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<h1><font size=4><b>Note to ESPN’s Bill Simmons: Tiger Woods is not
Muhammad Ali<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/note-to-espn-s-bill-simmons-tiger-woods-is-not-muhammad-ali-by-dave-zirin" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/note-to-espn-s-bill-simmons-tiger-woods-is-not-muhammad-ali-by-dave-zirin<br>
</a></font><font size=3>Source:
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/note-to-espn-s-bill-simmons-tiger-woods-is-not-muhammad-ali-by-dave-zirin">
The Nation</a><br>
Thursday, March 04, 2010<br><br>
<i>"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."<br><br>
– Muhammad Ali<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
For the uninitiated, Bill Simmons is a pop-culture vulture in the best
and worst sense. If you want 3,000 words about <i>The Real World</i>,
he's your fella. If you want even 300 words about the actual real world,
you're better off reading a TV Guide.<br><br>
This became crystal clear when, in an online chat, Simmons
wrote,<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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?"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"Some people thought I was a hero," he says in his book <i>Soul
of a Butterfly</i>. "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.."<br><br>
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 <i>Huffington
Post</i>, "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 <i>Tiger Woods Reality Show</i> feels bigger than anything Ali
endured. But in the reality based community, the legend of the Champ only
grows.<br><br>
<br><br>
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