Ali Motto: “I am the Greatest” Signal of End Times

Given all the financial, race, and drug problems the city of Detroit has had to deal with over the last thirty odd years, I was glad when I heard they were building a new ice arena for the Red Wings which is scheduled to open for next year’s start of the National Hockey League season. But I have one misgiving. It no longer will carry the name of one of our greatest born and bred citizens, Joe Louis. The arena was affectionately called by fans of hockey and the citizenry of Detroit simply as: “The Joe.”

I never saw Joe Louis box, only watched the gritty films of him fighting Max Schmeling, the then heavyweight champion, when that meant more to political propaganda than it did even to sports fans around the world. My mother, a proponent of civil rights for blacks long before it ever became vogue, taught me that Joe Louis was a simple man of no high intellect, but a man to be respected for his humility who stood firmly against the prejudice and bigotry of all races. She did not encourage me in this, but I think as a young kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in South Bend, Indiana, where negros were not to cross Michigan Ave after dark, I respected Joe Louis because he did his talking fairly and appropriately in an athletic arena with his fists.

Joe Louis was still in the prime of life in those days when my mother taught me about our government using him in the war against Hitler’s Nazi Germany. How its white supremacy claims and propaganda had not only given impetus to Hitler’s antichrist war, and how Louis had put more than a dent in Hitler’s mad claims of godly supremacy of whites. Though my mother did not like me or my brothers to – Uhh – engage in pugilistic experiments, she did enjoy encouraging me to love Joe Louis. It wasn’t hard, though I never met him, I knew things about him, saw him speak on TV, and heard what people said about him. He was a good guy and a great boxer. So I liked the guy the way kids ought to like heroes and athletes of extraordinary skill. It helped that my mother had been the one who taught me about Joe Louis, too.

Years later,  my mother also encouraged me in the following passage of end-times scripture: “This know also,  that in the last days perilous times shall come.  For men shall be lovers of their own selves.”

Now I know that Joe Louis had issues of his own – married a few times and went bankrupt and got in trouble with the IRS. But he never humiliated his opponent or fomented racism by fighting fire with fire. He fought it by fighting against it in the ring, and America appreciated him because he had humiliated racism and fascism in a most crucial time.

This, however, relates to the beef I had with Cassius Clay. For years after he had won the heavyweight belt against Sonny Liston in Bangor, Maine, when I was thirteen years-old, I loved him. Through my twenties I thought he was the greatest guy going, until upon reflection I began to contrast him with Joe. Ali’s braggadocio, his ‘mouth that roared’ act, encouraged by the legendary lawyer-turned-sports-commentator Howard Cosell, became more than inappropriate to me. It had become menacing, arrogant, had lost its cool swagger and had turned racist, degrading, a thing to humiliate innocent people for his own aggrandizement.

His signature saying said it all; what he roared with regularity was “I am the Greatest.” That became too much for me; it was, in the parlance of today – over the top. It started the era of trash talk in sports, and when I became a sportswriter later on, I saw how degrading to an opponent it really was. It was humiliating, plain out wrong. Though everyone thought it was cute and great, it became inappropriate and intolerable to me. Cosell had encouraged it, had taught America and the world to applaud such obnoxious arrogance, such unnecessary degradation of someone engaged in something as banal as a sports event. It didn’t matter who was giving their all, doing the best they could. Ali would roar, “I am the Greatest,” rubbing it in.

Ali’s slogan was even more important than the belts he had won in the ring. I will always remember him for starting this infestation that has done a great deal of damage to the youth of America. It is all because he was a world’s spokesman for the end times phenomenon of prophecy being fulfilled – that is, “men shall be lovers of their own selves.”  Ali lived to be the very personification of that part of perilous times of which we have been warned by scripture. This is the legacy I see which is Ali, the legacy stamped indelibly on stadiums and coliseums everywhere around the world.

I can’t really say I’m sorry about Ali’s death, even though he had entertained me and impressed my very soul greatly when I was a young man.

Later, after I had become a reverend in the Pentecostal Church during the 1980’s, only two years after Joe Louis’ death, I became acquainted with one of his quotes, a quote which I often quoted in my position as a minister of the gospel. It was a Joe Louis saying that was, and is to this day, often alluded to by preacher and congregation alike. When trying to encourage one another to pick up their personal cross and follow in the steps of Jesus, the preacher might say, or the congregation might even sing: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

To this day, this statement remains my favorite memory of my days as a Pentecostal minister. in my heart it is the greatest and most direct expression of the highest goal to which an individual follower of Christ can aspire. That is: to deny one’s will so one might allow Jesus’ will to have birth in one’s heart, so that his will and saving grace can be performed. To seek to the highest, which is to live what he said: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

Just for that saying of Joe’s alone I can tell you that I am sorry that I will never hear an announcer of a Detroit hockey game declare: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen; and welcome! We’re glad to be bringing you the game tonight from “the Joe.”