On boxers and boxes
Posted: Wednesday February 17, 1999 11:59 AM
In the last 40 years, since a young man from Louisville strode, open-mouthed,
onto the stage at the Rome Olympics, there have really only been two boxers who
have moved into the broad public consciousness. Oh, yes, George Foreman amused
us, and Sugar Ray Leonard was charming -- especially since he was much too cute
to be a fighter ... but really, the only two boxers who found their way into our
cultural enyclopedia were that loquacious lad from Louisville who would become
Muhammad Ali, and that sad, brutish misfit of a manchild named Mike
Tyson.
So, if ever the alpha and the omega of one sport flashed before our eyes
together, it was last week when, on one day, Ali was put on a Wheaties box, and
on the next, when Tyson was returned to reside within another kind of
box.
It would be easy to leave them at that, the curious juxtaposition of the beloved
and the reviled, but ... no. The greater irony is how that came to be. We must
not forget that there was a time when Muhammad Ali -- he who would light the
Olympic flame, he who is adored as a kind of saint of sweat wherever he alights
upon this earth, he who is now prominently upon your dining room table, there
with you, as you partake of your Breakfast of Champions -- was held once, by
many Americans, in as much contempt as Tyson is
today.
And there was a time when Tyson was perceived as a precious kind of paradox -- a
vicious slugger in the ring, but outside: a gentle creature who loved his
pigeons, a serious student of boxing history, a rehabilitated child of the
streets.
The fact is that, on the evidence most of us had, the wires were crossed. The
boorish young Muhammad Ali was supposed to end up as the sensitive young Mike
Tyson has -- and vice versa.
Part of the lesson here is simply the old one: don't believe everything you
read. Now, of course, we know: Tyson was obviously never clear of the
musty shadows of his past nor of the raging demons of his soul. And Ali, for all
his braggadocio and his ugly dalliance with racial division, was either only
having a little fun or, well -- testing life, testing us, going through phases.
But, in the crux, as in the ring, he always instinctively did right. It's just
that, as Tyson falls back naturally on brutality, Ali inclines to sweet charity.
It almost makes you believe in predestination, or, anyway, in a selective
original
sin.
While he was in New York to enter the Wheaties realm, Ali and his wife, Lonnie,
were also carrying on their mission to raise funds to build the Muhammad Ali
Center on the Louisville riverfront. Notably, the huge project will not be,
foremost, a museum. Rather, the prime mission of the Muhammad Ali Center is to
encourage inspiration -- especially in children, in those children anywhere in
the world who are so impoverished of self and spirit that they dare not
dream.
Well, as grand -- almost presumptuous -- as that ideal is, who better to
represent it than Muhammad Ali?
Of course, Ali and Tyson had much in common as children, didn't they? They were
both uneducated minority kids from the fringe of American society whose fists
were their only way up and out. So their very uncommon adult experience only
shows us again that, as sport can make little lives larger, it still leaves for
the athletes the task of making themselves as people.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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