#360view: Ali's lasting legacy is his humanity

Ovais Naqvi 14:17 05/06/2016
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  • Use #360view to share your tributes to Ali.

    In a toweringly tragic year for the loss of some of our greatest heroes, the king of all of all them is no longer with us.

    Born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942, he left us in 2016, as a King called Muhammad Ali. If ever a generation saw a true sporting superhuman, it was Muhammad Ali.

    And this is not a time for sadness, it’s a time for reflection and celebration. We should even be thinking about how we can learn and improve ourselves while remembering the battles he fought for himself and others.

    Hundreds of thousands of people lined streets to catch just a glimpse of him. Dhaka, Bangladesh; Kinshasa, Zaire; Jakarta, Indonesia; London, England; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Dublin, Ireland. One can go on forever and the scene was still the same. Huts in rural villages in Africa and Asia hang his image. Official residences of Presidents, past and present, boast their proudest moment in meeting Ali. Then Russian president Leonid Brezhnev met Ali at the Kremlin in 1978, remarking to his closest aides beforehand: “Who is this Muhammad Ali? I want to meet him”.

    His uniqueness lay in his extraordinary humanity. He was superhuman but never more or less than the rest of us.

    He saw himself and the wider world in full Technicolor and five-dimensional. He looked into the sky as a child, saw himself in the stars and made his dreams happen. Ali’s is a story that captures every facet of the potential of humanity, and yet he never lost his human touch nor love for mankind.

    In an era synonymous for the fame of the meaningless, he stood for far more substantial stuff.

    He stood for principle. He announced himself as a Muslim in February 1964 and built that into his core values. To him, he was first a father and Muslim, everything else came after that. He gave up his World Heavyweight crown in 1967 for his refusal to fight what he considered an unjust war in Vietnam. Not only did the decades prove him right but the Supreme Court upheld his decision to refuse induction in March 1971. Who now remembers his detractors and those who called him a traitor?

    His judgment was unerringly right-on. Whether it was an opinion of his opponents or whether it was his view of the way the world should operate. His take on the racial context of 1960s America was profoundly prescient. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X courted him. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad won him over. Heads of State in the 1960s and 1970s – in Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Qatar, even Gerald Ford in 1975 – all invited him to visit their countries and enlighten them.

    Whatever the racial doggerel of those two decades, he established himself as a hero to all of us – whether we were Asian, African, European; Christian, Muslim or Jew; indigenous or immigrant.

    All the while, Ali created an industry around himself. He built the greatest sporting brand in history, simply on instinct and an innate sense of self and core values. Later in the 1990s, some brand management came in. Starting with his igniting of the Olympic Games at Atlanta in 1996 and continuing with the multi-million dollar sporting endorsements for the likes of Adidas, IBM, Apple and, more recently, Porsche.

    He built a money-making industry in modern boxing. Without him, forget the likes of Don King, Bob Arum, Sugar Ray Leonard, Howard Cosell, Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson and so on even existing in quite the form that they have. Each was a byproduct of Ali. Even George Foreman’s career was boosted by Ali. Who would have heard of Sonny Liston now, were it not for Neil Leifer’s iconic image of Ali Over Liston? Even his opponents and their kids worshipped him.

    Superstars attached themselves to Ali and developed some of his swagger into their own personas. The much-missed Prince, Sylvester Stallone, Michael Jackson, Jay Z, Kevin Hart and Tom Jones have all channelled an inner Ali. Hip-hop and R&B owes him a debt of gratitude: ask Dr Dre, Pharrell Williams, Ali Shaheed Muhammad or Kanye West.

    I was lucky to meet, then work with him in the 2000s, through coincidence and synchronicity. I wrote to Mike Fox, then Director of the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville and he not only wrote back, but allowed me to represent the Center internationally in its fundraising efforts. Parallel to that, I got a call from Taschen, the German publishing powerhouse and there began a one-year journey of working with Ali and his marvellous wife Lonnie on “GOAT – A Tribute To Muhammad Ali”, a herculean 792-page, 34kg photographic and literary celebration of Ali’s life. Ali himself signed all 10,000 copies over months, the signing itself a form of concentration therapy as his Parkinson’s took yet firmer grip.

    If ever meeting a hero was affirmative, this was it. You stood in awe of his patience, humour, unwillingness to yield to his limitations and the sheer impact he had on others. From boardrooms in the US to huge press conferences and events in Germany and Ireland, people from all walks of life would wait hours to see him. No-one showed tears or felt pity for him in during his illness, they all saw themselves in him and celebrated his resolve by cheering as he walked.

    He was truly a great man and The Greatest of us all. But remembering him for his values is, I believe, the single biggest way to make a difference, especially in these fractured times. In the words of our Zairian brothers: “Ali Bomaye!”

    Muhammad Ali: our brother, we love you and you live in all of us.

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