Making a Difference - Postscript

Ali victorious against Sonny Liston

The ink of my previous blog had hardly dried when I read this morning of the death of Muhammad Ali – the former boxing heavyweight Champion of the World. Today the media is full of his remarkable story and whether or not you have any feelings for boxing or for the man himself one cannot deny that he has been one of the great influences and characters the second half of the twentieth century. Even those like myself who are perhaps at best indifferent to boxing cannot deny that his story and what he brought to his sport in particular and to wider sport in general was both unforgettable and, many might argue with some credibility, magical. In a world obsessed with faux celebrities and glamorous fourth rate “stars” he was truly a celebrity.

A measure of his claim for celebrity status is that it was not only in the world of boxing that he was a star and a champion; he was a star and a champion of causes and beliefs on a wider front. In many ways his story, with the benefit of hind sight, anticipates our modern world. His conversion to Islam, his refusal to become part of the Vietnam War, his uncompromising arguing for civil rights in his own country and the wider world, and his ability to use the media to promote himself and intimidate his opponents in a way not seen before were all ground breaking and, I would argue, in many ways building bricks of our modern world – for good or ill.

Against Britain's Henry Cooper - a fight Ali almost lost

But as I read the many tributes and commentaries one thing stood out – how he initially came to boxing and thus his celebrity status. He came from the humblest of origins – a black man in America’s deep south when segregation and racial violence were taken as the order of things. He was born the eldest son of Cassius and Odessa Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, and named Cassius Marcellus after his father. His mother was listed on the birth certificate as a household domestic, his father as a signwriter. The family lived in the segregated city’s black west end. In the Kentucky state census rolls, all four of his grandparents were described as “free coloureds”. One of Odessa’s grandfathers, Tom Moorehead, was the son of a white man called Moorehead and the partner of a slave named simply as Dinah. Odessa’s other grandfather was a white Irishman, Abe O’Grady, born in County Clare, who married a “freed slave woman, name unknown”. Reading his background and heritage is to  read the history of the USA in just a few sentences.

It was, recalled Ali, a small but happy family in which penury was taken for granted. Ali and his brother were both good boys, neighbours later recalled, and unfailing attendees of the Baptist Sunday school. Odessa was a good homemaker, although Ali’s father liked to drink which led to occasional court appearances. He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city. The two boys would sometimes help. “Louisville was more peaceful, less dangerous then,” Ali’s brother Rudolph  recalled many years later, “except if we strayed off-limits, then white boys would threaten: ‘Hey, nigger, get back to your own.’”

At school the young Cassius Clay was no scholar, and by the end of his schooling, only an occasional attendee. He could scarcely read or write when he graduated from Central High School in 1960, and ranked 376th in the graduation class of 391.

A young Cassius Clay with his mentor Joe Martin

Long before then, however, he was devoted to boxing. When he was 12, in October 1954, his bicycle was stolen. Clay had sheltered from the rain with his friend Johnny Willis at an annual bazaar run by and for the black community called the "Louisville Home Show" held at the Colombia Auditorium. When he came out several hours later, full of free popcorn and hot dogs, he found his brand new red and white bike had gone - stolen.  He frantically looked round for the bike and for help. Someone told him the nearest policeman was in the basement of the Columbia.  In tears, the young Cassius raced downstairs to tell the policeman. What he found when he got downstairs was a boxing gymnasium. The white policemen, Joe Martin was a boxing coach in his spare time In his autobiography  Ali - as Clay had by then become – recalled that first experience of the boxing world: "The sights and the sounds and the smell of the boxing gym excited me so much that I almost forgot about the bike. There were about ten boxers, some hitting the speed bag, some in the ring sparring, some jumping rope. I stood there, smelling the sweat and the rubbing alcohol, and a feeling of awe came over me." Martin promised to help look for the bike but stopped the tears with an ice cream and the young Clay left with an application form to join the boxing club. The dressing- down he received from his father over the lost bike made him want to forget about the day’s events but when he watched television the following weekend and saw Joe Martin again, working with his amateurs in a boxing programme Cassius Clay suddenly decided that boxing would be his sport.

Joe Martin's role – unplanned and unknowing at the time - in sporting history can be crystallised by that moment when he calmed that angry, weeping 12-year-old  in that run down basement boxing gym. To Martin, who had run his gym since 1938, young Cassius was just another kid off the street. Martin was more social worker than boxing technician. He loved taking kids, black and white, off the streets and giving them a purpose to each day. He was also ahead of his time in the deeply segregated American south – Martin combined the previously segregated black and white gyms into one; "A boxer has to fight everybody to prove he is a champion,"  he would say – “there’s no black and white when these guys enter the ring”. Joe Martin’s ability and experience  as a coach was limited but he was a coach for the 1960 USA Olympic boxing team in Rome; and when Cassius won the heavyweight gold medal Martin, understandably, wept. As Clay moved up the professional boxing ladder he needed coaching from those with the experience at the top level but he never forgot Martin and what he had done for him on the day he lost his bicycle.

Olympic gold in 1960

And Joe Martin? In the end he was an ordinary guy doing his job but unknowingly and unintentionally he made a difference.  He didn’t aspire to producing a world champion but he was the lynch pin in doing just that. He provided the initial momentum. Martin often told of the day when the young Clay ran into his gym: “He said that he just wanted to ‘whoop’ whoever took his bicycle” and I said to him: ‘Well, kid, you’d better learn to box first’. For the young Clay Joe Martin made a difference not only on that long gone day but for the rest of Clay’s life and indeed for the rest of the world – for, whatever one’s views on boxing or on Muhammad  Ali it cannot be denied that the world is a different place because of him. I would also suggest, too, that his passing makes the world a poorer place. Today, United Nations’ Secretary General  Ban Ki-moon said: “Ali was far more than a legendary boxer; he was a world champion for equality and peace. With an incomparable combination of principle, charm, wit and grace, he fought for a better world and used his platform to help lift up humanity.” He is not wrong. Ali often claimed that he was “The Greatest”; well, as another great , the American, poet and author Carl Sandberg,  famously said of Abraham Lincoln “A tree is best measured when it is down – and so it is with people”........ And so it is, too, with Ali;with his death we can get a measure of the man and I believe that he really was one of the “greats” - not one of the false gods that we often today call great but who in reality are soon forgotten when the latest fashion changes. Perhaps the best testament to the man is something that he himself said: "Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it......Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”  Ali did indeed change the world for all time; as President Obama said of him today “Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it”. And all because of a lost bicycle and an ordinary American cop who took notice of a crying kid.