Sam Leith: Muhammad Ali, the man with the killer blows and punchlines

Tribute:'Muhammad Ali made you love him'
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Sam Leith6 June 2016
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Ten years ago, when his collection District and Circle came out, I interviewed Seamus Heaney at his home in Dublin. He spoke admiringly of a number of poets — Yeats, of course, but also Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stevens and... Muhammad Ali. His face creased with delight as he quoted the poem Ali delivered extempore at a lecture in Harvard in 1975: “Me? Whee!”

Nobody, perhaps, has ever made egotism so attractive as Ali. Nobody has dissed others so charmingly and so without rancour. George Foreman said: “Muhammad Ali made you love him... I wanted to beat him and knock him out but I loved the man.” This is the Foreman of whom Ali said: “I’ve seen George Foreman shadowboxing — and the shadow won!”

What made Ali so captivating was not the speed of his fists, of course, but the sharpness of his wit. There was such a lightness to him — such mirth — in a trade where the currency is punches in the face and an America where, for a poor black man growing up in the South, there was little to be mirthful about.

He was witty even when he was angry. His refusal of the draft for Vietnam can barely be bettered as a compressed expression of feeling: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? [...] I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. So what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.” Go through that with a rhetorician’s eye and you see erotema, antithesis, tricolon — perfectly balanced sentences, and a killer pay-off. The pay-off is a joke: an angry joke but a joke nevertheless. A punchline.

It was only when I saw When We Were Kings — the 1996 documentary film about the fight with Foreman — that I appreciated that you could be witty even in a boxing ring. I’d thought boxing was, more or less, a matter of two men beating the hell out of each other until the one with the least severe brain damage was crowned the victor. But in that film George Plimpton and Norman Mailer, years after the event, could recall the fight punch by punch. They explained with extraordinary clarity how Ali beat Foreman by soaking up damage and tiring the stronger man out. You got the powerful sense, as a viewer of that film, of how boxing could take place in the mind rather than the fists. There’s a special cruelty that Parkinson’s took him.

Heaney’s friend, Ted Hughes, once wrote to his son: “As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.” Ali — though far from a saint — certainly did that.

Muhammad Ali - In pictures

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A man of many written words — but few spoken

To the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday to see the American novelist Don DeLillo interviewed on stage by my old colleague Alex Clark.

This was a rare thing. He says he’s not reclusive but “private”, and he guards that privacy carefully. I had the good fortune to be at a dinner for DeLillo the last time he was here, in 2003, and he was the quietest person in the room. Thirteen years on, at a drinks reception before the event, DeLillo’s publisher gave an effusive speech about what he called the author’s “masterpiece”, the new novel Zero K. DeLillo himself looked pained.

Then it was his turn to say a few words. He said five: “Can I go home now?” Everyone laughed. Don stepped gently aside. No joke. Writers are perpetually expected to explain themselves these days. Mr DeLillo takes the admirable line, following Pontius Pilate: “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” What I’ve written, I’ve written.

Put a cork in it and promote these people

Staff at the South Kensington nightclub Boujis have been caught on camera merrily refilling £360 bottles of Dom Perignon with £9 prosecco, and £260 bottles of Grey Goose vodka with £10 Imperial before sending them out front.

A shrewd cost-cutting measure, you might think. The club’s parent company, Ignite, has issued a stern statement, saying it had no knowledge of this initiative by its staff and would like to “take action against those responsible”.

I’d think a promotion would be in order: imagine a member of staff on a fixed salary, selflessly and anonymously risking prosecution for fraud simply to increase the profits to his employer!

Also, how delightful that none of the red-trousered idiots paying £360 for a bottle of fizzy wine in a darkened room Prince Harry was once in actually noticed that the stuff in their glass was plonk.

This is surely the ultimate victimless crime.

Chilcot nails the guilty ones

It’s reported that Alastair Campbell — widely seen as the prime mover behind the so-called “Dodgy Dossier” that took us to war in Iraq — will escape censure in the Chilcot Inquiry.

There will likely be a rumpus about this but it seems to me to make sense. However influential Mr Campbell may have been at the heart of government, he was, finally, a press officer.

The responsibility for making policy was not his — and if it turns out that it was, then blame lies with those who gave him that influence.

“I was just following orders” is no defence in this sort of matter. “I was just following orders from my employee” is outright pathetic.

Chilcot’s job is to go for the organ- grinder, not the monkey. Early indications are that he’s done just that. Good on him.

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