This past weekend, 65TPT made an eastbound trip to Louisville, Ky., to celebrate the HS Graduation of its author's second-youngest cousin on Dad's side -- not that the educational outcome was ever in doubt, mind you. This kid's so resourceful, he took apart two broken NES systems and wired the working parts together, purely by trial and error, giving birth to a jerry-rigged FrankenTendo, which we used to burn many of the post-midnight hours of the National Memorial Holiday. I guess its tough to relay the importance and sheer heft the celebration had on your humble scribe, but I can't believe the kid is even driving, much less leaving High School in his dust, and looking up at an English Ed. degree at UK.
My, my, don't they grow up fast? I must be getting old.
Anyway, we accomplished more last weekend than downing free food and beer, dominating Contra and River City Ransom, and spilling college-days beans to inquisitive relatives.
We had the good fortune to spend Saturday afternoon at the Ali Center in downtown Luhvul, a five-story shrine to the city's most spectacular athletic product and likely the most influential sports figure these Fifty States have ever seen.
The museum itself, with its intimacy of detail and grandeur of scale, pays fitting tribute to a man who was so much more than fists and feet -- a man whose tenacity, fearlessness, and quick tongue helped amass an aura of invincibility around his undeniably human weaknesses: womanizing, racism, and unabashed pride. Unshakable pride.
Now, there's no doubt that his missteps were highly publicized, and that they were made in the thick midst [and mist] of young stardom. Obviously, Ali suffered more racism than he promoted, but I'm of the opinion that ignorance can't be cured or tempered with more of its kind. Call me a romantic, or a slow-witted and thick-tongued idealist, but those are my sentiments.
In a society that would have just as quickly lynched a flamboyant black man as accepted him, Ali ran his mouth as if he were paid by the word. [History would prove, of course, that prize-fighters are paid by the word -- by every ear that hears them, in fact. Pay-Per-View is a beautiful racket, no? ]
Ever since Mike Tyson's Punch Out first ran on my beloved 8-Bit world-changer, I've appreciated boxing for its beauty and sheer duality. [Unfortunately, the boxing classic was the only game I tried that wouldn't run on Zach's FrankenTendo. The ironies never cease.] The sport's base, carnal nature has always been balanced by the grace and precision necessary to practice the sweet science at its highest level. Heavyweight boxing, despite its recent devolution into a hugfest/slugfest dichotomy, represents the pinnacle of athletic achievement to me, because the "game" itself lends no distinct advantage to one party or the other. It's purely adversarial -- aside from weight restrictions, it's man vs. man.
Forgive my chauvinism of terms, but I'm learning. On the museum's third level, I saw a video of Laila Ali [to scale, no less] that made me gulp hard -- twice. Let's just say I came away with a greater appreciation of the female athlete. Not that the WNBA and it's "Expect Great" ads will totally escape this publication's ire, but that's another post entirely. [Apparently, we in the sports media have pummeled the word "great" into absolute meaninglessness. But that's all I'll say on the subject for now.]
What astounded me most at the Ali Center was the sheer personal depth of the Greatest -- his perspective, and ability to spit his ideals in terms as efficient and biting as lead-eating acid. Plainly put, the man was a poet.
Regardless of the ideals and intentions of the white majority that surrounded and supported him, Ali used the mainstream media to his own ends, and his back-and-forth with Howard Cosell will hopefully live on for decades as television at its best.
Even in his latter years, as Parkinson's robbed him of his razor-sharp tongue, Ali supplied a final immortal sports moment to the posterity of the 20th Century. The nobility and resolve he showed when he willed his visibly trembling hand to light the Olympic torch in Atlanta seem to make his Parkinson's contagious. To this day, the footage of that night renders me speechless and gives me the shakes.
In the end, though, the museum stood for more than Ali's sporting greatness. It was a testament to the man's principles and adherence thereto.
The quote that summed it up, for me, was this.
"I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world."
No comments:
Post a Comment