I have just seen, thanks to the miracle of the film archives, the fight between Muhammad Ali and Zora Folley, in New York in 1967, when the audience at Madison Square Garden seemed more like a Wall Street convention with the great artistic world, than a ‘ring side’ for the title of the complete weights.
It was not be for lowerly; Ali made boxing one of the fine arts, a mixture of dance, dramaturgy and “pop” show. Norman Mailer, Ursula Andress, Sean Connery, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Alain Delon and Ernest Hemingway, before the shotgun blast in Ketchum, Idaho, should not miss her staging. Around the time of that fight, on March 22, 1967, Ali had just been champion, in February 1964, against Sonny Liston, whom he rightly baptized as “the ugly bear.”
Boxing had in the English provinces, Wales, one of them, and also in France, that category of pagan spectacle attended by the local town in the solemn trappings of a funeral. And the fights that were waged bare-knuckle and shirtless, with their pants rolled up, in improvised rings in Paris, were attended by fashion divas to show off the latest suit of the season, and also by the rich guys from the patio, to smoke cigars and toast with champagne between rounds.
Ali, the former Olympic medalist in Rome, the same boy who decided to become a boxer the day his bicycle was stolen, is the boxer that anyone would like to see in that winter of the 60s; a 219-pound gymnast, 25 years old, and a dance of lateral steps, forwards and backwards, the agility and speed of a cat, the dangerousness of a perched tiger. Successive left jabs, the right guarded, the guard down, the mockery, the gloves up and down, as if he were paddling on an imaginary river, the Congo, down which all his ancestors had rowed, and suddenly darkness for him. rival, the canvas, the right hand unleashed according to his dogma: “In boxing, you should not expect to be hit; you must strike first…”
It is necessary to see a combat of these to understand how much the world has changed. A boxer like Ali may not be born again, just as another Garrincha has not occurred, nor another record holder like Bikila; nor another Pelé, nor a runner like Fangio or Enzo Ferrari.
Maybe it’s a protein issue; It is clear that today’s world does not know what it is to chase a chicken with a hatchet and then burn its feathers and see it emerge, golden, in the center of a table. These tomatoes with pesticides and these poor fish poisoned with mercury are part of the diet of a world that has lost value in all its orders. Even the civil value has disappeared, and the bullfighting, foisted another day on guys like Gallo, Manolete, Ordóñez, Bienvenida, is shipwrecked today in a circus of vanities and shaved bulls.
They say that admitting that all past times were better is a sign that we have begun to age, but what to do, if reality returns us axioms; there are no more Beatles and the Rollings will take their treasure to the bottom of the sea, without anyone disputing it, and no one will play ‘Stairs to Heaven’ better than Led Zeppelin.
Will any band do what the Eagles did today, by perpetuating a poem as profound as ‘Hotel California?
In the same way, we ask ourselves, who is like Beny, and where are the successors of Roberto Faz, Miguelito Cuní, Bola de Nieve, Celeste Mendoza, Vicentico Valdés, Rolando Lasserie, José Antonio Méndez, Olga Guillot, La Lupe, Panchito Rizet. , to sing a bolero.
Yes, the Cassius Marcellus Clay fight on March 22, 1967, defined by a knockout at one minute and 55 seconds of the seventh round, is telling us that the world was better. Definitely.
The mercury in the fish has damaged the heads of the likes of Putin, and allows the genetic creation and recreation of people who see evil in good and vice versa; a specimen that is taking the world to the debacle: the mamerto.
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