The Making of a Hero

You know his name.  That’s why they can just put his picture on the cover. No name needs to accompany the photo because you know his name.  And he made it so.

Before his name was Muhammad Ali he was Cassius Clay.  That’s when I was introduced to him, as an impressionable boy looking for heroes.  Mr. Clay, as he was known in 1964, wrote a piece for a sports magazine before his big fight against Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. I became a fan of championship boxing during these years, and even as I write this I marvel at this because it seems so out of character for the rest of my self-image.  I attribute it to the name change, Clay became Ali, and all that followed the decision to change his name, to re-identify himself.

Mr. Ali went on to beat many opponents, and only some of them were in the ring. I think that is why I was attracted to him. He proclaimed himself to be “The Greatest” and he lived into that proclamation. I wonder if he was the greatest boxing champion of all time because of his physical skill and mental determination, or did he create a persona that he forced himself to live into?  I think it was the former, that he really was that good, and all he needed was the world to know what he knew. But I think that when people like Mr. Ali set the bar for themselves so impossibly high, it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He tells the world “I am the greatest”, and now he has to prove it.

He admitted that the behavior which made him famous was what I call “performance art.”  He was a self-promotion machine who the media fed on in a frenzy, and the sports-obsessed public loved to hate him. Until they loved to love him.  He wrote in 1964: “Where do you think I would be if I didn’t know how to shout and holler…. I would be poor…and I would probably be down…in my hometown, washing windows or running an elevator and saying ‘yes, suh’ and ‘no suh’ and knowing my place. Instead of that, I’m saying that…I’m the greatest fighter in the world, which I hope and pray is true. Now the public is saying to me, ‘Put up or shut up.’” And he did. (SI, 6/13/16. C. Clay)

Every boy and every girl needs a hero.  Someone whose picture needs no name.  The problem is that one day all of the heroes die.  But One.  You know his name.