Will Smith was asked to serve as one of the pallbearers at Muhammad Ali’s funeral Friday. Smith and Ali became close when the former portrayed the boxer in the 2001 biopic, Ali. It’d be worth asking if he was thinking of Ali when he made his most recent picture, Concussion, playing Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian doctor who fights the NFL over his research into chronic head injury and brain deterioration. It seems that most accounts of Ali’s life, positive and negative, are skirting the rather obvious issue: The Parkinson’s Disease he was diagnosed with in 1984 is almost certainly attributable in part to what made him for a while the most famous man in the world.
“Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s may not have been caused by boxing” is the counterintuitive title of one article. Okay, maybe we’ll never be 100 percent sure, even if the Ali family does ask for an autopsy. (They’re not leaning in that direction now.) But lots of medical professionals say they know “that boxing could lead to Parkinson’s disease.”
One famous boxing personality who suffers from Parkinson’s is open about it. Before he became a hall of fame trainer, Freddie Roach fought professionally. He says his doctors told him that his illness may be partly inherited, but it’s largely about the number of punches he took. His trainer, Eddie Futch, warned him to retire. “There isn’t a way as far as I know to know for sure, but they think mine probably came from boxing,” says Roach.
It’s especially odd that the press is reluctant to deal with the likely genesis of Ali’s illness and death, now that concussions are a major concern in American sports, and not just contact sports like football, but even soccer. The suicide of former high-profile NFL star Junior Seau and the Will Smith film have brought tons of attention to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So why are so many people being less-than-honest about Ali’s illness? Perhaps it’s because his suffering touches on the central legend of the man. And it implicates his fans.
Ali won the gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in Tokyo, beat Joe Frazier twice in their three fights, and knocked out Sonny Liston in the first round of their famous 1965 rematch, but he is best known for defeating George Foreman in their 1974 fight in Zaire. It was here, at the “Rumble in the Jungle,” where Ali deployed the now-famous rope-a-dope strategy, and absorbed hundreds of Foreman’s crushing blows as the bigger man wilted in the humid African evening. By the eighth round, it was obvious that Foreman was spent, and with the clock running down, Ali turned on his man, connecting with at least three solid rights, with the last one knocking down the big Texan for the count. It was an extraordinary victory for Ali, and it was perhaps here where he was killed nearly 42 years ago.
It’s instructive to watch the fight again. While waiting for Foreman to enter the ring, Ali is shadow-boxing—you can see how fast his famous hands are, and he’s dancing. It’s beautiful. His feet are amazing—”$5 million feet,” says one of David Frost’s broadcast partners—with a kind of lightness and agility that even champion fighters at much lower weight classes would envy, never mind other heavyweights. It’s those fast feet that allowed Ali to evade Liston, who, according to former boxer Chuck Wepner, hit even harder than the powerful Foreman. And Foreman came into the Ali fight with a record of 40-0 and 37 knockouts, including Frazier and Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw.
Ali didn’t use footwork in Zaire. Some writers and fight fans argue that Ali lost some of his foot speed during his three years away from fighting. He was also 32 years old. But sometimes boxers also just have dangerous ideas. In the first Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight, for example, Leonard was determined to slug it out with those hands of stone and lost by unanimous decision. Leonard wanted to show he could punch and take a punch as well as box and move. Maybe Ali thought he had something to prove, as well, though it was pretty clear by then he could take a punch. He stayed in Foreman’s range all night because that was his plan—to make Foreman exhaust himself. It was a huge risk, because Ali could’ve miscalculated his ability to withstand Foreman’s famous punching power.
It was the fourth round when Ali’s strategy became evident, as he leaned back on the ropes with Foreman hammering away at him. Ali tied Foreman up repeatedly, hanging on him, further tiring him, and whispering to him.
“Is that all you got, George?” Ali was supposed to have said.
Boxing doesn’t have to be
Later, Foreman admitted that Ali’s words disheartened him. It is all I have, he thought to himself. When you pound away at someone with everything you have and the other guy will not go down, you’re halfway to being defeated. The heat may have sapped Foreman’s strength, but Ali stripped him of his will. Foreman started swinging wildly, further spending himself.
In popular memory, the rope-a-dope is about Ali taking Foreman’s blows to the body, pummeling his ribs. But watch the fight. Foreman also gets in dozens of head shots, big right hands, and at least one left hook to the head that would have felled Achilles. The announcers keep saying that Foreman’s shots had no effect on Ali, but that’s simply not true. Even the jabs hurt. Ali was famous for a quick jab he threw from various angles, but Foreman’s lead left was a powerful weapon that found Ali’s head lots of times. A jab, of course, doesn’t have the same impact as a cross or a hook, but it’s still crushing when thrown by a professional who’s been practicing punching for more than a dozen years.
Heavyweights hurt each other. Their punches have more force and leverage than a smaller man’s, but their skulls aren’t proportionally thicker just because they’re bigger. They just get used to getting hit by big people who punch for a living. The boxer’s stance puts one side forward, and thus shrinks the map of the body the opponent can easily hit. But Ali stood squarely in front of Foreman on the ropes. Lots of fight fans argue that the ropes were loosened so that Ali could lean back further, but that’s irrelevant. His entire torso was vulnerable to Foreman’s power punches. Ali caught some of the shots to the head with his gloves and others got through his guard. For the 12 minutes of rounds four, five, six, and seven, Ali turned himself into a heavy bag, absorbing some of the biggest blows from one of the heaviest hitters in the history of boxing. This was one of the most heroic performances in the history of American sports as well one of its most gruesome episodes.
Boxing is not about getting hit—it’s about not getting hit, and hitting. Oh, sure, there are epic slugfests that are a part of boxing lore, like the three fights between Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward, including the ninth round of the first fight, one of the most famous rounds in boxing history. And, yes, this kind of fight may be a testament to the human spirit, resilience, will, etc., but it’s also about blood sport.
Boxing doesn’t have to be like that. Indeed, the career of the now-retired Floyd Mayweather is a counter to that idea of boxing. Mayweather knew that spectators wanted to see him get hit. He made them want to see him get hurt, and opponents wanted to target that mouth of his. But his great defensive skills not only made him a champion, they also allowed him to enjoy a long and apparently healthy career, during which he won all 49 of his fights.
That’s how Ali fought when he beat Liston. That’s the kind of boxing that his most famous slogan describes: “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” But that’s not what he gave fans that night in Zaire, and that’s why so many are now uncomfortable discussing the illness that killed him. Maybe it wasn’t the Rumble in the Jungle alone that did him in—he fought another seven years—but it was certainly a large part of it. Ali turned himself into a human sacrifice. His fans loved it, and they should be embarrassed. Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy won him the fight, but it may have cost him his life.
