VIBRANT
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAVYWEIGHTS? When Norman Mailer took his son to meet Muhammad Ali, Ali was the heavyweight champ of the world. Michael Mailer reflects on when giants danced, and championship titles were real. Ali was a champion of Celebrity Fight Night, the charitable organization that has raised funds for a variety of causes for over 25 years. The organization is now helmed by Dr. Stacie J. Stephenson and her husband, Richard J Stephenson, both of whom sit on Gateway Celebrity Fight Night’s board of directors. On March 12, Celebrity Fight Night raised over $4 million for cancer research. BY MICHAEL MAILER
Who is the heavyweight champion of the world? Who is the greatest? Who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee? Can you embrace him? Can you even name him? I can’t, and I grew up a fan and a practitioner of the sport. Growing up in Brooklyn, we used to compare ourselves to the greats: Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey. The list went on. Never did a main event, a heavyweight title fight, escape our attention that we wouldn’t hang out on the stoops till late afternoon arguing who was going to take whom, in what round, and with what kind of punch or combination thereof. Occasionally a lighter-weight division champ would enter the dialogue, but it was the heavyweights by whom you’d measure yourself. If your man was the man, then you were, too; if he got knocked out or dethroned, you were toast. That is, till the next main event gave you a chance to realign your identity. Indeed, the heavyweight champs were gods, and in the case of Muhammad Ali, perhaps God himself. He was not only the self-declared greatest, he was the greatest! A deity is perhaps second only to J.C. in name popularity—maybe even greater, as the Chinese knew Ali before they knew Jesus. But that was before the invention of what’s commonly referred to as “alphabet soup”: a smorgasbord of sanctioning bodies (organizations empowered to declare champions) that sprang from the void like the mythic Gilgamesh. After all, if you could imagine a “champ,” even on paper, then a “title” was on the line and more money was to be made. It worked for a while. Initially when the boxing world splintered into three groups—WBA, WBC and IBF—it was a
The Stanley Weston Archive
Muhammad Ali
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