Muhammad Ali: The unparalleled showman

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For any other cultural icon — and Muhammad Ali surely was one, every bit as much as he was a towering figure in boxing history — it would be deliciously goofy enough to say he took his cues as a showman from Gorgeous George, wrestling’s human orchid. We know by now, however, that there was always something extra when Ali was involved, something no one expected. So it was with the role model whose intimates called him G.G. while his valet spritzed him with cologne and he sprayed his opponents with insults.

Ali found himself under the same spell as Liberace, who copied the sequined robes that G.G. wore into the ring, and Little Richard, who must have shouted Awomp-bomp-aloobomb-aloop-bamboom! the first time he laid eyes on the gorgeous one’s strut and the waves his hairdresser put in his hair. Better still, Ali was in the same sentence as those two preening piano pounders, a sentence that instantly became sacred to devotees of the outrageous. But what could easily have been a nesting place for him turned out to be a launching pad. Once he achieved liftoff, running his mouth the way Gorgeous George did yet adding his own unique spin, there wasn’t anyone who flew as high as Ali.

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You can measure the altitude he reached by thinking of all the people who hated him in the beginning — “Who’s this Cassius Clay think he is, calling himself ‘The Greatest?'” — and ended up cheering for him, weeping for him, lionizing him. Or you can consider the multitude of young athletes, strapping specimens from every sport, who have been deluded enough to try to match his bombast. What these pretenders fail to realize is that Ali possessed a genius that was his and his alone — nothing from a textbook, mind you, but a chemical composition of instinct, wit, looks, and the light that never went out in his eyes. “He glowed,” said Angelo Dundee, his trainer for a lifetime. “He really glowed.”

Surprisingly for a subject so unabashedly fond of himself, Ali needed time to realize just how much of a show he was capable of putting on. He had done some big talking when he won his gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960, but his voice didn’t carry as far once Dundee began guiding him through his on-the-job training as a professional heavyweight. Dundee understood why: “My guy, he was an introvert.” Even with an ego big enough to subdivide, it would take inspiration and ingenuity for Ali to turn himself into the most memorable character ever to come off the assembly line of sports.

His future appeared before him one June evening in 1961 when he was still doing business as Cassius Clay and found himself on the same Las Vegas TV show as George Wagner, otherwise known as Gorgeous George. They were there to hype their respective main events, on back-to-back nights, in the same convention center. After young Cassius offered up a couple of predictable boasts, George seized center stage and didn’t turn loose of it until he had promised to crawl down Las Vegas Boulevard on his hands and knees if he lost — but of course that would never happen because he was the king of the wrestling universe. Dundee looked over at his tiger and saw a kid who looked like he had just been handed the keys to a factory-fresh Cadillac El Dorado. “We gotta go see this guy,” Cassius said.

Angelo Dundee knew just how hard …

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