasn’t so lonely.
I made 50 bucks betting on the first Liston fight, serious bling for a teenager in 1964 and worth $382.72 in today’s dollars. I coerced the five people I bet with into giving me 10 to 1 odds so I only laid out $5. I thought I might be a gambler. But I eventually became a teacher, which should have been unthinkable, considering my hatred of all things school. A heavyweight who danced made the unthinkable routine.
The famous scene in “On the Waterfront” that finds Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, a down-on-his-luck ex pug, in the back of a Hoboken taxi with his brother Charlie, played by Rod Steiger, comes to mind for some reason. At one point Charlie says: “When you were 168 pounds, you were beautiful.”
Muhammad Ali was beautiful no matter what he weighed.
