Just finished the final episode of Ken Burns' Ali doco. Ali's my all-time hero. He was before my time but I took my Dad's love for him (the dog's name was Cassius) and ran with it. I've read and watched everything ever published or produced about him. Nothing has better driven home the tragedy of what was allowed to happen to him than this episode. Watching his friend and former sparring partner Larry Holmes in tears, giving his idol brain damage because he wouldn't go down. Realising that the shaking, shuffling ghost barely able to hold the torch in Atlanta '96 was only 54 years old.
Reckoning what the world lost when this brilliant, beautiful, inspirational, witty, future political leader was reduced to mumbles and shuffles by his early 40s. The cynic in me says they would have cut him down another way, that any serious political move he made would have been met with bullets, because that's America. True greatness, boy it extracted a heavy toll. The man paved the way for everyone from Jordan to Cube to Obama. His story is as poetic in its tragedy as any of his pre-fight predictions.
The 20th Century was America's. Ali was America in a man. Beautiful, terrible, unmatched and irreversibly tragic.
Boxing. Doesn't that brutal balletic corrupt yet pure sport sum us up.