Becoming Muhammad Ali

I loved this collaboration of Patterson and Kwame Alexander. As soon as I heard about this book, I knew I wanted Good Trouble For Kids to feature it. First, because I am so taken by Ali’s bravery in refusing to go to Vietnam when he was at his peak at an athlete. He can certainly be seen as a model of the athlete practicing social justice – leading perhaps to the most recent example of Colin Kaepernick. Second, because of Ali’s phenomenal use of language – his outspoken poetry of the self; I don’t know what else to call it. (“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”) There are other athletes who have been described poetically (e.g, sports journalists comparing Lynn Swann to ballet dancers Nijinsky or Nureyev; or Michael Jordan’s seeming ability to literally glide through the air - defying gravity - being described as poetry in motion). But Ali’s use of language was something else. In Round 10, the authors, using Lucky’s voice, acknowledge the unusualness of this. I particularly like that that poetry of language was not determined or defined by academic institutions. It was who he was, just as his continued commitment to social justice and philanthropic causes – beyond his extraordinary display of civil disobedience – spoke to his character.

I used to love boxing. I was enamored of it perhaps in the same way Joyce Carol Oates was enamored of it, and as she wrote about it in On Boxing, which I read when it came out both because I was taken with some of Oates’ prolific output, and because I was incredibly curious as to why boxing appealed to her. All these years later, I still can’t quite figure out why it appealed to me, and in fact am somewhat disturbed by how I was entertained by what on some level is truly just an exhibition of violence. Was it the one on one in the ring that attracted me (but then I must face echoes of the Greek arena), or the sheer physicality of it? the beauty of the male physique? (which then entails an examination of how the Black male body specifically has been exoticized). The questions themselves are uncomfortable. The sport finally fell apart for me when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear – as if that moment somehow defined the brutality of a sport that had of course always been bloody, brutal, and brain-damaging. And of course there had always been the racial undertones of the Great White Hope; the white gaze on the Black Body; the complexity of Joe Louis fighting against a German in the Olympics and the symbolism of that in a country (the US) plagued with racism and Jim Crow, and a country (Germany) about to publicly embark on outright genocide of a people they deemed a lower race – with 6 million Jews murdered at war’s end. But growing up in Poughkeepsie, NY, not far from the Catskills where Tyson trained with Cus D’Amato, much as Ali trained with his white trainer, Joe Martin, I sucked up the story of a boy like Mike Tyson who had nothing and “made it.” I am embarrassed by that now, and it begs the question of what did I think “making it” meant? When it comes to Ali, and especially in light of Good Trouble For Kids, Ali “made it” in the right ways – as a model for civil disobedience; of how to practice philanthropy; of how to take pride in one’s Blackness; of how to elevate sportsmanship into a way of living and being in the world.

Patterson’s and Alexander’s story of the young Cassius Clay “becoming Ali” capture the feel of this time in Ali’s life, particularly the divide between Black and white worlds (you can see here the Jim Crow laws that were in place in Kentucky and other Southern States). The more I study the civil rights era, the more I am moved and heartbroken by the bravery of Emmett Till’s mother insisting that America confront the destruction of her son’s body by her refusal to have a closed casket. What Mamie Till did was force America to bear witness to what white supremacy had done to her son. It necessitated a public accounting, and made the murder of Emmett Till a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, as I wrote about in my write-up on Marilyn Nelson’s book A Wreath For Emmett Till (featured in our 15+ category in January 2021).Think of the impact of Till’s murder on boys around his age, much like Ali was. Today, one cannot help but think of Trayvon Martin’s face, or of Tamir Rice’s – two of too many gunned down by police in their youth. The trajectory of Ali’s life in this light – the dangers ever present to his body out of the ring – must not be forgotten. Patterson and Alexander convey this powerfully in their book.