THE SOUL OF A BUTTERFLY By Muhammad Ali with Hana Ali. Bantam £12.99; 208pp ISBN 0 5930 5249 8
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Sometimes you accumulate a lot of books on the same subject: not through an act of will but because it just seems to happen. I have a load of stuff on the James Joyce shelf, shelf-and-a-half by now. The sports section has an inordinate number of books about Muhammad Ali. With both, I ask: how can there be so many versions of the same man — and all of them true? Truth is not elusive: it is endlessly various. That is doubly the case with the utterly exceptional, in any field. And so here is another book for the Ali section, another purported autobiography, this one written with a daughter, Hana Yasmeen Ali. No, not the one who boxes. She writes poems, also included in the book.
The book mixes tales of boxing — the night Ali beat Sonny Liston, the Rumble in the Jungle — with professions of faith and meditations on the Lord’s Plan For Us. It’s not a book you meet every day: sort of Rocky 2 meets Un coeur simple. Except that simplicity is only one aspect of the endlessly complex nature of Ali, and of his story. Take love, for example: and the book is all about love. For Ali, it seems essential that he loves vast numbers of people, and is loved back by them. I was there in Atlanta when he lit the Olympic flame, and I felt the oceans of love washing towards him from America and the world. I have been at prize-fights where the very name Ali gets a bigger cheer than either contestant. Ali: the world’s most beloved sportsman; perhaps the world’s most beloved human.
Which is odd when you remember that he spent years as a hate-magnet. Quite deliberately: he modelled his free-wheeling braggart monologues on a wrestler named Gorgeous George, reasoning that the more people who wanted to see his ass whupped, the more tickets he would sell. He was always an actor, an illusionist, a man who adores conjuring tricks. He still does them; though now, as a devout Muslim who will never deceive, he afterwards insists on showing you how it was done.
He is remembered — quite erroneously — as a man who spoke out for the civil rights movement. He changed his name from Cassius Clay as a member of the Nation of Islam, a group that demanded a separate nation for black people. He was the movement’s prize specimen, but says that refusing the draft was his own idea. His fellow black Muslims wanted him to accept, but as he said at the time, unforgettably: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” He made the decision out of love for his fellow man, he says; it certainly made him hated by an awful lot of his fellow Americans. These days, everybody remembers supporting the civil rights movement and how much Ali was adored. It was rather different at the time.
Ali was kept out of boxing for three and half years. He came back, though, and it was at this point that Ali started to rewrite his own history and the history of his sport. So perhaps it is only right that America should rewrite its own history as well.
You are not supposed to make comebacks at any sport, especially one so demanding of vaulting ambition and physical courage, both wasting assets. But Ali went through boxing like an avenger, like a righter of wrongs, like a healer of harms: an emblem of the greater struggle he took part in. It was in those fights, the Thrilla in Manila, the Rumble in the Jungle, that Ali ceased to be a story, ceased, in one way, to be a human being. He created a living mythology with himself as hero. No wonder truth has always been, in a sense, the least relevant part of Ali’s story.
Like all great heroes, Ali was an over-reacher. He won the world heavyweight title three times: and in the process received the injuries that in all probability caused his desperate physical decline. Many neurologists suspect that his “Parkinson’s disease” is nothing less than punch-drunk syndrome: a subtle and cumulative deterioration of a man whose brain has been walloped too many times.
But his disability only inspires more mythologies, and sees him emerge as yet another kind of hero, yet another kind of love-object. In the book, in his conversations with his daughter, he emerges as a person of almost Christ-like nature: sweet, gently proud, remorseful. His apology to his greatest opponent, Joe Frazier, for past insults, is truly touching.
Ali was always the most reckless spendthrift: of money, of himself. He gave the stuff away in handfuls: he never refused an autograph, never withheld a kind word. One of his aides once remarked that he would insist on sleeping with all the ugly women.
His daughter tells a story of how the two of them gave a lift to a man, and on seeing that he had little money, Ali tried to give him cash. The pair debated furiously. “Take it, man,” Ali said. “I’m trying to get to Heaven!” “So am I. No.”
These days, Ali describes himself as “a mainstream Sunni Muslim”, and a man who believes in tolerance, decency, love, all that sort of thing. “At night when I go to bed, I ask myself: ‘If I don’t wake up tomorrow, would I be proud of how I lived today?’ and with that question in mind I have tried to do as many good deeds as I can, whether it is standing up for my faith, signing an autograph, or simply shaking a person’s hand. I’m just trying to make people happy and get into Heaven.”
God, yes, it’s a book you can mock. You can mock it all day and all night for its naivety, its meaningful texts, for Hana’s sweetly sincere poems. But there are two things that makes mockery stick in your throat. The first is the context: the memories of Ali, stalking his opponent like a panther, his extraordinary mixture of courage, grace and intelligence; also of Ali in his prime as a wordsmith, daring to bandy words with anyone.
But the second is faith. Faith, some say, is a gift: Ali has it, and it defines his life, makes sense of what has gone and what is to come. And that can’t be mocked: for no one can mock what he truly envies.
But Ali must have the last line, and if it is one of his oldest, it deserves to be heard again and again: “I would like to be remembered as a man who won the heavyweight title three times, who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him, and who helped as many people as he could. As a man who stood up for his beliefs no matter what. As a man who tried to unite all humankind though faith and love. And if all that’s too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxer who became a leader and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”
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