From the Left

/

Politics

Why Muhammad Ali Still Matters

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Of all the riveting stories that made up Muhammad Ali's amazing and controversial life, the most intriguing to me is how well he performed despite testing poorly in school.

Conventional measures of intelligence did not capture his potential, but he did not let that stop him. He didn't sulk, pout or give up. He tried harder. Having his abilities underestimated by others only seemed to make him more determined.

In his Louisville high school, young Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. -- Ali's original pre- Muslim "slave name"--had such poor grades in the tenth grade that he had to drop out and repeat the year, according to David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and author of the "King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero."

When Ali later took the Selective Service's mental aptitude test in 1964, the year of his first heavyweight championship at age 22, he scored only between the 16th and 18th percentile.

That was well below the required minimum of the 30th percentile -- until the Pentagon lowered the requirement to the 15th percentile in early 1966, making him draft eligible. "I said I was the greatest," he famously quipped at the time, "not the smartest."

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover apparently wanted to make sure Ali hadn't deliberately gotten a low score. According to "Muhammad Ali: A Biography" by Anthony O. Edmonds, Hoover assigned an FBI agent to check on Ali's draft status the day after he announced he had converted to Islam and joined the black separatist group Nation of Islam.

 

"The fact that Cassius barely earned a certificate of attendance and scored 83 on an IQ test administered by the Army," Edmonds wrote about the FBI's findings, "seemed to validate its decision."

Yet George Foreman and Earnie Shavers, among other boxers that he beat, said he was one of the smartest boxers of all time and had a keen ability to con his opponents.

That wasn't just boxer talk. Ali was a well-known rule breaker. He liked to thrill crowds with his swift scissor-step shuffle. He would drop his hands, hold his chin up, lean straight back and commit other no-no's to avoid a punch and taunt his opponents.

Ali also was "hyperverbal," Remnick reports in The New Yorker, which a fancy word for a kid who talks a lot, a characteristic that fed right into Ali's penchant for poetry, an unusual pastime for any boxer but particularly fruitful for Ali.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

John Branch Jeff Danziger Eric Allie Adam Zyglis A.F. Branco Lee Judge