Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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By fight night, Ali looked sedated. He was Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For ten rounds, Holmes hit him. Over and over. In round nine, Ali screamed. Ali didn’t fight back, couldn’t fight back. But he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go down. Holmes kept looking at the referee, he wanted him to stop the fight. He wouldn’t. Eventually Angelo Dundee, Ali’s long-time trainer, threw in the towel. Holmes cried.

I remember when highlights of the fight were shown on television. Not so much the details of what happened, more my father’s response to the fight. I had little to no conception of Ali’s full history, the 1960 Olympics, the poetry, Henry Cooper, Liston, the Nation of Islam, the Vietnam War, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’. My father cherished Ali’s defiance and willingness to confront mainstream America, to defeat white America. If the Black-British footballers in the seventies, often victims of abuse from crowds, had symbolised what black people were going through in their everyday lives, Ali had been emblematic of what we could be. He did not bow when criticised for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and converting to Islam. He did not bow when he had been threatened with jail and lost his world titles because he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He had been the highest profile athlete across the globe, yet he did not minimise his politics to attain or retain fame. He used his platform to highlight the plight of black people across the globe. With black history having been bleached, silenced and obscured, in education, on television, Ali was our great hero, our great king, a symbol of a heritage that had been denied, the black messiah.