I realize I’m spitting into the storm here, but th🦹ere are popular, entered-as-fact myths about Muhammad Ali perhaps worth addres✨sing:
1. Cassius Marcellus Clay, as Ali often shouted, was “my slave name.”
Nonsense — and from the day he was named.
Cassius Marcellus Clay, 1810-🐲1903, was a Kentucky planter, politician and newspaper publisher who, at enormous risk, wa🌳s a devoted abolitionist in a state — Ali’s home state — where anti-slavery activism could and did leave one dead.
In 1843, Cla🦩y survived a bullet fired by a hired gun of slavery proponents. The founding publisher of an anti-slavery Lexington newspaper, Clay’s shop was wrecked by 🔯a mob. Undeterred, he published from Cincinnati.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Clay, appointed minister (what we now call ambassador) to Russia, was among the first and most relen﷽tless to urge Lincoln to act to end slavery. Clay donated the land on which Berea College, in 1855, opened — for all races.
The father of base🔥ball Hall of Famer and Ohioan George Sisler was Cassius Clay Sis💎ler, named in honor of this brave abolitionist. As “slave names” went, Ali’s was antithetical.
2. Ali for years suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
Wrong. Parkinson’s disease is mostly a mystery affliction associated with aging. Its syndrome mimics the disease’s symptoms but is both explainable and preventable. Ali’s Parkinson’s syndrome is know🎶n as dementia pugilistic♌a — mental and physical debilitation from being hit in the head too often.
When asked about Ali’s health, Don King, who made a fortune from Ali being hit in the head too often, eagerly claimed tꦫhat Ali has Parkinson’s disease, as if King had ꦫnothing to do with it.
Likely the worst beating Ali received 🅷was in 1980, at 38, when King w🌟as paid to match Ali, his speed and reflexes gone, against Larry Holmes. Requiem for a heavyweight.
I met Ali once, at Pele’s farewell game, 1977, in Giants Stadium. Even then, he appeared glassy eyed, slightly vacant. That he’d ꦬfight four more times — 50 more rounds — seems criminal. Ali then lived in a darkening, thickening fog for the next 30 years.
And after King, no one used Ali — until he was all used up — more than the Black Muslims, who would hop on his gravy train and line up for background photo ops until, inevitably, Ali ran low on cash. That’s when his cౠo-religionists were no longer in his picture. Ali, smart as he was, was eaꦡsily had.
3. As read in books, spoken in documentaries and now written in obituaries and spoken in eulogies, Ali was a champion of the young political left and legions of anti-Vietnam War activists. Ali vs. Joe Frazier remains characterized as American counter-culture vs. establishment.
A gross over-generalization. As a long-haired, hippie-uniformed college student in the early 1970s, I was among many of similar appearance, apparel and politics w🌱ho backed Frazier. We didn’t like the way Ali cruelly baited Frazier, taking advantage of Smokin’ Joe’s inability to spar verbally and intellectually with Ali. Many of us, raised to dislike bullies, showboats and braggarts, pulled for Frazier.
Sure, Ali, aside from his boxing talent, was often charming, mug-for-the-camer🦄as funny. But when he called Frazier “a gori🐻lla” — a racial slur even spoken by a black man — many of us figured Frazier the better gentleman and sportsman.
That Jesse Jackson grandstanded a⛎t Frazier’s funeral, eulogizing him as a man of “great dignity,” was appalling. Whe༒re was Jackson when Frazier needed him?
And now we’re told that Ali, who denigrated gracious, dignified Joe Louis as an “Uncle Tom,” represented and even created great, upward social change in America. I’m unsure of that, but I know he helpe𒐪d change American sports.
Ali w♈as pandered to by a mass media that suddenly seemed unwilling to see, hear and report wrong from right, choosing to weigh matters as cases of black or white, a dubious method t🌸o promote racial equality.
Ali was able to — allowed to — populariꦏze and commercialize trash-talking, name-calling and chest-pounding — something we’ve never recovered from — as few in the media wish to be identified as uncool, to knock something not in society’s best interests, applauding acts of bad-is-good they’d never encourage in their own.
And so, in Ali’s rise, pandering flowered and remains in full, no-upside bloom.൩ “Hah, hah, ain’t he/wasn’t he great?” Well, it depends. He was a great boxer, a world-beater. But a world-changer? For the better? Where? How?
Quickly, boxing promotion news conferences demanded obligatory threats, vile invective and hassles. A part of Ali’s boxing leg💃acy. Modesty, once considered a fundamental attribute, has been TV-conquered by immodesty grown more severe, widespread and ugly in all sports. Ali and the “We’re cool, too!” pandering media broke that ice best left frozen.
And our sports now are even deeper stuck in the morass that Ali ꩵand his pandering, give-us-more indulgers introduced as good when they had to know better. Sorry, but that’s the way I saw it, the way I still see it.
YES booth gives Beltran a free pass
The Game Has Changed, continued: Friday, as Yoenis Cespedes stood near homꦿe never giving first base a thought, his deep fly to left was caught. “That was not very good,” said Ron Darling as SNY showed a tape of Cespedes plate-lounging. Gary Cohen agreed.
But this was treated as an isꦑolated case rather than the latest example of Cespedes’ chronic minimalism. And it was just a few weeks after Darling and Cohen made the dubious claim that Cespedes’ enthusiasm for baseball, particularly as a Met, is extraordinary.
On YES, also Friday, Carl൲os Beltran grounded into a double play that appeared far too slowly turned for Beltran to have not been safe at first — h🦹ad he run from the start. But, unlike on SNY, an isolated tape of Beltran did not appear.
Throw out the book, already
By Th🤪e Book, continued: Saturday, after Baltimore’s Mark Trumbo homered against the Yanks, FOX’s Matt Vasgersian and Tom Verducci felt we should know that it had a “23-degree launch angle” and that three of Trumbo’s homers are on this year’s top “exit speed” list.
Thursday in Detroit, Andrew 🌺Miller pitched one inning and allowed an earned run, as did Aroldis Chapman next. Both had 9.00 ERAs for the game. Miller was “awarded” a hold, Chapman the save. Dellin Betances, before Miller, allowed a hit, a walk and an earned run in 1 ¹/₃ innings. He got th♔e win.
Wednesday in Houston, Will Harris, 0.36 ERA, started the eighth for the Astros, who led 4-1. He retired all three D-backs he faced, one 𒈔a strikeout. Out he went! Closer Luke Gregerson, 4.32 ERA, entered. Three hits, three earned runs later, tie game!
Ali was almost as famous for his quotes as he was for his boxing: