Mick Hartley

I've never shared what seems to be a general adulation, particularly among ageing sports writers, for Cassius Clay, aka Muhammed Ali. In particular his taunting of his opponents, particularly Joe Frazier, always struck me as offensive - as confirmed here:

It was one of the most iconic boxing matches of all time, and the culmination of an intense rivalry between the fight legends Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Yet the so-called Thriller in Manila, as argued in a new documentary of the same name, was marred by the racist antics and erratic behaviour of Ali, whose relentless abuse of Frazier became strangely obsessional and ultimately revealed the dark heart of a beloved sporting hero….

During Ali’s three-year ban from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, it was Frazier who offered him support, financially and professionally (by appealing to boxing commissions to revoke their withdrawal of Ali’s licence). But after Ali’s return to the ring in 1970 the relationship soured, and by their third and final fight in Manila in October 1975 Ali’s traditional pre-fight antics had become ugly, obsessive (he stalked Frazier’s hotel even when the media weren’t around), and defined by sinister racist rhetoric — Ali’s team caricatured Frazier as a gorilla, wore gorilla T-shirts and regularly humiliated him in public, while Ali called him an “Uncle Tom”, a “flat-nose”, and implied that he was intellectually inferior.

“He’s the other type negro, he’s not like me!” Ali famously said, during his Parkinson interview in 1974, alluding to his status as a racially superior African American. “There are two types of slaves, and Joe Frazier is worse than you [pointing to Parky] to me!”

There's also this:

The smoking gun in the avalanche of racial abuse is a short interview that Ali gave to New Zealand television in 1975, just weeks before the fight. Here, as Ali espouses his strident racial beliefs (including a complete separation of the races), he boasts about attending a Ku Klux Klan rally. “It was a hell of a scene, all those white hoods, the bonfire, and me on the platform talking,” he begins, with something approaching pride. “I says: ‘Black people should marry their own women!’ I says: ‘Blue birds with blue birds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles! God didn’t make no mistake!’ And they say [imitates cheering]: ‘Yeahhhhh! Now you teach the rest of them niggers and everything’ll be all right!’ ”

That kind of talk was in the air back in the Seventies – see this post of a couple of weeks back about Marcus Garvey and the rhetoric of racial separation in Rastafarianism. It was all part of that kind of radical chic / shock tactics that Ali seemed to thrive on. I don't think it's worth taking particularly seriously, or that it deserves the kind of condemnation that you'd want to give to comparative stuff coming from a white guy. But it does lend weight to the idea, as the article suggests, that it's Joe Frazier rather than Ali who deserves more of our respect.