Muhammad Ali was a fighter, but he was a charmer, too. Serious men would jelly at the knees in his presence. Presidents would covet his photograph. Even now, 35 years after he departed the ring for the last time, he beguiles. His pithy quips adorn the posters of a million student bedrooms, spawn a million internet memes.
He frequently crops up in discussions about the greatest humans of the 20th century. All of which, if you are a non-boxing fan of a certain age, is apt to engender the suspicion that the Ali myth has long outpaced the Ali reality: Nelson Mandela with a right hook.
People in boxing, meanwhile, will tell you with a sneer and an arched eyebrow that, actually, Sugar Ray Robinson was a far superior fighter. But while Ali was a sportsman, somehow he was always grasping for more.
He was no politician or statesman or pastor, but he was a leader. When the Vietnam war broke out, he refused the draft and was stripped of his world titles. He fitted into neither of America’s two preconceptions of black men: the obedient servant and the violent savage, caricatures neatly encapsulated by two of his predecessors as world heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. Instead, Ali built his own image.
He was a shameless self-publicist four decades before Twitter. He was a handsome rebel, an anti-hero for the colour television age: dark enough to be “other”, light enough not to scare the Johnny Carson audience. And so he became, and remains, an icon in the most literal sense: a palimpsest of competing images, a cracked mirror reflecting our own warped society right back at us.
One of the more understated points of interest in I Am the Greatest, the new Ali exhibition in London, is the collection of Sports Illustrated magazine covers from his career. “CASSIUS INVADES BRITAIN”, warns one from 1963, over an image of the then Cassius Clay casting his menacing shadow over Big Ben.
More than a decade later, in 1974, the same publication features a beaming Ali as its “Sportsman of the Year”, dressed in a smart dinner suit with a large red rose pinned to the lapel. Mainstream America finally learnt to love Ali, and on his terms. It is a process that, if anything, has only accelerated since his retirement.
It is strangely fitting that this exhibition should take place at the O2: a place where culture comes to die, only to be revived, retouched, repackaged and resold with a chilli dog and curly fries. You enter through the gift shop, past an array of £20 T-shirts with Ali quotes on them, a reminder that this is perhaps how all rebellions end.
Then you walk in, via a real-life boxing ring, to be greeted with more than 100 items of varying sentimental value: the door frame from his childhood home in Louisville, a medal from the Rome Olympics of 1960, the famous ripped glove from his fight against Henry Cooper in 1963. Yet the gloves are motionless. The ring is empty. It was the hands and feet that gave them life. Can you capture this most animate of men with a cache of inanimate objects? Perhaps not. The story of Ali is compellingly told.
The collection has clearly been assembled with a great deal of thought and care and genuine affection.
Understandably, it glosses over Ali’s Parkinson’s-ravaged later years. Meanwhile, if you want an insight into the more complex aspects of his personality - the strange mood swings, the febrile domestic life, the falling out with Malcolm X — you are probably best exploring them in one of the many excellent Ali books or films, rather than in a large metal dome opposite a Harvester restaurant. But perhaps we miss the point.
You wonder, instead, what Ali himself — now 74 — might make of all this. He understood better than anyone that the medium was never as important as the message. And here we are, in the heart of London, his message blazoned 40-feet high in capital letters, his image and his keepsakes venerated by men and women and children of all ages, all convinced that they are in the presence of a hero: the old charmer charming anew. I suspect he’d rather approve.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016.
“I Am The Greatest” runs at The O2, London, through August 31.
