boxing

By the Way • June 4, 2016

The Greatest, After All

Turns out, he was right about almost everything, ahead of time, on Sonny Liston, the Vietnam War, black grandeur, his own singular majesty. Wrong only, it seems, about the humanity of Joe Frazier. Muhammad Ali ...

Turns out, he was right about almost everything, ahead of time, on Sonny Liston, the Vietnam War, black grandeur, his own singular majesty. Wrong only, it seems, about the humanity of Joe Frazier. Muhammad Ali was The Greatest of all time in Fistiana – maybe; but surely the greatest word-smart, street-smart public intellectual of our time. He was a wit at the level of Alexander Pope, an aphorist at or beyond the perfection of Emerson, Twain or Orwell. Only Donald Trump comes close in self-promotional genius, with the difference that Muhammad Ali’s collected wisdom is a full catalog of generosity, soul, courage and truth.

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I had a touching weekend in Muhammad Ali’s company in the summer of 1980, through our mutual friend, the one-off Tennessee politician John Jay Hooker Jr., who was turning 50. Hooker dressed his crackling mind and heroic ego in three-piece suits, a high-collar cartoon of the old white South. Ali and he made an odd pair, but they’d had discovered a profound kinship, real love for one another. In his corner after “the Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s near-death win against Frazier in 1975, one of the champion’s first gasping notes for TV cameras was that he wanted to thank his friend John Jay Hooker in Nashville — in words to the effect that “he taught me how to hold on.” Hooker was a courtroom performer and fried-chicken entrepreneur who had a long string of political defeats and one unforgettable rally in black Memphis, where Ali had come to endorse him. In the middle of his uproarious speech, Ali turned to the candidate: “By the way, Hooker, what have you ever done for black people?” Hooker jumped up and feasted on the bait: “Muhammad,” he roared, “I’ve always been a big tippah!”

On Hooker’s birthday weekend in 1980 we hung with the retired champ when his Parkinson symptoms were clear but not obtrusive. My three little treasures: that picture, from Ali’s great photographer and best friend, Howard Bingham; then The Joke, and our visit to Meharry Medical School.

“Muhammad’s got a joke,” Ali said, getting back into the car as we toured Nashville on a Sunday afternoon in August.

“What’s the joke, Muhammad,” somebody said, probably Bingham.

“Here’s the joke,” Muhammad said. “What did Abe Lincoln say, coming off a three-day drunk?”

“What did he say, Muhammad?”

“He said: I freed the What?”

Meharry was a main stop on our pilgrimage – second-oldest black medical school in the country, one of the holy places. Ali came to tour a hospital ward and specially to thank the nurses for being there. What sticks is the picture of the longest, most pure-hearted embraces I ever saw. Not just with those electrified nurses, one felt Ali’s mission was to download some of his confidence, some of his own divine spark in the rest of us.

 

Podcast • March 3, 2011

Andre Dubus III: How “The Fighter” Became The Writer

Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill ...


Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill town) becoming, first, a one-punch knockout street fighter, and later a National Book Award finalist for The House of Sand and Fog. Strangely, beautifully, painfully along the way, he finds himself coming into the same demanding vocation — writing — that had drawn his famous father away from a severely neglected family.

The story unfolds in the 1970s along the Merrimack River, just downstream from the scene of Wahlberg’s almost-Oscar movie, “The Fighter.” We’re in the same rough bars with the same wacko clans, hearing the same bad Boston accents — his friend Cleary says he’s always “hawny in the mawning.” As in Dickens, we are confronting social squalor in the home of the great imperial nation and wondering where the glory went — or where it is hiding in the town, even now.

There’s a lot of wondrously authentic energy in Andre Dubus’s voice, on the page and in our conversation. I remarked to him: Townie reads like David Copperfield, with heaps of crystal meth, junk TV, Fritos and Vietnam thrown in. He’s speaking here about his own memory of metamorphosis, as the crysalis of the thug breaks and the artist starts to spread his wings:

It’s something that was semi-conscious, this thought of the membrane in my life, and then became more clarified as I began to describe it in this book. … One thing that I realized, I would see people that weren’t experienced fighters, and they would do this shoving match thing: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Experienced fighters don’t do any foreplay; once they know it’s a fight situation they pound you in the face as hard as they can. … Once you learn how do it, that psychological hymen in you is always broken. You can always do it. Once you break through it you’ll know how to do it and you’ll keep doing it. And that’s the barrier; once you learn to cross that you can fight.

But to the writing: I had a very interesting, strange experience when I first began to write. It felt so familiar, and I couldn’t quite place what it was. But it was another kind of membrane, where I was allowing myself to seep into the being, into the private skin of another, an imaginary other. I had to somehow disappear to become them, in the same way as a fighter. I had to let my fear of my safety disappear and my sense of myself disappear.

Andre Dubus III in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, March 1, 2011.