The Greatest: Muhammad Ali

Myers draws parallels between the lives and afterlives of Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr., to highlight the way controversies lessen over time, suggesting that it is easy to sanctify figures when the stakes are lower. While Ali is now a legendary figure, emblazoned in the culture even years after his death, Myers chronicles just how controversial he was in his own time. Likewise, he suggests that when people today think of the civil rights movement, the dominant images are of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s marches and speeches and a peaceful movement dedicated to integration. King himself was likewise more controversial in his own time than his currently hallowed reputation would suggest, and shortly after Ali captured the heavyweight crown in 1964, the civil rights movement was in crisis. King would spend the rest of his life struggling to redirect the movement toward broader social challenges, such as poverty and militarism.

Myers structures his narrative of Ali’s ascent in boxing with the rising tensions of the civil rights movement. As Ali grew, more confrontational movements also became ascendant. The Nation of Islam would lose its most charismatic speaker with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, but as the United States deepened its involvement in Vietnam, the Nation and groups inspired by it would argue that integration into white society was a foolish dream. With a “major escalation of militancy among young blacks in the civil rights struggle” (57), there was greater emphasis on Black power and self-determination. Myers hence historically situates Ali’s ascendancy, reinforcing the text’s arguments about The Intersection of Sports and Politics.

This contextualization is equally clear in his narrative about the Vietnam War. Myers views Ali’s refusal to join the army in light of his advocacy of Black pride. For Ali, it was implausible to “put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs” (61). Many people in that era faced the accusation of being “draft dodgers,” of selfishly looking after themselves while others fought and died. Ali had his critics, but his refusal to take part in an action that was destroying so many Black bodies helped call attention to the injustices of that war. Myers therefore portrays Ali as a product of the controversies of his time, characterizing him as a political figure as well as a sporting hero.

While portraying Ali’s fight against white supremacy, Myers also focuses on the positive messages of his politics, including the idea that Black Is Beautiful. As he argues, few people epitomized that attitude more than Ali. No one considered Sonny Liston beautiful. If anything, he reveled in his reputation as a hulking brute with connections to organized crime. For the young upstart Cassius Clay to beat Liston, and by forcing him to quit on his stool no less, he upturned the conventional image of the world heavyweight champion from one of quiet menace to boisterous charm. Ali is therefore further characterized as a graceful and beautiful role model as well as a fighter, both in politics and in boxing.

Myers highlights the character development of his biographical subject in this section by focusing on his name change. By joining the Nation and changing his name shortly after winning the title, Ali would become a Black champion like no other, making his race an essential part of his identity, whereas his predecessors had been champions who happened to be Black but did not make it a key part of their public persona. According to the Nation, Christianity was the religion of the enslaver. To reject Cassius Clay as a “slave name” and take on a new name was a subversion of the tradition of name changing in boxing history, which, as Myers notes, was done either out of accident or as a way of making someone more appealing to a mainstream audience. For Ali to thumb his nose at the establishment at the very moment of his triumph, and then to dispatch challenger after challenger who refused to call him by his name, made him a preeminent source of Black pride even when he was defeating other Black opponents, who (fairly or unfairly) were considered allies of the white establishment by denigrating Ali’s politics and his religion.