Happy Birthday Champ!

Dave Anderson has penned a nice Happy Birthday piece in the NYT today about one of my heroes:



Muhammad Ali is 65 years young today and despite Parkinson's disease invading his body, don'tcha know he still has that twinkle of mischief in his heart if not his eyes.

"I am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates," he said. And he was that:

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?
Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see
Now you see me, now you don’t
George thinks he will, but I know he won’t.

I done wrassled with an alligator
I done tussled with a whale
Only last week I murdered a rock
Injured a stone, hospitalized a brick
I’m so mean I make medicine sick.

- Before the "Rumble in the Jungle" 1974

He is also a stand-up guy. During the height of Ali's boxing career he refused on conscientious objector grounds to be inducted into the Army during our war on the North Vietnamese people:

No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end. (Source: Voices of A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove eds.)

Ali was convicted for his refusal, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-0 opinion overturned that conviction:

Petitioner appealed his local draft board's rejection of his application for conscientious objector classification. The Justice Department, in response to the State Appeal Board's referral for an advisory recommendation, concluded, contrary to a hearing officer's recommendation, that petitioner's claim should be denied, and wrote that board that petitioner did not meet any of the three basic tests for conscientious objector status. The Appeal Board then denied petitioner's claim, but without stating its reasons. Petitioner refused to report for induction, for which he was thereafter tried and convicted. The Court of Appeals affirmed. In this Court the Government has rightly conceded the invalidity of two of the grounds for denial of petitioner's claim given in its letter to the Appeal Board, but argues that there was factual support for the third ground. Held: Since the Appeal Board gave no reason for the denial of a conscientious objector exemption to petitioner, and it is impossible to determine on which of the three grounds offered in the Justice Department's letter that board relied, petitioner's conviction must be reversed.

--CLAY, aka ALI v. UNITED STATES, 403 U.S. 698

Colin Powell said of Ali, ''I wouldn't call him a draft dodger. . . . He stood up and said this is something I cannot do and I will take whatever consequences come from that decision. I admire that in a man.'' (Source: The Prettiest of Them All, Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, December 19, 2001.)

As I said, Ali is a stand up guy; that's one of the reasons I consider him a hero.

If you'd like to send Ali a birthday wish, just surf on over to the Muhammad Ali Center where they have set up a page where you can do just that.

Peace to you and all the best, Champ!