Muhammad Ali outside of the box
Or, Cassius Clay's beat poetry
There’s a reason we name them after gods: When you watch an Olympian in action, it’s superhuman. But then they climb down from the podium and get in front of a microphone and you remember: This fresh-faced 19-year-old has spent every waking hour of their adolescence focussed on one very specialized skill that is not oratory.
So consider Muhammad Ali’s statement after winning the men’s heavyweight boxing gold in Rome in 1960:
To make America the greatest is my goal
So I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole
And for the US won the medal of gold
Italy said ‘You’re greater than Cassius of Old
We like your name, we like your game,
So make Rome your home if you will.’
I said I appreciate kind hospitality
But the USA is my country still
Cause they’re waiting to welcome me
In Louisville.
The boxer born Cassius Clay was, as he never tired of reminding the world, the greatest of all time. His self-promotion augmented his athleticism, and it was his particular knack for the brag poem that made him much bigger than his sport. That skill came from natural talent to be sure, though there was also some clever borrowing.
Ali’s first poem was published at the age of 12, when the Louisville Courier-Journal printed this pre-fight couplet:
This guy is done.
I’ll stop him in one.
He thought in rhyme, or so he told an audience member in cateye glasses in this 1963 talk show appearance:
Yes I do, I write my own poetry and I think in rhyme. As a matter of fact as I’m talking to you I’m writing the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feels to be me. This is it, the greatest short poem of all time: Me, wheeee!
He used that one whenever he could. But it was a finding from a different sport that convinced him to develop his brag poems.
Muhammad Ali was vocal in his admiration of Gorgeous George, one of the great stars from the First Golden Age of Wrestling. George leaned heavily into flamboyant stereotypes to draw “heel heat,” or the crowd’s excited anger at the stage villain. Also known as The Human Orchid, George dyed his hair platinum blonde, had rose petals tossed before him, and spritzed the ring with Chanel No. 10 (“Why be half-safe?” he joked.) He monetized homophobia, and gave Ali the idea to monetize racism.
“A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth,” George explained. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous.”
Or as Ali later remembered: “I saw 15,000 people comin’ to see this man get beat. And his talking did it. I said, ‘This is a gooood idea!’”
He leaned in to the nickname Gaseous Clay and developed elaborate taunts like this one of Sonny Liston:
Who would have thought when they came to the fight
That they’d witness the launching of a human satellite.
Yes, the crowd did not dream when they lay down their money
That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.
His most famous line was deployed against George Foreman and is even better in context:
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.
Now you see me, now you don’t.
George thinks he will, but I know he won’t.
And his best stanzas frame him as a folk legend:
I’ve wrestled with alligators
I’ve tussled with a whale
I done handcuffed lightning
and throw thunder in jail
You know I’m bad, just last week I murdered a rock
Injured a stone, hospitalized a brick
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.
It’s evocative, it’s Biblical, it draws on Black vernacular, it rhymes, and there’s not a non-artificial snowball’s chance in Beijing of hearing anything like it again.
Quick quips; lightning
“They gave me the key to the city and then they changed all the locks.”
— Dick Gregory
“Young man, your arm’s too short to box with God.”
— James Weldon Johnson
“He is a modest little man with much to be modest about.”
— Winston Churchill, of Clement Attlee
Speaking of...
Self-obsession as career choice
Talkative converts to Islam
In this corner: GWQ NO. 136, perhaps the greatest of all time for one week only. Everyone from Ken Burns to David Remnick has profiled Ali, but there’s a particular game-recognizing-game charm in Ali Rap, a quote collection by self-aggrandizing ad-man George Lois. Did Ali invent rap? Maybe? But even he couldn’t beat tooth decay. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting could murder a rock in game of rock paper scissors. Keep on sassing and tap that ❤️ below like it belongs to Sonny Liston.