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Walter Dean MyersThe Greatest: Muhammad Ali
Nonfiction | Biography | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Intersection of Sports and Politics
Content Warning: This section discusses racism.
As Myers outlines, sports sustain a meaningful connection to important social and political issues of the day. Muhammad Ali came to fame in an era when athletes, especially Black athletes, were expected to maintain a low profile and stick to their assigned field. For the great fighters who preceded Ali, such as Sugar Ray Robinson or Joe Louis, they “did not speak, they were spoken for” (78). Ali was not the first or only athlete to entertain controversial positions, but he did so in a bold and unprecedented way, so in the biography, he is representative of the integration of sport and society. Ali linked the two at practically the moment he became heavyweight championship as Cassius Clay, declaring himself a member of the Nation of Islam and taking the name Muhammad Ali. In Myers’s view, the two events were meaningfully linked. Much civil rights activism was dedicated to nonviolent resistance, but to a fighter like Ali, such an approach “seemed futile against people bent on committing violent acts against black churches and black children” (46). Embracing the militant faith of the Nation was part of Ali’s role as a fighter, taking challenges head-on rather than seeking moderate accommodations.
Myers draws even more explicit connections between Ali’s status as a sports icon and his political activism. Initially known as the “Louisville Lip” with immense athletic gifts but major gaps in his fighting skills, the “amusing man-child” stunned the world first with his ascent to the top of the heavyweight ranks (39). He then put his career on the line on behalf of his religious beliefs, refusing to serve in any capacity on behalf of a war outside the parameters of his religion. Ali lost three years of his prime due to this decision, and upon finally returning to the ring in late 1970, he made up for his diminishing physicality with nearly superhuman courage against some of his most ferocious opposition. Ali paid a physical toll for his courage in the ring, much as he paid a price for standing up for his beliefs. Through this biography, Myers suggests that sportspeople cannot be removed from their political context and that sports and politics intersect because the political environment produces the person and creates the conditions for their sport.
The Brutality of Boxing
Myers frequently pauses the narrative to emphasize the extraordinary toll that boxing imposes on fighters. Ali was such a beloved figure: handsome, charismatic, and as gifted with his mouth as he was with his fights. There is therefore a glaring contrast between the brash, young fighter and the older Ali, most famously seen lighting the torch at the 1996 Olympic games, who appeared “as slow as he had once seemed fast, as subdued as he had once been lively” (148). It is unclear, even after Ali’s death, how much boxing was responsible for his developing Parkinson’s, but in either case, Ali’s extraordinary success contrasts sharply with the toll of fighting in the biography. Most fighters make very little money, devoting the majority of their modest purse winnings to pay for equipment, trainers, managers, and promoters. Most will leave a ring with as much obscurity as they entered and with little to show other than the accumulated effects of the blows they suffer in the ring.
Physical pain is the central fact about boxing. All fighters, even the greatest, inflict and withstand enormous amounts of punishment. The “name of the game” is beating one’s opponent into unconsciousness (18). A fighter may lose if they are not willing to bludgeon their opponent, pounce at their moment of weakness, or exult at the moment of someone else’s agony. Ali’s charisma was such that even as he threw up his arms in triumph as his opponents fell to the canvas, he was so far removed from the stereotype of the brooding, bullying boxer that his fans could cheer him on without feeling like they were indulging in bloodlust.
Myers explores the way that, ultimately, the human body is not particularly well equipped for boxing: “A good single blow to the face [from a heavyweight boxer in good condition] can break the neck of an ordinary person” (82). Ali both suffered this and caused others to suffer it. While Myers is as eager as anyone to honor Ali as a hero, he does not deny the ugly side of his chosen profession. Nevertheless, he suggests that the pull of this brutality is both to observe the limits of the human body and to assess strength in a raw way.
Black Is Beautiful
Muhammad Ali’s rise to fame coincided with a cultural movement designed to instill a sense of pride in Black Americans, often called the Black Is Beautiful movement. The experience of segregation and other forms of structural racism did not merely deprive Black Americans of their equal rights as citizens and deny them dignity in public spaces but also made it “very hard to maintain a sense of pride in either yourself or your people” (153). Ali would be among the first Black celebrities to refer to himself as “beautiful” (46)—which he did often—and this was particularly surprising in the sport of boxing, typically viewed as the realm of machismo rather than beauty. Ali was a surprisingly handsome man in a sport known for blood and bruises, and the persistent inability of his opponents (especially early on) to put a dent in his handsome face meant that he remained handsome. To the extent that he made himself a symbol of Black beauty, his chosen profession proved to be an unexpected advantage. By defying the odds to stay “pretty,” fight after fight, he became a symbol of Blackness itself staying beautiful in spite of centuries of oppression and the contemporary travails of civil rights.
Ali’s profession of his own beauty was particularly tied to his embrace of the Nation of Islam. Toward the end of the 1960s, there was a “major escalation of militancy among young blacks in the civil rights struggle” (57). Preachers of nonviolence like Martin Luther King, Jr., were met with an assassin’s bullet, and peaceful marchers were beaten bloody in the streets. Groups like the Nation, whatever their flaws, affirmed that Black people were the pinnacle of God’s creation and were therefore perfectly capable of defining their own lives and social standards apart from white standards of appropriateness. Even for those who did not share the Nation’s political or religious beliefs, this insistence on self-definition informs a major part of Ali’s legacy, which endured through his decades of illness and endures still after his death. Myers argues that “[i]n Muhammad Ali, young people found a model for their pride” (154). Myers hence uses the biography to oppose white supremacist notions of beauty and pride and reiterate the point that Blackness equates to beauty.
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