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Muhammad Ali: The Glory Years
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Defeat
for Ali, the man who had proudly promised "If I lose, I will
crawl across the ring on my hands and knees and tell him, 'Joe
Frazier, you are the greatest,'" would seem to have almost
certainly been an intolerable humiliation.
Shakespeare reserved tragedy for kings and princes, believing
only they truly had the capacity to suffer the necessary fall
from grace. Ali was unquestionably a latter-day king, and the
press had no hesitation in ascribing tragic proportions to his
failure.
But Ali appeared curiously unaffected by his misfortune.
"Oh, they all said about me that if I ever lose, he'll shoot
himself, he'll die," he told reporter George Plimpton the day
after the defeat. "But I'm human. I've lost one out of 32, and
it was a decision that could have gone another way. If I'd gone
down three times and got up and was beat real bad, really
whupped, and the other fighter was so superior, then I'd look at
myself and say I'm washed up." If defeat meant the end of all
the reporters, cameras, and crowds, he said, then he didn't
mind, "I remember thinking that it would be more relaxing to be
a loser."
Of course the press and its public had no intention of
forgetting Ali, and despite his words to the contrary, he seemed
relieved by the continuing attention. The next day he was
eagerly guiding an army of fans through his still-unfinished
$250,000 house in the New Jersey suburb of Cherry Hill. Later he
bolstered his spirits with a conspicuous new $15,000 Oldsmobile
trimmed with $7,500 worth of gold plating.
Defeat did have its compensations. For the first time in many
people's eyes, Ali looked human, sitting propped up in bed
telling the world's press, "I'm not going to cry." Frazier's
fists went a long way to defusing the frustration Ali's critics
had suffered for almost a decade. Besides blotting his
unblemished record book, the defeat marked the end of "Ali, the
Man They Love to Hate". Coincidentally, three months after the
fight, the eight judges of the Supreme Court voted unanimously
to overturn Ali's draft conviction and five-year sentence. |
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Felix Dennis & Don Atyeo
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