Love of The Greatest:
Book Etches Permanent Memorial for Superstar
Reviewed by Vincent F. A. Golphin
The Muhammad Ali Reader
Edited by Gerald Early
The ECCO Press, 320 pages
ISBN 0-88001-602-7, $26
The book's glossy dust cover says it all. Actually, it has no words; just a dimly lit, black-and-white head shot. No matter, few will have trouble recognizing Muhammad Ali.
As was clear when he lit the flame at the 1996 Olympics, the former, two-time, heavyweight, boxing champ man has been out of the ring for more than fifteen years, but he is still the greatest. The self-appointed ambassador of peace and justice once declared himself, "the greatest." This collection of 30 articles shows the nation finally agrees.
Serious students of the national character should add The Muhammad Ali Reader to their collections. Norman Mailer said it first: Ali is the spirit of the 20th Century. The book proves it.
As an American Bookseller review says the champ "remains an iconographic presence that writers of every stripe have spent 30 years trying to understand and articulate." As editor, Gerald Early, who won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle award for "The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture," brings 35 years of social, political and psychological analysis and commentary about the man to bear. The reader get a more three-dimensional look at the boxing phenomenon, but the image is incomplete. Muhammad Ali, despite his struggle against the crippling effects of Parkinson's disease, remains more than a man.
Thomas Wolfe's 1963 essay, "The Marvelous Mouth," reminds readers of the arrogant, young fighter who toppled ex-champ Sonny Liston, and other opponents, was as much an actor as athlete. Gordon Parks' 1966 Life magazine profile, "The Redemption of the Champ," weaves in the hesitant admiration in many African-American hearts.
"There was a side to this brash, poetry-spouting kid that I admired," wrote Parks. "I was not proud of him as I had been proud of Joe Louis. Muhammad was a gifted black champion and I (ital)wanted (end ital) him to be a hero, but he wasn't making it."
Cassius Marcellus Clay, the grandson of a slave, was determined to break the bonds that held most African Americans in the 1960s. He was a craftsman in the ring with a tongue and mind as sharp as a razor. The Louisville native was twelve when he punched his way into the fight game and racked up 108 bouts in the first six years. He was not the soft-spoken, mannerly Joe Louis or Floyd Patterson. He refused to be grateful to the white-run nation for a title shot. The champ was bold and taunting, like the hated Jack Johnson, a feared dominator.
Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's color line, says he might be one of the greatest heavyweight champions this country has ever produced, in a short piece that ran in the Pittsburgh Courier in March 1967. That was at the height of the furor over Ali's refusal to go to the Vietnam War, his conversion to Islam and alliance with Malcolm X. "One thing is certain," wrote Robinson. "He is the most hated. . . . He is hated because he speaks his mind."
Ali tormented those who came to see him defeated. As Cassius Clay was reborn into Muhammad Ali, the boxer became a metaphor for the black American freedom struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. Converting to Islam and changing his name were the visible signs of a deepening commitment to a different kind of manhood. The more Ali became convinced he was great, the more he realized a debt to his people.
"We black people could become freer sooner than you think if all the athletes and entertainers . . . took a walk through the ghetto one day and told the white man, ' We're with these people and we ain't going to sell out anymore,'" the champ says in an excerpted interview from Black Scholar.
In the end, he made the foes into fans. "The brash rap-style egoism of young Cassius Clay underwent a considerable transformation during Ali's long public career, yet strikes us, perhaps, as only altered in tone," Joyce Carol Oates writes in a passage from "On Boxing," a 1994 book. "Mystically involved in the nation of Islam, Ali sincerely believes himself an international emissary for peace, love, and understanding (he who once wreaked such violence upon his opponents!); and who is to presume to feel sorry for one who will not fell sorry for himself."
The book's assembled pieces assure the man and the legend will not be forgotten. Ali remains a part of the nation's spirit because he sees no limits. He stood up to the nation and his race in defense of righteousness. He embraced blackness and Islam, when the smart thing would have been to remain a colored Christian. He put his greatest accomplishment, the title, on the line without a flinch. When others doubted, he demonstrated excellence to win it back. Even illness does not bring him down.
Ali emerges a hero. Even when the boxer lost, the man was never defeated.
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In a spirited conversation with a former student, I once described golf as, "a haven for rich, fat, balding white men from their equally chubby wives." The comment was neither fair nor true, but a hate to lose a verbal joust. Well, to be more precise, golf has an image as a white sport, but Calvin H. Sinnette's "Forbidden Fairways: African Americans and the Game of Golf" brings us the rest of the story. African Americans have played the game since the 1780s.
African Americans used the manicured landscapes of golf courses -- along with every other avenue in U.S. society -- as a path to push for equality. It was another means to show skin color meant difference, not a lack of skill or brains. The 200-page, "Forbidden Fairways," chronicles an outstanding but largely unknown line of black men and women caddies, trainers, golfers, course designers and golf course owners from the sports emergence on U.S. soil. As expected, the story comes to a high point, not an end, with international phenom Tiger Woods, who vaulted and smashed the sports "white-only" facade with a 1997 Masters Tournament championship.
Golfers and lovers of the game will find a few surprises in the book. It fills a void. Not much has been published about black golfers, and the author goes to a great deal of effort to cover the subject from many angles. For the unintiated like me, every chapter of Forbidden Fairways offers revelations.
Some of the choicest:
-- A Boston African-American dentist, George Franklin Grant, patented the first golf tee in December 1899.
-- Slaves were caddies in the 1790s and likely sneaked chances to play. Eventually, many began to master the sport.
-- The greatest African-American golfers learned as caddies.
-- Black golfers' struggles for equal access paralleled the national bid for civil rights. "The African American tried to the utmost to participate in all areas of human endeavor, and some excelled in the process," Sinnette writes. "Certainly there were blacks who caddied, but that was not their sole involvement with the sport."
-- The military's role in expanding golf interest and access among African Americans.
-- Four of what was once more than thirty black-owned U.S. golf courses still exist.
The author, a long-time golfer and retired Northern Virginia pediatrician, writes smartly and energetically about the game. He does not sugarcoat the bigoted attitudes still held by some white golfers. Sinnette notes that even today some golf courses in this country bar African Americans from play. The game remains no different from the society in which it is played, yet the painful reminders are balanced with Sinnette's hope-filled forecast of increasing interest and excellence among African-American golfers. That should not surprise most readers.
Tiger Woods is the first to admit his phenomenal success is built on the strength of centuries of black golf-lovers denied full access to competition. It was his father Earl Wood's love of the links and a never-give-up spirit honed during a military career combined with a willingness to sacrifice anything to refine his son's raw ability, that crafted Tiger.
The book in no way tries to blackface golf. Sinnette acknowledges it as a largely white past-time. After all, as readers will learn, golf originated as leisure for Scottish kings. Scot and English immigrants dragged the tradition with them to this side of the Atlantic. The urge to whack at the little white ball grew among the population, so how could African Americans resist?
"It is most unlikely that we shall ever discover the identity of the first African American to swing a golf club," states Sinnette. He speculates that Georgia and South Carolina slaves used as caddies in the sport's "dark ages" were the first to try. It was a natural match, slaveowners often looked to bondsmen to do the rough stuff in southern life. Old-time golf courses were rugged. Black slave caddies lugged the equipment over primitive hills and fairways often carved out of public lands. They acted as "finders," chasing balls and spotters, yelling "fore" to warn pedestrians of an impending shot. After play, slaves cleaned the clubs. He speculates that is when some tried their luck.
Sinnette says while owners were in their post-game cups, "was an ideal, but probably perilous, opportunity for a slave to secretly test his master's golf equipment." A slave caught golfing (an act of betrayal or, at least, dangerous ambition) could be beaten, sold or even killed at a master's discretion. The risk is clear, most slaveowners resented blacks who took on white manners. Yet, this was one of the few facts for which Sinnette offers no documentation. "Considering human nature," he asserts, "it would be naïve to think otherwise." In an otherwise thoroughly researched work that seems cheap grace.
As golf gained more widespread participation, after the Civil War into the 1890s, Boston black dentist George Franklin Grant joined the crowd. More than that, he built a course in the meadow next to his country home in Arlington Heights, Massachusetts. Sinnette states Grant's daughter, Frances, caddied for him in the 1880s. His African-American playing partners included civil rights activist Archibald Grimke, Howard Lee, a restaurteur and Butler Wilson, an 1884 Boston Law School graduate.
Grant's 1889 invention of the wooden tee was one of the first steps away from the primitive conditions of early play. Golfers once used a small mound of sand to set up the ball. Yet, it took nearly a century (until 1991) for the sports establishment, the United States Golf Association, to acknowledge the gift. That is one of many tales of racial discrimination in the history's underside.
Sinnette takes the reader name by name, age by age through Africans' ups and downs in the U.S. golf scene. Everything from the travails of Joseph Bartholomew, who designed New Orleans area golf courses on which he could not play, to the double struggles of Ann Gregory, the first black woman to enter a USGA event. He tracks the sport's effusion into the historically black colleges and in black-owned newspapers and magazines. In the end, Forbidden Fairways unveils a portrait of near triumph.
Sinnette believes the sport of golf, as opposed to individuals in it, is ready to absorb African Americans as equals. The World Golf Foundation's establishment of 'The First Tee' program and the USGA's 'For the Good of the Game' program aim to push non-white youngsters into the game. He says First Tee plans to build 100 golf facilities, to bring 1,000 new players a year to the sport. The USGA's $50 million, 10-year program hopes to make the costly sport more accessible to interested amateurs of any budget. "Both programs," he declares, "are long overdue and if they fulfill their expectations, they could help significantly to increase the pool of younger minority golfers."
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W.E.B. DuBois once said blacks and whites in this country stand on opposite sides of a "veil." Most whites don't see it, but there is a thin, delicate shade that obscures the huge gap between most African Americans and what society sees in them. The nearly transparent cloak is a survival reflex -- being what "the man" expects -- crafted from centuries of experience. It's a hedge against the racism that causes many of their fellow citizens to greet them with fear or rejection. Most blacks work hard to gain credit as contributors to the "the melting pot," far too many Americans of other hues still see the race as a slimy refuse to be scraped off the top. So, African Americans shrink behind the veil. Their voices are stilled, but not Bruce A. Jacobs.
The author who strode onto the larger literary stage last year with the publication of "Speaking Through My Skin," the 1998 Naomi Long Madgett prize-winning poetry collection, is back as an essayist. More, "Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans," shows the Harvard-trained scribe wants to be a peacemaker in a racial cold war most honest U.S. citizens consider unstoppable. The publisher, Arcade, declares the 208-page monologue a spur for black-white conversation. The only drawback is that the book raises more questions than answers.
Jacobs acknowledges that most people don't want to talk about race. Still, he says, we must, if only to survive. "The flat-out strangeness about race in America has long made me wish that someone had written a book -- as in a guidebook for tourists, or anyone who needs to be informed about the flora and fauna of a region -- that could lay bare everyday racial behavior and make sense of it," the author writes. It would be great to have a how-to on what Studs Terkel call, the American obsession. Millions of words have been penned on the subject, but Jacobs' are no more effective. He hits all of the key sights: white women clutching purses in the presence of black men; black women bristling at white women who date black men; white drivers eyeing black squeegee kids; whites and blacks who shy away from race talk because they see each other as either too sensitive or too ignorant to make the risk worthwhile. Maybe it's because I'm black, but I didn't find his insights on such experiences any more directive than others. Although, he says it better than most.
Jacobs' writing makes Race Manners a worthy read. The nimble prose can inspire any word-lover. Wordsmiths will be impressed with what he can do. Add the occasional deep insight on black-white interactions, and the 16-essay collection rises to the level of engaging. Many readers will find themselves turning pages with eagerness. Some might feel a tinge of anger when it ends.
Jacobs' personal accounts of jousts and slights in race-conscious America hits home hard. They replay moments most blacks and whites greet with familiarity. For example, in the chapter, "'Hey, Yo!:' Black Talk, White Talk and the Color of Speech," he details the type casting that occurs around black speech. As he explains, many whites expect blacks to talk like the hip-hop, African-American clowns on Fox and WB sitcoms. When reality differs, they get confused.
Jacobs tells of a white video production company representative who, after weeks of phone conversations, failed to realize he is black. When they met, the man walked past Jacobs, vigorously shaking hands with the authors' white co-worker. "He was utterly confident this was the man who had hired him," the author states. "And he was utterly embarrassed when he learned otherwise. Like so many others, he held racial preconceptions about authority." It is that sense of outrage that rates a reader's attention and tugs at the emotion.
The book's weakest points are where Jacobs tries to cast the world through white eyes. He does this in an effort to shape even-handed discussions. The problem is he too is unable to pierce some veils. For example, "Elvis Has Not Left the Building," begins with two clear concepts:
1. The former "king" of rock n roll re-packaged a black product for a white market.
2. Elvis was a great artist.
Those thoughts lead him to assert: "The answer is for blacks and whites to come to some kind of mutual acknowledgment of Elvis. I'm not suggesting we need town meetings on Elvis. Just truthful confrontation. … When blacks and whites mix, they maneuver around Elvis, without comment, as if he were an elephant in our living room. When the blacks leave the room, whites dance with the elephant; when the whites leave, blacks laugh at it. It's all very dysfunctional." This is the nature of racism.
"Race Manners" is a weak invite to a conversation that only seems to exist as confrontation. The author admits he only points to questions that should be raised, rather than offer solutions. What he does not seem to understand is most Americans don't want to be involved. The average American feels he or she can do as much about racism as the weather.
© 1999 by Vincent F. A. Golphin; all rights reserved
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