Muhammad Ali, The Greatest — and the great paradox

Muhammad Ali was the great paradox.

He was shaped by his times, but not defined by them. A black son of a sign painter and domestic worker, born into Jim Crow America, no one walked freer: “I don’t have to be who you want me to be; I’m free to be who I want.”

He was royalty, and yet the common man was his friend: “The real enemy of my people is here.”

He alienated millions of Americans by standing up to the government at a time when young men were being sent to die in a war 10,000 miles away, and yet we now know he was right: “I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Cong.”

{mosads}In a statement released by the White House last week, President and Mrs. Obama said of Ali, “He wasn’t perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes — maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves.”

So many tributes have poured in over the past several days that it’s easy to forget that, at one time, Ali was hated. He was hated not only by the mainstream press and right wing of this country, but he also drew ire from the mainstream civil rights movement and the liberal media as a result of his membership in the Nation of Islam. Distaste for Ali was not exclusive to one religion, race or political ideology.

Speaking truth to power is not necessarily transformative in all forms, but in the case of Ali, it was ahead of its time.

There was perhaps no more complicated relationship in Ali’s life than the one he had with boxing. Ali understood, and in some ways loathed, the “game” — the brutality, the conquest, the role of the unenlightened gladiator — and yet made millions off of it.

Ali understood the sport’s sordid history, particularly as it relates to race. And his reconciliation between understanding boxing’s place in the world and his participation therein reflects a complicity that is altogether paradoxical.

“They stand around and say, ‘Good fight, boy: you’re a good boy; good goin’,” the champ 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.” What a startlingly intellectual and graphically poetic assessment of a sport that made him a legend.

Understanding how to honor Ali in his death demands a deep understanding of the paradox, and ultimately reconciliation, between a man who stood against a country that was both racist and bellicose, and a sport that at its core embodied both.

Ali was of course so much bigger than pugilism; he was so much bigger than sports. In a modern sports era of airbrushed athletes, a modern climate that encourages “brand awareness” and a detached approach to all things politics and activism, Ali was the antithesis. He wasn’t a “brand”; he was a life force. There may be more money in today’s staid, less risky strategy, but there will never be greatness.

The choice to be free is different for all of us. The arrogant rhetoric, the radical convictions, the savage right hand — honoring Ali means accepting the paradox that’s innate in a man whose greatest fight was not with Joe Frazier, or Sonny Liston, or George Foreman, but with his own soul. The path to freedom for Ali was not an easy one. It transcended the sport that made him famous. The path to freedom for Muhammad Ali was an inherently American one.

“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me — black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

Spatola is a West Point graduate and former captain in the U.S. Army. He currently serves as a college basketball analyst for ESPN and is a host on SiriusXM radio.