Taught an Eight Year Old

I can’t stop.  I need help. It’s been going like this for well over twenty-four hours.  Ever since I glanced at the New York Times website and noticed that Muhammad Ali had passed away I’ve been unable to stop myself.  I just keep watching clip after clip after clip of the champ.  I didn’t think he would, but he’s left a void in me.

I’m far from home, have been for a while and somehow, Muhammad Ali is home.  I’m eight years old in suburban New York, and there’s nothing to do but watch TV and it’s Cosell and Ali in my 1974 mind.  Why did this come on so strongly?  I had all kinds of things to do, and work to get done, but a period of mandatory communion has quickly asserted itself.

Like most people, I know of all these periods:  his brash bravado before the Sonny Liston fight.  His remarkable clarity as he explains why he’ll risk all to be a conscientious objector: “Just send me to jail.”  His fights with Foreman.  His fights with Frazer.  His fights he shouldn’t have had and his slow decline.  And for each assumed moment there are reels of material to steep oneself in and consider what was, anew.

And so I dug, into his clips with Malcolm X, his interviews with David Frost, William Buckley, Jerry Lewis, Dick Cavett, Howard Cosell.  Then there are the bouts themselves.  I’m never one to watch much sports but boxing is oddly primal, and seductive.  Just how did he knock out Liston before he stood above him in that famous pose?  What was it like for him and Frazer to go fifteen rounds?  What does that eighth round in the Rumble in the Jungle look like when he comes off the ropes and finally knocks George Foreman out?

And, as has been noted, he alone was as remarkable to hear speak as he was to watch fight.  I think he taught an eight-year old me, like much of white America, something essential about a black perspective.  Perhaps that’s what is familiar and lonesome in his passing and this consumptive ritual.  Things I experienced later, working in the African American community for many years were not simply foreign.  The humor, the anger, the might, the poise, the tragedy had all been lodged early and immutably by this remarkable diplomat.