Written by Devoting my second weekly column to Ken Burns’ Muhammad Ali documentary, that aired in four parts- Four Rounds- last week on PBS, has me running the risk of repeating myself. But in “Round Four,” which followed Ali from highest high, his victory over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, through his long physical decline, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. It shows the most strident, polarizing athlete of his time, or anyone’s time, silenced, the most physically gifted of athletes stooped and slowed.
But that is “the road all runners come.” There is only one truth for every athlete who doesn’t heed A.E. Housman’s advice “to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay,” is that we will all be ex-athletes, perhaps for far longer than we were athletes at all.
No matter how long we cheat time and stay in the race, the game, or the contest, we are all destined to be former athletes. No blaze of glory, no matter how bright, will change that. Muhammad Ali, the brightest of all stars, lived half his years on earth after his boxing career, most of them trapped behind a mask of pain and illness. But it was in that time when Ali moved from hated to beloved, or as The New Yorker’s David Remnick describes it, that the change took place in us, we were the ones transformed by his example and the reconciliation he sought with every labored step.
Of course, I am now just using Ali’s journey as a metaphor for our own journey in life after sports. It is unlikely that any of us will be successful as Ali was athletically. None of that really matters, the lesson that connects Ali’s story to our purpose at Culture in Sports, is that our lives after being an athlete go on and it is what we learn while playing, how we take those lessons to heart, and how we open our hearts and minds that will make all the difference in whether those years matter. For many of us, not gifted, those years after, will be the most of what we get. The key is how we choose to embrace them and use them. Do we face them with bitterness about what has been lost, or never was, or do we embrace the magnificence of having been in the race or contest just as we were?
Sports are a thread that unites us. They can weave us together, “in a single garment of destiny,” as another 1960s hero, Martin Luther King, once wrote. Or they can become symbolic of what divides us, our pettiness, and our anger. That common thread is easily pulled, but the work for all of us in the years that come after is for those of us who love sports to do our best to follow Ali’s example, and seek to repair that garment, however poor or challenged our efforts may be.
Whether we encourage or mentor a young athlete, whether we coach or administer sports, we always need to be mindful of both the purity and goodness of the sports we love and how quickly that purity can be corrupted. We see examples of this everywhere, from youth, to college, to professional, to Olympic sports. But if we live our own lives after, with compassion, wisdom, and dignity, in seeking understanding, we will leave sports just a bit better than we found them and isn’t that the ultimate victory? Author Robert Lipsyte, one of many Ali biographers prominently featured in Burns’ documentary, has written of the meaningful change that sport creates in us as being far more important than the winning.
If you say they don’t celebrate what comes after the way they celebrate that moment in the arena, consider this from Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone has played Rocky Balboa as many times on screen after the Italian Stallion retired as when he was active, in Rocky V, Rocky Balboa, Creed, and Creed II and it is his loving mentorship of Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed that turned Rocky from caricature to character. Dolph Lundgren stole Creed II with his transformational arc from being hell bent for revenge to a father to his son. The shaky journey of redemption that Karate Kid villain Johnny Lawrence takes, along with some very snappy 80s nostalgia, is what makes Cobra Kai both a fun and meaningful show. And don’t forget Burt Lancaster’s Archie “Moonlight” Graham, in Field of Dreams, who gets his long-delayed wish to play against major leaguers only to leave it behind to practice his true calling. It is about meaningful change from playing and what follows it.
A much lesser author than Lipsyte or Remnick- me- once wrote in assessing the impact the sport of football has had on my life, “the game exists to teach us long after we are finished playing.” There are so many lessons I experienced while playing, but only learned or fully comprehended much later. It is completely what comes after that matters. Our lives after will hopefully be both long and meaningful. Ali’s, despite his many challenges and so much that he lost, was. The indignities of time are only indignities if we give into them if we lose hope and perspective about what truly matters, and that is what we do with what comes.