Muhammad Ali's redemption from an appalling man

National Post, 26 September 2021

The Burns documentary, more than any other major treatment of Ali, allows the shadows to appear.

Is there anything new left to be said about Muhammad Ali?

Not really. Books, movies, documentaries and a thousand magazine profiles — Sports Illustrated, when it still mattered, made itself Ali’s fulltime publicist — have told the story in all of its many-splendored glory.

Yet Ken Burns, America’s master storyteller, took up the tale this past week on PBS, with a nearly eight-hour documentary, Muhammad Ali.

Burns tells a different tale with the same well-known facts. Ali, in the ancient categories of drama, was not a tragic figure, the great man undone by a dominant flaw. Ali was nearly the very opposite. Burns delicately shows, though always with the affection of a fan, that Ali was a dreadful man, a dubious character who associated with dubious characters, who nonetheless took one great, principled stand that partially redeemed the rest of his abominable behaviour, the toxic residue of which still drips through American culture. It is not an accident that both Ali and Donald Trump would find a congenial environment in professional wrestling.

In the end though, it was his objections to being drafted for the Vietnam War that redeemed him. It was physical suffering and diminishment, stripping him of all that he bragged about, which purified Ali’s soul when his body betrayed him.

Twenty-five years ago the unexpected signature moment of Ali’s public life took place, when he lit the Olympic Torch in Atlanta. It was intended, in the heart of the Deep South, to be a grand moment of racial, cultural and national reconciliation. But Ali originally declined, not wanting the public humiliation of appearing in public, face frozen by Parkinson’s, arms trembling, the famous Ali shuffle now just the shuffle of a prematurely old man.

In the end, the great showman could not resist one last show. But how would the world react to the diminished form of what the documentary calls “the most beautiful athlete in motion ever seen”?

The world saw not a humiliated, but a humbled Ali. Humility he learned late, after a lifetime of arrogance, and Atlanta was a triumph. Over the subsequent twenty years of his life until his death in 2016, Ali would continue that work of redemption, attempting to bring the shadows of his life into the light.

Continue reading at the National Post.