Athletes knew their place, never venturing beyond the sphere of their respective vocation. It didn't matter what they thought or what they believed. Just hit the baseball. Just shoot the basketball. Conviction took a back seat to convention. The black athlete, specifically, silently and subserviently played the role of peaceful indifference. Somehow insulated from the injustices of the larger racial community because of the privileges of sport.
And then came Muhammad Ali.
His death at age 74 late Friday night claimed one of the last monuments to the most turbulent period in American history _ the '60s.
It's true that history has a way of placing the right people in the right time with the right message. Ali intersected the two biggest political, social crises of that period _ the civil rights movement and growing dissent over the proliferation of the Vietnam War. His effortless charm and engaging intellect meshed perfectly with the growing presence of television news during that decade.
The '60s shook America from its comfort zone. The horrific visuals of law enforcement officials taking water hoses and attack dogs to its own citizenry simply because they sought equality and the senseless destruction of both American and Asian lives in a confounding conflict 10,000 miles away came into our living rooms every night.
Maybe we weren't the country we thought.
And a brash, boastful boxer from Louisville, Ky., with quick feet and an equally fast mind tapped into that collective reevaluation.
Ali ruled at a time when boxing was America's top sport. And its heavyweight champion was a larger than life figure. But he wasn't a demurring Joe Louis from 20 years earlier. Ali fit the generational upheaval of the '60s. There was a militancy intent on forcing change under the insurgent's terms. As some described him, he was the Beatles with boxing gloves.
The athlete now had a strong voice. The force of Ali's impact made his successors less hesitant about using that voice.
Ali defied the rules of acceptance. He saw what others pretended didn't exist. He saw the parallel between Vietnam and civil rights. It wasn't the white college students from well-to-do families marching on campuses with protest banners fighting the war. It was the poor and uneducated. He was vilified for applying the principles of religious freedom that forged this nation in making his case not to serve in Vietnam in 1967. He joined Islam. He changed his name. He was branded a traitor, a coward, a revolutionary. Only because he was doing something different, something unfamiliar.
And it scared people.
Nearly 50 years later, how much has really changed in regards to fears that Muslims are somehow not like the rest of us?
But Ali served as one of the best examples that freedom isn't free. He lost three years of his boxing career prime fighting the United States government as well as various state boxing commissions that wouldn't license him.
Ali never sacrificed his sense of right and wrong. That's his legacy. Not his poetry. Not winning, losing, winning, losing and then winning the world heavyweight championship a third time. He paved the path for other sports stars of that period, such as Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, among others, to appreciate that there was a greater responsibility for the black athlete. There was a necessity in using the forum afforded them through their athletic prowess to address far more important issues than sky hooks and rushing records.
Ali and Jackie Robinson were the two iconic American athletes of the 20th Century.
Robinson changed how we saw sports.
Ali changed how we saw the sportsman.
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