[News] Tiger Woods is not Muhammad Ali

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Note to ESPN’s Bill Simmons: Tiger Woods is not Muhammad Ali


http://www.zcommunications.org/note-to-espn-s-bill-simmons-tiger-woods-is-not-muhammad-ali-by-dave-zirin
Source: 
<http://www.zcommunications.org/note-to-espn-s-bill-simmons-tiger-woods-is-not-muhammad-ali-by-dave-zirin>The 
Nation
Thursday, March 04, 2010

"Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some 
bloodthirsty people. I'm no longer a Cassius 
Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the 
world, the black world. I'll always have a home 
in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money."

  – Muhammad Ali

Can ESPN please declare a company-wide moratorium 
on comparing current athletes to Muhammad Ali? I 
thought it was unfortunate when columnist Jemele 
Hill wrote that anti-choice icon Tim Tebow was 
"as courageous" as Ali. But that comparison is 
inspired compared to recent comments by "ESPN's 
The Sports Guy" Bill Simmons. Simmons wrote that 
Tiger Woods's return to golf from "sex addiction" 
would be tougher than Ali's return to the ring 
after being banished for opposing the war in 
Vietnam. Yes, for Simmons, Ali's efforts to 
resist the military draft are dwarfed in 
importance by Tiger's efforts to resist nookie.

For the uninitiated, Bill Simmons is a 
pop-culture vulture in the best and worst sense. 
If you want 3,000 words about The Real World, 
he's your fella. If you want even 300 words about 
the actual real world, you're better off reading a TV Guide.

This became crystal clear when, in an online chat, Simmons wrote,

"Tiger's comeback is going to be the most 
fascinating running sports story of my lifetime. 
I really believe that. We only get a handful of 
truly transcendent athletes per lifetime, he's 
one of them, and yet, none of them have ever been 
tested this way. The only thing that comes close: 
When Ali returned from 4 years of boxing exile 
for refusing to serve in Vietnam."

An incredulous reader typed back, "Really Bill? 
Ali coming back to win the title after being 
banned from the sport for religious convictions 
that prevented him from serving in a war that 
continues to effect the course of American 
history today, ‘comes close' to Tiger missing 5 
months for a cavalcade of bimbos and a staged sex rehab?"

Simmons' retort: "Here's the big difference 
though: Everyone was rooting for Ali. He never 
came even 10% close to facing the scrutiny, 
vitriol and 24/7 news cycle microscope that Tiger 
will face." He later sniffed, "You don't know 
your Ali history." Unless by "Ali history" 
Simmons means movies starring Will Smith, this is idiocy.

Yes, when Ali returned to fight, he didn't have a 
24-hour sports media cycle and 10 billion blogs 
charting his every move. But while "old media" 
was smaller, it was also more centralized and 
able to shape public opinion. When Ali took his 
stand, the great Red Smith wrote, "Cassius makes 
himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed 
punks who picket and demonstrate against the 
war." In the Los Angeles Times, Jim Murray called 
the Champ, "the white man's burden." Beyond the 
sports page, Ali also had other concerns that 
Tiger couldn't comprehend: daily and credible 
death threats against his family, financial ruin, 
and a five year prison sentence in Leavenworth 
that he was challenging on appeal.

Ali also endured the full weight of the U.S. 
government on his back. The day of Ali's 
conviction, the U.S. Congress voted 
overwhelmingly to extend the draft and make it a 
federal crime to desecrate the flag. Ali's 
passport was revoked and the FBI bugged his phone.

But while the media, the state, and the lunatic 
right were in full froth, Ali was becoming a 
resistance icon throughout the world. There were 
pickets of support from Guyana to Ghana, from 
Cairo to Karachi. During the first major British 
demonstration against the war in April 1967, one 
slogan was: "LBJ: Don't Send Muhammad Ali to War."

Dave Kindred, the veteran sportswriter, captured 
this dynamic when he wrote, "You had riots in the 
streets; you had assassinations; you had the war 
in Vietnam. It was a violent, turbulent, almost 
indecipherable time in America, and Ali was in 
all of those fires at once, in addition to being 
heavyweight champion of the world."

When Ali returned to the ring, he had a global 
movement claiming him as their "warrior prince" 
while the pro-war lobby wanted him eliminated. He 
also came back a slower fighter and found out, to 
his own surprise, he could take a ferocious 
beating and still emerge victorious. He paid a 
terrible price for that pounding, although years 
later, he still maintains that he has no regrets.

"Some people thought I was a hero," he says in 
his book Soul of a Butterfly. "Some people said 
that what I did was wrong. But everything I did 
was according to my conscience. I wasn't trying 
to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I 
made a stand that all people, not just black 
people, should have thought about making, because 
it wasn't just black people being drafted. The 
government had a system where the rich man's son 
went to college, and the poor man's son went to war.."

Ali has "no regrets" but Tiger sure does. He 
regrets he was caught. He regrets losing 
sponsors. He regrets that his private life has 
become reality television for "culture vultures" 
like Simmons. But outside the 24-hour sports 
bubble the Tiger story is little more than 
cocktail chatter. As Bill Maher wrote Friday on 
the Huffington Post, "I haven't commented on 
Tiger Woods much because, well, he's just a 
golfer and it took me this long to give a shit." 
Maher isn't alone. In the Bill Simmons "Sports 
Guy World", I'm sure the Tiger Woods Reality Show 
feels bigger than anything Ali endured. But in 
the reality based community, the legend of the Champ only grows.




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