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Muhammad Ali at 3:AM

MuhammedAli
Maybe Muhammad Ali came not to destroy boxing but to fulfil it. But he destroyed it nevertheless. Before Ali, boxing was an existentialist art form in the same way as jazz and the blues were existentialist art forms. By existentialist I mean places where people were busy drowning and it was an impertinence to try and save them. A sense of ruin and defeat inevitably haunts every moment in these arenas, prowling around as a principle, where as Dylan knows, there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all. From the thirties to the fifties this was boxing’s domain: Ali brought in the sixties and its revolutions and like everywhere else, nothing would ever be the same again. .

The familiar note of monochrome requiem is the sombre music of the fight game pre-Ali, a fag and whisky dive mix of Miles Davies sax cool and Charles Hoff noire snap. What came after Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston was a different kind of meaning, one which took almost all of its power from Ali himself. And with his passing there’s not a lot left. Boxing’s a marginal player for an increasingly dwindling audience on satellite tv, no longer able to carry messages about ourselves that go deeper than, for example, the average game show greed or WWF circus camp routine or ‘Fight Club’ Extreme-Fighting chic. .

Before Ali boxing carried a different kind of truth.

Ali from the 3:AM archive

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