In 2005 Muhammad Ali told journalist John Capouya how he owed some of his apparently unique verbal style to Gorgeous George Wagner. The 19-year-old Cassius Clay had met the flamboyant wrestler in a locker room after the 46-year-old star had defeated his rival Freddie Blassie. "A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth," Wagner advised the future champion. "So keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous."
Two years later, in the liner notes for Ali's 1963 novelty album I Am the Greatest!, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Marianne Moore argued that Ali's verbal gift "is romantic comedy, it is poetic drama, it is poetry". Before long, the New York Times would be comparing the young champion to Alexander Pope. But on I Am the Greatest!, as Ali recites his most famous lines and sings Stand By Me, you can hear from the laughter of the live studio audience that mainstream America still viewed him as an entertaining clown.
What Marianne Moore understood, even if those audiences did not, was that Ali was already using quicksilver wit and charm to undermine and overturn expectations of what a young black man might be allowed say and do.
In the years that followed, he would use language not just to push boundaries, but to break them forever. In this, he was an important part of a broader political and cultural liberation movement in which the spoken word had immense power, from political leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the revolutionary verse of Imamu Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. As the Sixties wore on, those same forces would filter into popular music, with the rise of the Black Power movement. Ali was the single most potent, most loved and often most divisive figure at the centre of this whirlwind.
Part of that was due to the fact his appeal went far beyond the US. Like the Beatles, Ali’s potential starpower was amplified a hundredfold by the new medium of television, which was tailormade for irreverent wisecracking underdogs. Whether as a fighter or a talker, TV was Ali’s medium, and Ali was TV’s first global superstar (his forays into feature films are best left in the remainder bin).
Pop-culture icon
What is Ali’s cultural legacy? Those black and white shots of a preternaturally beautiful young black man at work in the ring or goofing around for the camera place him as the first African-American to take his place in the first rank of 20th century pop-culture icons.
That in itself marks a significant moment in the story of black America. But it’s rendered more explosive by his defiance of authority and remarkable charisma, along with the historical moment in which he emerged.
“Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people,” Ali said in 1970, in one of the many angry and polemical quotes which don’t necessarily make all those Top 10 lists.
It’s hard now to place ourselves in that particular moment, half a century ago, where boxing was the world’s most popular sport, when there was no such thing as pay-per-view, and where hundreds of millions of people would gather to watch live fights on television. Great writers and film-makers (pretty much all of them white), were drawn to the sport, and in particular to Ali, like moths to a flame.
The result was some of the greatest reportage and non-fiction prose writing of the century from, among many others, Norman Mailer, Robert Lipsyte, and David Remnick along with arguably the best sports documentary of all time, When We Were Kings.
Ali, therefore, became a mythic subject for other artists and writers to inscribe meaning on. But it was his own wordplay that left the greatest legacy, setting the template for much of the popular music of the late 20th century.
It's no accident Ali's favourite subject – proclaiming his own greatness – would also be a primary theme of the golden age of hip hop. Before the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali rhymed, "I have wrestled with a alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, throwed thunder in a jail."
Rapper’s Delight
Five years later, on Rapper’s Delight, the Sugarhill Gang would rap: “I don’t mean to brag, I don’t mean to boast / But we’re like hot butter on your breakfast toast”. The first breakout hit of the new genre could hardly have worn its influence more strongly on its sleeve.
“I’ve been credited with giving birth to rap,” wrote the late Gil Scott-Heron. “But the first rap was done in 1789. You can go back far as Pearl Sweetly and Jupiter Jones, I believe that Ali’s attempts at rap were a part of the spirit of the brotherhood.”
That tradition and that legacy are central to Ali’s pivotal position in African-American culture and politics. But he also embodied something simpler. Carl Fussman put it well in 2003. “There are very few people in the history of the planet who could make everybody in the world stop for a moment, forget their differences, smile, and applaud in unison. Perhaps Ali was the only one left. I wondered if there’d be anyone after.”
