Ali’s treatment of Frazier has become the strongest argument against his sainthood, the one flaw that can’t be placed within some favorable context. The evidence — whether Ali’s repeated insistence that Frazier was an Uncle Tom or the highly publicized news conference where he rhymed, “It’ll be a killer and a chiller and a thriller when I get the gorilla in Manila,” and punched at a tiny toy ape — is incontrovertible and can’t be explained away as mere prefight banter. (Frazier certainly didn’t see it that way.) If Ali was so dedicated to the dignity of Black people, why did he belittle Frazier in such a cruel and relentless manner, especially in front of an almost entirely white press corps?
The earliest Ali hagiographies either poked lightly at these ugly incidents or ignored them completely. But that trend has shifted recently, especially with Kram’s book and the release of 2011’s “When the Smoke Clears,” a sympathetic documentary about Frazier. Burns, for his part, employs his usual evenhanded tone, but he devotes an unusual amount of time to the topic, which doesn’t necessarily reflect Burns’s opinion on the issue but rather how much this criticism has entered the Ali consensus.
Most people don’t care about any of this, though. Burns also seems ambivalent about what Ali actually said, outside of those sound bites everyone knows, most of which address his greatness inside the ring. For a film that’s almost eight hours long, it doesn’t have much about Ali’s thoughts on American politics, aside from a clip in which he says he agrees with the segregationist George Wallace and the famed quote about the Vietcong. That type of precise editing runs through most Aliology: We know Ali stood against racism, but do we really know much beyond that?
Gandhi, for his part, was not so obscured at the time when Orwell wrote about him, but even his stated principles had begun to fade into an image of a gaunt man in robes. In “Reflections,” Orwell was trying to revive Gandhi’s actual ideas, some of which, like asceticism and the disavowal of close friends, Orwell did not particularly like. But these, like many of Gandhi’s ideas, were both prescriptive and political: He was asking you to do something.
Ali, by contrast, was an athlete with a loyal following of famous writers, whether Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson or Gay Talese, who asked the reader to believe that his speed, grace and bravado inside the ring were also somehow political, which, I suppose they were, but not in any prescriptive way.
The odd thing about American sainthood is that we seem to prefer those who, like Ali and Jackie Robinson, did not engage directly in the dirty world of politics but rather stood as trailblazers or icons in sports or Hollywood. Or, as in the case of King, if we cannot ignore their political contributions, we strip their critiques of all the specifics and present them, too, as images and sound bites.