Posted 8:33 AM by Paul
Ali

A couple of weeks ago The Observer published a special supplement on Mohamed Ali and I have justed posted it down to Noel in Madrid. He did a bit of boxing in the Army and has always been an enthusiastic fight fan since he was a boy. I know he will enjoy it. Leafing one last time through the beautiful photos of the greatest heavywieght of all time brought back memories of another age. For a moment I was a boy of 7 sat on the corner of the bed listening to the first Cooper - Clay ( it was before he changed his name ) fight with Dad on the old valve radio: a plate a cheese sandwiches and a pot of tea on a tray on the floor. Dad was amazed by Ali's speed and agility and reckoned him the best boxer in history.

I know all the negative aspects of the Ali story - the segregationist view that races should never mix. The Black Moslems insane belief that the White race had been created by an evil scientist. The strange unsolved murder of Malcolm X.

But even, so there was - and is - something inspiring about the man. Something beyond and above his time. People look back at the 60s as a better age but I wonder. When Ali became champion there were still states in the US where we could not have eaten a sandwich at the same lunch counter. Or he would have been told to stand up for a white man on a bus. Ali opened the Atlanta Games in 1996 but in the 1963 he came across an ageing Jersey Joe Walcott holed up in his hotel in Baltimore eating a sandwich afraid to go out lest he was attacked by whites resentful of his desire to sit in a restaurant. A man who has fought for his country and been the champion of the world could not sit down for a meal without the threat of violence. Some things have got better.

When we look back at those times I think we should be struck not by the radicalism of black Americans but by their patience and their patriotism.