LOUISVILLE, KY. (WDRB) -- I usually wait for the reminders to hit home several times, like so many combinations the man threw, so fast they seemed over before they began.
It was long before I began driving to work in an office on Muhammad Ali Boulevard in Louisville that I started making these mental collections -- noting how many times I would pass Muhammad Ali in a given week, decades after his fights had faded into documentary-style footage, more history than highlight.
Ali is a frequent part of life in this city, and not just because a street bears his name, nor even because his Muhammad Ali Center rises above the banks of the Ohio River. When someone's name becomes so commonplace, it's easy to pass it undetected. Even when his boyhood home wound up for sale, I thought little more of Ali's ever-expanding reach, even in the grip of Parkinson's disease.
Then came the combination. I walked above the weight room at the University of Louisville football complex and there was Ali, the largest image in the room, his words exhorting the Cardinals' football players: "The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, behind the lines in the gym and out there on the road long before I dance under those lights."
A punch landed.
The opening ceremonies of the London Olympics were marching along and then paused, with the Olympic flag, long enough for a white-suited Ali to reach out and touch it, lending that historic presence once more to the historic event.
A punch landed.
Moving out of my former office, at The Courier-Journal, I came across a commemorative Ali section, its date not present anywhere. There was no advertising. But there was greatness on every page -- and not just because of the fighter. There was original artwork from Herman Weiderwhol on the cover. There were pieces inside by Billy Reed, Dave Kindred, even Howard Cosell himself.
There appeared to be no news "peg." The paper simply had great talent, and a great subject, and wanted to put out a great commemoration. It did. Consider these words of Kindred's:
We forgive Muhammad Ali his excesses because we see in him someone we would like to be. In all of us a child lives. The child laughs and cries. He asks for the sweets of the world as if they were his alone, and he begs in a hundred ways, a thousand ways, for the attention that is a guarantee of love. We grow old with this child in us and we pretend the child is gone, for we are told to put aside childish things.
Muhammad Ali is the child in all of us, and if he is foolish or cruel, if he is arrogant, if he is outrageously in love with his reflection, we forgive him because we no more can condemn him than condemn a rainbow for dissolving in the dusk.
And the child is good.
Punch. Landed.
Tonight, in Philadelphia, they gave Ali a medal. It is one of the more prestigious awards given in this nation, the Liberty Medal, awarded by the National Constitution Center. And it chose Ali on a significant night, celebrating the 225th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution.
It would've been unthinkable that Ali ever would receive such an award, particularly when he was arrested for draft evasion in 1967. A lot of people will never forgive Ali for not only refusing to join the Armed Forces when called, but for speaking out against the war and the American society at the time.
But that freedom to speak, and the courage to do it, is what the Constitution Center was honoring, not so much for what Ali said during the 1960s, nor during his boxing career, but every day since, or at least, until his voice was taken from him. And that he would be the one honored in this historic year says as much about the strength of the U.S. Constitution as it does anyone who would rise up in support or dissent.
"As the Liberty Medal recipient during this historic year for the Constitution, Muhammad Ali represents how far we have come as a nation and the spirit of determination, ambition, and civic service that will propel America forward for 225 more years and beyond," said Doug DeVos, Chairman of the Constitution Center's executive committee.
Cosell, the lawyer turned loud-mouth sports commentator, knew all this was coming before any of us.
"The first point I would want to make about Muhammad Ali," his piece in that Courier-Journal section began, "is that he has been, almost from the beginning, transcendental to sport. He is in fact a figure of legal history, of constitutional law history, and he is, in point of fact, a world figure and he has been from the very day that he rejected military induction."
Another punch lands.
Four years ago, I wrote a similar remembrance to this one, after a similar set of circumstances. A team had used Ali has inspiration in the NBA Finals. The U.S. Ryder Cup team was using him. Two children's books had just been published about him.
Today he is slowed by Parkinson's, yet he still floats and stings, from places you do not expect. The more silent he has become, the louder his life has spoken, with many drawing meaning from it that is different from one perspective to the next.
The only punches Ali throws anymore are playful pokes into the air.
But they still hit home.
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