My parents are a little insane. I pin most of it on the 2016 election. But they’ve always been a little insane. They had bomb drills in their schools when they were kids. They were growing up when the mob was pumping neighborhoods with heroin. Not there neighborhoods, but you know. My parents have an intrinsic mistrust of change, progress and outsiders. I’m not saying my parents aren’t the kindest, gentlest people I have in my life. I love them and I keep up a relationship with them despite being on opposite sides of the country.

But I don’t know how they would feel, about someone like Muhammad Ali, if he were in his youth today. Yes, they consider him the Greatest Boxer of all Time. Sure, he’s the great Muhammad Ali. But I think if there is a Bingo card with all of the things my parent’s generation hates… Its a loud mouth, confident, successful, muslim, draft-dodging, liberal, black man.

He is so compelling because he’s the obnoxious opposite to what America’s template was in the 1960’s. Ali was unafraid of retaliation from the weirdo Christian Republican world. Yes, he was selfish. Yes, he was greedy. Yes, he had terrible relationships with his wives and carried on affairs with no less than a thousand women. Yes, he was manipulated by the people around him in the abusive power dynamic between professional fighters and their promoters. Yes, he found himself in the spotlight of activism less for the altruism of it all and probably more for the popularity. But I think Muhammad Ali was a good man in spite of all these things.

As an aside, Johnathon Eig is a killer biographer. I read his MLK biography last year and it was great. I want him to do JFK next.

have no fear,

C. Randir