An outstanding man, to be sure.
One of the things that came to mind with his death was remembering how we insisted on calling him Cassius Clay long after he had changed his name. You could still find people who would not honor the Ali name until about the time of Watergate or so. I was one of them. We were a bit contemptuous about it.
Our reason --or mine anyway-- was that we didn't believe his conversion to be sincere. We thought he was 'showboating'.
In the obituary from the BBC yesterday afternoon they told about a match in 1967. I was just a kid then and don't remember this. But his opponent had also refused to recognize the new name. It sounded as though he'd been a bit contemptuous, too.
Apparently throughout the fight Ali challenged this guy with, "What's my name??!!" Clearly enough that the audience could tell what was going on. Some matches do get a bit personal, of course. But it sounds like this one was so much so that people wondered if it had crossed the line from sport to real combat.
They didn't say --or I didn't notice-- whether this guy ever 'cried uncle' on the name issue. I also didn't notice just who won this match. But we're talking about Ali here. So my money would go on him.
I think I understand him better now than I did forty or fifty years ago. Yet he's still, in some ways, so enigmatic that I doubt my ability to pass much intelligent judgement on him. But I like him a great deal more than I did back then.
Physically he was obviously a man-and-a-half. At least. He had an ego the size of Texas. Yet it usually wasn't obnoxious once you got to know him a bit. Even when he was angry or bragging, there was something humorous and, seemingly, well-meaning about it. It took me a while to perceive that. But once it sunk in, he became pretty like-able. He was bold at a time when it might well have gotten him killed and he would have received very little sympathy. It's kind of a miracle that it didn't happen. But he prevailed over those who might have done so much like he prevailed over most of the folks he faced in the ring.
An astonishing man, overall. And I'm sorry to see that he's now gone.
And I'm also sorry to go just a bit off-topic. But I think that Malcolm X deserves an honorable mention here. A similar sort of personality. Somewhat frightening. Yet I think he was sincere and would have led people in good directions. I wish he'd lived longer.
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