maybe not …
Cassius Clay
Mohammad Ali
The Louisville Lip
The greatest boxer
The beguiling entertainer
The chap with clay feet—he was great, and not.
Love him or not, the man who died as Muhammad Ali on 3 June 2016 was more than a pugilist, much more.
The American sports journalist, Robert Lipsyte, writes, ‘Along the way he [Ali] made us laugh, curse, cheer, and cry. Most important, he made us brave.’[i]
The boxing ring was merely Ali’s platform to tell provocative stories and to ask unbearable questions, perhaps sometimes unknowingly.
Many of the stories he told and the questions he asked have not yet been resolved—about war and peace, race and class, power and privilege.
As 3 June 2024 came and went, I remembered Ali in his finest moments, and they were not in the ring, even if there were great feats.
On this day, as I re-read the powerful obituary penned by Lipsyte a good few years ago, I recognised how Ali is all of us, and all of us are Ali.
Yes, I remember his public feats and his failings; the latter often towards people closest to him, his family, and those who he had influence over.
Each of us is great, and not-so-great; it depends on how we tackle each Leadership Moment, day in and day out, large and smaller.
Ali might be the greatest (boxer) of all time, but that is not our story.
Yes, he is indeed a boxing legend and a man who created the possible out of the impossible in his boxing life.
He was also a master of the gab, an ability to spin his story.
However, I reckon that much of what he said was tongue-in-cheek, jest, his mouth running away from his mind, and plain entertainment.
The good, the bad, and the ugly…
Ali’s story is about how even the greatest of us at Influential Leadership at one moment might also fail, not fall as we all do, but fail.
To fail means to keep doing the same unproductive thing over and over without learning, without overcoming the hazard, without changing direction and behaviour.
Falling is fine in leadership, failing is not.
So, let us juxtapose a great Ali Leadership Moment, with an abject failure.
Ali rejected his military draft papers to join the American War against Vietnam.
He stated that he ‘had nothing against the Viet Cong on the other side of the world’; that they had never called him a ‘nigger’ as had American citizens who thought he was too vocal and cocky.
By rejecting the draft Ali was stripped of his boxing title, fined and barred from obtaining a boxing license.
That might have been the end of his boxing career, in his prime.
It was not.
Ali went back to the ring three years later after a successful appeal case.
He subsequently won the world title back, twice, before he left the ring for good.
Here we have a man who applies a sound principle that has significant human, social and economic costs for them.
By choosing not to go to war, not to be coerced to murder people who have done him no harm, he paid a huge price.
Lipsyte puts it this way.
For half a century, whether or not we wanted to go, Muhammad Ali took us … for a wondrous ride in which we made him a symbol of the resistance to war, of the racial struggle, of the individual standing up to establishment pressure.
… his willingness to sacrifice money and career for principle, started him on a path to widespread public redemption [and] a great athlete of principle who taught the world to be proud and brave.
But, sadly, there is another side.
The other side, the side on which he was an utter failure was his, to put it diplomatically, enduring and endless ‘womanising’.
Ali had a face and a bearing and success that made him easily liked. And he liked women, we are told, a lot of them, a lot of the time.
Lipsyte and others tell it their own way, and we must consume their words as accurate reflections of the facts.
These seedy stories of his philandering are not of a principled man, an honourable person, and a man with a sense of personal responsibility and integrity.
At these multiple Leadership Moments, when faced with the power of his status and personality, Ali fell and fell until he failed.
It is with a heavy heart that I re-read these stories because I don’t want to know that the Greatest is not. I respect him for opposing and exposing the prevailing social and political systems, but must also acknowledge his feet were made of clay, like each of us.
The man who refused to go to war, to kill and maim and hurt people far away was guilty of disrespecting those close to him, and thus set an unproductive example far and wide.
Ali was great in one area, yet flawed in another.
Ali’s story is also ours, each of us.
So, what are the Leadership lessons for us?
There are, of course many, but I offer just two:
- Influential Leadership is tough because we are only a success if our last Leadership Moment was a success. We must tackle each Leadership Moment in each part of our lives—public and private, at work and at home, at play and in the supermarket queue. Everywhere.
- All of us are pretty much the same, whether we are global personalities, or private people going about our lives. Some of us have further to fall than others, and some more publicly, but we each face our Leadership Moments. We shall each fall, that is life, but we must not fail.
How should we think of Ali?
What is his legacy?
A final sense of Muhammad Ali in his own words.
Lipsyte writes that ‘Ali himself was rather modest in his demands on posterity. In a 1975 Playboy interview, he offered how he would like to be remembered:
“As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could … I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”
Keep your senses on all your Leadership Moments, tackle each one, they all count.
If you fall, it is fine, just don’t let falling turn into failure.
Have the Greatest Leadership week!
Regards,
Colin @ Karoo
We Activate Apex Skills!
Leadership Weekly Note: 2424.100624
e: colind@karoo.world
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