Forty years ago today the star-packed celebrations prompted by Muhammad Ali beating Jerry Quarry were only just dying down
Forty years ago this very morning, we woke blearily from a feverish jam-packed party all?nighter which had jubilantly swirled around a whole floor of the swish Regency Hyatt hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.
In a way, 20th-century sport and celebrity culture were never the same again. It was the morning after the prodigal prodigy Muhammad Ali had contemptuously defeated the game white boxer Jerry Quarry in three rounds to mark his return to the ring after a ban of three and a half years for refusing conscription into the US army.
What a swellegant elegant party it was. While just about the whole world and his wife were there in spirit, of course, the elite of the American civil rights movement was in rapturous attendance in actual animate fact ? Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Ralph Abernathy, Mrs Coretta King, Arthur Ashe, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Andrew and Whitney Young and such harmonious top-team collectives, each member flamboyantly dressed to the nines, as the Temptations and the Supremes.
Ali's biographer Thomas Hauser recalled all of three decades later that night of 26 October 1970 as "like something out of Gone with the Wind and probably the greatest collection of black power and black money ever assembled up to that time. They weren't boxing fans, they were idolaters." The New Yorker essayist George Plimpton also remembered that invasion of the Harlem peacocks in their enormous purple Cadillacs: "I'd never seen crowds as fancy, especially the men ? felt hatbands and feathered capes, and the stilted shoes, the heels like polished ebony, and many smoking stuff in odd meerschaum pipes."
It was half a dozen years since Ali had been listed 1-Y in the Army Draft Board's intelligence test, a level considered unfit for service; but in February 1966 he was suddenly reclassified as 1-A and told to be ready to be posted to the Vietnam conflict. The boxer applied at once for exemption on conscientious grounds as a minister of religion (Islam): "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."
That single sentence reverberated around the world. But in much of the United States it was considered near treason. It took Ali's 43-month banishment from the ring ? as the body bags continued to be flown home from Asia ? for the popular sentiment to change, particularly among the young. Had the illiterate young boxer, after all, uttered a crucially salient sentence? Traitor was turning into a hero ? and with nice irony it was Lester Maddox, the reactionary governor of Georgia, previously a club-swinging civil rights basher, now suddenly in need of some black votes, who broke ranks and allowed Ali's boxing comeback to be staged in Atlanta. Thus was set the scene for quite a party that October night.
Who most smartly twigged the resonance of the party invitation was probably the square-shouldered flat?nosed puncher Quarry, a competent but inconsistent operator, and one who could usually be relied upon to succumb when it mattered most. Which, of course, he did on this auspicious occasion. But what if Quarry's eyebrow had not been expertly scalpelled open by one of Ali's short corkscrewed right?handers at the beginning of the third? Might the desperately ring-rusty, out-of-puff Ali have soon been flattened by the journeyman? Defeat by Quarry would have writ finis and kaput on any miraculous resurrection; the legend would have died, the fabled Second Coming script would have been torn up there and then, and Muhammad Ali would have been just a footnote in history.
It was a quarter of a century until I was to see Ali again in Atlanta. Canonisation was total ? but the saint who opened in 1996 the Atlanta Olympic Games was now a martyred, stumbling, dumb, half-tragic hero.
October remains a potently seminal month for Ali idolaters. The two most far-famed laurel-decked contests ? 1974's so-called Rumble in the Jungle and, a year later, The Thrilla in Manila ? both took place in October. And that ostentatious Atlanta happening 40 years ago yesterday was halfway house between 29 October 1960, the day the loose-limbed, appealingly cocksure 18-year-old Olympic champion called Cassius Clay had won his first professional six-rounder in his Kentucky hometown, and all of 20 Octobers later at Las Vegas when a bewildered, broken-up and hurting Ali wretchedly ventured on a doleful attempt to regain his title against the apologetic new champion Larry Holmes. Not so much a contest, more an execution. Regicide, you might say.
Ali hardly landed even a token blow and after 10 excruciating rounds his devoted trainer, Angelo Dundee, mercifully announced: "That's it, no more, it's the end of the ballgame."
No comments:
Post a Comment