Rednecks full of hot-dogs and mercury who have never played war are now in a race to out gross each other by throwin’ every racist and derogatory epithet they have in their limited vocabulary at Muhammad Ali … look, you dastardly dudes and lil’ lords of confusion, I know you’re sitting there in your shit-shack with your stolen valor and your shootin’ iron feelin’ all bummed over the fact no one will ever give you a gold medal for havin’ the bluest truck nuts this side of the Mason Dixon line; your ego is bruised because no one will ever bestow upon you a cool nickname in the positive (Mr. Meth Mouth is a negative, bruh). Look, ripping copper out of an abandoned house, or stealing your grandmother’s lawn mower, will never be viewed as a fantastical feat of awe-inspiring endurance anywhere in the same galaxy as “The Rumble In The Jungle.”
Your sad truth is that your most-fabled battle went down in the parking-lot of the Electric Cowboy, and it was so painfully slow and lackluster, no one even bothered to film it. So maybe baby, you need to keep your spit-drippin’ lip zipped while the rest of us here in society can get busy saying goodbye to “The Champ” … and look hoss, I know you’re feeling slighted and salty because no one will ever build a museum to your lack of child support, lionize your abilities to dead-lift a baseball bat and swing it at your neighbor, or feel thrilled that you associate the term “speed-ball” with shooting poison into your arm, and not with physical fitness, so let’s chill with the hate talk … so yeah, you love the idea of war — your little special parts get all tingly when you think of tank loads of white men wiping out anyone who doesn’t look like your hero, Hulk Hogan, and so you go shouting words like draft dodger and coward, when in fact Ali had more bravery in one be-ringed finger than your whole twisted family tree. Ali looked White America right into its blood-lust eyes and said, “My conscience will not allow me to shoot my brother.” And Ka-booms! With that he told the whole eagle-grinding war machine to go fuck itself.
And I can see from that blank, listless stare that you’re not computing any of this, and that’s why there isn’t a soul on this wild and glorious planet who will ever cherish the words that come tumbling out of your soured breath. Every hateful thing you say through gnashing teeth will be forgotten with the quickness, and thank Christ! No movies will be made depicting your life, because throwing empty Bud Lite cans into the Ohio River is not thrilling in the least. No songs will be sung praising your legacy of stupidity, for you have zero grace, and your understanding of the Muslim faith is on par with Andy Milligan’s understanding of “cinema.” Being featured on the cover of Crime Times for abusing a dog is not in league with having your sexy visage adorn a gazillion boxes of Wheaties, so reflect yo-self before you eject yo-self into oblivion.
Being loud, obnoxious, boorish and rude does not make you a “Louisville Lip,” a “Poet with Punch,” “The King of The Ring” or “The Emperor of Endless Quotables.” You are not “The Greatest”! You are the worst! And the closest you’ll ever come to being interviewed by Howard Cosell is being interrogated by a cop with a bad hair piece for murdering your landlord with a monkey wrench you boosted from your own father. You will never inspire children to reach for the stars, or master an art form so utterly and completely that you flip the script on the whole boxing council with such zen-like force you change forever how we the public view, not just the game, which you have conquered, but also every fuckin’ boxer who comes after you for the rest of time! No one will ever make the mistake of confusing you for a humanitarian, or a true fighter for human rights. You will never have the strength to battle with dignity a deadly disease for over 30 years. When you finally buy the farm, after being electrocuted to death because you stuck your Buck knife into a wall socket on a painkiller-fueled dare, there will be no funeral parade for you, no monuments erected and no mourners on the row. Your friends will pick your pockets, and they will light out for the mud hills of Fairdale, leaving your corpse behind to release death-fart after death-fart into your traitorous Confederate flag-printed underwear.
“I’ve done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean I make medicine sick”—Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest of All Time.”
