What I Learned From Muhammad Ali

When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, professional boxing was a big sport that my dad followed and, heck, like a lot of kids, I enjoyed many of the things my parents did. My dad exposed me at a very young age to a gold medal Olympic boxer named Cassius Clay, who would later changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

Ali was the classic showman who pontificated by using the most quotable quotes. That talent, mixed with a boxing acumen we had not seen before, made him a PR person's dream, but his activities also made him an occasional PR person's nightmare. He was in the mix of the turbulent 60s, and I vividly remember his charisma and cockiness: from when he announced his name change (denouncing his "slave" name) in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, to his arrest for evading the Vietnam War draft. This made Ali an incredibly polarizing figure, buoyed by his braggadocious approach when the cameras came on. But in the end, it turned out that Ali's taunts and beliefs were really nothing more than the truth. Time vindicated his actions. But through it all, Ali just didn't talk the talk, he walked the walk with a confidence that was simply magnetizing.

Looking back

Full disclosure: I was, am, and always will be a Muhammad Ali fan, so I write this with extreme prejudice. I kept a scrapbook as a kid, an old spiral-bound calendar planner with a red cover my dad had discarded, which I found the other day. Inside, I pasted an eclectic mix of newspaper photos—Apollo missions, photos of all the 1968 presidential candidates like Nixon, Humphrey and Wallace, Chicago Blackhawks legend-in-the-making Bobby Hull getting his mouth wired shut from a broken jaw while his young son looked on in sadness and, most importantly, photos of Ali and my other favorite boxer, 'Smokin' Joe Frazier, and the punishment his face took after beating from Ali in March 1971 at Madison Square Garden.