Volume 45, Number 9 · May 28, 1998
The Wonder Boy
By Gerald Early
Muhammad Ali, as a result of his touching, or poignant, or pathetic, or tragic (take your pick) appearance at the torch-lighting ceremony at the 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta, has become, for new generations that did not grow up with him and for the older generations that did, the Great American Martyr, our new Lincoln, our new Martin Luther King, Our Father Abraham, Our Father Martin, Our Father Muhammad: the man whose hands, once unerring pistons of punishment in the prize ring, tremble from boxing-induced Parkinson's disease; the man whose voice is such a slurred whisper that he, who was once called the Louisville Lip because he loved talking so much, does not like to speak in public and rarely does; the once-uncompromising black nationalist now reduced, like Orson Welles at the end, to performing magic tricks for the crowd as if he were parodying his own pop-culture greatness, exposing it as an illusion, just as his nationalism had been, just as his cultist/religious self had been. Everything in popular culture throbs with impermanence, its significance threatened by the triteness it cannot hide, by the banality it bloats into eminence through a personality that blends the public and the private. And no one embodied American popular culture, its excesses, its barbarities, and its disarming densities, more than Muhammad Ali.
Feature, 5743 words
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