In the last few rounds, those watching felt a growing and almost unreasonable pathos. It was an emotional force considerably larger than the spectacle—a heavyweight champion losing his title—might be expected to generate. The moment carried an accumulation of memories and meanings that are involved in the drama of great athletes aging and failing.
Even when performed amid the Naugahyde and flash of Las Vegas, sport can serve a kind of liturgical function. It becomes a parable: those few athletes who are gifted with a certain magic become proof of the splendors that the body can achieve—the feats of grace, strength, speed, skill, stamina. But the athlete's half-life is so short; his decline and failure become a model of the mortality in everyone.
Muhammad Ali has caused inflammations of metaphysical prose in a number of writers; perhaps the urge ought to be resisted. But sport and play can lend themselves to extravagant speculations, and Ali is one of the most abundantly complicated figures in the history of games. His career in boxing has of course been totally entangled with his celebrity—Ali may be the most famous man in the world. Since he took the heavyweight title from Sonny Listen in Miami Beach 14 years ago, "the Greatest" has been the protagonist of a vast popular psychodrama in which sport was only a part. But more vivid than his conversion to Islam, his anti-Viet Nam politics or his famous mouth is the memory of his sweet dancing vitality in the ring. That recollection played in the back of people's minds, almost in their subconscious, last week as they watched a 36-year-old man too tired and slow to hit the boy who was taking everything away from him.
Such a ritual transfer of the championship can touch deep, unarticulated feelings. If men dread death, they also look nervously behind them as they age to see what younger people are hurrying up to replace them, not only on the job but on the planet. The passing of champions can be cathartic; it is part of the large, primitive theatrics that sports perform.
There are relatively few athletes whose glories and declines seem to acquire an emotional importance. Quarterback Joe Namath, who retired several weeks ago after 13 years in pro football, is one. In his early years with the New York Jets, Namath's popular image had more to do with booze and stewardesses than football. His feats alone brought the upstart American Football League into parity with the National Football League. But like Ali, Namath's lasting imprint in memory involves certain splendidly perfect moves: his flickingly fast release of passes, his clairvoyant readings of defenses and where his receivers would be. Like Ali, Namath could be an arrogant gamesman: he preposterously predicted that his 17-point underdog Jets would beat the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl—and they did, 16 to 7.