The Athletes We Share and the Athletes Who Divide Us

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, has thirty plus year legacy of making thought-provoking documentaries for PBS. His current subject is Muhammad Ali. Burns’ four-part look at Ali’s life and times premiered on Sunday and continues over the next three days.

There is probably no athlete, perhaps at any time in history, who became such a lightning rod as Ali became in his early days. Ali was someone who divided us in the most polarizing of times in the 1960s, when the looming changes of Civil Rights Movement and both support for and backlash against the war in Viet Nam, pulled Americans apart. His conversion to Islam alone, in 1964, was more than most could comprehend.

Americans then divided along many fault lines and violent protest followed. But that is only one of the many stories Muhammad Ali inspired in his lifetime and his long arc across the public consciousness. In the fullness of time, he became an athlete who in his brilliance, charisma, and his own narrative, brought us together in a larger community. His activism never really changed, we became more accepting of what motivated it.

In an era when boxers fought in Madison Square Garden in New York and at casino hotels in Las Vegas and a handful of other cities, Ali took his craft to places and people as far flung as Jakarta, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Manilla, and San Juan. In this second act of his career, Ali had more than one act, after not fighting for three years and being stripped of his title for his refusal to accept induction into the U.S. Army, Ali’s roadshow went to four different continents in three years. In so doing, he connected to a larger and more diverse world and became perhaps the most recognized person alive. It seems that it is possible the athlete who divides us, can also be the athlete who challenges us to see a different perspective, take a larger and longer view, and who may just end up uniting us afterall.. So, it was for Ali.

Watching this documentary tonight, and distinctive basso profundo narration of actor Keith David drew me in, within the first seconds, I found myself thinking of my own father. As it is for many fathers and sons, and I imagine daughters too, our shared love of sports also became our common form of communication. There were times I thought we disagreed on a great deal, but in reality, we disagreed on very few things.

I grew up and shared his common faith in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Branch Rickey’s Dodgers, Frank Leahy’s Notre Dame, Harry Truman’s plain speaking, Joe Namath’s guarantee, the Miracle Mets, Willis Reed’s Knicks, and perhaps above all, Jack Kennedy’s vision of an inclusive America and Irish-Catholic ethic that believed there needed to be opportunity and promise for the person on the rung below you on the ladder, too. I embraced that then and I do, perhaps even more strongly, now.

But my father who served in the Navy in the Korean Conflict era could never embrace Ali, the man who declined induction into the military. For me, born four years after 17-year-old Cassius Clay’s Olympic triumph in Rome, and growing up in a world lit by the charisma of Muhammad Ali, I could not get enough. For me he would come to embody so much of what was expansive and good, and all that was changing in our nation and world.

Today, I treasure every game, match, or sport I ever had the chance to watch with my dad. I dearly wish we could watch another together. Those memories aren’t diminished in the slightest if, in some, I rooted for Ali and he rooted against him. For us, Ali is the athlete who divided a father and son. But we shared so many others, it hardly made a single wit of difference.

We will all find things that divide us. But remembering our shared love of sport and in trying to see what it is the other sees, we may be able to, in that same fullness of time, find our way to appreciate even the athlete who challenged and divided us. The same Muhammad Ali who divided so many, ended up uniting so many more.