Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (9 page)

Victory was followed by compassion.

“Great-hearted Epeios took Euryalos in his arms and set him upright, and his true companions stood about him and led him out of the circle, feet dragging as he spat up thick blood and rolled his head over on one side.”

When Homer’s tales were first woven together, the world known to those who listened to them was very small. No one could have imagined Muhammad Ali.

Ali, once known as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., burst upon the scene as a gold-medal winner at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In the decades that followed, he brought unprecedented grace to boxing and changed forever what we expect a champion to be.

Ali’s accomplishments in the ring were grist for the milling of legends. There were two fights against Sonny Liston, when he proclaimed himself “The Greatest” and proved that he was; three epic wars against Joe Frazier; and a stunning victory over George Foreman, when Ali traveled to Africa and reclaimed the crown that had been unfairly taken from him.

In ancient Greece, hundreds of people gathered around fires to hear of Achilles’ battle against Hector. Three millennia later, hundreds of millions of people waited for word of Ali’s exploits on battlefields as far-flung as Kinshasa and Manila.

Ali is a hero for modern times. His personal magnetism, good looks, and charisma made him ideal for the age of television. But beyond that, he meets the criteria for classic heroism.

A hero must achieve something substantial. Heroes can be presidents, military leaders, sports champions or quite average (such as a teenager who leaps into a rushing river to save a drowning child). But a hero must do something that most people can’t do or haven’t done.

A hero overcomes substantial odds.

There must be an element of risk that has been met head-on.

Heroes often “do it alone.”

Ali’s ring exploits are in line with the above. But true heroism requires something more. A hero places principles and loyalty above personal gain, a higher good ahead of self-interest.

Ali’s devotion to principle inspired the world.

Initially, Ali stood as a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the globe. Every time he looked in the mirror and said, “I’m so pretty,” he was saying “black is beautiful” before that became fashionable. He demanded equality for himself and others. Then he refused induction into the United States Army at the height of the war in Vietnam, was stripped of his championship, and threatened with imprisonment. He became a symbol of the belief that, unless there’s a very good reason for killing people, war is wrong.

Sadly, Ali’s ring career tracked the arc of a classic Greek tragedy.

In that genre, a hero is endowed with
arete
; excellence, the attributes that make him great.

Ali had preternatural physical gifts; strength, speed, stamina, and a seeming imperviousness to pain.

Then the hero gives in to
hubris
; a mixture of overconfidence and pride leading to the belief that he’s invincible and immune to the pitfalls that destroy other men.

Hear Ali’s words: “I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m fast. I can’t possibly be beat. I am The Greatest.”

A
nemesis
is sent by the gods to threaten the hero’s destruction.

Achilles versus Hector . . . Ali versus Joe Frazier.

Even if the hero triumphs over his nemesis, the seeds of his destruction have been sown.

Finally, there is
ate
; the demise, the inability to see one’s own fate until it is too late.

In 1996 at the 26th Summer Olympiad in Atlanta, the world watched as Muhammad Ali lit a cauldron with a torch carrying the Olympic flame. Ali was in less than good health by then. It was a difficult physical task. More than one billion people around the world were watching.

The people who witnessed Ali’s struggle that night were united in love and caring for one man. More than a billion people, if only for a moment, had all the hate and prejudice removed from their hearts.

Ali prevailed. The flame moved from torch to cauldron. It was the perfect benediction for a hero’s life devoted in large measure to helping others.

Ali today enjoys a status that is bestowed upon few men in their lifetime: the knowledge that he is immortal.

ELVIS AND ALI

2011

I
saw Elvis Presley perform in 1971.

One month earlier, I’d finished a stint as a law clerk for a United States district judge. Five years as a litigator at a large Wall Street law firm would follow. I was taking three months off between jobs to travel cross-country and explore America.

I stopped in great cities and small towns; staying with friends, camping out at night, checking into cheap motels, and spending several days at a commune in Wolf Creek, Oregon. I visited steel mills, Disneyland, and the Grand Canyon. I passed through cornfields in Iowa, fields of wheat in Nebraska, and potatoes in Idaho. There were times when I drove too fast because I was young and foolish and didn’t consider what the consequences of an unseen pothole along the open highway might be. I walked the streets of Selma, Alabama, at a time when the term “nigger” was commonly used, and retraced the route that John Kennedy traveled in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

On the night of August 14th, I was at The International Hilton in Las Vegas.

Two years earlier, Presley had signed a five-year contract that called for him to perform at the International for eight weeks each year. During his run, there were two shows nightly, at 8:00
P.M.
and midnight. The ballroom seated 2,200. Elvis was Las Vegas’s signature act. All 826 of his shows, which continued until his death in 1977, sold out.

I arrived at the Hilton at 7:45
P.M.
, knowing that no tickets were available. I just wanted to feel the mood. Hundreds of people were standing in line outside the ballroom. They had tickets for the midnight show and were queuing up because they wanted to sit as close to the stage as possible. The audience for the 8:00
p.m.
performance had long since been seated.

As unlikely as it sounds, there was only one security man at the main door and he was looking away. I simply walked in.

The ballroom was jammed, but I found an open seat at a table with a group of women. The show began with a set from Elvis’s back-up group, the Sweet Inspirations. A comedian was up next.

Then the sound of
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(popularly referenced as the theme from Stanley Kubrick’s
2001
) pulsated through the ballroom. Elvis strode onto the stage wearing a white fringed suit accessorized with a purple scarf. The audience roared its approval.

It was an off night for Elvis. By mid-performance, he was letting the orchestra carry the tune while he wandered around the stage, mopping his brow. There were flashes of greatness but not much more. I didn’t appreciate what I was seeing then as much as I do now.

Thirty-one years later, when I was in Memphis to cover the heavyweight championship fight between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson, I visited Graceland.

Elvis lived there from 1957 until his death at age forty-two. The mansion reflected his tastes. Some of the décor is garish. Many of the furnishings are what one might find in a typical middle-class home. There are the obligatory Elvis artifacts: gold records, movie posters, outfits that Elvis wore onstage. And a “jungle room” with an indoor waterfall.

After I returned home, I found myself listening to Elvis’s music more than before.

I met Muhammad Ali in 1967. I was a senior at Columbia University, hosting a weekly radio show called
Personalities In Sports
for the student-run station. Ali was in his prime, preparing to fight Zora Folley at Madison Square Garden. It would be his seventh championship defense in less than a year.

Ali told me to turn on my tape recorder. We talked about Nation of Islam doctrine, with some questions about the military draft and boxing thrown in. Ten minutes after we began, Muhammad announced, “That’s all I’m gonna do,” and the interview was over.

In 1988, through a twist of fate, I became Ali’s biographer. Over the course of a decade, we spent countless hours together in his home and mine. I experienced the joy of traveling around the world with him.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the parallels between Elvis and Ali. They grew out of the same soil, the segregated American south; one black and one white. Each had a magnetic personality. They were remarkably good-looking, albeit in different ways; instinctive showmen with an energy about them. They weren’t deep thinkers; they did what they did. Ali fought intuitively. Elvis sang intuitively. It was genius on each man’s part. They were craftsman with remarkable natural gifts who honed their gifts in marvelous ways.

Elvis and Ali were curiosities, human-interest stories for a slow day in the newsroom, before they evolved into something more.

Then they became counterculture symbols; feared as Pied Pipers, who would lead their followers (young people for Elvis, black people for Ali) in rebellion against the establishment and the status quo.

They weren’t trying to change the culture. They were simply doing what they wanted to do.

Over time, they became “safe”—benevolent monarchs in all their glory, sharing the bond of almost incomprehensible fame. Elvis was a global superstar unlike any who had come before him. Ali followed suit, rising to iconic status in his lifetime.

Finally, they got old and their dissolution made them even safer. Neither let his disability keep him out of the public eye.

I’m recognized as an authority on Muhammad Ali. I’m not an Elvis Presley scholar. But I lived through Elvis’s rise and fall and grew up in a culture that was shaped in part by his music and persona. I decided recently that I wanted to write about Elvis.

I

Elvis Aaron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935. Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was just coming into being. Social Security had not yet been enacted.

Elvis was an only child. His twin brother was stillborn. The family often found it difficult to make ends meet. “Poor we were,” Vernon Presley (Elvis’s father) acknowledged years later. “I’ll never deny that. But trash, we weren’t. We always had compassion for people. We never had any prejudice. We never put anybody down. Neither did Elvis.”

Elvis’s first love was gospel music. At age ten, he entered a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. At twelve, he performed on a local radio show.

In 1948, the Presleys moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Elvis graduated from Humes High School in 1953. Classmates later described him as a loner. He wasn’t about fitting in. He dressed and styled his hair differently from the other students. He was obsessed with music.

After graduation, Elvis took a job driving a truck and began studying to be an electrician. In August 1953, he went to a Memphis recording studio and, for four dollars, cut a two-sided record of
My Happiness
and
That’s When Your Heartaches Begin
as a birthday present for his mother. The only accompaniment was his own primitive acoustic-guitar playing. He returned in January 1954 to cut another record. This time, Sam Phillips (owner of the studio and a record producer) was there.

In some ways, America’s airwaves in 1954 were as segregated as other closed institutions. Mainstream radio stations wouldn’t play “race music” by black recording artists. Phillips had once said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”

Now he had found him.

Six months later, Phillips called Presley back to the studio and matched him with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black. Soon, Elvis’s records were being played locally. Then they rippled through the south.

In the mid-1950s, the youth market in the United States was exploding as a separate economic entity. Families no longer sat around the living room listening to the radio together. Adolescents had their own radio in their own room and their own money to spend on records. Music was a common denominator among the young and a primary lifeline for the new youth culture.

Before long, the spirit of Elvis Presley was wafting through America.

In November 1955, Sam Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA for the then-generous sum of $40,000. RCA released
Heartbreak Hotel
in January 1956. It was Elvis’s first #1 hit. That was followed by an LP album entitled
Elvis Presley
. Soon after, a record that paired
Don’t Be Cruel
and
Hound Dog
rose to the top of the charts and stayed there for eleven weeks, a mark that would not be surpassed for thirty-six years.

At the same time, Elvis began performing outside the south; most notably, on a fifteen-city midwest tour. More significantly, he was discovered by the exploding medium of television.

Elvis’s first national TV exposure came on CBS’s
Stage Show
in early 1956. That was followed by two appearances on
The Milton Berle Show
and one with Steve Allen. By mid-1956, he was receiving ten thousand fan letters a week.

Elvis had soulful eyes and a sensual voice. He wore his hair in a pompadour style that looked as though it had been made for him. At times, he curled his lip into a sneer, but always with a twinkle in his eye. The sneer was akin to a secret smile; good-natured, not mean, part sexual come-on, part flaunting of authority.

There had been popular music stars before Elvis; most notably Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. But their performances had been highly stylized and controlled. Yes; women screamed when the young Sinatra sang. But he’d been cloaked in the elegance and glamour of the Tommy Dorsey band.

Popular music wasn’t sexy before Elvis.

Elvis put sex (not love, sex) in the music. Sinatra whispered in your ear in the wee small hours of the morning. Elvis grabbed at your body with the lights on.

Before Elvis, singers were heard. Elvis was heard and seen. Gyrating, thrusting his hips. If he’d come along a decade later, his long hair and gyrations might have seemed unremarkable. But audiences in 1955 were accustomed to seeing some guy wearing a suit and tie sing, “M-o-o-o-n over Miami . . .”