No contest: Muhammad Ali is ‘The Greatest’

Now that the Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquaio fight is history, and all the exaggerated hype has turned out to be nothing but a clever marketing gimmick, perhaps it is now time for us to reflect on who, after all, is the greatest fighter of all.

Many people will vote for Muhammad Ali, and with good reason, given that he won some brawls where he was clearly the under dog, especially when he was a brash young fighter.

I would also choose Ali as the Greatest, though for other reasons: his off-the-ring performance was as good as if not better than what he did in it.

In an eponymous book in which Muhammad Ali co-operated with the author Thomas Hauser, one gets glimpses of a fighter who was not only exceptional in the ring but who had a blindingly high opinion of himself, and who did not hesitate to have pre-fight verbal assaults on his opponents.

“One of these days,” he told a Sports Illustrated journalist, “they’re liable to make the house I grew up in a national shrine.” He went on to brag that the world had not seen anything like him.

“I got the height, the reach, the weight, the speed, the courage, the stamina and the natural ability that’s going to make me great. Putting it another way, to beat me, you got to be greater than great.”

He had this uncanny habit of making predictions of which round he would end a fight, and the journalists loved him for it. He usually kept his word, but in this particular fight with a chap called Don Warner, and which he had promised the world that he would floor the opponent in the fifth round, he did it in the fourth. Asked why his prediction was wrong, his answer was vintage Ali.

Warner had refused to shake hands with Ali at the start of the fight, he told the reporters, and therefore, Ali had subtracted one round “for poor sportsmanship”.

The verbal jousting took a new height just before his fight with Archie Moore, one of the hardest hitters of the time. Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) said that though TV reporters were saying he talks too much, he would prove to them that he was a man who keeps his word, and that he would shatter Moore’s then impeccable fight record.

“I notice Archie Moore said that empty wagons make the most noise. Well, I don’t know about empty wagons but that old man won’t go but four rounds with me”, he predicted.

Not to be outdone, Archie Moore retorted that the only way he would fall in four is “by toppling over Clay’s prostrate form.

“I’ve said Clay can go with speed in all directions, including straight down if hit properly.”

Ali did not let that one pass. At the time, Moore was in his late 40s, and people were saying that he should have retired by then. “Why doesn’t somebody just get that old guy a pension?” asked Ali,”why doesn’t somebody just retire him?

He’s too old, he’s old enough to be my grand daddy. I wish people would get together and work out a pension or something for him or I am gonna have to do it once and for all.” Needless to say, Ali knocked out Moore in round four as he had predicted, and Moore had a perfectly good explanation why he lost the fight.

“You see, he (Ali) had a style; he would hit a man a lot of times around the top of the head. And if you hit the top of a man’s head, you shake up his thought pattern. You disturb his thoughts. A fighter has to think, but if someone is plunking you on top of the head, you cannot think correctly.” But it is the fight with Sonny Liston that Ali outdid himself, on and off the ring.

Sonny Liston was indestructible, a man who would stare down an opponent. Sheer intimidationBefore the fight with Ali, he had just floored former world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson twice, both fights inside of a round.

“A prize fight is like a cowboy movie,” Liston said after the Patterson fight. “There has to be a good guy and a bad guy. People pays their money to see me lose. Only in my cowboy movie, the bad guy always wins.”

Ali was scared of Liston, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, though he tried very hard not to show it.

BAD POETRY

“I will hit Liston with so many punches from so many angles he will think he is surrounded. I just don’t want to be champion of the world but champion of the whole universe.

After I whup Sonny Liston, I am gonnawhup those little green men from Jupiter and Mars. And looking at them won’t scare me none because they can’t be no uglier than Sonny Liston.”

Just before the fight, he continued haranguing Liston, as part of his strategy to throw him off balance, and get him worked up. “If is see that bear on the street, I’ll beat him before the fight. I will beat him like I am his daddy. He’s too ugly to be the world champ.” After the fight, Ali continued, “I am going to put that ugly bear on the floor…..and use him as a bearskin rug. Liston even smells like a bear. I am gonna give him to the local zoo after I whup him.”

Ali also dabbled in bad poetry, mostly self praising ones, and, before the Liston fight, he was inspired to write one, detailing how he would beat up Liston. He would hit Liston so hard that he would:

Raise the bear

clear off the ring

Liston is still rising

the ref wears a frown

for he can’t start counting

till Sonny comes down

now Liston disappears from view

now the crowd is getting frantic

but our radar screens have picked him up

he is somewhere over the Atlantic

who would have thought

when they came to the fight

that they would witness the launching

of a human satellite?

In the fifth round of the fight, Liston stayed put on his school. He had had enough. And Ali’s legend as the Greatest became engraved in stone. No wonder he said: “I am so great I even impress myself.”

Mutahi Mureithi is a communications expert and an avid reader