How to Think Like Muhammad Ali

The Paradox of Greatness and the Power of Mental Toughness

Kevin Mitchell

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781313497
• eBook ISBN: 9781781313794
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Consider the question - why does anyone buy sports books, or books about or by sports stars? For sure there is a souvenir and nostalgia element. But people also buy sports books to see if our heroes give any clues to the magic ingredient that has made them so successful. We read them to see what we can learn about their lives, particularly in the hard times, and how they triumphed over adversity.

Chapter One

Bicycle Thieves

If there is an enduring truth in professional boxing it is that theft speaks all languages. Prizefighters for centuries have been robbed of many things: money, dreams, dignity and, in the saddest circumstances, their lives. Fighting, embedded in Western culture through centuries of casual violence, became business in Georgian England when dissolute members of the aristocracy capitalised on that brutishness and laid aside their distaste of the underclasses long enough to make organised pugilism acceptable. Strengthening this contract between rich and poor was the uniquely British concept of muscular Christianity, where the devil met God. Those were the building blocks of boxing as a sport, mainly as a vehicle for gambling, with no regard for the welfare of its front-line participants.

What turned prizefighting from barbarism conducted secretly in fields and on river barges into the commercial extravaganza it is today was the conviction of the moguls of the sports entertainment industry in the twentieth century that the desperation of brave and poor men offered limitless opportunities for them to make vast sums of money without risking personal injury to body or wallet. It was not a fair or just enterprise then, and it is not now. Nor, these rich men discovered, would it ever disappear. When that particular penny dropped – about the time the moving image began to enchant millions and sports stadiums started to bulge with massed voyeurs – the process was irreversible. In this evolution, no corner of society has been immune to boxing’s charms. It has touched men and women, kings and vagabonds, scoundrels and adventurers, intellectuals and idiots. How could it die with a demographic as all-embracing as that? The fuel that drives the engine is, of course, money. Given that it survives on the thinnest moral premise and is as addictive as heroin, paid fist-fighting trails only war and the stock market as the ultimate expression of raw capitalism. The Hollywood utterance of capitalism’s great anti-hero, Gordon Gekko, ‘Greed is good’, found a home in the boxing ring long before it hit Wall Street.

As with all forms of the greed industry, boxing does not discriminate on the grounds of sentiment or concern for others. Like war, it demands sacrifice from the weakest, with the spoils going to those who need it least. Like the stock market, it purports to give all of its soldiers a fighting chance, even if such a concept ignores its core truth: there are no winners without losers. Boxing is a contract of mutual exploitation, signed by all parties in the pursuit of hard cash masquerading as glory. To imagine otherwise is to surrender to shameless sentimentality. If you agree with that view, what follows might make some sense. If not, you are in the wrong part of the bookshop.

I have to admit to an unkillable, illogical love of boxing. There is a fair strain of it running through both sides of my family. And, while there is also ambiguity, doubts fade at the announcement of every major fight. Boxing has been the meat and drink of my professional life. I earn my living writing about men (and, lately, women) hitting each other in the head. Ultimately, against my better instincts and the advice of smart friends, I love boxing. But I am not sure I will ever truly understand it. Just as Ali accommodates Parkinson’s disease, a lot of us come to a guilty understanding with the fight business.

When gathering my thoughts for this book – or, more likely, looking for a distraction while waiting for a single thought to come along – I flipped on a DVD of Bicycle Thieves. It is a movie of searing simplicity about an ordinary man looking for work in late-1940s Italy, with the echoes and the dust of the Second World War settling still on recently vacated battlefields. On the face of it, Bicycle Thieves had nothing to do with boxing, yet it had much to do with survival, and those two things definitely are connected. Ricci, a man of meagre means, applies for a job in his small town and his prospective employer tells him he must have a bicycle to get the job. Ricci tells him that, yes, he does own a bicycle – then sets about getting one. He pawns his bedsheets, buys a bicycle and gets the job.

After this innocuous deception, Ricci finds himself in a minor role in the dream-selling business. His chores include sticking up posters of Rita Hayworth and contemporary American movie stars whose glamour illuminates the lives of the town’s impoverished citizens via the local cinema. Ricci identifies with these famous strangers. He is, he tells himself, a member of their galaxy, not just a poor Italian scraping a living in post-war desolation. And he imagines his friends will be pleased and grateful to be so touched by this association. All of a sudden, he has invented another world for himself. And he hopes, too, that he can earn a little money. Ricci did not choose this as a career, however, it chose him.

For the film’s creators, the Marxist writer Cesare Zavattini and the director Vittorio De Sica, the story is their critique of a political and moral system they mistrust. They contend that man’s values are eternally compromised by circumstance: man will lie to live, and those of his comrades who are corrupted by the system will live to lie. In a sledgehammer metaphor, Zavattini and De Sica argue that the dilemma is cyclical, like the revolutions of a bicycle’s wheel, turned again and again by helpless men passing their own burden on to others, all of them victims of oppression, but all of them manipulators too. In the inevitable twist to the tale, Ricci’s bicycle is stolen by someone who is as desperate as he had been. He finds the thief (with ladled imagery, in a brothel, the quintessential palace of exploitation) but he cannot prove it is his bicycle. So he steals another one … and the cycle, if you like, is repeated.

It is a near-perfect metaphor for the boxing industry.

In the summer of 1954, five years after Bicycle Thieves opened to critical acclaim in Europe, a person or persons unknown stole a young black boy’s new $60 red Schwinn bicycle from outside the Columbia Auditorium in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. It was the site of an expo for black businessmen and, as free food was on offer, it was a magnet for young rascals not much interested in the grown-up concerns of commerce but familiar with the thrill of a complimentary hot dog. Among them was the young boy who had just had his bicycle stolen. Incensed by the theft, he complained to a police officer who was nearby supervising, as it happens, a team of young boxers. On the recommendation of Officer Joe Martin, the boy took up boxing, ostensibly to cultivate fighting skills with which to confront the thief. The tale has the ring of convenience about it, given what was to follow, but that is the version of the stolen bicycle as it has been handed down. Unlike Ricci, the boy did not find the miscreant; if he had, the script might have changed right there, with who knows what sort of ending. However, the boy did take up the officer’s suggestion – and he did become quite brilliant at boxing. Six years after he lost his bicycle, Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal in the country that provided the setting for Bicycle Thieves. He already had a Roman name; now he had a Roman trinket.

In the post-war maelstrom of uncertainty and chaos, there were some inevitable contradictions. The Americans had conquered the Italians (with help from their Allies) and were then embraced by the vanquished, a tradition as old as the Roman Empire. The American GIs, who not long before had been bombing them to bits, were now their saviours and heroes. And the culture from which they sprang was heroic also; you can’t beat Hollywood.

True to this rolling narrative of disappointment, when Clay returned from the 1960 Rome Olympics hailed as an American hero – like the soldiers twenty-five years before him had been when they came back from conquering and seducing Europe – he was reminded that he was still regarded as a second-class citizen in the divided South. Cassius, a young black sporting hero in a white-ruled society, was every bit as powerless a victim of ‘the system’ as was Ricci. It is said he was so angered by the hypocrisy of a community who hailed his victory yet despised his presence that he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River. By this point, however, he was caught up in another cycle of theft: the sport and business of professional boxing. What he could not have suspected then was that he would become the most celebrated athlete in the world, and much more – but, nevertheless, ‘still a nigga’ as he is inclined to remind people to this day.

These were the formative episodes in the life of Muhammad Ali, as Cassius Clay became. They were the early chapters of one of the great stories of twentieth-century sport, about an athlete who transcended his discipline and the business of the fight industry. And they are so deeply planted in the public imagination as to invite charges of heresy if questioned. Are they true? Did someone really steal young Cassius’s bike? Did the Olympic champion really throw his gold medal into the Ohio River?

For his part, Davis Miller got what seemed to be a great scoop when he resumed his relationship with Ali in 1989. In a telephone conversation, Miller is telling Ali about how he has sold a story he wrote, called ‘My Dinner With Ali’, to a sports magazine, and they want photos to go with it, but just of his hands. Ali is sceptical – or sounds like he is. On pages 204–5, Miller writes:

‘“You ain’t no writer,” he says, when I get up the nerve to tell him why I’ve called. “They just usin’ you.”

“I’ve wanted to write for years. Like you, when you threw your gold medal off the bridge, I threw my beeper in the river and quit my job so I could write.”

“I never did that,” he says.

“Did what?” I ask.

“Never threw my medal off no bridge. Just lost it, that’s all.”

“You serious?”

“Mmmmm, that’s a story I made up. I know what it takes to sell a story.”

“What matters,” I say, “is the way you influenced me. What matters is I did it because I thought you had.”’

So, who to believe, what to believe. Ultimately, it depends on whichever definition of the truth you find most convenient. Ali, a prisoner of his own invention, was as keen to believe in the tricks and stunts he performed throughout his career as were the mesmerised members of his audience – such as Miller – a constituency that would be numbered in several millions. It suited everyone to believe some of the outrageous things he said and did because to pretend otherwise would be to kill the magic. If you forgave him his enthusiasm for major and minor manipulation of the facts, yes, these tales were, in the very widest sense of the word, true. They were true for those who wanted to believe. For Ali, that was good enough. In an industry built on lies, Ali was as honest as any other trickster.

It is helpful to accept a loose interpretation of what constitutes truth in the fight game to properly understand Ali. Not only was he drawn to invention and inconsequential mischief, his life and his sport are littered with lies and half-truths, innocent and profound. He was romanced (with little resistance) by people who recognised him as the ultimate salesman for whatever it was they were selling, from tickets to a boxing match to religion and politics and, in the sad end, to scraps of his glorious past reheated in the auction houses of the world as boxing memorabilia.

As I was finishing this book, in July 2014, the gloves Ali wore in the Fight of the Century, his first meeting with Joe Frazier, at Madison Square Garden in 1971 when both men were unbeaten, were listed for sale at an auction in Cleveland. This was not unusual – except this was the second time in two years the gloves had been sold. Their lineage was interesting. The first time they were sold, they came from the estate of Ali’s career-long trainer and friend, Angelo Dundee, who plainly had received them as a gift from his fighter. Dundee died in February 2012. In December that year, his son, Jim, sold them for $385,848 to help pay medical bills. At the same auction, for the same price, a collector also picked up the gloves Ali wore when he beat Sonny Liston in 1964 to win the world heavyweight title for the first time. There is more to this recycling story: in February 2014, near the first fight’s fiftieth anniversary, the Ali-Liston gloves were sold for a second time, this time bringing $836,500, more than 200 per cent profit in less than two years. What would the Fight of the Century gloves return their lucky owner in July 2014? An anonymous bidder paid $388,375, less than half that paid for the gloves from the first Liston fight. Memories fade, even those of Ali. ‘These gloves are more than sports memorabilia,’ said the auction’s organiser, Chris Ivy. ‘They’re artefacts of early 1970s American pop culture.’

And there’s me thinking there was no distinction between sports memorabilia and ‘artefacts of … pop culture’ which go on sale for nearly half a million pounds. Whatever you like to call them (battered old boxing gloves?), I bet they made someone other than the original owner a good deal richer.

Here’s the oddity, though: Ali would not care. He has probably given away millions of dollars worth of tat during and after his career. It is not that he does not know his own worth – when he came to London in 1999, for example, to be celebrated as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, it cost the organisers $100,000 – even though Ali long ago ceased caring about material things. He is comfortable. He lives modestly. What money comes his way as the most marketable living relic of the past century goes to his eponymous foundation in Louisville, which does much good work in the community and beyond. It is not the passing on of the gloves that matters, however. They are only gloves. They could be left in the corner of any old gym, picked up and treasured for ever more. No, it is the commerce they generate, the profit that one party makes from a fighter’s working tools, the gloves that guard the knuckles that crack the skulls of his opponents for our enjoyment. It is an odd business, altogether.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of this curious trade was the case of the cigarette paper. In 1961, the renowned boxing historian and memorabilia – sorry, artefacts – collector Hank Kaplan met a young Cassius Clay in Dundee’s 5th Street Gym in Miami. Clay, the most engaging and involved of individuals, paused after his workout and noticed Kaplan smoking a cigarette. According to legend, he took the cigarette from his hand and, in a delicate hand, signed it. Many years later, that cigarette paper went for $1,900 at auction – just as Clay knew it would.

So, there have been many people – not just managers and promoters – who have co-opted Ali’s words, achievements and property for their own ends, interpreting them to suit, or selling them on. You could say this book is an example of that. You could say that I am no better or worse than Dundee, Kaplan or any of the others who trawl Ali’s life and go to work on it; and you could be right. But I will try to keep it as honest as I know how. Not everything is as it seems, though.

Ali’s personality perfectly suited his accidental calling because he was a born kidder, and an illusionist who retained a life-long fascination with simple magic tricks, who loved to joke and mess around, forever deriving pleasure from harmless japes. In the ring, such an inclination can bring success and it can bring pain. Ali and boxing were the perfect partners – even if, like Ricci, he did not choose boxing. Boxing chose him.

At the heart of the sport of boxing (as distinct from the business) is an understanding between fighters that requires them to indulge in an unspoken dialogue during the course of a bout. It goes something like this: you must believe you are better than your opponent, even if you suspect you are not; you must persuade first yourself and then your opponent of your conviction, no matter the legitimacy or otherwise of the evidence. He, similarly, will tell himself and you the same lie, and you will either believe him or you will consider him fraudulent. When it is done, the fighter who has created the most convincing narrative and played it out to the satisfaction of hopefully independent arbiters, exposing the other man as the least believable liar, will be declared the winner. That is how boxing works: you reach the unavoidable truth through an elaborate confection of half-truths. Ali’s ability to deceive sustained a boxing career in which he held a spell over nearly all of his opponents. Few who came into contact with him – inside or outside the ring – wanted to or were able to resist his charms. Hypnotised, they were desperate to believe what he had to say. For all but five of his sixty-one opponents, such surrender to his will led to inevitable defeat.

For all that he mesmerised fighters, fans and the media, however, Ali was real. He actually was what he said he was: The Greatest. He beat them all. He delivered on his magic trick time and again. He wrote poems predicting exactly what he would do, and, for a briefly wondrous time, he did not disappoint. Thomas Hauser, one of his biographers, estimates he got the round right the first twelve times he made a prediction. And then he stopped. Whatever the number, he confounded all the anointed experts (especially those more potent with a pen than a glove) who proclaimed he did too many things wrong in the ring. Men such as Norman Mailer, who asserted with the certainty only an egotist could muster that Ali did not conform to any known orthodoxy from the time-dusted book of boxing wisdom. Sitting ringside in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 with George Plimpton, another American intellectual hooked on the glamour of the fight game, Mailer gave Ali no chance against George Foreman. Plimpton agreed. They were not necessarily wrong because of their rudimentary boxing analysis (nearly all the hard-core boxing types agreed with them) but because, for once, they and everyone else stopped believing in a phenomenon they had helped create. Within eight rounds, Ali made fools of all the wise men. He did not care what they said because, underneath his megaphone boasts, he knew he was blessed and he placed absolute faith in his God-given talent, as well as his own brand of magic. ‘Ali Bomaye!’ the crowd chanted in Lingala: ‘Ali, kill him!’ He didn’t do that, but he knocked Foreman out. Then they believed; all of them. Some rewrote their sentiments. ‘Oh my God, he’s won the title back at thirty-two!’ Harry Carpenter famously shouted into his BBC microphone. But they were all back in the Ali business, beneficiaries of a boxing miracle conjured by the sport’s great magician.

There were so many nights like this. For believers – like fans of Roger Federer who will not listen to cynics who insist he can never regain the dominance that brought him seventeen grand slam titles – it is no more than what they expect to happen. They have faith. When Ali’s gifts began to properly dissipate, however, there could be no avoiding the cruel full stop to the first chapter of his life. It arrived on 11 December 1981, in the Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Nassau, the Babylonian capital of the tax haven of the Bahamas. This was a place where lying was legitimised and rewarded. It was twenty-seven years after young Cassius’s bike was stolen. There were no nuanced exchanges, no pretence or fooling around, no rabbits left in the hat, just a lot of public suffering and humiliation. It was a Friday and, for what remained of Ali as a professional fighter, not a very good Friday. For half an hour, the hollow clack of a cowbell (requisitioned at the last minute from a nearby field, so tawdry was the promotion) interrupted the three-minute beatings, spread over ten rounds, which a strong young Canadian called Trevor Berbick administered on the shell of a once-magnificent athlete. Ali, a giant in our lives for two decades and more, shrank towards invisibility in the space of half an hour in front of a smattering of bemused locals and cynical insiders. It was an ignominious end, a sad, lonely conclusion to the most wonderful adventure any of us had been privileged to celebrate.

That Sunday in the Observer, Hugh McIlvanney wrote that witnessing Ali lose for the fifth and final time was like watching, ‘a prince leave town on the back of a dust cart’.

While Ali’s story would not differ in many respects from those of most prizefighters – boxing encourages extravagant swings in fortune – it was unique. He was, indeed, that prince – a prince like no other. He would get down off the dust cart, put his crown shakily back on his handsome ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Poets and Polemicists
• Chapter One: Bicycle Thieves
• Chapter Two: Veni, Vidi, Vici
• Chapter Three: Homecoming
• Chapter Four: ‘The Posture of Your Blows are Yet Unknown’
• Chapter Five: But What Nation?
• Chapter Six: From Shelby to Maine
• Chapter Seven: Writers Not Fighters
• Chapter Eight: A Different Kind of Fight
• Chapter Nine: Jungle Beat
• Chapter Ten: A Fight Too Far
• Chapter Eleven: King on Ali
• Chapter Twelve: Silence
• A Short Reading List
• Copyright