“Cowards die many times before their death” is an adage of popular universal cognition. Whether or not you are aware of it as issuing from “Julius Caesar”,an epic dramatology of Shakespeare, is merely secondary. I’m certainly no coward from every imaginable indices. Yet in a sense, I cannot but confess a guilt to this malady.
I remember that eerie sombre night;a moment of reality,May 9,1987, when I was greeted with the missive of the departure of the Great Awo,my fore-most political idol,it came as a blustering rude shock.It was the least I had ever expected, considering my Olympian imagery of the legendary sage, as an enigma, with the mystical sheath encasing the invincible specter of the great ripper – who by that token, can never die.
However, with the grim dawn of reality, one in this compelling circumstance, could not but defer to the finality of the great ripper – given the scenario in which the resurrection power, as availed within the context of Jesus and Lazarus was such that defied the mortal ken.
But in the case of Ali, the pugilistic deity of global acclaim – I hasten to confess – and unabashedly too; to the cowardly – dying many times, on the perenially tormenting suspense of imminent apparition of death knocking any moment, based on his continually worsening health – till funereal moment of death eventually sounded the bugle.
At the apotheosis of his fame and glory, Ali bestrode the pugilistic hypodrome like a collosus.
From primordial inception and even to date – there was none like him, let alone anyone, fitting into the legend of his fabled gloves in years to come.
He will go down in the chronology of the pugil art, as the paradigm of ultimate fistic glory and excellence. Even in death, Ali stands in prosiliently astounding terms above the giants.
Like an opium, he dazzles, titilates and intoxicates in the temulence of his prodigy.
Indeed, when the Lord asked thus in the omnibus book of the scriptures, the Bible:”Know ye not that ye are gods?” he was verily referring to this god-king of the fistic art – because make no mistake about it;Ali is simply beyond manly frame – towering as he does, on leviathan deism.
There was simply something divine in him;or expressed in other words, Ali was indeed divine;an unsung illuminati. Otherwise,imagine a teratoid hound like Sonny Liston;ever eager for a feast of blood.
Beholding him in sheer monstrous fiendishness, was jitter-ying enough to declare the bout cancelled or signal in instantaneous immediacy,an ominous fatalism of the odd, clearly ranged against the legendary “Louisville lips”
Why? Because it was far from giantomachy.Giantomachy is a war of the giants;but in this case;it was a tilted battle between Liston the giant and Ali the “dwarf”- perceived on the terrimotive hauls of T.K.O.s that had sent many of Liston’s opponents reeling on the canvass;and of course,the teratogenic calculus of sheer physical frame.
But this fistic potentate was to confound popular rating in a giganticide – giant killing – of the roaring pugilistic blood hound – thus inspiring a seismic registeration of his unchallengeable arrival, and incontestible primacy on the global scene.
Today, sixty years ago or there-about,this feat is yet to be rivaled, let alone surpassed;more-so, because Liston the Bull never fully recovered from the frenzy of saturnalian fistic rain.
Who then says the Louisville prodigy is no god; that he wasn’t actually the object in view,at that momentous point that the Lord said ” ye are gods”
Imagine again,the thriller in Manila and the weirdly rope- a- dope.What other mind was it that could have strutted such rave of the brainwave, if not a god!
While at this point, I essay to confess the severe buffeting of fate in my experiential oddyssey – my saving grace – an immense one at that, as I hasten to declare – consists in the entrenched fond of surreal nostalgia
Assuming I do not consider my Almighty maker in heaven, worthy of thanks for anything on earth – mind you, this is sheer assumption, because I have quite a lot to be thankful for – one thing I cannot deny and for which I owe him an eternal debt of gratitude, is the particularly auspicious moment he breathed unto me and I became a living being;here in the land of the living. Otherwise,how could I have partaken of the euhemerism of the Ali myth and enigma,in all its immensity and grandeur!
Supposing I had been disadvantaged in sheer datal calculus,in debuting by creative birth,to this terra-firma – adventing much later,that I could not behold him in his elemental artistry and pulchritude; could I have blamed my maker?
Could I have known how much I missed and could I have been so grateful to my maker,for so enriching my experiential youth with the esctatic magic of the Ali metaphor,which makes my day, teleporting me to giddy euphoria,at every point of nostalgia,that I forget my buffetings,like one temulent and titilated with an opium?That is the Ali metaphor in my emotional chemistry!
That is why like a coward,bitten by the frenzied bug of Ali-phobia,I had actually died in recurring multiple occurrence before Ali’s eventual death
For him, my funeral elegy commenced right from the authoritative media dispersal of his Parkinson syndrome several years ago – striking a pathetic climax as I caught glimpse of him at the momentous funeral of Joe Frazier.It was a moment I wept freely within me, even if devoid of the parturitive lachrymal – seeing the Louisville legend in his diametrical totality, a lamentable shadow of his old self.
A train of thought welled in my emotional frame, eliciting in turn, an imaginative noesis into the probable workings of his mind, right at that point in time. I managed to fight back tears, accentuated by the Yoruba adage:”Ti iku ba npa ojugba eni, ara a maa so ni”
In the past, I used to imagine how awkward and unthinkable, it would seem; referring to this pugilistic panjandrum in the past tense, because the icon Ali, was himself synonymous with life.
But today, Ali is gone! Never to be seen again, except in the chambers of incorporeal treasured memory.Gone with his color, glamour, showmanship, dramatic flair;his cacoethus loquendi,furore poeticus;his fistic science and the mathematism of his footwalk.Gone with the endemic magic of his persona – refusing still to die in the seismicism of their ever lingering spell.
He will go down in history as one of the greatest figures to have traversed the American hemisphere. An eminently outstanding quantity in the equation of American grandeur. And even as its plenipotentiary,he remains prosiliently sui-generis in his leviathan frame and acclaim; just as he remains a symbolic metaphor of the fecundity of the African mind and its limitless possibilities.
The auric spark exited with him,alters the American genius loci.With his exit, America certainly can never remain the same again,nay,the macrocosm of the larger global world.
That our one and only Wole Soyinka, the revered literary leviathan and distinguished World Nobel Awardee composed a poem for him, indeed speaks volume.Soyinka had rarely honored an individual with a poem,more-so,with such stir of emotional ecstasy and pathos of mournful dirge.
Why are old things evanescently fading away?
Good old days, a forlorn hope
Our paradise fading away
Pray! Can we have anew those halcyon days of yore
Moment of nostalgic memories
Can we have our paradise lost?
This blessed day January 17th,the fistic icon would have turned 83,but cruel death pulled its usual “funny” stunt.May his great soul continue to rest in peace.
*Kola Johnson Is A Writer And Journalist.
