Ali, The Poet

Tags

1960s, boxing, muhammad ali, peyton manning, poetry, sports, the greatest, tom brady, writing

I’m not old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was in his fighting prime, but I’ve always enjoyed watching old film clips and documentaries about him in those days. I especially love the poems he would write and share with the press before big fights. In addition to being the greatest boxer in the world, he was a genius with words and phrases. Ali coined “Rumble in the Jungle,” and “Thrilla In Manila,” the phrases we use to recall two of his most pivotal bouts. Grantland Rice would have been hard-pressed to come up with better catch-phrases than those.

Ali wrote the following poem, “I am the Greatest,” when his name was still Cassius Clay. He was 21 at the time. National Public Radio featured the original audio recording of the poem earlier this week.

Do you know any 21-year-olds who have the self-assurance to read a piece of verse they wrote to a large gathering of strangers? Do they also possess the skill to make the piece boastful, but humorous and playful at the same time? And do they have the charisma to read a poem called “I am the Greatest” without coming across as an arrogant jackass? Finally, how many 21-year-olds do you know who could back up that performance by actually being the greatest at what they do?

It has been written many times that Ali was a one-of-a-kind, and that is true for many reasons. For me, his charisma stands out as something totally unique in the dull, calculated, humorless world of sports. Can you imagine Tom Brady or Peyton Manning sharing poems they wrote before an upcoming Super Bowl?

Here’s the poem. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y,
of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speed-y.
The fistic world was dull and weary,
But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color and someone with dash,
Brought fight fans a-runnin’ with cash.
This brash young boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his des-tin-y.
This kid fights great; he’s got speed and endurance,
But if you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.
This kid’s got a left; this kid’s got a right,
If he hit you once, you’re asleep for the night.
And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten,
You’ll pray that you won’t have to fight me again.
For I am the man this poem’s about,
The next champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
This I predict and I know the score,
I’ll be champ of the world in ’64.
When I say three, they’ll go in the third.

So don’t bet against me, I’m a man of my word.
He is the greatest! Yes!
I am the man this poem’s about,
I’ll be champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment,
I’ll hit him so hard; he’ll wonder where October and November went.
When I say two, there’s never a third,
Standin’ against me is completely absurd.
When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse,
Don’t ask how; put your money where your mouse is!
I AM THE GREATEST!”

Book Review: The Night Train

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1960s, back bay books, book review, civil rights, clyde edgerton, dunn, family, fiction, little brown, north carolina, novel, segregation, southern fiction, Stephen Roth, the night train

Some of my fondest childhood memories were the trips we made to Dunn, North Carolina, to visit my mother’s family. I would sit in the kitchen of Grandma’s house or in front of her massive RCA color television in the back room, listening to my aunts and uncles reminisce about life growing up in a small tobacco town in the 1950s and 60s. There was a lot of laughter and the occasional heightened pitch of my mother or one of her sisters recounting a particularly juicy part of a story. Everyone on my mother’s side of my family was a good storyteller, so I guess I come by that honestly.

Reading The Night Train, Clyde Edgerton’s 2011 novel about a small town in the early 1960s, reminded me of Dunn and some of those raucous tales at Grandma’s house. Fictional Starke, North Carolina, is like countless other Southern hamlets before and after Segregation – railroad tracks splitting it into the white part and the black part of town, with little overlap between the two other than in the tobacco fields and at a few businesses. Despite the separation and the history, Edgerton notes, folks on both sides of the tracks seem to share more in common than they would care to admit:

We could accurately say that the railroad divided a community of cornbread, vegetable and chicken eaters; or a community of pet lovers; or a community of rural dialects; of families of men who hunted quail and rabbits; people who owned chickens; women who cooked and sewed; or people who had, in their lifetimes, “worked in tobacco” – picked it, carted it behind mule or tractor, tied it to sticks, hung it in barns to cure, took it to market, complained about suckering and sand lugging.

Sunday mornings, however, encapsulate just how far apart the two sides of town are:

The truths of their pasts gave each group a different God (one of deliverance, the other of dominion), a different mode of worship service (one with energy and joy trumping solemnity and fear, the other almost reversing that). And their histories brought hardships to the people of West Starke not understood by the people of East Starke, and guilt to the East not understood by anybody.

Somehow, despite their upbringings and social pressures of their town, two teen-aged boys – one black and one white – slowly become friends. As with a lot of kids suddenly old enough to form their own tastes, it is music that brings them together. Dwayne Hallston has discovered James Brown and instructs his all-white band to memorize every song on the Live at the Apollo album. Larry Lime paces Dwayne through James Brown’s dance moves, but Larry Lime’s real passion is piano jazz, which he’s learning from a hemophiliac musician called the Bleeder who plays a club on the outskirts of town.

Both Larry Lime and Dwayne love The Bobby Lee Reese Show, a local TV variety show featuring the latest country and rock acts every Saturday night, hosted by a transplanted Yankee with a strange knack for connecting with both white and black audiences. Dwayne wants to audition on Bobby Lee’s show, and what could possibly go wrong with white boys playing soul music on TV at a time when the South is about to erupt over Civil Rights?

At little more than 200 pages, The Night Train is a fast-moving, often hilarious trip along both sides of the railroad tracks in tiny Starke. Edgerton’s skill at developing characters is such that even the most vilely racist ones come off as strangely sympathetic. They’re not bad people, they are just products of a tightly wound caste system that still exists in pockets of small towns and big cities all across the country.

You know from the very beginning of the book that the blooming friendship between Larry Lime and Dwayne is bound to be tested. Along the way, however, there are wonderful boyhood adventures and vivid characters of all ages. And, as with all of Edgerton’s books, there’s some great storytelling. You can almost taste the fried chicken, green beans and buttered biscuits on Grandma’s kitchen table, no matter what part of town you’re from.

The Episode in Which “Madmen” Jumps the Shark

Tags

1960s, advertising, amc, don draper, madmen, new york, peace corps, television

SCENE: It is a Sunday morning at the Drapers’ spacious Manhattan apartment. MEGAN DRAPER lounges on the couch in a silk nightie, flipping through the pages of Look Magazine and smoking a Virginia Slim. DON DRAPER enters the apartment and drops his keys on a nearby table. He wears a ruffled charcoal grey suit and a loosened burgundy tie.

DON: Good morning.

MEGAN: Where were you all night? You look like hell.

DON: (Staring into the hallway mirror and smiling slightly.) I do, don’t I?

MEGAN: Are you drunk?

DON: As a matter of fact, I’ve never been more sober.

(DON drags a trash bin from the kitchen and places it next to the living room liquor cabinet. He stoically pulls one bottle after another from the cabinet and tosses each one into the trash. MEGAN rushes to him and grabs him by the arm.)

MEGAN: Don! What are you doing?

DON: (Not looking at her) Something I should have done a long time ago.

MEGAN: This is crazy. What’s gotten into you?

(DON ignores her, continuing to pile bottle after bottle into the bin. There are a lot of bottles, so it takes a while. When he finishes, DON turns to his wife and puts his hands on her shoulders. He looks at her dreamily, as if he is seeing her for the first time. He takes the skinny cigarette from her mouth and tosses into the trash with all the bottles.)

DON: Honey, this guy walked into my office yesterday. We spent the whole night talking.

MEGAN: What kind of guy?

DON: I’ve never met him before. He said he was with the Gideons and he gave me this (He pulls out a pocket-sized New Testament and places it on top of the liquor cabinet). Megan, have you ever heard of being born again?

MEGAN: What are you talking about?

DON: (Getting down on one knee and looking up at his wife with a pleading expression. There are tears in his eyes.) Look, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. Drinking, carousing, deceiving. There’ve been women. A lot more than you know about it. So many, even I’ve lost count. In a way, you could say my whole life has been a lie. When I came back from the war in Korea… Well, maybe that’s a story for another time.

MEGAN: Don, I–

DON: –But I think I’ve got a chance to set things straight. Tomorrow morning, I’m walking into Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and I’m handing them my resignation. I’m giving up my partnership. The agency’s no good for me. Not for what I’ve got planned. Besides, advertising has bored me for years. I think it’s the Heinz account that finally put me over the edge.

MEGAN: But you’ve spent your whole career building up that company. What on earth are you going to do?

DON: (Smiling slyly.) Well, there’s this little thing call the Peace Corps.

MEGAN: Oh, Don, no!

DON: Listen. All my life, I’ve taken from people. I’ve been a crappy husband, a crappy father. I’ve made up ads that testify that true happiness can only be found through the purchase of the right brand of deodorant. I’ve worshiped false idols, and I’ve created false idols. But now I think I can give something back. I think I can get my hands dirty in a different way. Megan, do you know where Sierra Leone is?

(MEGAN says nothing, but starts tearing up).

DON: Hey. Hey! I know it sounds crazy. But listen to me! Listen to me! Listen to me! (He is shaking her by the shoulders.) Everything we know, everything in this apartment… It’s all phony. It’s nothing. Out there is the real world. The Third World. Look, it’s only for a couple of years. After that, you can go back to your acting. You hate working on that soap opera, anyway.

(He kisses her tenderly on the forehead, puts a hand under her chin and nudges it up so that MEGAN is eye-to-eye with him.)

DON: What do you say? Just you and me? We can start over.

MEGAN: (Looking at him hopefully). Yes. YES!

DON: You’ll never regret this. I swear. We go in for our immunization shots tomorrow.

MEGAN: Uhm, okay.

(The two hold hands and look out the massive window as the sun peaks above the New York City skyline. It is a new day for DON and MEGAN DRAPER).