30, 1974, Ali surprised his corner with the rope-a-dope, a tactic then and an enduring metaphor now.
If anything, there was fear for what might happen to Ali in the face of Foreman’s lethal power, which bounced Joe Frazier off the canvas like a soccer ball with six knockdowns within two rounds in a 1973 title fight in Kingston, Jamaica. Foreman was feared, an angry man who used to bully people on the streets of Houston’s Fifth Ward.įew gave Ali any chance at beating Foreman. Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his time before he faced Ali in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. There’s no better example than George Foreman. He embraced change in himself and was transformational because the people he challenged and fought on both sides of the ropes eventually changed too. Ali always changed and – more important perhaps – was never afraid to. How that happened is the overriding theme to what Merchant calls his uniquely American character. Ali did what nobody would have ever predicted when he was at his polarizing best as a heavyweight champion with as many opinions as punches during the divided 1960s. There’s something for everyone in who he was, who he became and who he still is.
“An improvisational genius, kind of a Mark Twain with boxing gloves on.” Pacific Time on June 3 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona, he has been called transformational, fearless, humane, controversial, a visionary, cruel, scary, a puncher and a poet Larry Merchant, who was at ringside as a sportswriter for defining Ali fights in New York, Zaire and Manila. In the days since Ali died, age 74, at 9:10 p.m. It’s as if his face is a collage of what people see – or hope to see – in themselves. There’s the young man who rumbled and the old one trapped within Parkinson’s’ terrible silence and everything in between. The world’s collective memory of him is inexhaustible and sometimes imaginative. Muhammad Ali’s legacy is in how people recall that single moment when he whispered in their ear, or threw a playful jab in their face.Īli was a People’s Champ, for sure. They continue to gather in a deep and endless collection of moments in an elevator, or on the street, or at a ballgame.
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