First, Ali strikes me as one of the few champions who, in his prime, could have dominated today’s generation of athletes as he did his own. It would be hard to say as much for icons in other sports. Bill Russell, for example, almost certainly would have started in today’s NBA, but he would have had far greater challenges defending against today’s NBA centers and power forwards than those he faced in his own time, when Wilt Chamberlain was the only other center for much of his career who played above the rim. He would not win eleven rings today. Ali, though, was a physical specimen comparable to the scientifically maintained athletes we now take as given in professional sports; one can see this in photos particularly from the years prior to his Vietnam draft exile. His style of boxing would have translated as well, relying as it did on quickness, strategy, and playing with the minds of his opponents as much as brute strength. Maybe he wouldn’t have won three championship belts, but I could see him taking Floyd Mayweather apart, and he would have been every bit as compelling to see in the ring now as then.
Perhaps the great tragedy of his career, though, is that he had to fight for years longer than he should have in order to keep himself financially afloat. In today’s world, given his ability to stop traffic for blocks whenever he showed his face in public, he would have made far more outside of the ring than within, but during his career he was considered off limits in the advertising world. He may have been the most famous person on earth, but the only endorsement I ever remember seeing with him was a low-budget commercial for bug spray. Race and his political outspokenness were undoubtedly responsible for this omission, but nowadays, when outrageousness is mostly rewarded rather than penalized, his face and his doggerel poetry would have been a fixture on Madison Avenue and the Internet. And even with all of the saturation we now experience with celebrity culture, I daresay the world would have been better for it.
And I would have loved to have heard him go off on Trump.
– Chuck Strom
